Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  A woman in black sat across from me on the train breaking off bits of bread and staring out the window without eating. The crumbs fell into her bag and onto her skirt. She was far too young to anticipate the flying chairs, playing cards, devils, and houris I expected to find when the train stopped at Montreuil.

  I had no trouble locating rue Francois Debergue. The house said to have been the domicile of Claire Francoeur is empty and appears to have been abandoned for many months if not longer, although the letters imply the place wasn’t kept up. The front and back yards bristled with frozen-over weeds. Windows and doors were locked. I walked around the entire building looking through dirty windows. Rooms inside were empty as far as I was able to tell. Will make further inquiries as to the identity of the property’s owner.

  As the city becomes choked with refugees and emigrés, as you know, some spill out beyond its boundaries, even living out in the suburbs. Claire’s neighbors on the east side, for example, did not speak French well and were reluctant to open up until I shouted police inspector at the door. The woman who finally opened it, holding a cup of tea as if she had all the time in the world, told me they’d only recently moved into the neighborhood, and hadn’t ever seen anyone coming or going from the house directly next to theirs. There were packing cases behind her and thin, worried faces. Someone was translating as I spoke. A man’s voice, in a language I supposed to be Russian or Polish, expressed disagreement. Whether the tone of disagreement was in response to a domestic situation or to my questions asked from outside the threshold, I had no idea. A hand in a black fingerless glove appeared clutching at the doorjamb only to be pushed away by the one holding the teacup. I wasn’t able to see the body or even the arm attached. The way she pried fingers loose was deliberate yet the hand clung so tenaciously, I expected she might pour her tea on those stubborn digits just to get rid of it. They were packing up, she said, moving to the west. Nobody, a voice in the back said, trusts that the Maginot Line will hold. I heard the sound of the speaker being thwacked, and imagined someone saying in Russian, Stupid old man. You talk too much.

  Their limited French vocabulary was soon exhausted, and we were left communicating by a kind of sign language, so I thanked her and departed without feeling very hopeful. The next house, a narrow, listing dwelling, was further down the road. Sitting in the middle of its front yard was a large model of a camera, the sort of camera used perhaps thirty years ago. This oddity was enough to make me question the reliability of anyone I would find within, and I was inclined to skip the house altogether, but then changed my mind. Although I have seen pictures of actual overblown cameras used in the desert, this monster couldn’t ever have been a working machine. An elderly man scraped frost from its body. When I approached he introduced himself as Doublier, greeting me before I could speak.

  “It was a sight gag. Used to shoot water. If the thing might be made to work again I would aim the lens at all these new strangers. Squirt, squirt.” He made an obscene gesture. I didn’t ask him what it was used for now, only nodded in blind agreement, then inquired if he knew anyone who might have lived in the house down the road.

  “A woman lived at that address, but I didn’t know her. She kept to herself, never any conversation. I’d like to have gotten her with this.” He patted the camera.

  Stuffing a rag in his pocket, he asked me in, and I agreed, following him through a green front door into a hall so cluttered there was hardly any place to put one foot in front of the other. The old man limped ahead of me, sometimes hopping, sometimes holding onto a coatrack or a shelf for balance. If I weren’t a thin man, I would never have been able to penetrate his house, yet here in these rooms filled with rubber feet and false beards were shreds of my childhood dream tour of Star Films, but the shreds had been transformed in some grotesque way, ridiculing me as I stepped with difficulty. His laundry hung drying near the stove. I picked up a rubber nose feeling as if I were being taunted or secretly punished although I didn’t know what for. The rooms were airless and smelled of something sweetish and rotting.

  “Have you heard of any break ins or thefts nearby, especially around last Bastille day?”

  “Yes, at that house you asked me about. She hated everyone, but no one from this neighborhood would have robbed her. They must have come from elsewhere. The barbarian is at the gate. I tell everyone.”

  “Did you know anyone named Sylvie, a maid in the house?”

  “Yes. I told her to get a dog after the house was broken into.”

