by Susan Daitch
1897 Felix Gribelin covered his googly eyes with dark blue glasses. He was about to enter a public urinal in the Parc Montsouris. A man whose long, drooping moustache would not have set him apart from any number of other middle-aged men in the Paris streets that spring, he didn’t need much of a disguise but felt the dark glasses were important, if not essential. Gribelin was the archivist of the Section of Statistics, an agency something like the FBI, but he didn’t approach the arranged meeting with Count Esterhazy as if it were all in the course of an ordinary day, because it wasn’t. He had been summoned by the General Staff for this appointment, and he had to carry out their wishes.
Gribelin was startled to see a large woman exiting the small stone building just as he was about to enter. Her face was veiled, and she opened an umbrella to shield herself from the rain. He turned to look at her back and the folds of her skirt as she disappeared, making her way through the park. Despite the somber tailoring of the woman’s clothing there was something gaudy about the way she put herself together. Her green brocade jacket was very bright as well as close fitting, and he had seen many rings on her gloved hands before she opened the umbrella in his face. He assumed she was a prostitute, but what he didn’t know was the woman was actually Major General du Paty de Clam. Once she was out of sight, Felix entered the urinal to find the Count leaning against a tiled wall, coat unbuttoned, humming a tune, waiting for him.
As long as they were determined to condemn Dreyfus, the real spy, Esterhazy, had only a slight chance of being convicted, and he was arrogant with the knowledge that although guilty he was almost untouchable. They needed him, and the deeper the General Staff dug in asserting Dreyfus’s guilt, the more they needed him. The Count was fortunate that the letter signed D found in the garbage at the German embassy had been misattributed to Dreyfus. Had the D been assigned to a Drumont or Deroulede or d’Ormescheville, Christians all of them, the outcome would not have been so clearly in the Count’s favor. Du Paty de Clam was powerful, a man who arranged convictions, promotions, a man who moved without restraint, a man so confident of his position that he could wear a dress, and no one could say I have the goods on you, a man beyond blackmail.
In the dim urinal, made considerably murkier by his dark glasses, Felix made out the shadowy form of the Count. Water dripped, gaslights sputtered, the tile smelled of chlorine and salt. The two men shook hands. Du Paty had told Felix that national security issues were at stake in the Dreyfus trial and therefore the conviction must stand. Esterhazy made Felix a little uneasy, which was unusual because after all his years with the Section of Statistics, few people did.
Just as du Paty’s General Staff was an agency of parallel government arranging deals in public urinals, creating evidence of crimes where none existed, so too was Oliver North able to manufacture the fraud he was the architect of, or perhaps he genuinely believed in it. His project, however, operated on a global scale, getting one group of thugs to bankroll another. Again, North’s testimony was bracketed by deletions and assertions that “national security issues were at stake.”
1992 John Lennon’s file is still sealed. The FBI claims national security is at stake.
Do you see what I’m getting at? Méliès wrote: “The scenario is simply a thread intended to link the ‘effects’ in themselves without much relation to each other.” In other words the individual stories are less important than the parallels they represent. The who’s, where’s, when’s and why’s might be interchangeable. The scenario is a means to the end. Evidence of mistrials and cover-ups, the forgeries and lengths of shredded documents are only a series of similar patterns. Yet all these machinations make a mockery of even the notion of gullibility. I want to believe what you’re telling me is true, I yell childishly at the radio, television, and microfilm. I want to believe the lives of John Lennon and Salvadoran children were corrosives eating away at a filigreed and imperiled democracy, but face it, Frances, don’t you find all this a little difficult to swallow?
Some “national securities,” so important at the moment, turn into exercises in clownish paranoia, the butt of curatorial or custodial jokes in a museum of ancient history, and while some conspiracies deflate when subjected to the pinpricks of the late twentieth century, others are born and gain momentum fed on underground springs. It was believed Napoléon died from stomach cancer. We know now that Napoléon died of arsenic poisoning.
Méliès’s slogan was Star Films: The World Within Reach. He really believed any event, from kidnapping to a flash of lightning, could be caught and preserved, made accessible through the camera. It was an optimistic slogan. I think he was saying that because of the camera, the truth couldn’t be perverted. Little did he know.
One thing I should add, someone stole the two books on Méliès from the New York Public Library. Settling down at the Donnell branch I called for the books only to find they were long gone, so most of what I’m telling you about him was learned while I worked at Omnibus. When I arrived back in the States I thought I would have access to more information and may yet, but so far I’m coming up empty handed. Not only are the books missing, but I’ve found microfilm tampered with by someone armed with pins and needles keen on riddling the strips with strategically placed pinprick holes and minute slashes so that any information I sought was rendered inscrutable. Most references to him have been poked or sliced out. When one of the books I searched for was found, the sections about Méliès had been torn out, replaced by chewing gum, tissues, or nothing at all.
Last week I was followed from the library into the subway at Broadway and 66th Street. It was early evening, just past rush hour, but the underpass that connects the downtown and uptown sides was surprisingly deserted. How do I know I was followed? I don’t, but I think I was, although I heard no footsteps. A figure came up suddenly from behind me, and an abrupt blow to the jaw almost knocked me out. I didn’t get a good look at her, but I’m certain it was a woman. She was a pro and moved quickly and gracefully like a figure from a Jackie Chan movie. Punjabi dance music floated down from the news kiosk on the subway platform just up the stairs above my head and the sounds of tabla and sitar threaded in and out of my consciousness until I was able to stand up and make my way to the stairs. I groped toward the sound, comforting and familiar from my years in London. Finally I reached the steps, damp with spilt liquids, and sat down again, my head in my hands. I swallowed my screams because this is a crime I’m unable to report. I’m here in this country illegally although I was an American citizen at one time and suppose I still am. I held my arms against my stomach rocking back and forth, unable to go to the hospital for exactly the same reason. No one paid any attention to me. When I was able I made my way onto a train although it was going the wrong way. My wallet was gone, which means someone has my address and Alphabet’s. My assailant knows I’m living in New York, and I worry about you as well. They surely know you have this film and that you are working against the clock to preserve it.
Yours truly,
Jack Kews
I remember watching the Watergate trial on television. The screen flickered. Our reception wasn’t very good. Howard Hunt with his pencil moustache. Liddy with his burned hand and love of Nazi propaganda films. Round-eyed Maureen Dean, a name with rhyming parts. We sat around the kitchen table watching. I remember the scene as if it were evening although it may have been during the day, and because I was very young I probably didn’t know exactly what was going on. Houseplants and lumpy pottery made in grade school framed the talking heads. When a television commentator expressed shock, I had a sense of imminent catastrophe and shame, but it wasn’t personal shame, and I didn’t know who to attribute this shame to. Everyone sitting around the table talked back to the television.
“A thief. I always knew it.”
“Magruder,” my mother said, “like the sound a flat tire makes slapping the road.”
“If they don’t want you to know something, if it’s really big and ugly and makes them look bad, don’t th
ink for a minute the thing will surface on national television. Don’t be naive,” said Mr. Levine, a neighbor who was considered an alarmist but one with interesting theories about conspiracies that he even exposed to children. As he paid you for mowing his lawn he might explain the connection between former president Johnson, an unlabeled complex of cinder-block buildings down Route 2, and a Coca-Cola commercial which co-opted sports imagery. “It’s a racket,” he would always say. There were no guns in his house, no freezer full of deer parts and bloody footprints on the concrete garage floor, and he refused to vote.
Paty de Clam. Patsy de Cline. I put the letter into a desk drawer beside the first one and reached for the telephone, then replaced the receiver without dialing. The notes didn’t threaten or harass, they only proposed schemes like those hatched by the long-dead man down the road, links between assassinations of popes and presidents, between the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, and Aldo Moro, as if suicide, shooting, and kidnapping were all hatched from the same committee, a cartel shrouded in secrecy that exerted power over every unconscious citizen. As I fit the film over the viewing machinery and examined each crumbling frame, I was afraid of what I might learn, but if I learned anything from my mother staring into space and my father plotting against those who believed Adam and Eve were parentless, it is that there is no safety to be found in pretending the facts aren’t staring you in the face.
Even up on the fifth floor a fly had somehow gotten into Alphabet, and I watched it collide with the strips of venetian blind. I shut the door behind me and walked down the hall, letters in hand. Felix the Cat was being restored next door. The jingle, played at the beginning and at the end of the cartoon, was repetitive on its own but run over and over as the film was spooled back and forth, the lyrics could easily become the kind of episodic torture used to drive someone mad. I knew it was the actual cartoon that was being played not something spliced together or borrowed and used as a weapon in an imaginary setting, but the knowledge didn’t keep the song from being any less penetrating. As I walked past Julius’s office I could hear him talking loudly. Antonya sat with her feet on the reception desk, writing notes in the margins of a book on martial arts. Her glasses were pushed up on her head; replacing them in order to look at me she peered through black-rimmed eyes and lenses smeared with hair gel.
“Did a man come in this morning, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, jacket, sweatshirt turned inside out?” I asked her.
“No, but I’ve only been here an hour. The temp who comes in while I’m at class might have seen someone yesterday.” I showed her the letters.
“A crackpot.” She only glanced at them, then shrugged in dismissal, but she did call the agency, got the temp’s number, called her home and left a message anyway.
“Why don’t you leave Kews a note asking him to knock next time so you can actually shake hands.”
“I don’t want to shake hands with a stalker who doesn’t want to meet me anyway. He writes about old magazines and Napoléon.”
“What if he thinks he’s Napoléon?”
“Look in the book. Did Julius have an appointment with Napoléon yesterday?”
With a twist Antonya turned the appointment ledger around so I could read it. He had meetings with a woman from the British Film Institute, a man from Kodak, a pair of researchers compiling a catalog of silent Westerns, a man who had a collection of films made on early cameras, the Mutigraph and the Mirograph, and the list went on. Jack Kews could have been any of them.
“Why don’t you go to the police?”
I shook my head. Could you spell Méliès for us? they’d ask, the note having been sent to another department in order to determine what kind of old typewriter had been used to produce it. The female officer might open her drawer for a second and I’d be able to see a glint of handcuffs, keys, unused chopsticks, Rolaids and Juicy Fruit. Perhaps Kews had a record, a police file that could be called up on a computer that would reveal a past I’d no knowledge of: tax fraud, armed robbery, credit-card and identity theft. I would lean over the screen and try to read what he’d been apprehended for: resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, loitering with intent, blocking the entrance to a church.
“Whaddaya think? They’re going to issue a restraining order for a phantom or place a guard at the door?”
For a moment she reminded me a little of Mr. Levine, the man who had watched the Watergate trial with premonition and enthusiasm, the man who saw the figure in the carpet, who thought everything was a swindle of some kind. With very little information she could construct cathedrals of imagined crimes, and yet Antonya was only humoring me.
“You got nothing better to do than worry about some couple of notes that don’t even make sense?”
My explanations, stories about surrendered sunglasses, aimless trips to shops, emptied drawers that had long been cleaned out of anything meaningful, all these statements were left half-finished, stuttering. For Antonya the way to keep ghosts at bay was to figure out how many free meals you could tolerate at Burrito Fresca, because if you could put away a certain amount of money each week, you might hope to return to the city where your family had disappeared. She calculated and didn’t reflect, taking a pragmatic approach, losing patience with my stuttering and obsession with the Dreyfus trial.
“Could he be charged with trespassing? He wasn’t even seen for certain. Any messenger could have delivered the letters.”
As far as I knew the police had never been to the offices. I imagined them arriving on the fifth floor to dust for fingerprints. They’d pick up copies of anticolorization letters stacked in the reception area, not with the intention of mailing them, but only to file away somewhere. They’d tell me that as long as my life wasn’t threatened, there was nothing they could do. It was just a prank, sweetie. I went back to work.
At six o’clock Antonya knocked on my door. The temp had called back.
“She remembered only two visitors who didn’t have appointments: a woman who inquired about renting an editing room, and a man who claimed to have rented space, but he left a few minutes later, saying he had forgotten something. He didn’t return while she was here.”
Three days later the following note arrived by mail:
Dear Frances,
I changed my mind. Meet me at La Chinita Linda’s at 7:00 this Tuesday. I have short brown hair, wear glasses, beard, and moustache. Will wear a black T-shirt and a plaid jacket.
Yours,
Jack Kews
I tacked the note to the bulletin board above my light table, my eye wandering up to it when tired of examining and preserving the fleeting images of tiny men and women. Dreyfus read a letter from his wife, Lucie, and looked as if he would disintegrate with anguish. The prison as Méliès had designed it in 1899, gray and minimal, looked very modern. The emptiness of the prison cell wasn’t the result of film-stock degeneration; the film at this point was in good shape. Lucie’s letter, a surprisingly stark white square, fluttered to the ground. I worked on this scene all afternoon until my eye began to hurt. Toward the end of the day I showed the third note to Antonya.
“He didn’t ask what you look like.”
“So he knows. It’s not like the notes are responses to an ad placed in a personals column.”
“He knows your name, too. You better watch yourself. You want me to come with you?”
“Sure. Why not?” I tried to sound offhand, but Antonya was right. What did I really know about this guy?
Jack Kews was a fin-de-siècle Terminator, programmed, relentless, fixated on the twists and turns of a forgotten trial, obsessively cracking bilingual puns, pretending he’s Georges Méliès disappearing around corners and reappearing already sitting in your chair when you open your door. On the other hand, why me? I was such a bit player in this. Why target the restorer of an obscure silent film? It was as if by setting his sights small, as if looking for a toehold, a footnote might be produced that would alter the course of the story or change how its meaning mig
ht unravel.
I locked Alphabet for the night. Offices had long ago emptied out, and the deserted Mayflower Building would make anyone jumpy, but after the notes from Kews I felt prone to hearing footsteps, seeing shadows down the halls, and catching silhouettes against doors when clearly even maintenance workers and guards had gone home. We stepped into the night. The air smelled like overturned earth, but dirt that was full of metal filings, asphalt, and loose parts of archaic machinery. A road crew worked on part of the dug-up avenue, steam from pipes or Con Edison ducts partially obscured their legs so that the workers’ heads appeared disembodied, floating above the street.
We stopped in front of an appliance store whose display window was full of televisions, an entire wall of televisions turned to different channels. The one in the center was not tuned to any particular station. It was broadcasting pictures of us. A video camera had been set up to look at the street and transmit the picture to a monitor so you could see yourself and the scene behind you as if you were on television. Antonya and I stared into the screen while she combed her hair, our breath misting in the cold night air. I stepped to one side, my image reflected over a baseball game. There was no sound piped outside, the window display wasn’t a segment of a Tower of Babel; there were only pictures.
My father used to take me to these kinds of stores, concrete shells with deep-discounted appliances arranged in long rows or grouped into a square as if a kind of model room. We didn’t buy much in them, they were more a source of ideas. He used to love to take cars and machines apart and put them back together again. Spinning parts of the clothes dryer became a turntable. His workshop was a hospital for darkroom timers and short-circuited ceiling fans. Scores of radios were taken apart, their tubes and wiring, like miniature futuristic cities, transformed into other, more powerful radios. At night he would drink black coffee, listen to Jean Shepherd broadcasts from New York City, and laugh to himself.