by Susan Daitch
In Felix’s employ there were men who saw spies everywhere, but none of them knew anything really incriminating about Dreyfus. There was bucktoothed Brucker whose job it was to keep German diplomats under surveillance, and he in turn employed an army of maids, messengers, butlers, and errand boys; professional flies on the wall who felt it their responsibility to overhear conversations, poke around in drawers, pockets, hatbands, and steam open letters, but so far they hadn’t turned up anything of value for the case. Documents would have to be created. He needed a writer with a facile hand.
What he did have disturbed him: something called le petit bleu had fallen into his hands, stolen from the German embassy garbage. It was addressed to a German attaché, Schwarzkoppen, and it was from, not D, but the real spy, Z.
The entries in Notebook B kept Felix up for several nights. His light could be seen from the street, an illuminated window set back on the third floor. A short woman in a felt hat slipped out the back door of the German embassy carrying battered shopping bags. Rats waltzed in the gutter under her feet. She noticed Felix’s silhouette at the window, wrapped her coat more tightly around her chest, lit a cigarette, and walked on.
Stacks of postcards lay on Felix’s desk. First he looked through satirical postcards of men with big heads and tiny bodies shoveling shit, looking for what the caption said was “the pearl of truth.” It was a reference to the trial, and the three caricatured shovelers were recognizable as men he knew and respected to one degree or another, and so the caricatures made him bristle. He thumbed through a series of cards entitled History of a Crime and tried to read a handwritten message scrawled on the back of one of them. He was annoyed by a drawing of the minister of war, a scythe in his back, Au Beaucoup de Faux written under the blade. Faux could mean forgery or scythe. He wanted to humiliate, to force the hand of one of these postcard artists, make him work for the Ministry; he was looking for the thing he could hang over a head, but all he came up with were cheap prints, photomechanical ephemera, and lousy puns.
The Dreyfus trial confirmed Felix’s belief in the Syndicate, a vast network of businessmen, lawyers, shopkeepers, theater owners, actors, all kinds of people from bankers to newsboys. No one was exempt from suspicion of membership, but if a citizen crossed the street when a church came into view, that pretty much guaranteed association with the Syndicate as far as he was concerned. Felix believed in the magnitude of the Syndicate, and if anyone questioned its far-reaching influence he gave as an example the incident of a contractor who cheated the army, bilking it of great sums of money by supplying faulty hardware, yet the man was never prosecuted for his extortion. This was one of many examples that Felix felt proved the Syndicate protected its own. Anxious as he was to expose the conspiracy, the network of stool pigeons who worked for the second floor was, in his opinion, less than satisfactory. Informants were usually paid by the piece, creating an enterprise any eavesdropper or riffler could dip in and out of and many did. Crooks who needed cash or revenge put on a patriotic face and endeavored to acquire information which might be useful and lucrative. Felix was convinced that ideas about allegiance, loyalty, and commitment grew flexible, or at least highly subject to who found what in whose garbage, whose mail, and what they did with it.
According to the Section of Statistics, apocrypha didn’t exist. Felix squared the postcards so they formed neat stacks, bound them with twine, and took out a set of pens.
He searched Notebook B for information on a prisoner he had interrogated years ago, but he couldn’t recall her name. She remained frustratingly anonymous, but he remembered fragments of her speech. She had detected conspiracies between the two of them that he would not have imagined.
When is a bed not a bed?
He had looked in her cell, seen dried blood on her dress, signs of torture, but her pain had been entirely invisible to him, even while he participated in her interrogation. Her wounds, he had told her, were self-inflicted. He shut Notebook B and called his secretary who did remember her name and brought in her file. Some pages she’d written had been found and confiscated.
Everything in this cell apes the idea of home, house, a shelter. There is an iron bed with a mat on it, home to bugs of all nations, one chair, and even a basin. I’ve had my head beaten against these so they are no longer signs of comfort: bed, chair, metal rim. The signs of homeness ridicule a desire to go home. In spite of accommodations which imitate a residence I’m certainly not in one now. A bricked-over window is only the footprint of a real window. Hatch marks on a wall parody a calendar and the idea of deadlines or pressing time. Limericks, names, verse scrawled overhead mimic the idea of narrative, something to read at night whenever night is. Something to read before bed. The objects in this cell bear so little connection to their definition that some other prisoner, an English/French lexicographer, wrote a list in a desperate attempt to remember definitions and make them stick.
le logis – home
la loi – law
la logique
loin – far, distant
louche – dubious, suspicious
louer – to rent, to praise
Or perhaps he or she was bored or could only make L sounds with their tongue and broken teeth. I think the message is as follows: a doubtful or distorting version of law which is not law has provided me/us with this home which is not a home. When a person is in physical pain, logic is a far, distant thing. How can renting be confused with praise? My relationship with my cell is not one of rent paid out, but it isn’t a space I own either. In English someone wrote: home, hostage, hostile. A slice of alphabetical coding I don’t understand. Where is I, J, and K?
Since my body is an agent of pain I hate it, I sting myself, bite my tail, and what’s worse is that none of this is private. You and your doctors and soldiers watch all of my most private functions and agonies.
