The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  Noël cleared his throat. “I don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “We cannot equate Churchill with Hitler,” said Noël, “regardless of how little you care for either of them.”

  “Not even in jest,” said Tarcovich. “And look at the photograph. You can’t see his face.”

  “Sure, you can,” said Aubrion.

  “Only part of it.”

  “Enough to know who it is.”

  Tarcovich said, “The point of the photograph—you said so yourself—is to show them he’s not immortal. But look at his face. The lighting, the exposure...it’s too dramatic. He looks too powerful.”

  “All right, all right, so we’ll toss this one out.” Aubrion passed the offending photograph to me. “Shred it, Gamin.”

  “Yes, monsieur,” I said, but I intended to keep it, and I still have it.

  “What about this one?” Tarcovich picked out a second photograph.

  It was a tad grainier than the others, and smaller. Hitler’s sepia body and torso blended and faded into black. He was oddly proportioned: his torso took up most of the frame, and his head seemed smaller than it should have been. Squinting, Aubrion held the picture up to the light. The gray and black grains, cheap-looking as they were, articulated the fury on Hitler’s lips, the passion in his eyes. Even so, the Führer appeared to have been caught off guard, for his hands were perched weakly on his chest, like he’d received a bad scare, or had heartburn.

  “I like this one,” Aubrion said.

  “But what is the story?” asked Noël.

  “It’s easy.” Tarcovich took a cigarette from her purse, then, perhaps remembering where we were, put it back. She walked the perimeter of the abandoned laboratory, stooping every now and again to pick up a photograph. Aubrion and Noël and I watched her. After several minutes of this exercise, she said “ah!” and emerged with a picture she’d found tucked beneath a lamp. “Here we are.” Tarcovich passed it to Aubrion.

  He blew the dust off it. The photograph depicted a flying fortress, one of those fat-bellied bombers with the pug noses. It cleaved through a patch of clouds, the gaudy American star barely visible on its backside. The bomber was flanked by three of its compatriots.

  “We put this photo on the top left-hand corner of the front page.” To illustrate, Lada took it from Aubrion’s hands. “We put the Hitler photo in the bottom right.” She placed the two photographs on a table, adjacent to each other.

  “But Le Soir only ever has a single photograph on the first page,” said Aubrion. “Our readers will know immediately that we’re playing some sort of game.”

  “Which is exactly what we want, isn’t it?”

  Noël leaned over the desk, studying them. I stood on my toes to see, too. I don’t believe I had ever noticed the crow’s feet near the director’s eyes.

  “So, the two photographs?” said Noël.

  “Neither of you see it yet, do you?” Tarcovich’s smile was wicked. “What are the two things the people out there are afraid of?”

  Victor lumbered over to join us, wiping his hands on a cloth. “Hitler is one, obviously.”

  “Air raids,” said Aubrion. “That bloody siren.”

  “Precisely,” said Tarcovich. “The best thing we can do is to set these two figures against each other—the bomber and the arsehole—by showing Hitler being afraid of the flying fortresses. And so, we put the first photograph, the one of the bombers, here with some caption, perhaps ‘in the middle of action.’ We put the second photograph there—”

  “We could splice them together, to make it look like they are parts of the same photograph,” said Aubrion.

  Victor grunted. “That would take at least a week.”

  “We don’t need to,” said Tarcovich, smacking Aubrion on the back of the head. I laughed—giggled, really. I have searched endlessly for a word to describe my excitement, my pure joy, at watching these people at their craft. “We’ll write a note saying our typesetter made an error, that the two separate photos should be one. Our photographers were on the scene at the precise moment when Hitler caught sight of the Americans flying above Germany. Gave the poor Fuhrer such a fright.”

  “Do we want to inspire that kind of sympathy for Hitler?” asked Victor.

  “That will not happen,” said Tarcovich.

  “And to make sure it will not happen,” said Aubrion, grinning madly, “we’ll caption the photograph.”

  In the dramatic pause that followed, Noël sighed and asked: “What’s the caption, Marc?”

  “I am so glad you asked, René. Allow me to tell you a story about Kaiser Wilhelm II.”

  “Oh, God,” said Tarcovich. “Here we go.” But she was smiling. I saw it.

  Aubrion continued: “If you recall, at the start of the First Great War, we all blamed Germany for the blood and the suffering and all that.”

  “Because it was Germany that started the blood and the suffering and all that.” Victor folded his arms across his chest. “I know you were a babe in your mother’s arms at the time, Marc, but others of us were not.”

  “But Germany did not—and does not—believe it caused all that. Have you seen their textbooks?” Aubrion tapped the picture of Hitler. “They teach their children that Germany’s hand was forced. It’s all propaganda, of course. And the propaganda began long ago, after the first major battle of the Great War, up in Flanders.”

  “I know this one,” said Tarcovich. “Wilhelm arrived after the battle to see the carnage.”

  Aubrion nodded eagerly. “He was silent for a moment, bowed his head in meditation. His advisors waited by his side. Then, overtaken by feelings that we poor mortals can only imagine, the Kaiser looked up to the sky and cried out—”

  “Ich habe das nicht gewollt!” I supplied, for I’d learned this tale in school.

  “Stellar, Gamin.” Aubrion winked at me. “‘I did not want that.’ At least one of ole Wilhelm’s advisors had the presence of mind to bring a notebook on the trip—or so I guess, because those words were plastered across every propaganda poster and leaflet the Germans produced until the end of the war. Proof of the Kaiser’s innocence. Spoken evidence of the Reich’s moral purity.” Aubrion rolled up his fake obituaries and pointed them at Victor, like a duelist’s sword. “If you are concerned someone might feel sympathy for Hitler, here is your answer. We caption the second photograph with something like ‘here the Fuhrer catches sight of the American planes and borrows the Kaiser’s words—I did not want that.’ Yes, yes, of course Hitler is innocent. As innocent as the Kaiser.”

  Noël clapped Aubrion on the shoulder. He started to say something, but he was overcome. Aubrion smiled at him, and we got to work on the business of making a paper.

  LAST DAY TO PRINT

  MORNING

  The Gastromancer

  EVERY MORNING, a team of intelligence officers wrote a nine-page document outlining the state of the war. It was always nine pages, never eight or ten, which perplexed Spiegelman; it was such a gawky number. A clerk usually slipped the leaflet under his door, and Spiegelman ignored it. He did not wish to know the state of the war, nor did he trust the intelligence officers to report it as it was. Today, though, he flipped through it eagerly, looking for any indication that the Royal Air Force was preparing to bomb Enghien. His search proved less than fruitful. Apparently, the Italians had bombed the Vatican; the Red Army had taken Kiev from someone; and the Allies had seized Castiglione. Frustrated, Spiegelman tossed the leaflet to the floor.

  The Smuggler

  Church bells rose above the moaning wind, admonishing Lada Tarcovich. She made a rude gesture in their direction. Despite her fury at Andree Grandjean, Lada needed to see her again, and she was a fool for it. When she closed her eyes, she was tormented by the grim finality that awaited her—but more than that, by the idea that her story would fade to black and
Andree would never know what had become of her. Even the most obvious stories have endings; Aubrion used to say that. “What begins with once upon a time, Gamin, must end in happily ever after, or the audience will demand their money back.” If their story had indeed ended, then Lada and Andree needed to put that ending on paper for all to see. Two years into the war, Aubrion wrote on a blackboard in the basement: “An ellipsis is a poor substitute for a period, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise...” An ellipsis would not do, not any longer, not this close to the end of Faux Soir.

  Besides, Lada couldn’t have Andree thinking she was so insecure that she’d leave a relationship—even a relationship that was two weeks old and somewhat lopsided—without saying goodbye.

  It was past eight now, so Andree Grandjean was just beginning to hear the day’s cases. Lada flicked away her cigarette. The sky stirred, a light rain dusting her coat and gloves. Turning up her collar against the cold, Tarcovich looked up and down the road. Her favorite pastry shop was open today, one of the few left in the city. Lada toyed with the idea of getting a croissant. But she would have to stand in a line, and she was not sure she had the patience for that. And so Lada started down the road to downtown Enghien.

  It was a rather long walk to Andree’s courthouse during the afternoon, but twice that in the morning. Though the city was a ghost of what it’d been before the war, it greeted each day as loudly as ever. The city yowled at Lada Tarcovich, the way starved cats yowled at empty bowls. People offered her things from their carts: bread (some of it fresh, most of it stale), meats, chipped plates, blankets. Every night, shopkeepers sent their workers—often small children—out to the roads around Enghien. There, they gathered the discarded things that refugees traveling out of Belgium decided they could live without—usually toys, bars of soap, that sort of thing. Those who were not caught returned with cheap goods, sold for half their worth. As Lada walked, street vendors waved old wooden animals and ugly mirrors at her. Everyone had necklaces and bracelets that no longer shone.

  Tarcovich stopped near an alley to retie her shoelaces. When she got up, she stood face-to-face with the remains of a poster: the fund-raiser poster, she realized. Tarcovich laughed. It had looked so fine before. The poor thing was pathetic now, hanging in gaudy shreds. She tore the rest of the poster down, putting it out of its misery.

  By the time Tarcovich reached the courthouse, it was almost noon, and her stomach was protesting. Ignoring it, she greeted the clerk in the lobby with a placid smile. “That’s the trick, Marc,” she’d argued to Aubrion. “If you want someone to let you in where you don’t belong, you must look like you don’t care to be there.”

  “Hello,” Tarcovich said to the clerk, sounding as though she’d rather be anywhere else. “I have an appointment with Judge Grandjean.” She glanced at her watch. “For twelve fifteen.”

  The clerk consulted a pad of papers. “I apologize, madame, but Judge Grandjean was taken ill and has not come to the courthouse today. Can I take a message for you?”

  Tarcovich declined, then proceeded to Andree’s apartment. She did not dare believe that Andree’s heartache had confined her to her flat; Lada could not afford to be so arrogant. If pressed, though, she would have admitted that a part of her hoped it was so—part of her prayed Andree could be struck dumb by her feeling for Lada, that she could be inspired to sit and wallow in her sweet anguish.

  Lada knocked on Andree’s door.

  Andree opened it. “You?” she gasped, almost comically.

  Tarcovich shrugged, as though she could not help it. “Me.”

  They went inside, regarding each other with fleeting glances. Though it was now past noon, Andree seemed to have just woken up. She leaned against a wall, watching Lada with wary eyes, while Tarcovich took a seat on the floor across from her.

  “Going somewhere?” asked Lada.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “The place is a wreck.”

  It was true. Books lay in dust-covered mountains across the floor, scarves and trousers had been tossed onto lampshades, which teetered on their sides by blank shelves.

  “I’d considered going on a trip.” Andree played with the hem of her dressing gown. Tarcovich was faint with the sight of her. “But that’s all. Just considered it.”

  “I see.”

  Andree mussed her curls. “Lada, why are you here?”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Do not do that.”

  Lada rummaged through a pile of Andree’s books. She smiled at the titles: Torchlight to Valhalla, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Poems of Sappho, We Too Are Drifting, Pity for Women, Songs of Lesbos. The novels lay among the legal tomes and the encyclopedias and the reference books, open and visible like nude interlopers on a private beach. Tarcovich pulled Torchlight to Valhalla from a pile, sending two encyclopedias tumbling head-over-heels.

  “I thought you didn’t know,” said Lada.

  “I did not know.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “My books?” said Andree.

  “I’ve never read most of those.” Lada smiled mournfully. “For a long time, I did not even know that most of them existed. I’d heard whispers of books about deviants, sexual inversion, ‘and that night, they were not divided,’ Radclyffe Hall’s trial. Women who made love to each other between the covers of their beds and these books, but never outside, never where I could see them.” Tarcovich’s hands went to the shelf. “I must meet your smuggler.”

  “You already have. It’s the Gestapo. Three-quarters of the material they deem obscene is burned. A quarter of it is spared. If you’re good to the Reich—” here Grandjean shrugged an apology for being good to the Reich “—there are ways to get what you want.”

  Tarcovich walked over to Andree’s bed, touched the woman’s face on the cover of Torchlight to Valhalla. She took her notebook from her purse. “For you,” she said to Andree.

  Andree took it. “What is inside?”

  “Stories.”

  “That you wrote?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you couldn’t,” whispered Andree. “That you could never bring yourself to write anything. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Things changed.”

  “Oh, my God.” Andree set the notebook atop Torchlight to Valhalla. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. She clutched a fistful of her hair as though in mourning already. She knew, she knew. “Something is about to happen. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Lada. Her throat was dry. She tried to swallow, and the effort brought tears to her eyes. Lada repeated it: “Something is about to happen.” The repetition was a promise, to herself and to Andree, that she would not leave here without telling Andree everything.

  “With the FI?”

  “I am not supposed to tell you—”

  “Then don’t.”

  Lada put her hands out to steady herself. “Do you mean that?”

  “Christ.” Andree laughed. The apartment smelled of her, of them. She laughed, and Lada laughed with her. It was a divine joke, the lot of it—whatever it was. “Of course not. Please, Lada.”

  And so, Lada told Andree everything. Andree Grandjean listened without moving or speaking.

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  “I DO NOT know exactly what was said,” the old woman murmured, “and I do not wish to know. This part of the story belongs to Tarcovich and Grandjean. It was written by them, and is theirs to tell or not.” She leaned back, breathing slowly. Eliza’s dark eyes were fixed on her. This room, the room in the back of the blue-doored building, had grown quieter since Helene’s story began. Eliza wondered whether anything still existed, outside.

  “This is not enough for you and your notebook, I know. You will want to know why Tarcovich went back. But I cannot tell you that.”

  “You don’t know why she went ba
ck,” said Eliza. It was half a question, half an admission on Helene’s behalf.

  “I can’t know. I wasn’t there.”

  “But can’t you—”

  “Can I guess?” Helene shrugged. The carelessness of the motion made her seem far younger than she was. “I don’t know. Why do we do anything? Sometimes, there are no motives. Other times, there are many. The important part is that she went back, and she told Grandjean everything—even though they’d quarreled, even though things seemed to have been lost between them. And when Lada had finished her tale, the church bells began to speak in her stead. They chimed and sang, and neither Lada nor Andree wanted to talk until they’d finished.”

  LAST DAY TO PRINT

  AFTERNOON

  The Smuggler

  “THIS IS HAPPENING TOMORROW?” Andree said softly. “What you’ve told me? Tomorrow is the day?”

  “It is,” said Tarcovich.

  Andree laughed. “My God. A fake newspaper.”

  “Faux Soir is what we’re calling it.”

  “It’s daring, I’ll give you that.” Andree shook her head, her eyes unfocused. Before now, Lada had never recounted the whole scheme from start to finish. It sounded absurd, horrifically absurd—not just absurd, but impossible, a caricature of some German comedy about those madcap Belgians and their daydreams. Lada watched Andree struggle to hold on to what she’d heard. “I apologize,” she said, after a while, “but I can’t quite—I can’t quite grasp it, I suppose.” She laughed shortly. “The Royal Air Force?”