The Department of Missing Persons

by Ruth Zylberman

  Jan and Bielinski had known each other years ago.

  At the time, Jan had a print shop on the ground floor of a cut stone building on a street perpendicular to boulevard Barbès. He used to like walking around his machines, alone again in the darkness barely dented by the weak light filtering in from the windows overlooking the sidewalk. He’d greet the workers who arrived one by one in the budding dawn. The noise of the machines, the smell of the ink, the stained fingers, all of this was what Jan liked: the promise of a closed circuit that was productive and self-sufficient. All of the advertising agencies that emerged in those days—the years of flashy money, the debut of Mitterrand’s presidency—entrusted Jan with their gleaming brochures that had been sweated over by overpaid graphic designers and editors.

  Jan had clients in the fields of advertising, cinema, and design. He sometimes ventured to the luxuriant parties held at Le Palace or Le Sept. His joviality and colossal alcoholic decline, along with the mystery that emanated naturally from him, drew throngs of creative demimondes around Jan, who, in the early eighties, had found his kingdom. He adapted perfectly to the expected codes of behavior: expensive, excessive, demonstrative. But his most discriminating interlocutors could sense that behind his friendliness there was still rigidity, a secret unshakeable zone that was completely foreign to the spirit of the place, as if the orgies in which the evenings often ended were decadent and ridiculous children’s games he had to endure without really taking any of it seriously. Because nothing, ever, intimidated him: he’d stay at Le Palace until the wee hours of the morning, drinking at the bar, sniffing directly off of tables, fucking quickly in dark corners, then go straight back to the print shop, change his shirt, and get to work with nothing on his face bearing witness to how he spent his nights.

  Bielinski, the charismatic leader of the Polish opposition movement, had come to France under cover. In a café on rue du Faubourg-Montmartre he met Jan, who, despite Bielinski’s perfect French, had identified his accent. From that day on, they never left each other’s side again. Jan added the books and tracts Bielinski requested from him to the luxurious brochures made of glossy paper. He did this without a second thought, and in the middle of the night, one next to the other, without speaking, Jan and Bielinski would often arrange the freshly printed sheets together. Then they would leave to walk the streets of la Goutte-d’Or, where Jan had grown up after his father’s departure from Poland. The books, precious ammunition in the democratic conspiracy, were then carried secretly to Poland by inoffensive tourist cars driven by French volunteers eager to do something heroic. Jan only made the trip once. He spent the three days in Warsaw getting drunk. Most likely in order to avoid discovering so much as a single trace of the life his parents had led there.

  Then Bielinski went back to Poland.

  Jan abandoned the parties. He closed the print shop and reinvented himself.

  Business, import-export. It was vague, I couldn’t really put my finger on it.

  He saw a lot of people, that was for sure; he was permanently in meetings, and usually late to ours. I would wait. Then in the bedrooms I’d throw myself at him to hit him and beat him with both my fists, barely reaching the height of his chest. It was absurd and yet I beat him with all my strength, outraged by his failures. I didn’t understand yet. I didn’t understand anything! He pushed me away with a flick like an agitated insect. He held out his hand to me and picked me up when I fell to my knees, screaming.

  “Get up, not on your knees. Where do you think you are? Voluntary servitude. None of that, none of that. Come on, forget it. I have stories. Great ones. Listen. Don’t waste your time. Don’t hit anymore. Get up. Listen.”

  I quickly felt that he was overdoing it. Too much wine, his voice was too loud, too many cigarettes smoked and stories told. He was overdoing it to make people believe in his presence. To make people believe he would always be there as brother Jan, father Jan, with an exterior full of benevolence and enthusiasm, a firm grip, steady on his two legs. Jan the boastful.

  “Yeeeees, I understand, ab-so-lute-ly.”

