Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  Listening, invisible at the head of the stairs, from where I stood I could see four individual feet lying on a mattress left on the floor. I heard whispers and the sound of Wasserbaum pulling her to him, but it was the feet I recognized first.

  Did he ask her about my papers, subtly and patiently working his ambitions into his seduction, or was Sylvie really all he was after? She wiggled away with a rustling sound. I stepped back as I heard her foot on the bottom stair and pretended to be busy with Delphine whom I’d actually just kicked out of the way. The audible sound of her sniffing and pawing was too much; I was doing the same, but at least I was quiet about it. That afternoon I moved my papers around.

  For the second time I looked in as he slept. The door doesn’t squeak, I can open it and walk in all the way. One would never imagine this sweetly sleeping young man had used Sylvie under my nose any more than one could have pictured you, Lille, with Z. I had a kitchen knife in my hand which I was tempted to use. I heard a sound in the dark. I thought the thieves had broken in again and couldn’t see much beyond vague shapes. He’d rented this room. We never knew much about him. Yes, it was in self-defense. His real name is Wasserbaum. A violent imagination may come naturally to me, but I’m a coward at heart. I wanted to swing at him, the double dealer, but for what, really? As with Z, his pockets were probably bare. I don’t know why I bothered, so I went to another room, threw the knife in a drawer, and slammed it shut loud enough to wake the dead. I can’t come out of any crime innocent; I’m too much tarred with Z’s brush.

  “He said he found it in a cupboard in the cellar.” Sylvie spoke as if she revealed a secret. “He put the microscope on top of your desk and dusted off the body with the back of his sleeve.” She freely tattled on Wasserbaum, but didn’t realize that I knew more than she seemed inclined to tell.

  “Where does she hide her papers?” I’m sure he asked her.

  Sylvie told me only about the microscope. As you read the word microscope do you get the chills? Glasses that enlarge, magnify so you can examine every embarrassing detail. Aplanatic lenses are those which have been corrected for distortion, lack of sharpness; through them you can see a fly on a rooftop, if not a cell or a microflage.

  I wasn’t in the apartment at the time, but I picture the scene as if it were a movie cliché. On a late afternoon Z enters the room, jacket unbuttoned, hat pulled low as was his custom. The windows are shuttered against bright sun, and he can’t see well. He lies down beside a figure on the bed, thinking it was me, but as he reaches over your shoulders he realizes his mistake. Lille, I’m sorry, I thought you were Claire. You look so alike. I’m only imagining this scene, but I’m probably close to the truth. With charming nervousness he suggests you stay and the two of you get acquainted, iron out the unsettling bumps of mistaken identity, a harmless mistake after all, no? Maybe not. You’re easily persuaded. To the untrained eye he was reassuring, adult, and in control of his desires as well as his finances. He took you up to the roof, the sun was bright, and you looked out over the city through a pair of large black binoculars, not opera glasses with mother-of-pearl handles, but heavily encased lenses which felt weighty in your hands. He put his arms around your waist, untied, unbuckled, and you dropped the glasses, they fell to the street and shattered. The Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, Montmartre all spun in a blur that tourists would envy for salient compression. You thought I never knew, but he asked me to pay for their replacement without telling me how they broke. Whether spying at a window or from a roof, he enjoyed looking through magnifying lenses, as if innocently scanning the horizon for a dirigible or a rare bird. The glasses had been expensive, and without them he felt denied a great pleasure. Maybe all of this means nothing. I’ve never been really sure.

  August 11, 1934

  Dear Lille,

  Wasserbaum disappeared for three days without a word.

  “He needed things from the city. He’ll be back soon,” Sylvie said. Although she was uncertain, she spoke with authority, and I felt old and foolish in the face of it. What did he really want from me?

  The night he was arrested, Z tried to store the most important documents pertaining to the Dreyfus case somewhere in my apartment. We frantically devised hiding places, overturning drawers, dislodging plants, turning paintings around so they hung askew. We spent too much time unscrewing bedposts that turned out to be solid. If we’d only tapped them we would have known they weren’t hollow.

