Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  I can imagine your anxiety. I’m being foolish, you think, losing my head over an intruder who probably has conspiratorial designs on my papers. He wants to see you exposed, you will say, and not in the way you think. He can have no interest in a woman so many years older than himself. I counter with this: it is my association with Z that makes me desirable. He wants to shake the hand of the man who shook the hand, so to speak. You’re afraid I’ll throw away your legacy, and I might, but let me remind you, I want to come out of this innocent. Why should you have a less conspiratorial reputation? I’ve no doubt you and your children will construct a portrait of me that will be to your advantage financially, as well as to provide a vehicle to clear your name. She was distant and difficult: a snob. Reckless, never thought about the consequences of her actions, of what it meant to be the mistress of a spy. After years of provoking my insults you will be able to make me look like Z’s dupe, which for a while I was, but remember Flaubert said it’s better to be a dupe than a knave. Remember also, Lille, that there came a time I learned to resist your provocation, not to be lured into your trap, not to hit back. I could be a martyr, too. You used to bait me by saying I had the long Francoeur nose, when in fact yours outdistanced mine, but I remained silent. I knew you wanted to be hurt, and so said nothing, would not oblige you in any way. As I said, you were the one to discover the alliance between pleasure and pain.

  Before leaving for the night, Sylvie made a bed for him in the large front room. We cleared some minarets still remaining from the intruders’ stockpile. At first he insisted on helping move furniture to the edge of the room, but perhaps feeling more in the way than useful among a stranger’s possessions he soon gave up. Fascinated by the pre-Revolutionary clock left on the mantle he stood still, clutching it in his hands, then he held it to his ear.

  “It doesn’t tick,” I explained. “I keep it for sentimental reasons, because it’s so old.”

  “It reminds me of a clock I once saw whose back was engraved with a table that translated Gregorian months into Republican months: Brumaire equals October, Nivoise equals September, Thermidor equals July and so on.”

  I wasn’t sure how to interpret this comment: sincere or cynical? The reference to the Revolution, like the quote from La Fontaine, might not indicate the obvious at all. I have known slippery times when insignificant signs hint at circumstances of life and death, but I wasn’t sure whether his reminiscence was intended as a republican salute or a wish for the reliable days of monarchy. With his hand on the fireplace, he took on what appeared to be a depressed or thoughtful pose, not unlike Z in the park when he wanted me to believe he should be left alone. I came up behind him and reached around as if in an embrace. He started, but I only wanted to take the clock from him and did so, barely touching his arm, watching our reflections in the mirror above the mantle. Whether he was intrigued by Esterhazy or not, as the mistress of the spy, I know I’ve been of interest to those who haunt certain kinds of bars in the city: oddball, but occasionally even attractive individuals whose proclivities run in the direction of playing roles. You be Z, I’ll be D.

  “It has an enameled sun and moon, once in a while they turn.” They were jammed, and I shook the clock as if trying to dislodge the planets. I sounded as if I believed the thing were genuine.

  “Hey, wise guy.” It was Sylvie talking to the dog in imitation of Fontaine’s slang. I wondered what she was up to. Sylvie is a small woman with a long neck and limbs that make her appear octopuslike, as if her torso had little meaning to her apart from a juncture of limbs — unlike some women who are all conjunction, all middle. The effect of Sylvie’s body is one of adolescent seductiveness, I think, as if those long limbs are signs of entanglement. Sylvie continued to move chairs around, and Fontaine and I behaved as if we were invisible, the way one feels invisible in the back of a cab — you can do anything, say anything, you hope the driver is ignoring you. Finally I could hear her collecting her things, shutting the door to the street, and it was clear she had left for the night. With her absence an awkward silence followed, and he looked at the floor. The clock, after a good shake up, suddenly began to tick loudly. I turned to go, but as I left I didn’t close his door all the way, leaving it slightly ajar, just a crack. He was absorbed in his thoughts and didn’t seem to notice, unless he was more of an exhibitionist than I ever imagined.