  He cut out his words, delicately detaching and prolonging the vowels and bursting into great guffaws. He’d smile at invisible interlocutors who interrupted our tête-à-têtes, mirroring the intonations I imagined at the other end of the line. He was totally preoccupied with approval and understanding the most desperate of people. Not that he was naive, some Tolstoyan idealist lost in the world of business, but his vibration in unison with other people, whose psychic frequencies he detected with exceptional precision, was, at the end of the day, a method of seduction like any other. And then there was the experience of seeing him eat, listen, and embrace people, as though he were animated by an unshakeable and vital self-assurance. He was “Monsieur Jan,” the man of confidences and admitted hopes, the universal savior, the axis of life around which, like wandering planets around the sun, the constellation of his friends, clients, and militants hoping to take shelter behind his thundering body turned. And Jan went along, laughing, promising, forgetting, and fleeing, absolutely, unconditionally, and magnificently. So people ran after him, tripping over themselves, looking for revenge. “Don’t you remember your laugh, your promise, our hopes, don’t you remember, absolutely, unconditionally, magnificently?” But Jan knew the virtues of forgetting and fleeing that allowed a person to be reborn a few miles or years away, untouched by the sadness of broken promises.

  He would disappear for days. Weeks.

  His life was as partitioned as a Comintern agent’s, and like an agent, he had mastered perfectly the difficult art of the secret.

  And I became greedy. Greedy for the hard-won hours when his body was mine. Greedy for his energy without which, from then on, the world around me—the streets I’d walked along and the books I’d read, Daniel, the man I’d loved—became colorless and mute.

  Even my nights no longer belonged to me. In my sleep I drifted over monochromatic solids where the only things that stood out, like in Chinese theater, were Jan’s bounding and luminous silhouette and mine always trying desperately to catch up to it.

  The alternation of these appearances-disappearances that followed each other in an unpredictable rhythm threw me into the same emotional state as if he’d been holding me against him at the top of a cliff, fighting exaggeratedly against the elements to keep me from falling, only to suddenly let go of my body for no apparent reason and watch it fall into the void without the slightest movement to try and catch it. In reality I was lying prostrate on the bed, my limbs stiff just like a dead animal, trying to offset the magma on the inside with my perfect immobility. Fooling myself was one heck of a game. Maybe, I thought, if I could stay long enough without moving, every movement—the one unleashing itself inside my brain, whose materiality I perceived as though colored fluids were redrawing its circulation on an X-ray—would be abolished. Maybe then I could believe in my own death and finally escape from the spell and the pain.

  The time for revolt came, too: I wanted to appropriate the power of disappearance for myself. I wanted to become an amnesiac, too. It was so simple. All I had to do was find the borders I used to have and ignore the new geographies. Parisian topography, the topography of my body.

  I had to bring myself back to life from the red sofa to the library, behind the shining railing. So I disappeared. With a diligence that already signaled my failure. As I methodically drew up the list, certain neighborhoods became off limits to me. I paced the untouched streets with rage. I threw out the books and letters. I forgot the addresses and telephone numbers. I forgot the madame mademoiselle, the enormous eyes, the strong hands, the collapsed buildings in Warsaw, the ravenously smoked cigarettes.

  Ah! My arrogant and conspicuous disappearances!

  It was not so simple; everything spoke the language of addiction and memory. My body was dry, cut down like a tree on the bed, lifeless. A body from which all life had retreated. This was not words, not feelings, not love. This was physiology.

&nbs
p; There was only the voice, and it was my lifeblood again, the lifeblood that redirected my hindered circulation. I put myself back together, an activated marionette, one leg in front of the other, and even the trees on the boulevard, disheveled with their branches still black from winter, kept me company as I went.

  I found him. A new dark bedroom and Jan, stranded like a marine animal, no longer encumbered by his seductive regalia. It was when he relieved himself of that paraphernalia—when the silence finally settled, when he stopped trying to reassure, to outdo, to support, to betray, when he let himself just breathe the smoke from his cigarette, when his body lost its magnetic abilities—that he returned to his most fundamental essence, the void, the unnamed. His feet swung gently off the edge of the bed, detached from the rest of his body, and the crumpled sheet squeaked under the weight of the continuous movement. His eyes remained closed, tired from projecting strength, enthusiasm, or pleasure. I moved my wedding ring mechanically along my finger; I knit together a strand of hair. In the cracks of this silence, I saw the thing that linked me to him, more firmly than his constant tours de force, unfurling itself in front of me. In the cracks, in the immobility, each of us had our space in the wings without words that led us toward the place we came from.