  We behaved like a pair of clowns, but when the police arrived they searched my rooms on rue de Douai meticulously from six o’clock in the evening until after midnight, as if a key to the city lay in the chase. The evening grew dark and quiet, then it was night. My maid brought them coffee. Anyone looking through the window would think the police investigators were nothing more than late-night janitors whose job was specific: to collect and sort papers. Although careful with the furniture they emptied boxes, tins, turned pitchers upside down, and knocked for hollow places. Some papers were well hidden but despite his care, others were found which revealed the generals had a hand in the fabrication of Dreyfus’s guilt and the construction of Z’s innocence. The pile finally carted away did contain evidence of that tightly framed facade. Push hard on one part of the construction, and the whole edifice might come down around your ears. He would later claim that letters attributed to him were forgeries fabricated from his handwriting, and that I or someone else had traced the lines from scraps of his original script, completely changing the meaning of his original intention, and doing so out of spite. If anyone knew this wasn’t true, it was me.

  After the police left with him I expected the worst and told the landlord I was afraid Z would kill himself, and could the lease, which was in his name, be transferred to mine? Even Wasserbaum knows of this incident and has accused me of self-interest before all else. If Z were a hero I’d be considered mean spirited, but since he isn’t I get off with being practical, cool headed, suspiciously down to earth. Apartment leases were important and not easy to inherit if you weren’t part of someone’s family. It turned out that even when confronted by the most damning evidence many would swear by Z’s innocence. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but the idea of Z as an innocent victim was something you could bank on during those years.

  My punishment really consists of the following: the Dreyfus affair won’t ever be finished for me.

  The morning of the fourth day Wasserbaum drove into the yard in an old Delage, as smoothly as if he coasted on clouds, cats scattered, and I was impressed.

  “Would you like to go for a ride?” He held the car door open.

  “No, thank you. I don’t travel.” It had rained again; his trousers and the windshield were spattered.

  “Now that you have a car, you can leave whenever you like.” I tried to sound more matter of fact than bitter. One reads of characters stuck in houses far from cities; they are miserable and doomed. Once in a while they escape, but in spite of the accessibility of this car I didn’t think I was going to be one of these.

  “I’m not in a hurry to leave you.” He kicked mud from his shoes, scraping them against the stones of the house. He sounded sincere. Practitioners of smoothness have always been my undoing.

  As he walked through the door he pretended to ignore Sylvie, and she barely looked at him, but I’ve watched the way he responds. When she enters a room, snub nosed, reedlike, and passive, his eyes light up. She is perfectly set up for this kind of attention from an urbane man who thinks nothing of using her for reasons she’s clueless about. He imagines that because she cleans, she knows every inch of the house, but he’d better move quickly; his money must be running out. I couldn’t let him stay without payment, even though I know it’s difficult for him to procure the sums I require.

  “If I can’t pay you, perhaps I can offer you something else.” He actually put his hand on mine. He didn’t really want me, I do know that, but I didn’t remove my interlaced fingers either.

  “I’m going into debt, but yo
u’re the source of a story that would pull me out of it.” He tightened his grip.

  Wasserbaum knows he would make more than a little money. A killing, in fact, could be made from the story of my affair with Z. Esterhazy’s Accomplice Speaks! It seems ironic yet necessary that the killing will ultimately be yours, Lille, not Wasserbaum’s, however, as I’ve indicated, you would be restrained by whatever censorship I chose to exercise over my papers in the meantime.

  “The papers the police didn’t find were meant for my sister.”

  “You haven’t seen her in years. You don’t know much about her. She could do you in as well as a stranger.”

  “How do you know?”

  He gave no answer. Sylvie pretended to dust. I pictured my betrayal on the wet mattress lying on the cellar floor crowded by junk.

  “My sister will know what to do with my papers. Will you? I’m not sure.”

  Dismissing my arguments for family loyalty with a shrug, Wasserbaum didn’t give up easily.