  “Do you know where I might find her now?”

  “She disappeared sometime after Claire Francoeur’s death. Did she steal something?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk to her.”

  He seemed confused about days, so I wrote names and dates on a large chalkboard that served as a tabletop. Bits of chalk and pencils were crammed into a tin cup near my elbow.

  “This chalkboard was used in a film too. French Cops Learning English. I played a student policeman.” He made motions with his hands miming the gestures of writing and looking stupid.

  “Did you ever hear screaming or arguing from next door? Ever see anyone burning papers?”

  “No. I’m a retired cascadeur, a comic stuntman, everyone knows me, but I don’t know everyone.”

  This line of inquiry seemed to have reached its conclusion. I thanked him for his time and decided to continue my investigation elsewhere. I may return to question him if photographs of the sisters become available. On the other side of his house there were a few buildings and houses with small frozen gardens, separated by fields and low stone walls, perhaps filled with more retired actors and stuntmen who walk their dogs through the flapping hinges and empty mullions of Star Films.

  I inquired after Lille Charpin with the sisters at Sainte-Anne’s. They’d had a Lille Charpin staying with them, but she had to leave suddenly. They described a younger woman. Too young to be a sister of Claire? It’s difficult to say with certainty.

  Did Lille really lose valuable documents? I’ve spent an afternoon talking to a man who’s still somersaulting through burning windows and swimming in a blown-up fish tank.

  Remember the case of the Marie Antoinette forgeries? Her friend and supporter, Baron Feuillet de Conches, had several of her letters, so he invented a few more. Even now many aren’t sure which came from Versailles, Bastille, or from the cabinet of Baron Feuillet. She’d written so little, everyone wanted to believe in them. Tell us more, please! Then every hairdresser, every fourth maid, every prison guard had a book to write. What if all that survives from one’s life are the enthusiastic forgeries that reinvent from birth to death in virtual similitude, and who’s to know the difference?

  Apart from inquiries regarding any possible sale of Esterhazy letters, the question remains, is there a Wasserbaum? Will have Devereaux check his anarchist files for a writer who fits his description as she gave it to us. A woman might invent such a man out of guilt or desire. He might not exist, but suspects can be found and questioned. Will also inquire at the morgue.

  Best,

  H. LeMaitre

  Inspector

  Commisariat du Arsenal

  1, rue Jules Cousin

  Paris

  April 1942

  Paris, Germany

  Dear Chantal,

  Here in a storage vault in the cellar of the Musée de l’Homme, I pass time going through relics of dead or dying societies. The curators would prefer that we not unpack their crates, but you like to know what you’re sitting on and who your neighbors are. We’re careful not to leave spears and things in disarray or mix up Dogon bowls with those attributed to the Kwakuitl. One minute you’re running down a street in what you thought was the twentieth century, the next you’re hiding in the Bronze Age and lucky to be there. I knew where I was running to. It had been arranged, but I couldn’t tell anyone, not even you.

  Lying in one box: Asmat sculpture from Dutch Indonesia. A naked man and woman, tab and keyhole, they grin
from ear to ear, elbows resting on knees. I sleep on top of a crate of masks belonging to the Iroquois False Face Society. I leaned over the side of the crate in order to read a card meant to be displayed alongside them: The False Face Society is made up of men and women cured by a man who crawls through the doorway of their house wearing a False Face in imitation of the deformed, crippled spirits in the forest. They rattle shells and skins of snapping turtles. They were believed to cure not through themselves but-from the power of those they imitated. “Crippled spirits” might be a wounded bird, mashed bugs, a broken twig. If I could take on the form of dented North American phantoms I might be able to walk unnoticed from Clichy to Passy. I put a snapping-turtle shell on my head and wave a rattle. Nothing happens. I’m still hiding in the museum basement. The very presence of these masks make me wonder who the native informants might have been. Who told the curators or anthropologists what object cured by virtue of imitation? How do we know what we know? Perhaps the rattles and beetle shells were used for no purpose whatsoever, relics from a garbage dump. Spells misfired. The tribe died from malaria or smallpox. I’m still here in hiding, untransported. No walking through walls.