  And so the penis that swells, the penis that penetrates, is no longer an erotic attribute. It becomes a symbol, an organic and mutual bond of survival.

  In the middle of that peaceful capital, glorified for its achievements in the gallant sciences raised to the status of a fine art, in that modern country where pleasure spread over the posters, the newspapers, and the Internet like a tangible avatar in a society of overconsumption, Jan and I were sharing fantasized miracles, an unpolished sexuality without adornment or play. We were replaying the part of those for whom the interlocking of bodies scorchingly preceded disappearance. And the cries of love were no longer anything more than the cries of a threatened life turned into echoes.

  He also says, “Air, wind! Let’s forget! Let’s live!” So we leave the center of the city for the steps of Paris, toward Marx-Dormoy. No one would find us among the short Indian shopkeepers, the crowd of junkies, the African families who spread out single file on the sidewalks. Jan buys me a ring at a stall laid out on a white sheet on the ground. I choose the thickest one: imitation ivory encrusted in imitation silver. It’s too chunky, too wide, too big; it slides on my finger. For a laugh I argue over the price with the seller, a Pakistani man with pockmarked skin. He smiles and hands me the ring. Six black men are cooking corn cobs in six cooking pots in front of them.

  We walk along the unused streets. Cranes, crumbling buildings, and vacant lots protected by gray and green metal fences. The workers in helmets yell, activating their machines that rise up like clumsy birds and cut into the sky. The teeth of mechanical diggers swallow the rubble and sand, the excavating cranes launch their sledgehammers against the stones revealing shreds of painted paper, orphaned walls made of black stone, the squealing of pulleys and sheet metal, the roar of explosions, the dust coming up in swirls. We look at everything, we listen to everything. Jan takes me by the hand and brings me under a cinder block archway that leads toward a building lost between two vacant lots. Some Chinese are gathered; a few are squatting in the courtyard looking at us anxiously, appearing slightly hostile. We can hear snippets of murmured prayers. We stay there like two travelers who have wandered astray at the ends of the earth. The Chinese start to move, pointedly showing us we are not welcome. We leave. At the end of the street, almost on the corner of the aboveground métro, we stop in front of a dilapidated façade on which bas-reliefs inspired by Socialist Realism are sculpted. Men in hats and thick women, scythes or hammers in hand, stalks of wheat, sickles.

  A junkie in a half-torn gray coat, wide open, plows into us. He’s babbling, saliva running out of one side of his mouth, his dreadlocks stiff with filth. He wants money, he can sing us a song in exchange. He starts, he jumbles it up. We stop him. A bill sneaked into his hand. He cries and pockets the bill; he tries to sing again and jumbles it up once more. The métro going by above us covers his voice. He gets annoyed and bangs into Jan and Jan takes him in, opening his arms, holding him against him. The junkie spits on the ground and pulls away, swearing. Against a corner of a pillar, a few brown and blonde-haired heads emerge from a pile of different colored sleeping bags. Their bodies are squeezed against each other for warmth.

  Vendors try to pass us contraband cigarettes and we take them.

  A man puts flashing lighters under our noses, Chinese toys. We take them.

  An old Arab man bent in two holds out his hand. We give something to him.

  We bury everything—the lighter, the cigarettes, and the toys—in my bag.

  An overweight gypsy child turns on his scooter while staring at us, unblinkingly.

  Our hands look for each other, our hands lose each other, our hands find each other, I hold myself against him, I take refuge against him, and I go blind, my head burrowed into his coat. I am blind, he brings his hand lightly up over my buttocks, against my back, and we keep going, we hobble along.

  Delicately, too delicately, he removes his arm from my body, runs his hand through his hair, and detaches himself from me.

  “I’m going. I have to.”

  “Okay.”

  I play the game; I’m still feeling powerful because he’s here.

  “I have a meeting, I have to go.”