  “I know about the generals who had to insure Dreyfus’s guilt and toward this end constructed a series of forgeries, but the other side of that coin meant protecting the real spy,” he said.

  “That had nothing to do with me.”

  “But they visited Z.”

  “I never saw them.”

  “Their disguises were hammy and obvious: Felix Gribelin wore dark blue glasses. Others sported fake beards. Major General du Paty de Clam kept liaisons in the Bois du Boulogne covered by a veil and black silk gloves. There are those who find the spectacle of men in women’s clothing seductive; maybe they’re drawn to signs of vulnerability. Z also used to meet du Paty in public urinals: caverns with the sound of water dripping in the background.” He put his face very close to mine as if to demonstrate the force of his argument, as if to say these were disgusting men. “But I know they came to your apartment. The lease was in your name.”

  “Z was depressed and anxious. He was going to throw himself off a train. All kinds of people knocked on the door. I remember very few of them.” Wasserbaum was going to put me on trial all over again. I didn’t know which path to take: a) contrition, or b) insistence on my innocence, my noninvolvement, absence from the premises, etcetera. Which would he find most appealing? Which would get him to stop badgering me?

  “Z would never kill himself, he’d twist in the breeze as long as he could. He was going to escape France then sell his story to the highest bidder. Its publication would make things hot for the generals and possibly for you. The General Staff couldn’t allow that. The parade to the guillotine would be a long one. Z said so often,” Wasserbaum reminded me.

  I could sense him weighing the risks. He could remain in my house and pay dearly for it, or he could leave, giving up the fantastic attention that he was certain awaited him if he could acquire my papers. His false hopes were, I think, extraordinary.

  “Once the papers are published, you’ll be vindicated.”

  He didn’t say: I’ll be able to move into another apartment, employ research assistants, and be able to turn to other subjects. I’ll get all kinds of offers, the word offers rolling off his tongue and vaguely sexual. With the publication of The Private Life of Z he would be considered a serious writer, an inquirer after the truth, not unlike Picquart perhaps. No more Ferdinand Martin, no more tracing the footsteps of charlatans like Claude of Tours.

  “That’s all it will take, do you really think so? One sharp lens trained on a botched forgery and you’re off, a rich man.” I poked him in the ribs yet shuddered to think of what that volume might contain, and who would be enriched by it.

  “Don’t you believe in holding the torch up to history?” Wasserbaum posed self-righteously, staring into the distance, yet at the same time he looked so hopeful and naive, I couldn’t stand it.

  “To illuminate or to set fire?”

  He looked surprised. Comparing himself to Z, he said, “At least you must be assured I’m honest.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “now I can sleep at night.” I wanted to tell him that I had come to believe that repression solves problems that should never find their way to an oxygenated surface. Just don’t talk about it, is my motto, and the rest will take care of itself. Wasserbaum, evidently, believes in the opposite, talking, remembering until the sound of your own voice puts you to sleep. He doesn’t understand that I want to forget about Z and all the rest of it.

  He led me to the stairs. I gently pushed him away, but let my hands stay on his shoulders for just a minute. It wasn’t easy; if I gave in, I’d probably end by handing him everything. My perch is still under the eaves, but no one sleeps through the night in this house.

  Before Wasserbaum found me, what were his days like? He sat in an airless room, reading a newspaper or a book, feeling excluded from the world of print. The presses roared without him, he felt neglected, nobody knew his name, and so on. Like Z, he’s desperate for attention, filled with envy, yet with less bitterness, I think. Enmity toward all those real and imaginary blockades (the army, women, modernism, Credit Lyonnais) created Z, and he was quite formed by them. Given time, Wasserbaum may become another heel, sort of drunk and miserable in a loud and humiliating way. Z had once commented that Picquart would become like a garment turned inside out, a reversal of his former self. He misattributed the quote, almost a malapropism in Z’s hands, to Flaubert; the line was not from Bouvard and Pecuchet, and he turned out to be wrong about Picquart. The image of frayed seams showing on the outside and the treachery of the dead Z all seem linked somehow. I can, however, see Wasserbaum as a jacket or trousers turned inside out, completely bitter and pessimistic; unrecognizable.