  Standing in the corridor motionless as a statue, I listened to the sounds of undressing, writing, and sheets turned aside. I looked in a hall mirror until the light went out, then went up to the attic. I didn’t sleep but sat cross legged on my bed reading while moths flew into the light. The house was as still as I’d ever heard it, but I wanted to explode that silence, to change the ordinary course of the night: a man and a woman sleeping in opposite ends of the house. Delphine had been put into the yard, and one couldn’t hear any creaks or sighs. I shut my book, crept downstairs, and opened the door to his room.

  He lay on his back like Marat in his bath, his clothes spread out and drying on chairs and tables. Hair fell over his eyes, and his mouth was open. I stood very close but didn’t touch him. Walking slowly about the room in a crescent-shaped path, the candlelight was dim, and I knocked into a dresser with a soft thud. Fontaine turned over in his sleep, and I heard a voice pronounce a syllable which sounded like Qui? Qui and the key were indeed what I was looking for. What if I had sat on the edge of his bed? I used to plonk down on yours, deliberately waking you up, and you would kick the air while I held you down. If I did the same, if I tried to pin him down, I realized he would probably throw me off in horror and run out of the house into the rain. If there is eroticism in terror (or in disgust) the experiment might have been worth an attempt. As I stood at the edge of his bed I thought even anger and humiliation have advantages over narcophilia, but I didn’t try to wake him. Overcome by feelings of foolishness, I put my hand on the shape of his hip under the blanket. Even without his waking I felt like a sterile, rejected intruder, a woman left out of a normal life of children and grandchildren because of wasted years siding with cheapskates, the ugly, and the humorless, the dry collector of the parish newspaper. My toe nudged a flat leather bag like a small portfolio. What’s this? I picked it up and carefully made my way back into the hall. Flipping on a light I sat on the steps, opened the folder, rummaged around, and without any hesitation began to read. His handwriting was wobbly, some lines scribbled quickly, notes were in no particular order, sprinkled with initials or abbreviations. To tell you the truth the papers were a mess, but a name, his real name was written in black ink on the inside cover on a small square of white canvas stitched into the leather.

  Wasserbaum. My guest is actually Monsieur Wasserbaum or Mr. Waterbranch, a kind of fountain, but not Fontaine. My visitor won’t drop names of priests and generals in order to prove his sympathies lay with those who supported Z. To the contrary, his connections were the reverse, and this was what he was trying to hide. He wrote for those who quoted Marx, Trotsky, and Blum. La Fontaine, of animals and moral tales, was a ruse.

  As I sat on the stairs, balancing the bits and pieces on my knees, I tried to keep their ordering straight, lest he later discover I’d been through them. He couldn’t be a very serious researcher, if this was the kind of archive he produced.

  October 31, 1894. Dreyfus’s arrest for high treason is announced in Le Soir.

  Z, the actual spy, lived on rue de la Bienfaisance. Rue de la Bienfaisance. Practice saying this without laughing and with no sense of irony.

  D goes about his bourgeois, probably happy, life as a captain in the army, then slam, in one minute everything changes, and even when vindicated, he will never be able to go back to the life he led before October 14, 1893. His brother described how marooned they felt. I’ve tried to imagine this. Their house must have seemed transformed into a stranger’s territory, even memories of childhood turn alien or seem to belong to someone else. What you thought of as your family life, secure, each respective identity intact, suddenly with
a snap of a stranger’s fingers, the whole edifice topples over the edge of some constructed horizon, and you’re left tottering from accusations that seem to have been delivered in another language and directed at someone else.

  Their country house in Carpentras will never look the same. They do return to it, but the place has been lost. Memory + landscape = nostalgia, well, not in this case.

  A letter is stolen from the German embassy that refers to “the Scoundrel D,” and a man is accused whose name begins with that letter, but the D was really a P. The P, whose tail was short, had been misread as D. Actually the P/D stood for Z. Secondly, if handwriting experts hadn’t pointed to D, he could have gone on pretending he was just like everyone else in the army. Many have said that if he hadn’t been accused he wouldn’t have been on his own side.