  “Go, go.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  He’s already walking away. Up above, the aboveground métro is passing. The old Arab man slips over next to me. I run after Jan.

  “Wait. What meeting? Please stay, stay, stay a little longer. Come on.”

  I cling to him, I beg, I squeeze.

  “Three more minutes, I’m begging you. Three minutes. Stay.”

  “I have to go. I’m late. No theatrics.”

  “And where are you going? With who?”

  “A lawyer, I have to see him. I promise I’ll call you tomorrow. Cross my heart.”

  And he’s detaching himself once again, his hand is letting me go, his body is leaving me; he disappears into the falling night. Alone! In the midst of the city and the beggars, the cheap ring on my finger I keep fiddling with. My legs become heavy, too tired to move. I squat down at the base of one of the métro’s steel pillars, across from the multicolored sleeping bags. There are empty bottles thrown all around, like a barricade of alcohol. The basketball players behind the fence—bands of boys, black, Arab, huge—throw a glance at me, elbowing each other, then return to their game, shouting. I put my bag under my seat, my head in my hands. When I lift it, I see a Vietnamese woman passing by, almost a dwarf, her thin gray hair sticking to her face. She walks, wrapped in a black anorak, squashed by a backpack as big as she is. She walks, looking relaxed on her voyage under the aboveground métro. She lightly touches the garbage, walking her hands along the surface. She picks some up and at lightning speed brings her hands behind her, opens the backpack, and crams into it what she has just found.

  I feel my telephone vibrate. Jan is leaving a message, endless. I stick the telephone against my ear. I can’t hear a thing with the métro going by, the car sirens, the shouts of the players, the monotonous chant of the beggars. I listen twenty times; twenty times I rewind the chopped message and put it together.

  “Madame mademoiselle who is so dear to me, who I’m pulling by the hand. I’m in the métro—uncertain breaks I can’t figure out—But open your ears wide, madame mademoiselle.”

  A shot into the fence, the ball bounces next to me. The giants in hoods shift around.

  “The ball, m’dame, the ball, m’dame, could you throw it back?” M’dame stands up and stretches. I take the ball at my feet. I loosen my arm and my fist. Bang, I throw it back inside the court.

  “Thanks m’dame, thanks m’dame.” They call me back to reality; no longer a lost little abandoned girl whose hand has been let go of, but now a ridiculous m’dame, pro
strate on top of her bag, always imagining an unconditional hand to hold onto her.

  “Madame mademoiselle who is so dear to me, who I’m pulling by the hand. I’m in the métro—uncertain breaks I can’t figure out—But open your ears madame mademoiselle to hear me speak. I’m murmuring for my fatigue is great.”

  Commotion; they’ve scored a basket. They jump into each other’s arms, turning on themselves like overactive puppies. One of the sleepers at the pillar comes close to me. I hadn’t seen him emerge from the backpacks. He doesn’t even speak to me, I just feel his body in front of me. I don’t lift my head. I dig into my pocket for loose change. He pockets the coins and leaves to sit down again on top of the bag, his back straight against the pillar. He is maybe thirty years old with short hair, a three-day beard, and delicate features. He almost looks like an ancient prince, a portrait from Fayoum. He eyes me from atop his bag.

  I jam the receiver against my ear.

  “Open your ears, madame mademoiselle, to hear me speak. I’m murmuring for my fatigue is great. I’m old, it’s very simple.”

  He’s come out of the métro. I recognize the tapping of his steps, cars passing in the background.

  “I’m old it’s very simple. Less momentum, fewer erections, but to still love you, with your large eyes, the witch, the evil one, the plaintive one, but to still love you …”

  I hear a blend of voices then the message abruptly breaks off. I listen, I play it back, three times, four times.

  “But to still love you, with your large eyes, the witch, the evil one, the plaintive one, the large eyes, the evil one the plaintive one, the witch, the evil one, the plaintive one, but to still love you …” I finally recognize a woman’s voice in the background yelling “Jan” before the telephone cuts out.

  Well. I get up; there’s no longer any question of fatigue, abandonment, or sinking. Predictable witch. I’m going to protect my property, Jan the Elder. I become a detective.