Your questions are allied to the administration of pain so sharp and all encompassing I’m left inarticulate, reduced to cells and sensors at your service. I imagine our sessions as a kind of dramatic dialogue that begins with the sound of a door opening. The parts are well rehearsed. The questions matter so much to you. My confession is your possession. You’ve taken my body as a testing site without my consent.
I’m altogether sensored.
Had she called him a nightmare with a human face? Or had he been Torturer with a Human Face? War with a Human Face? He couldn’t remember. Cliché after cliché emerged from all that nonsense, delirium, that absence of language. He had shut her door soundlessly. That really scares them, he had been told. She was a them, and that was all.
He remembered the rest of that night just as clearly. Afterward he went to the opera and nearly wept for Mimi when she died of cold in the snow. He hummed an aria in the cab and watched men and women on the street as he passed them. Although it was late, there were a number of people still to be seen out the window of his carriage. One woman walked quickly and appeared to be talking to herself. She was well dressed and alone; he might have offered her a lift but didn’t. A man crossed in front of the cab abruptly, in danger of being run over, yet smiling to himself, oblivious. Felix’s driver had yelled at him. Felix envied the man’s absentminded oblivion. He remembered that he was pleased to arrive at his home. He ran up the stone steps, undressed, and sat on his bed, unsure of what to do. He played with a brass reading lamp, turning if off and on until he finally decided to lie down. The base of the electric lamp was in the shape of Winged Victory, the bulb, concealed by a green shade, had been placed where her head would have been. He hadn’t fallen asleep immediately but reassembled the scenes he had just watched, inserting himself in small roles, dressed as a tailor or soldier. Apart from the pleasure and gratification of imaginary curtain calls, which was immense, the idea of performing on a stage frightened him. Drapery would brush behind him, he would look up at points of light on the balconies, then he would bow deeply with gratitude and humility. Somewhere in the audience he was even applauded by the anonymous pri
soner, this is a form of pleasure for you. She wasn’t referring to the opera.
Now, sitting in his office, cognac-colored light filtered through his glass and fell on Notebook B. Still taking imaginary bows, he remembered that she had once worked in the Section of Statistics until something about her had been discovered. She had been a Communard whose background had escaped research by the Section, or she had belonged to a Marxist cell in Belleville. He wasn’t sure; his usually exceptional memory was failing. He did remember one of the jailers saying, one man’s informant is another man’s hero, what can you do? He was looking for an artistic sort of writer, not an informer, and went back to his reading.
The body lay sprawled on steps just below the level of the sidewalk. On his way back from the bindery Jules saw her as he looked down. He hadn’t heard any footsteps running away as he approached the street from place Maubert, he was certain. The woman’s big legs had folded under her in an awkward angle, and he thought of calling for help, but the street was empty. At first he did nothing but stare. He leaned over the iron gate to see if she might still be alive. Her torn skirt fluttered in the hot breeze. It covered her face and then blew away in another direction so the bruised features became fully visible. The inert body had a heavily made up, mannish face. A camera had fallen down the steps near the basement door. Jules stepped over bent knees, picked up the camera and examined it. Part was nicked, but it didn’t seem to be badly damaged. Sticking the camera under his arm, he climbed the steps, skirting the body, and walked quickly away from it just as the door at the foot of the steps opened a crack.
There was a secret file filled with forgeries that contained copies of so-called originals written by employees of the Section of Statistics. Each copy had been authenticated. The General Staff guaranteed each copy had been made faithfully and reproduced a genuine original. When the minister of war was to leave the General Staff, he wanted to be sure the dossier on Dreyfus would, should it be examined in the future, contain no cause to doubt Dreyfus’s guilt. A dossier of 365 documents were added to the file and these documents had to be copied in turn. The need for writers was urgent and kept Felix awake at night. The material in the files was extremely sensitive. He did some of the writing himself. Undated papers were dated and each document was numbered and initialed by a different general. Some dates were changed. The file was designed to show that Dreyfus passed on valuable documents wherever he went. Leaks were made to seem to follow the trajectory of his assignments with calculated regularity. Felix felt confident his files were as solid as polished rocks.
“What’s on your shoe?”
“Dirt.”
“It doesn’t look like dirt, and your shoes smell as if you walked through a slaughterhouse.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Polish the shoes and then make some coffee.”
“Balzac died of coffee poisoning,” Maryse said.
“The man is feverish, said the doctor to Monsieur Gault; “but there’s always a bit of fever in an accused person at this stage, and,” he whispered to the sham Spaniard, “to me it’s always a proof that there is a criminal guilt of some kind.”
Jules tapped Balzac’s words so they sank in brackish water, a murky substance which had the capacity to pull the wool over his customers’ eyes.
There were some documents that Felix thought best to destroy. He did so reluctantly, imagining trees arriving from the Loire valley by train to be milled and turned into pulp. For higher-grade paper, rags were used. Yet experiments had been made with recycling paper, mashing it, repulping, returning the inky document to a clean piece of paper once again. So the mill becomes like a giant moth which will eat everything: plants, old clothes, lice, secondhand books, cigar wrappers, medicine bottle labels, stacks of old newspapers whose headlines proclaimed the Franco-Prussian War, the strike of Paris World’s Fair workers, the first celebration of May Day, old love letters. (No! I might want those back! Oops. Too late.) Everything is swallowed, no sentence or word can resist mastication. In the middle of a pristine white or cream-colored page, one will not find the ridge of a cryptic watermark or fragments of words: possibil, etoricat, your assig.
