Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  He didn’t know who Maryse might talk to given an opportunity. Night and day Jules manufactures messages from kaisers and diplomatic errand boys. She was a liability. Since the rare book business was finished he didn’t need her to help him anymore. He planned to tell her to move out. He was tired of her whining, and her cynicism no longer seemed as witty it had when they first met. It would be a relief to live alone again in a state of badly needed calm, an experience he had forgotten to the point where he had begun to doubt such a thing as a tranquil room could actually exist anywhere in the city at that particular moment.

  But I’ve never met Dreyfus.

  As you write, you’re engaged in a kind of extortion of identity.

  Plagio, but not plagiarism. The letters are my inventions, my words, perhaps modeled after Dreyfus, but the sentences are my own.

  A pigeon nearly flew into him, and he realized what he was doing, speaking out loud. No one seemed to be staring at him, apart from Caroline a few paces behind, and he didn’t notice her at all.

  Rabbit with cucumbers, 7 frs. Braised guinea fowl with tarragon, 8 frs. Felix wrote in his notebook, put it back in his case, and pushed his empty plates away. He turned to Jules’s letters, which should not have been taken from the rue de Lille office. They were useless; their content was rubbish. He would add them to the D file, although he couldn’t claim the letters had been sent to or from Devil’s Island. The handwriting was exceptional, the slant of the letters looked unforced and natural, a photographic copy of any sample of Dreyfus’s writing, but the content of the letters was the jabberings of a lunatic who screamed alone in solitary confinement. He wanted a cold-blooded Dreyfus, levelheaded and calculating, in touch with the Syndicate even from his island. He knew that Dreyfus did scream alone in his cell and throw himself against its iron furniture, but the letters Felix wanted were supposed to be penned by a rebellious prisoner, a man like Méliès’s double, unrepentant and plotting still.

  The first Caroline saw of him was the soft crown of his hat, his long hair and shoulders underneath as he made his way upstairs slowly, as if it was a chore. Leaning against her door she watched closely until the rest of his body came into view, climbing the stairs. He was carrying a box, and she guessed he intended to try to see the man who lived above them, but he stopped when he arrived at her landing. Sitting on a stack of old books Jules still hadn’t cleared away he lit a cigarette as if he had all the time in the world. They both knew the man upstairs wasn’t going anywhere. He smiled, unbuttoned his jacket, and asked her name.

  “What do you like to do, Caroline, when you’re not in the hall?”

  “I do drawings.”

  No one had ever asked her questions about herself or how she spent her time. On sheets of paper Jules had no use for, she drew only what she could see out the window or in the park, and what she could see was ordinary, so when he asked her what she drew she proceeded to describe pictures that she didn’t draw, pictures of things she couldn’t see or hadn’t seen.

  “I draw women and men.”

  She meant to say people and immediately regretted her answer. She felt as if she had stood on her hands for one second, then fell flat on her face. The refuge of a show-off, her father used to say, was the province of a girl who wanted to make startling gestures of talent and intelligence when everyone around her kept telling her she was just as difficult and ordinary as any other thirteen-year-old girl. “What makes you think you’re special?” her mother might add from time to time. Renard still smiled at her.

  She had seen men and women behind open doorways, through windows, in posters. She knew what they did together. Caroline watched him smoke and thought in his carelessness and indifference he looked like a man who could take care of himself, not like Jules. Jules, grown red eyed and disheveled, made her want to puke. Her mother pandered to his complaints, but expressed contempt for whatever it was he wrote and tore up and wrote again. Renard was clever and friendly. Jules ran on a cycle of nervous energy and despair, a series of impulses trapped in his hunched-up body. Go ahead, she wanted to say to her father and mother, make yourselves miserable, see if I care.

  “I have to find the tenant who lives one flight up.”

  He didn’t seem to mind that Caroline followed him upstairs like a puppy dog and watched as he knocked on Louis’s door.

