Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  I thought she might be making this part up. Then her tone changed. She came back to earth.

  “I was bored, looking out windows so much of the time. I remember very few nomads. All Europeans were called Frank or Franks. Most of the people we knew were Franks.” I imagined hundreds of people living within a few city blocks who, regardless of whether they were men or women, were all known as Frank. “There was a man, a Frank of course, in our building who smoked kif, and you could smell it in the hallways.”

  Kif, kif, kif. What was it? Could you get it in Paris if you grew bored with ordinary cigarettes?

  “How did you get to Marseilles?”

  “My mother died, and there were violent riots. There was nothing to keep me in Algiers.”

  “What kind of riots?”

  “Against certain businesses. There were violent riots everyday. Zola and Dreyfus were burned in effigy.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Two men who caused a lot of trouble. People were stoned, bludgeoned to death. I thought it would be safer here, and I met a man who was leaving for the same reasons. We traveled together.”

  I could see her leaning hard against the side of the boat, still bored. The rivets left little round marks on her back. A man, a Frank, said the water was full of sharks, so she stayed away from the edge of the deck. She was sailing away from Algeria, and she would never return.

  “There was a woman on the boat who smoked Javanese cigarettes; the smell clung to her clothes, and I picked up her suitcase, mistakenly thinking it was mine. She gave me dirty looks, and I dropped it. Had I taken it by mistake, we might have had an entirely different life. I heard later that it was full of cash. People whose businesses were being torched fled with all their money, and I could have become that stranger, and she could have taken a form of my identity since I no longer felt very attached to it. Toward the end of the voyage the deck became crowded with passengers looking at the horizon: men in red brimless hats, women wrapped in black from head to toe, a monkey on a leash, a parrot who flew off a man’s shoulder and was lost at sea.”

  “Who were you traveling with?”

  “I don’t even remember his name.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “No, I don’t. As we approached Marseilles I looked for him, but he didn’t seem to be on the boat. It was as if he had disappeared into the air.”

  “Had he jumped overboard?”

  “No. I went to find the captain, who was Spanish and spoke only a little French. He answered brokenly as he looked into the horizon, spyglass by his side. He had seen him; he was on the other side of the deck. I had just been there, but I looked again. He wasn’t on that side either. The coastline was growing clearer, and soon I thought I saw minarets in the distance, but they weren’t minarets. It was Marseilles, where the houses look like slices of wedding cake. The captain brushed me off, shouting orders for going into port while hurrying away. Just as we were about to dock, my companion reappeared. I asked him where he’d been, and he claimed he was only strolling around the boat. It was possible that each of us turned a corner as the other approached; he was a fast walker; in the street he had often been that much ahead of me, but he was an even faster talker.”

  Did she put her arm in his? What was she implying he had been doing during his disappearance. Was he my father? I mentally struggled with possible dates.

  “We disembarked, and he attended to our bags, but we were separated in the shoving crowd. In the crush of porters, passengers, and spectators with nothing to do I lost him. Later he told me that he thought he saw my head in the distance and yelled my name, but getting no response, continued to make arrangements for our things to be sent to a hotel or rooms or wherever it was we were to stay.”

  I never met this man. He actually did disappear shortly afterwards. The incident on the boat had been a rehearsal. He was like a tattoo of an old life, my mother said, but the kind that turns out to be erasable; the kind you can peel off and forget about. Armed with maps my mother made her way north, only to discover it was as possible to become lost in the heart of Paris as if one traveled guideless in the middle of the desert.

  Cher-ie! Cher-ie! Auguste leaned over the railing and called out to me.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to take me to the church of Saint Francois Xavier.”

  “I don’t know where it is.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “It’s too far away.”

  She made a face at me as if to indicate that my recalcitrance was thickheaded beyond comprehension.

  “I have to deliver messages.” She held out a bag of paper scraps and waved them at me. I shrugged, ignoring her, but she began to scream, growing increasingly hysterical. My mother came running out and thwacked me until Auguste stopped her noise. I hated Auguste Bastian. I was afraid of her ridiculous and meaningless requests, take me here, take me there, and kept out of her way. We put her in that little room where she stayed for days, but she wouldn’t talk to anyone, and no one came for her. I left food outside her door and watched the tray disappear inside then reappear at the end of the morning or afternoon. After the first week I tried to see past the door when the tray was taken in. My mother still maintained that she would make us rich, and I thought money or jewelry might be scattered around, lying right out on the rickety table or on the floor, but all I could see were wasps hovering over a half-eaten peach, stone exposed. Auguste’s chamber wasn’t very clean, but much of the garbage appeared to be recently acquired; how the junk was collected or generated I didn’t know. I never saw her leave. One morning she began to clean, scrubbing the stairs. I stood a few stairs below her and poked her with a broom handle. I don’t know why I did. She smelled very bad, and rather than tell her, I poked.

  “Where the goat is tied it must graze. It’s not my fault if frogs don’t have tails.”

  Her brush made a swishing sound as she spoke, and a wave of dirty water cascaded over the stair, lapping at my feet. The knees of her dress were wet gray patches. I only half-minded being ignored, but whether she was only talking to herself or not, her proverbs made no sense until I developed the uneasy feeling that I was somehow their target. I marched upstairs to the landing just below where she scrubbed. I watched her scrub nearer and nearer, then hopped cross legged down each step as she approached.

  “Why do you sweep all the time?”

  “My first job was in a house where one of the daughters refused to let me clean her room. She decided she didn’t want to be waited on. Her father used to come up to the maid’s room, that was my room, to do some things with me, but I wasn’t paid for it like Gilberte and the others who live here with you.”