An inkwell bubbling over with a morass of troubling or convincing words was no match for this kind of erasure. Felix saw himself as a kind of Goliath standing between the chomping jaws of one and the ink-stained press beds of the other. Take consolation in responsibility, Felix said to himself. Stories convincingly formed, backed up by hard evidence, will always ring true. Then the anonymous prisoner stood opposite him, jamming both the presses and shredder.
Or she stood on the side of the stage, faced the audience, and explained to all those rows of upturned faces exactly what was going on behind painted flats as he pretended to sing his heart out.
Louer, logis, louche
hospital, hostage, hotel
Looking out the window he thought he saw a man looking up at his window, just in the shadows outside the gate. He rang for his maid who was slow, and when she did come in with a tray she seemed somnambulant, her thoughts elsewhere as if she had been hypnotized. Her cap was askew, and it took her several minutes to answer simple questions. Perhaps the man had been waiting for her. If a man haunted his garden it could mean surveillance just as easily as encounter. When she left the room he hummed a few bars from La Boheme over his glass, then, drink in hand, he closed his curtains. The man was gone.
“This man claims you tried to sell him an eighteenth-century edition of Mallarmé’s Divagations including ‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Eliminate Chance,’ a poem not even found in the book.” Feix examined the accused’s hands and eyes. The man appeared slightly athletic, but like a cat burglar, not like a pugilist. He had a reason for taking interest in what may only have been a nuisance arrest or a minor charge of theft.
“No, he said the book was a copy of Pere Ubu, story of a Cistercian.”
Jules recognized the speaker, a little man in a black suit who appeared to fawn over Felix Gribelin and who spoke much better and more formal French now in a dark, high-ceilinged office than he had on the street. He didn’t know why he had been taken to the Section of Statistics rather than a precinct house. Gribelin had the curtains drawn. Desk lamps made small pools of light. Jules tried to scrutinize blocks of figures in a painting of a Napoléonic battle back in the dim recesses of the office. He didn’t know exactly who his interrogator was beyond a name, but the large room was a sign that Felix Gribelin was a man of some stature, and this was puzzling to him. His crime was minor and easily dealt with in a police station. What did a man who worked in rooms like these really care about small-time cheats?
“We misunderstood each other. I was trying to sell him a camera.” He had tried to throw the camera into the book deal just to unload the instrument, damaged and useless without a tripod. Jules hadn’t expected the man in the black suit to go to the police. He had always bet on the embarrassment of his dupes. To his surprise when he was brought to the police, special interest had been taken in the camera. He couldn’t imagine why.
“Where did you find the camera?” Before Jules could answer Felix turned and dismissed the man who’d made the charges leading to his arrest, making it clear he was no longer needed. The case would be taken care of without his testimony. Jules watched his disappointment and hesitation at the door. Unable to witness a miscreant’s full humiliation, he hovered like an afterimage until Felix finally waved him away. Turning back to Jules, Felix repeated his question.
“I do business with a book dealer who often asks me to sell things for him.”
“Did you look at the lens?”
“Why?”
“Did you look at it?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you clean the glass?”
“I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.”
“What do you call this?” He pointed to a smudge on the lens, but in doing so, left one of his own fingerprints o
n it.
“How should I know?”
“Glue. Glue for parchment. It’s sort of brownish color when it dries.” Felix took a book off a shelf and ripped it so the binding split. Fragments of white thread from its stitching and flakes of white glue fell onto his desk.
“The lens cap was on when it was given to me.”
“You were seen at La Libre Parole last week.”
“What could I have been trying to sell them?”
“You were seen at their printing works, near place Maubert.”
“No, I was in Lyon.”
“How did you get there with a railroad strike on?”
“I walked.”
“From Paris? You’re a fast walker, and you could walk fast to jail. You could disappear in jail.”
“Who’d I taken it from then?”
“A woman who was found dead in the alley adjacent to the printers.”
“No, I don’t think she was.”
“Dead? Indeed she was dead, as you were the first to know.”
“Didn’t look like a girl to me.”
Jules poured coffee-water out the window and turned the tub over to dry. He gathered up stained pages and old books, tied them together with lengths of twine, and stacked them in the hall near their upstairs neighbor’s door. When the table was swept clear he laid out pens, bottles of ink, pieces of gummed transparent paper, onionskin, several kinds of writing paper, and graph paper with blue-gray squares. There was a box of letters and other papers said to have been gleaned or stolen from the wastebaskets of the German embassy. Jules was to cut, paste, scratch out, recopy, and construct a series of documents that would create crushing proof, Felix had said, against a known guilty party. As far as initials were concerned, P’s had to be changed to D’s, and Z’s left out altogether. Jules pulled a handful of creased letters out of the box with attached explanations and instructions. The instructions read:
