The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  Only years later did I recognize that they were not quite what I had believed them to be. I had built these people into monuments. As Wolff himself had said, they were not the FI’s finest; they weren’t even the FI’s average. But to me, standing among them was a great, sacred dream.

  My smile faded. I was “a man of the resistance,” as Aubrion put it. If the Germans captured me, I would be treated as such, for my youth was no longer innocence.

  A woman left her typewriter to hand Noël some papers. He looked them over. “I hate the last paragraph. The rest is fine.”

  With a look of disgust that was probably directed at Aubrion, Noël tried to hurry away. But Aubrion persisted: “You don’t understand. I have an idea.”

  “All the more reason for you to leave. Do you know what happened the last time you had an idea?”

  “Yes, we—”

  “Lost two percent of our readership.”

  “You have no evidence that it was my fault.”

  “A column on how the war is affecting breastfeeding? Aubrion, what on earth were you thinking?” With another shake of his head, Noël tried unsuccessfully to leave the tiny room.

  “René,” said Tarcovich, blocking Noël’s exit, “Marc is leaving out some valuable backstory.”

  Victor hung his tweed coat on the back of a chair. “We were contacted last night by August Wolff.”

  Noël’s eyes widened. “The August Wolff?”

  “God, I hope there’s only one,” said Tarcovich.

  “What did he want?” asked Noël.

  Tarcovich said, “He wants us to co-opt La Libre Belgique, to use it for a black propaganda campaign against the Allies.”

  “And you agreed to this?” said Noël.

  “Obviously,” replied Mullier.

  “Oh, God.” Noël looked startled, perhaps just noticing that Theo Mullier, the renowned saboteur, was among us. Though I am not sure the two had ever met before, there wasn’t a resistance fighter alive who would not have recognized Mullier: a short man with ordinary features clustered in the middle of his face, grubby beard, hands knotted with muscle and wear. Mullier’s presence lent us some credibility, I think, which says more about us than it does about him. Noël said, “This could be—”

  “Wonderful.” Aubrion sat, stood, unable to keep still. “That is what I’m trying to tell you, René. It’s the perfect cover.”

  “For what?”

  Aubrion threw his copy of Le Soir on the table. “What if—what if—while Wolff is watching us prepare a black propaganda campaign using La Libre Belgique, we instead carry out a counter-campaign using the Nazi mouthpiece Le Soir?”

  “I am lost,” said Mullier.

  “Me too,” said Tarcovich.

  “As am I,” said Noël.

  “Let me back up.” I watched Aubrion take a breath, trying to capture his thoughts and order them. “If not for the occupation, Belgium would’ve celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German defeat in the Great War on November eleventh of this year. I say we celebrate anyway: by putting out a fake copy of Le Soir on November eleventh. It’ll look just like the regular Le Soir, just your ordinary collaborationist swill, until you start to read it. Then, my God, there’ll be jokes, puns, anything we can think of—all in the voice of Le Soir.”

  “To what end?” asked Tarcovich.

  We expected him to trip and fall into some madcap justification for this scheme. But Aubrion did not do that. I saw him travel somewhere far from buildings scarred by German mortars, far from our shamed, false city.

  “I think, Lada,” he said, “that people are losing hope. This war has been dragging on for a long time. If we can make light of the Nazis, just for a day—hell, for an hour—it will remind people we’ve beaten them before.” He smiled. “I know how this sounds, but...” Aubrion held out his fists as though begging someone to remove his handcuffs. “You’ve seen them, great crowds of refugees fleeing France and everywhere else, leaving everything behind, leaving their dreams on the roadside with their carpetbags. Somehow, we have a chance to give it all back.”

  Everyone was still—everyone but Noël, who had fallen prey to so many of Aubrion’s foolish ideas. “My God, Aubrion,” the director said. “It’s brilliant.”

  “Zwanze,” I said.

  Aubrion ruffled my hair. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “It’s suicide,” said Victor, pushing up his glasses. Sweat gleamed on his upper lip. “Do you even comprehend what you are proposing?”

  “You might think me bold for saying so, but yes, I do comprehend my own idea.”

  “No, no, take a moment to think about it. For an ordinary print run, let us say fifty thousand copies of this newspaper, just to be generous—for an ordinary run, we shall have to secure about fifty thousand francs. With four zeros. Assume for a moment that fifty thousand francs materialize out of the air.”

  “Why, Victor,” said Aubrion, “I never knew you had such a splendid imagination.”

  “Once we have the funds, we will have to secure printing presses, probably two hundred thousand sheets of paper, two hundred barrels of ink, additional funds for bribes and goods, additional funds for transporting the ink and paper to a print factory, we shall have to—”

  “That seems correct so far.” Aubrion was doing the math on a chalkboard behind the professor.

  “—recruit printers, photographers and editors who are perfectly comfortable with the idea that this funny little newspaper is their last will and testament, as well as carriers and vehicles to transport the thing. I might add that we will be operating under the strictest surveillance. After all, August Wolff expects us to produce a paper for him, as well—”

  “That’s right,” said Aubrion, as though this was all very reasonable.

  “—but assuming we are able to do all of that, which is the most irresponsible assumption I have ever indulged in—” Victor, who had gone red in the face, paused to catch his breath. “Even if we succeed at all of that, we are still talking about eighteen days. That is how long you have given yourself to print this newspaper. And even if we do manage to accomplish all of this in under three weeks, the Nazis won’t allow the paper to run for very long. It might reach a few hundred people, at the most, and then we’re caught and executed.”

  “We’re already caught,” said Tarcovich, “and halfway to executed. Do you truly think they’ll grant us asylum? As much as I might hate to say it, Marc is correct. If we write this paper, our deaths will mean something.”

  Victor turned to the saboteur. “Mullier? Surely you see the sense in what I am saying.”

  But Mullier shrugged. “We have done mad things before. It will not be easy, but it is not impossible. War changes the rules.”

  “It does indeed!” said Aubrion, surprised at Mullier’s amenability. He’d met Mullier toward the beginning of the war, when Marc Aubrion was a junior writer for La Libre Belgique. Noël had received word that a man who’d been sabotaging reputations since the first Great War—who’d gone nameless throughout the entire affair, executing daring feats without accomplices—had recently joined the FI. Intrigued by Mullier, Noël had instructed Aubrion to interview the fellow. Aubrion had taken the assignment, excited to meet this singular character. But he’d regretted it almost immediately. Before the days of Faux Soir, Aubrion had expected to survive the occupation and would accept nothing less. Thousands of us had been shipped off to camps, shot in the streets, taken in the night—but not Aubrion. After meeting Theo Mullier, though, Aubrion’s perspective on “survival” changed: while Theo Mullier’s body had survived the Great War, someone put a bullet in his sense of joy, in the organ that turned tragedy into laughter. Survival meant nothing if he was not whole, and Mullier was not; he had not been whole in some time. And so Aubrion too was astonished at Mullier’s support.

  The professor echoed Aubr
ion’s surprise: “I cannot believe what I’m hearing.” Victor looked at each of us as though he’d never seen us before, or might never see us again. “You lot are acting as though this foolishness is our only option. Why don’t we run?”

  Noël said, “Security has tripled in the past month. You’ll be dead before you reach the border.”

  “We have an idea,” said Aubrion. “Let us focus next on production, and then we can worry about distribution, and then execution.”

  “If only you were that funny on paper,” said Noël.

  “Are we all agreed, then?” said Aubrion.

  “I am not sure what I’m agreeing to,” said Victor. “Are we agreeing to die for a joke?”

  “Yes.” Aubrion realized that everyone had stopped typing and writing, chalking and printing. The room, which had been full of the sound of words, was now silent. “That’s right.”

  Tarcovich took a pen from her pocket, then spread open Aubrion’s copy of Le Soir. She drew a copy editor’s carat between the words Le and Soir and wrote Faux between them. Aubrion’s pulse quickened. The word sat there like an elegant intruder in a couple’s bed.

  “Le Faux Soir,” said Tarcovich. “I rather like it.”

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  THE OLD WOMAN’S voice changed colors, like clouds darkening before a hailstorm. Eliza leaned forward. She hadn’t lifted her hands from her notebook since Helene’s story began. Every now and again, she would take up her pen to make a note.

  Magicians and con men used to walk the streets of Toulouse, spinning tales for anyone with time to spare and coin in their pockets; Helene would beg her mother to stop so she could listen. They had a peculiar rhythm to their speech, these men. They spoke as though they were trying to recall something they’d read long ago. As she went on, Helene heard herself slipping into a similar cadence. It was musical, light; the air used to feel that way, before automobiles and paved roads. Helene played her words for Eliza, and the girl listened.

  LONG BEFORE FAUX SOIR

  The Gastromancer’s Tale

  DAVID SPIEGELMAN’S GRANDMOTHER was an accomplished woman. She had been a skier, a rower, a naturalist (back when being a naturalist still meant discovering things that were not yet discovered), a published writer, and a mother six times over. Then, at the age of eighty-two, she decided it was time she settle down and contemplate her life while she still had some left. Her son and daughter-in-law, Leib and Ruth Spiegelman, had a modest home in Hainaut, and Spiegelman’s grandmother liked how everyone in the neighborhood always kept their windows clean, so she moved into an apartment nearby.

  It was there David Spiegelman used to visit her, at the age of eight or nine, when his hands were still curious enough to touch things that didn’t belong to him. He used to wander through his grandmother’s study, running his fingers across the covers of her books when he thought she wasn’t looking. “Keep your hands to yourself, David, if you care a thing for your grandmother’s heart,” she’d tell him, which meant that Spiegelman learned patience as a small boy, waiting until his grandmother was out of the house to begin exploring her books.

  On one such day, Spiegelman pushed a chair next to his grandmother’s shelves and stepped up, holding onto the shelf for balance. Careful to listen for his grandmother’s footsteps, young Spiegelman studied the titles on the top shelf. It was then he caught sight of a fat, leather-bound volume, unremarkable except for its blank spine.