  Paintings have been carefully ferried in fireproof wrappings from the Louvre to mansions and municipal museums in the south: Veronese, Dürer, Caravaggio, the Mona Lisa. Objects of less importance have been kept on display. I am neither on display nor able to escape to the south. I stayed too late. Above me circulating around the city are obscene cartoons intended to portray the “real” parasite, the “real” foreigners; pictures of lynchage festivals appear in Paris-Soir and Le Matin. The stereotypes didn’t scare me. I saw my face parodied in all of them, but still I stayed.

  You yourself won’t need false papers, but you should destroy mine, which you’ll find taped under the sink. Monsieur Fontaine, as you know, looked just like me. False papers, even crudely done ones, weren’t difficult to obtain, and mine were nearly flawless, but my face isn’t. Face and name didn’t match, and because the French army isn’t invincible, I have to hide. In one month France is overrun, conquered. As escape routes were cut off (Holland, the Channel, the Pyrenees) I relied on the name La Fontaine to save me from my face, but eventually, in a public bathroom, I was identified, so I ran.

  You knew about the Fontaine identity papers, but not the papers I stole from Claire Francoeur, and these you should also destroy. I left Montreuil quickly, eager to be out of that house and done with her. I didn’t tell you at the time, but as soon as I was within sight of the city I stopped the car by the side of a road and began to read what I expected to be a gold mine, the correspondence between Claire Francoeur and Esterhazy. What I found were inventions. The pages I held against the steering wheel were indeed letters, but letters someone had tried to pass off as Dreyfus’s Devil’s Island correspondence. The handwriting looked accurate as far as I could remember from examples I’d seen, but these were clearly written by another kind of prisoner. I threw them across the seat in disgust. I was so sure I’d taken her correspondence with Esterhazy, Mr. Z, and she seemed to think so too. Where she actually hid those papers, I was never to discover. She was such a confused old woman, perhaps she no longer remembered where she hid what. How did she get hold of these Devil’s Island letters, and why were they written? I’ve no answers, only guesses. Get rid of them. In certain hands the forgeries might pass as genuine and only provide more material for lynchage. What if the actual, the “real” forgeries were all that were to remain one hundred years after the trial? On the other hand, what if Claire’s false forgeries were to become the only papers to survive? I have one with me because the forger seems to have mirrored the condition of imprisonment so well, and when I hear certain boot steps overhead, I think Devil’s Island has been transposed to the middle of the city. So far, of course, soldiers haven’t unlocked the cellar door to have a search. We continue to review the objects we pick up and put down in blind ceremonies. They are a source of mystery for a man from Le Havre, a source of indifference for a Czech who describes unthinkable train rides, dreaming delirious while he lies in a Guinean canoe. Rimbaud believed poems should be begun from the end, and here we are with nothing but the end, thinking about the beginning or the middle is like trying to put a stalled car in gear when it’s mired, hopeless, even sinking, and to think about the road ahead or behind is to think like a boy scout. Useless. The Czech sits up in his bark boat and out of the blue quotes Bakunin who “urged one not to take power but to destroy it.” I hold an electric torch up to his face.

  “Fat chance,” I say. “Where’s your war paint?”

  I’m hoping one of the curators will bring you this letter, otherwise I might fold it up and stuff the wedge between the legs of the Asmat sculpture, hoping someone will one day find it. I receive no letters; there is a poverty of written communication here just as there is above ground; any information is obtained because someone told someone who told someone else. This is not intended as a reproach, I realize the danger of writing to the late La Fontaine. In whispers we’ve asked for a radio with headphones, but we’ve been assured we’ll hear nothing accurate on it. Children, the curator informs us, sing along with the radio to the tune of La Cucaracha Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris est allemand! He imitates them to keep our spirits up.

  If you and the children need a place to hide, go to Madeleine’s. She’s taken over her mother’s place in the building, and I’m sure there are empty rooms to let. I know there’s a small one her mother cleared out a few years ago that can’t be seen from the street and has its own entrance and stair at the back. She might let you have it for almost nothing.

  Signed,

  Wasserbaum

  The Section of Statistics

  Maryse saw a girl in the park filling page after page with small cramped script. When she had written to the end of one page, she turned it over, filled the reverse side, then began another sheet. Maryse sat opposite her, staring, but the girl never looked up. She looked familiar, although Maryse was sure she didn’t know her. The girl seemed like a kind of distant imitation of herself, writing paragraph after paragraph, noting everything that she saw or overheard, everything that entered her head. Maryse had thought the observed life was a way to step outside things, to put herself beyond the restrictions imposed by her mother. Her mother’s constant vigilance was a series of snares: button up, confess, look clean. When Maryse ran away she discovered the water was full of sharks, and not knowing how to survive she swam with them for a while. The dangers left behind in her own house seemed frustrated and toothless by comparison.

  The swimming began when Maryse followed her older sister, Aurelie, defiant and annoyed, in the process of driving their mother crazy.

  “What did you do to your hair?”

  “Nothing.” Aurelie twisting a chunk of artificially lightened hair around a finger.

  “You always look as if you just got out of bed.” Her mother grasped at replacements, ways to imply what she couldn’t say. She couldn’t use vulgar words to convey vulgar meanings. Aurelie knew this about her mother and goaded her to the edge of incoherence.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I was right here. I never left the house.”

  At night when she thought everyone was asleep, Maryse listened to the sound of Aurelie’s door opening, followed by the sound of footsteps down the hall. At first she wanted to creep out after Aurelie but the security of her room pulled too strongly, a kind of irresistible gravity that at first overcame any impulse she had to run away, too. Then one sleepless night she got out of bed and stood in the hall with her shoes in her hands, not sure whether to come or go. From a stairwell Maryse watched Aurelie lock the door and run off into the night. Maryse had no idea where she went or what Maryse herself would do in the street except to feel foolish and risk being assaulted by whoever waited for her there.

  One evening while Aurelie and their mother were arguing downst
airs, Maryse went up to Aurelie’s room to have a look around. She searched her sister’s desk for letters or names and addresses written on scraps of paper, but found nothing. The little drawers were empty or contained balled-up cigarette packages, broken pens, a dry inkwell left uncapped. The closet overflowed with clothing and boxes. She looked for letters or other papers which might be found there. After feeling around in pockets she pushed aside jackets and coats, including a man’s tight-fitting cutaway suit. She wondered how her mother had never found it. The more Maryse looked the more she realized that she knew little about the woman who wore these clothes. In her frenzy to find something, anything, she wasn’t paying attention when the sound of arguing stopped. Maryse was reaching for a box hidden in the back of the closet when Aurelie grabbed her violently by the shoulders, turning her around in a rage.

  “What are you looking for?”

  The box fell. Men’s clothing, black trousers, a black jacket with shiny lapels, and other objects Maryse couldn’t identify tumbled out of the box. Her face red, her sleeves wrinkled from the effort of pulling things apart, Maryse waved a man’s shirt above her head. “What are these?” She knew the men’s suit was nothing more than armor to wear when she traveled alone at night. As soon as she got where she was going, Maryse guessed, the flowery Aurelie would change her clothes and stash the armor somewhere until she had to hit the streets in order to return home.

  “Leave them alone. Nothing.” Even when confronted with evidence, Aurelie ran over Maryse every time they argued, and she felt completely helpless. “What were you doing here?”

  The first crime had been Maryse’s: trespassing. The more ambiguous transgression of keeping men’s clothing in her closet dwarfed that in comparison, and Aurelie knew it. All Maryse could do was try to mollify her sister by letting her think she was on her side. Was it possible to make a deal?