  I’ve found myself being stared at by individuals who suffer from some kind of visual disease; they think they’re looking straight at you but they’re really focusing at a point over your left shoulder. You talk and talk, you look into her eyes, but even while she thinks she holds your gaze in hers, she’s looking at the clock or the crackling radio just behind you. This could be called D’s disease, except it’s the object of the off-the-mark stare that stands in the place of D. “It’s not me. I’m innocent. You don’t really see me at all.”

  Mid-March, 1896. Lieutenant Colonel Marie-Claude Picquart, a sharp man, thinks of the army as his family. As head of the Statistical Section, he acquires a document which will determine that Z, not Dreyfus, was the real spy. The story would appear to be over and vindication of D imminent, but the labyrinth of fabricated evidence has just begun. On Dreyfus’s side, nothing was forged to prove his innocence, unless you include the gesture of his brother, sending flowers to Claire, Z’s accomplice, in order to obtain a sample of her handwriting, but the compilations on the other side were staggering. If I were an out-of-work writer, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have applied for a job copying over documents, making changes here and there. The twists and turns of forgeries of forgeries and copies of copies are dizzying. It was crucial to the generals that the accused, Dreyfus, remain guilty, and the convicted Picquart had to be discredited. Nothing arrives in the state in which it was sent. In other words, every breath of air had been inhaled and exhaled by someone else before. All kinds of documents were produced to prove this, and Picquart was sent to prison. As with Dreyfus, everything he believed in must have fallen apart. At the trial at Rennes, Dreyfus was so pleased to be addressed by the generals, even though they were the architects of his suffering while Picquart dared to oppose them. Poor D, so little courage at this point. I weep for him, so sure that X is X with no taint of Y.

  The judge might have been the kind of person who, for example, studies a subject about which one hundred facts are known. He only learns twenty of these facts and bases all his conclusions on those twenty true statements, steadfastly ignoring the other eighty facts and the contradictions expressed by the total number of true statements. He sticks to the twenty he knows and bases all his blinkered conclusions on them. The army, therefore, is always right. Am I, in my own marginal way, just as occluded?

  I have faith in nothing and therefore will never be disappointed. I barter with rats, drink with rats, and I let them debase my language. I would exploit them if I could, but I with my bad manners, things get botched up, and I often find myself snubbed. Still I envy them and want the attention they offer.

  I’ve been to the archives, and even though they are well ordered, I’ve returned home again with a nearly empty notebook. Imagine separating a mountain of paper into two distinct piles: the genuine and the faked, and continuing to do so until two opposing walls of documents are erected. I don’t know if I can follow the tangled path, and instead feel as if I’ve dragged myself along on my elbows while wind blurs the parallel walls of paper into one mass once more.

  The pre-Revolutionary clock stopped. Delphine began to bark outside, and fearing she would soon wake everyone close by, I began to read more quickly.

  Colonel Maximilian Von Schwarzkoppen, military attaché in the German embassy in Paris who employed Z, wrote in his notebooks:

  “They [the French minister of war and others] regarded Picquart’s discovery and the great energy with which he seemed to want to pursue it as extremely embarrassing and fraught with difficulties… if he [Picquart] succeeded in proving Dreyfus’s innocence and Z’s guilt, it would be all over for them, for the army’s prestige, and for the country’s reputation. They had thus to render the pursuit of Picquart’s investigation impossible and to establish Dreyfus’ guilt once again.”

  November 26, 1897 — File begun on Picquart, intended to present a composite of information that will incriminate him. A process undertaken with the same industry as the production of documents constructed to seal the question of D’s guilt. Three months later he will be dismissed from the army. Z sends Picquart forged telegrams in order to throw him off the track. The telegrams were signed “Speranza.” Some believe the handwriting of the signature matches that of Claire Francoeur.

  Felix Gribelin, archivist of the Section of Statistics, created documents and cataloged them. He became very anxious when a document called le petit bleu was stolen from Schwarzkoppen’s trash. Le petit bleu confirmed Z’s guilt and Dreyfus’s innocence. Later he helped expose the labyrinth of his own forgeries, but he steadfastly believed in the guilt of Dreyfus and Picquart. I suppose he thought his forgeries were a way of replacing the gun in the murderer’s hand, nailing him to the spot until the police arrive, a believer in the value of planting evidence. He knew better than anyone that all the evidence was fake, but never doubted the conclusion his fakes led to.

  None of this was news to me. I looked for something more personal and found pages that revealed Wasserbaum is married and has two daughters. Then I found a more recently written entry containing a paragraph that I would guess had been written that night.

  No response to Montreuil letter requesting papers, but I’m sure she’s Esterhazy’s Claire, his accomplice exposed by Mathieu Dreyfus. Check address.

  A few pages later:

  The address was correct. Found the house in Montreuil and was able to watch from a far corner of the deserted Star Film Studios down the street, in fact it’s almost next door. Her house is small, there is a rotted balcony on the second floor, vines hanging from it, cats sleeping in the shade. From the front it looks abandoned, and there is a run-down garden in the back. A woman was sitting in it. She was reading, then shut the book, and began to pull up weeds, easily distracted. Might have been Claire.

  Invent pretense for entering house. An inspector of electrical lines in old houses, an indigent relative, an itinerant piano tuner who knew Z.

  I skipped ahead a few pages.

  Her desk is in the cellar where the servant went for cigarettes. Check it for photographs. She must have pictures of herself and Z, or even some of the false composites published in Le Siecle: Zola posing with Esterhazy, for example. When published they were entitled “The Lies of Photography.”

  I read a few lines over several times: Invent pretext for entering house. . . . She is Esterhazy’s Claire. The hoax is on me. Shreds of my tottering vanity finally shuddered and crumbled like a powdery model of Pere Ubu. Help! I’m perforated! wrote Jarry. Oh, Claire, I whispered out loud, what did you expect?

  Newspapers printed rephotographed collages of citizens involved in the affair who were sworn enemies, strange bedfellows, or characters who had never actually met, but if he thinks I would save these relics after more than thirty years, like some kind of repository or museum, as if degradation was something to remember and preserve, he’s very much mistaken. His notes were full of these kinds of inquiries, as if in his somewhat sloppy research, he’d come to a blind alley he thought I might provide a blasting tool out of. I pulled out the last piece of crumpled and yellowed paper that had been torn from a book.

  She’ll pay when her back is turned.

  Wa
s she Esterhazy’s Claire?

  For members of the Syndicate I’m still an object of revenge, so I have to be careful. What measures could I take to defend myself beyond hiding out in an obscure house? Some part of me wanted to be skewered by this man who slept in the other room, to have an odd last night with a man who desired nothing more than my exposure and humiliation. I sat for a few more minutes staring at his door then put the papers back according to their original order, but as I reentered his room I couldn’t remember where I’d found the leather case in the first place. Against which bookcase or table had it been propped? I took a few paces backward into the hall, and stared at his face framed by the doorjamb. He turned over in sleep, looking more vulnerable than calculating, much like you did as a child when you slept next to me. I stepped back into the room. He turned over again and I froze, mesmerized, an intruder in my own house. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember where he’d left it either. I bent over and leaned the smelly damp thing against a chair leg; when I straightened up he was still lying in bed rolled over on his side, but one visible eye was open and just beginning to focus on me. I jumped but had the presence of mind to invent an excuse for being in his room in the middle of the night.

  I crossed my arms as if to control my chest and steady my breathing, yet my voice quavered with sincerity.

  “I’m sorry to have wakened you.” I hoped he believed me. “I heard a sound downstairs and was going to let Delphine into the house.” I jerked my head in the general direction of the yard. “The shortest way to the back door is through your room.” This wasn’t absolutely true, but he mightn’t yet have determined the arrangement of the ground-floor rooms.