  “Is Louis in? I have some things for him. My name is Renard. I’m a friend of Antoine’s.”

  Louis’s response, though barely audible, was angry. “I’m not opening the door. Leave whatever it is you’ve brought and go away.”

  Renard shrugged, pushing a box against the door with the toe of his boot. “Suit yourself.”

  He took Caroline’s hand and led her down a flight of stairs, making as much noise as possible as they descended so Louis would think he’d gone. The sculpture alcove was conveniently empty, and pulling Caroline onto his lap, they sat in it. He smelled of cloves and tobacco. She nestled into his thin shirt and as he put his arms around her she felt self-conscious discomfort on his bony knees and awkward pleasure at the same time. They watched the food disappear and the door shut after it.

  “We might have rushed in,” he said, “but what would we find inside? Old socks, dirty playing cards, and opium pipes.” She made no effort to get up from his lap. He remained with her in the alcove, and for a few more minutes they watched the peeling door as if a wind might blow it open. He finally stood up, removing her from his lap with his hands around her waist.

  “You feel like a strong girl. I’d like to see you the next time I make a delivery.”

  “Don’t knock on my door. If I’m not in the hall, I won’t be in.” This wasn’t strictly true, but she didn’t want him to ask Jules or Maryse for her. “You wouldn’t want to meet my mother.”

  Caroline had watched her mother flirt with all kinds of people, from shop boys to Jules’s clients. It was easy to imagine the door slammed in her face, her mother and the tall man laughing behind it. Her mother and her new friend needed to be kept well apart.

  She watched him make his way downstairs. Caroline was smart enough to guess that he probably wouldn’t actually knock on her parents’ door to begin with, and the possibility of Maryse coming to the door half-undressed was not the reason why.

  She daydreamed about running away with Renard. When her mother spoke to her she answered as if Maryse’s voice interrupted the most spellbinding melodrama. The man who held her on his lap for a few minutes was transformed into a lethal weapon, a man who would settle scores for her; the image of Renard doing no more than leaning against a door sent shivers down her spine. She couldn’t come back to earth.

  Seeing him was a matter of chance. She considered skipping school, taking her plate into the landing and eating just outside her door in case he made deliveries while her family was having dinner, although they rarely ate together anymore. She considered moving into the hall, taking over the stairwell and a few of the steps, as if this were her own private dwelling put together from the architectural details (alcove, corner, ledge). It was a space few paid attention too since only her family lived near the top, and the man above them was never seen to go out. Apart from the others, she would balance her plate on her knees, arrange her clothes in boxes, and undress when the building was quiet. It was a futile plan. Maryse wouldn’t even let her leave the table. She went back inside and noticed her mother poking through Jules’s papers. She stopped long enough to say that Caroline caused them nothing but trouble and anguish.

  “Even Marie Antoinette had to behave herself once in a while.”

  “Why Marie Antoinette?”

  “What do you mean? Marie Antoinette, that’s all.”

  “Why did you pick her? You’d just like to see me with my head cut off.”

  If her mother couldn’t get what she wanted, she took her pleasure where she found it, even if the taking was at Caroline’s expense. Caroline looked forward to sleep. Lying in bed she reviewed her minutes on the landing with Renard, re
inventing the ending so that he carried her away in his arms. Feverish images of Renard rescuing her from the brink of enslavement to a grotesque taskmaster (in the form of the shut-in upstairs), gave way to the reality of her parents’ constant arguing. Jules talked while he ate big gulps of food. Her mother slammed doors. Caroline stretched her hands over her head until each one grasped a bedpost, then put her hands over her ears.

  Maryse wanted to kill Jules. He slouched over his desk or the table or wherever he came to a physical stop as if he were melted over the surface, his elbows like support struts holding up his curved back, so neither of them could see what he wrote. When she asked him what the pages were for, he wouldn’t answer, and she grew convinced his industry was directed toward a useless end. He sat in a wrinkled suit, sleeves covered with bits of ash, face like a nut. Deaf and mute, he refused to answer her, and this was only more infuriating.

  “You give no thought to anyone but yourself.” She grabbed a page from his hand so that a long line of ink smeared the writing. Jules smacked her as hard as he had ever hit anyone. Ink bottles fell to the floor. Black ink splashed on Maryse’s dress. Caroline ran into the hall, upstairs to the invalid Louis’s door and knocked without knowing why. There was no answer, and she kicked the door as if the stranger’s obstinacy was keeping her in her apartment, and at the same time keeping Renard away. It was a meaningless thing to do. She ran downstairs, certain he wouldn’t open the door and at the same time embarrassed by her impulsive kicking. His voice trailed after her.

  “Get lost, girlie. I can’t do anything for you. It’s not my fault that your parents are assholes. Why don’t you go kick a moving train?”

  Alone in the hall she stuck her knobby knees out straight, stockings had collapsed around her ankles, one shoe buckle was about to fall off. Hours passed. She wasn’t missed. She sat on the old books waiting in the hall. The books slid out from under her as she shifted around, and she collapsed into a heap on the floor, knees up to her ears. Caroline could hear Louis and his cat moving around in their apartment. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he was expecting a delivery soon. She waited.

  Jules sat in a hard chair opposite Gribelin while the archivist read the letters Jules had brought with him. It was growing dark; Felix had clicked on a brass desk lamp, and dust motes floated in its cone of light in a small pool on his desk. Someone entered and shut the curtains. Occasionally Felix smiled as he read, but Jules felt on pins and needles; look, you carved your name on the desk, we know it was you. He hadn’t planted jokes and sight gags in the Devil’s Island correspondence. Why had he been called in? What was wrong? He’d done what they’d told him to do. Usually a messenger was sent to pick up his work, but this time he had been asked to come directly to the Section himself. After a sharp knock, a man in the uniform of a general, maybe, Jules couldn’t be sure, and also not sure whether to stand when the man entered, so he just twisted back the other way and faced the windows. The man told Felix he wanted a word before he left for the night. Looking down at his shoes so he wouldn’t witness Gribelin’s subservience, Jules heard Felix push back his chair and leave the room. The heavy door clicked shut and the sound of footsteps could be heard outside in the hall.

  He walked around Felix’s desk, a broad U-shaped piece of furniture, sat in his chair, and took a sip of a drink he hadn’t been offered. The glass lay outside the pool of light, and he replaced it in its original position. He opened a drawer. Under a blotter lay a dead watch, a blank notebook, pencils, erasers, and a few boxes of gummed labels. A second drawer contained several documents. He picked up a sheet of onionskin on which individual words had been traced from a crumpled dinner invitation from the Italian embassy. Jules put it aside. He picked up a letter written on a piece of graph paper. The letter had been torn and pasted back together, just as many documents were, to insure they would appear to have been resurrected from the dustbin when in fact they’d never even seen the trash. All were newly made. The forgery Jules held up to the light was particularly crude. Half the letter was written on one kind of graph paper marked by blue-gray lines, the other half bore claret-gray lines and the graph’s squares were slightly larger. The shapes of the letters were hesitant; they had obviously been traced, not written freely. A name, Henry, was scrawled on a piece of paper clipped to the back.

  Jules heard footsteps down the hall, causing him to jolt upright, nearly knocking over Felix’s glass. The sound of a man’s step, a man who loped but did so with conviction, grew closer. By the time he managed to half stand, the footsteps had turned elsewhere. He sat down again in the padded chair. The drawer closed with a click. Noticing it had a lock, Jules wondered why Felix had failed to secure the papers before he left, perhaps he intended to show him an example of a forgery badly done.

  Opening the drawer again he found more papers. The second forgery wasn’t his work either. Brittle paper had been reassembled as if from bits of a sloppily produced puzzle of thirty or forty very small pieces, glued together with strips of transparent paper. A photograph of the document also lay in the drawer. A letter-telegram, it had been photographed to delete any trace of having been torn up. It was labeled le petit bleu.

  “If he doesn’t like it, he knows what will happen.”

  Jules froze, statuelike, holding le petit bleu up to the light.

  “Does he know?”

  “I’ve always made that clear to him.”

  The deep, authoritative voices belonged to the profiles of two women who appeared in silhouette against the glass half of Felix’s door, then they moved down the hall accompanied by the sound of brooms.

  It was only night cleaners talking about cooking and what would happen if their husbands didn’t eat what was put before them. He looked at the Henry forgery again. He had been writing letters as if from Devil’s Island for weeks, but the letters and documents the Section actually used appeared to be written by another forger, without regard to the fact that they were crudely done, much inferior to his own. Felix apparently didn’t realize the difference. He closed the drawer for the last time, took one more sip from Felix’s glass, then returned to his chair and waited.

  “Fifty francs will get us through this month, but no further.”

  “That’s all he would pay me. I couldn’t get any more.”

  “You write all the time. He could pay you twice as much, it’s worth it to him. If anyone were to find out what he’s hired you to write, the whole case against Dreyfus would fall apart. If any anarchist wanted to blow up the Section of Statistics they couldn’t find a more powerful bomb.” Maryse startled him with her political acuity. But he had decided he wanted her to move out, and he was impatient for the two of them to go.

  “While I’m negotiating a higher fee you and Caroline should move to a smaller apartment.”

  “In the sewer? What will we live on?”

  “Your mother could help you.”

  “You make me sick.” Caroline accidentally kicked Maryse’s chair while she was aiming for the table. Her mother thwacked her in return.

  “Shut up,” Jules said.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up. I’ve seen what you do on the street.”

  Caroline didn’t want to rub her cheek, didn’t want to let them know the slap stung.

  “I walk on the street. What’s wrong with that?”

  Since the book business disappeared her mother and father had become preoccupied with money. They calculated and came up short, counted notes, then began again, making lists of what they needed to buy each month, trying to shrink the margin by which they fell short. With sweaty meticulousness Jules pored over documents, holding them up to the light, tracing, cutting, then writing again He never seemed to get it right and was paid very little for whatever it was he worked so diligently on. She had read of poor farmers who murdered members of their large families because they couldn’t afford to feed so many children, smothering them in hay or throwing them down a well. It wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, and not in the city, but she
could imagine her parents selling her to Star Films, for example, as a worker bee, or dropping her off at a pawnshop somewhere on the rue des Rosiers.

  Before the Revolution, she had also read, children had been known to murder aged parents who could no longer work to earn their keep. She went into the hall. Bakery boxes, a bottle of wine, and a bundle of sausages had been left for Louis. Caroline opened one of the boxes. She could make out the name Bluette, but the rest of the writing was smeared and illegible. She pinched a rose from the side of the cake, probably stolen from a bakery, and replaced the box. Renard had come and gone again. She was furious.

  “It’s all your fault,” she yelled through the open door. A pot had hit the jamb as she slammed it. Caroline ran downstairs and out into the street. “I’m leaving. I’m going to live in the park.”

  She wandered past old women sitting in front of their buildings who looked at her as if she ought not to be out alone. Their stares had never seemed censorious before, but now they were full of approbation, as if they’d heard and seen everything. A bad girl, willful and full of ideas.

  “Piss off, you.”

  They didn’t hear her. Turning a corner she looked in the window of a shoe store; her heels were worn, that had been one of Maryse’s constant complaints, and she was sick of both her shoes and the nagging. A man’s reflection appeared beside her. He tapped her on the shoulder.

  “How do I get to the Bastille from here?”

  He stood very close, brushed her arm with his sleeve. Everyone knew where it was, not far from where they stood. He smelled like petrol. She pointed and ran away from him, past the old women, past the high windows of place des Vosges, and away from the Bastille.