  “He needed a way out, the means weren’t important.”

  “He needed you.”

  “What could I do?” I felt myself sweat. He knew things I’d neither heard of nor thought about for decades, connections I’d thought were forgotten and obliterated now reared their crusty heads. I tried to shove them back into oblivion, all the while hoping I appeared calm, probably failing to do so.

  “Handwriting experts claim that the gender of writers of forgeries and fabricated letters can be determined. You wrote with a female hand.” The pleasant, accommodating Wasserbaum had disappeared.

  “No! Did I?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. Madame Henry, wife of Major Henry, wrote some forgeries. You did others.”

  “Henry killed himself in prison.”

  “A shut razor was found in his hand. Do you think he had time to close it after he cut his throat?”

  “If he was murdered, no one remembers him now.” I wanted to change the subject and spun a globe that was standing nearby. Borneo, Tangiers, and Devil’s Island whipped round. “You remind me of what Mirabeau said of Robespierre: ‘He will go far; he believes everything that he says.”’ He was right. Each story was, for Z, indistinguishable from actuality.

  “Picquart,” he went on, “exiled to Tunis, was on to Z, and so you sent him a short telegram in an attempt to make him appear part of a conspiracy. Stop the demigod. Everything is discovered. Very serious matter. Speranza. What was that supposed to mean? He didn’t know any Speranza. It was all made up. The generals sent forgeries signed Esperanze. You dropped the e and added an a. You sent the fake telegram to Picquart in an attempt to make him appear guilty and to protect Z.”

  “One devises a paper trail, invents characters like Speranza and fiddles with the appearances of those who really do exist like Picquart or Picard, as he was known in one fabrication.”

  I was annoyed. Wasserbaum is an ambitious man. The picture of a solitary man spending bitter months in a cramped garret is both romantic and false. I’m a dupe. I felt foolish, an accomplice in my own discovery, and I wanted him gone. I’m my own Robespierre.

  We didn’t speak for several days and when we resumed our conversations, he didn’t allude to the papers. All kindness and concern, he pet the cats and the dog, spoke to them as if they were human, and pretended to care about how I l
ooked, but he never said you look ravishing, only you look healthy. Underneath his solicitousness the desire to achieve his own ends peeks through. One night he stood very close to me as I wound the pre-Revolutionary clock. His eyes looked impatient and very green, perhaps due to light reflected off its marine-colored enamel. He put his hand on my arm, but I noticed he had to shut his eyes first.

  August 15, 1934

  Dear Lille,

  A conversation.

  “If I may, I would just study the papers for a moment. I promise I won’t take them from the house. You can be assured that I won’t name you in whatever it is I write. In a sea of pseudonyms you can pick one out too, or you can remain unidentified.”

  “In your writings you can refer to me as Marie Antoinette.”

  He blinked. Marie Antoinette, a name that stands out as simultaneously false and symbolic. How am I like a headless queen, readers will ask?

  “What will you write in The Private Life of Z? Part scandal sheet, part history, prurient and salacious?”

  “There were many women in this story, you don’t have to be named,” he backed down.

  “There was only one woman forger, if you prefer. Madame Henry, wife of Major Henry, was an amateur.”

  “People are less interested in the affair than you imagine.”

  “Then why bother to write the book?”

  “I think there are new citizens with short memories who would make Z into a hero, and I think you know who they are.”

  “Who?”

  He looked confused, but barged on, putting his face close to mine.

  “Don’t wait until after you’re dead to be pushed around, to be made into something you’d rather not be. Annotate them while you can still defend yourself.”

  “If I let you print them and comment in the margins, I couldn’t defend myself in any case.”

  “So you have to be dead first?”

  Was he threatening me? I returned the favor, pushing him back until he was against a wall. “What if I used the papers as kindling?”