  Spiegelman sat cross-legged, turning the book over in his hands. It had not aged well, the spine creaking and the cover spotted with grease. Faint letters spelled out Amazing Stories of Far Off Lands. He cracked open the book. “It was a sort of encyclopedia, a catalog of strange customs, rituals, religions and the like, from places I’d never heard of,” he confided to Aubrion, in the early days of Faux Soir. “I remember it was arranged alphabetically, from Ayyavazhi to Zoroaster. Being a contrarian, I started from the end.”

  The book taught Spiegelman many things his grandmother (and parents) did not want him to know: about opium and morphine, about people who ate pork and enjoyed it, what women looked like naked, what men looked like naked with other men, about cults, secret societies, children who eschewed their parents’ advice and became artists or religious figures instead of lawyers or clerks. He took it in, all of it—but it blew over him like a strong wind, making a strong impression that was nonetheless forgotten quickly. That was until he saw the photograph in the back of the book, the image of the man with his puppet.

  In the photograph, a man with slicked black hair and a suit sits with a puppet propped on his knee. The man has his hand on the puppet’s back. When Spiegelman recalled the photo in his later years, it was difficult for him to remember what he saw in it. He had to imagine himself eight years old again, untouched by tragedy or responsibility, before the photograph’s meaning revealed itself once more: the playful mystery in the man’s eyes, the way he leaned into the shadows that touched his face and hands. Of course Spiegelman, a tiny Jewish boy with asthma and scrawny hands, would want to be that man, that magician.

  For weeks after, Spiegelman practiced ventriloquy with his brother’s wooden puppet. He would sneak out of the house when he could—“He’s found himself a little girlfriend, maybe,” his parents laughed—or he would slip into his parents’ basement when he could not. Then, when he was ready to show himself for what he was, Spiegelman called his parents and grandmother to a conference.

  “What I’m about to do has a long and interesting history.” Spiegelman sat in front of his parents and grandmother with his brother’s puppet on his knee. His brother squirmed in his mother’s lap. “Let us start with the name itself. The word ventriloquy is Latin.”

  “Have you been teaching him Latin?” his father whispered to his mother.

  “No, have you?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  Spiegelman went on. “It means to speak from the stomach. The ancient Romans—” he faltered “—no, the ancient Greeks did this in their religion. They would—they were called oracles—they would ‘throw’ their voice and make it sound as though they were talking out of their stomachs, and then these oracles would try to interpret the sounds, like the sounds were coming from the gods. It was supposed to help them tell the future or figure out what their ancestors wanted them to do to solve a problem. The Greeks called it gastromancy.”

  Adjusting his sweaty grip on the puppet’s back, Spiegelman said: “Hello, I am the puppet. Nice to meet you. Today I am going to—”

  “We can see your lips moving!” said Spiegelman’s brother. He spoke with exaggerated authority, like a barrister exposing a lie on the witness stand. He was six.

  Spiegelman blushed, pressing his lips together more tightly. “Today I am going to—”

  “Son, what is the point of all this?” asked his father.

  “It’s—interesting. Isn’t it? It has a long history.” David Spiegelman added that last part in a desperate attempt to appeal to his mother.

  “But what can you do with it?” said his mother.

  “Is this why you’ve been sneaking off?” His father waved his hands like he was conducting an orchestra. “To play with dolls?”

  His grandmother said: “A boy’s got to have a hobby, Leib,” and Spiegelman’s heart leapt.

  His father said: “He’s not going to be a boy much longer,” and Spiegelman’s heart fell.

  “Oh, Leib, go easy on him.”

  “He’s nearly ten years old. Do you know what I was doing at ten? I was working in my father’s shop six days a week, and studying on the seventh. He’s got to think about his future.”

  “Next thing you know, he’ll be practicing magic.” Spiegelman’s mother shuddered.

  “Can you imagine? Our son practicing magic? What would everyone say?”

  “We’d be the laughingstock of the temple,”
said his father.

  His brother shrieked, “I want my puppet back.”

  And that was the end of David Spiegelman’s career as a ventriloquist.

  Though he never again tried to speak through the mouth of a puppet, Spiegelman continued reading about ventriloquy under the pretense of studying history. Relieved that their son had decided to become a scholar rather than a magician or, heaven forbid, an artist, his parents encouraged him, buying him books and sending him to study under the most famous historians in Hainaut. But gastromancy pursued him, haunting him like a disease. It followed him even as he slept: he dreamed in strange sounds that he struggled to interpret upon waking.

  A few years after the puppet show, Spiegelman and his friends were playing in a park an hour before school. The school had a bell, an old cowbell that the teachers rang when it was time for the students to go inside. Somehow, Spiegelman and his friends did not hear it. They kept playing until an older boy realized they were an hour late for class. After some debate about the relative merits of slinking in tardy or avoiding school altogether, the friends slipped inside, braced for chastisement. Spiegelman, however, stayed behind.

  “You’re going to be even later,” his friends warned.

  “Go on ahead,” he said. “I’ll be there soon.”