  “What did he do with you up in your room?”

  “Ask you mother,” she taunted. “Anyway this man indulged his silly daughter, let her pretend to be another person, although in a few weeks the mess grew out of control. One day she slammed the door behind her, left her family, and joined the Commune.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was killed. Everyone was.”

  “That’s not true. My grandmother was sent to Algiers.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  I shoved a book at her, thinking she might read the story out loud, even if only to herself. It was a book of fables by La Fontaine. She held it upside down, and although it was then I realized she couldn’t read, I don’t think I really understood what illiteracy meant. Meaning was always there, it was right there. How could she not see it? For me, words, language, were closely allied to pictograms — obvious signs, no mystery in them. Not to be able to read seemed a kind of blindness.

  “Are the letters too small?” She nodded, lying. I pointed out the book’s pictures of lions and monkeys, told her the stories that I could recite, but I wasn’t being kind or offering entertainment. Not knowing what writing was, she wasn’t very interested, but I showed off anyway. I read the last verse of The Town Rat and the Country Rat. The Town Rat
invited the Country Rat to dinner, but the latter, I explained, was scared off by a cat. The Country Rat said:

  But at home I eat in peace,

  And nobody interrupts.

  Good-bye, then. And to hell

  With pleasure that fear corrupts!

  “You see, that’s you. You interrupt. You should go back to where you came from if you can’t pay for a room.” I knew honesty was a virtue. I had also been told directness was an admirable quality, and that goodness wasn’t always obvious. I interpreted these injunctions literally. I was trying to be good; it required thought, effort, and action. It’s better in the long run, I reasoned, if she knows she should leave.

  “A famished stomach has no ears,” she repeated another proverb. “I’m not your pet animal, sweetie.” She cornered me on the landing outside her room.

  “How can you get around without being able to read street or shop signs?” I wouldn’t give up.

  “You ask people, dummy. You go backward and forward until you get to where you’re going.”

  “That must waste a lot of time.” It didn’t occur to me that she mightn’t have any place to go to.

  “I have all the time in the world.”

  I ducked out of the corner and ran away from her, but in my flight downstairs, I left my book behind. She returned it to my mother the next day. “Nice of you to read to Madame Bastian,” I was told. My mother thought I’d finally done a charitable thing. If my mother thought I was being good when that was the last thing I had been thinking of, the rumor of wealth had paid off in some roundabout way. But that misreading of my character aside, a dividend of a sort, it was clear to me that whatever riches Auguste might be connected to could only lie in a fathomless hoax.

  Cher-ie! Cher-ie! Take me to the rue de Lille.

  “I’ll take you there, Auguste, and leave you with the Germans.” I’d learned something about her churches and the rue de Lille.

  “If you don’t go with me, the Syndicate will take over the world.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  One night while my mother was making dinner, which included special soft eggs and soup for Auguste, who had no teeth, she had told me the German embassy was on the rue de Lille near the churches Auguste pleaded to be taken to. They were all in the seventh arrondissement. I was sick of soft food; since my mother had taken Auguste under her wing, we all ate the same things. Auguste didn’t eat with us. I thought she was disgusting, and I couldn’t understand why my mother didn’t find her so, why she let this woman, this attention grabber, come between us. I left trays by her door, knocked, yelled that garbage was served, and ran downstairs. One of the women who worked at night told me to keep my voice down, then went back into her room. I held out empty hands to her as if to say it wasn’t my fault, I was the one who had no peace. Madame Gilberte, barely dressed, didn’t care what I saw. Her eyebrows were penciled arches, pointed and gothic, but her mouth had smeared to a long sneer. Donkey walks on four legs and I walk on two; the last one I saw was very much like you, I sang at Gilberte’s door. I still didn’t know exactly what Auguste meant by the men who went to her room to do some things, but I was sure it was sickening, nothing you could pay me to do no matter how much I was offered.

  It was a long walk across the river to the seventh, but I developed a plan. I was going to get rid of Madame Bastian who made my life miserable with her demands and insults. My scheme was simple, and when it was carried out I could play in the courtyard again without being tortured, without being caught between the two of them. I could be alone with my mother once more. I would take Auguste to her churches, but as we walked, in the middle of a crowd, I would let go of her hand and run away. I didn’t think she would become lost because she’d lived her whole life in the city; an anomie, she could never be truly lost and I was certain that all she’d ever done was wander around the city for years. It was just a question of shifting mass from one location to the next. The narrow room my mother shut her into couldn’t really be considered home. She could make someone else rich. My mother never explained to me why or how this would happen. When I asked, all she would say was that Auguste had worked in the German embassy; that’s all she had time to explain before a tenant rang for his key or came with some complaint or need.

  Come on, Auguste, I’ll take you.

  The next day when my mother was out, I went upstairs and took the smelly old thing’s hand; she looked surprised at my surly complicity and grew quiet, trying to figure out what I might be up to. We walked out of the courtyard in what turned out to be a short-lived silence and began our trip to the embassy.

  At the corner, deserted and quiet, she whispered to me, “I’m glad you came to fetch me, dearest, I needed you so.” I studied the base of a lamppost in acute embarrassment. I didn’t know why she’d changed her tune and sounded almost coy, but I suspected she might be plotting as treacherously as I was. Then Auguste handed me a folded piece of paper.

  “You can look at it.” She paused, waiting for my reaction, but I just looked at her. She stared at the sky as if someone were up there giving her cues, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. I unfolded the piece of onionskin she had handed me. The “writing” looked like knitting. It was illegible, not really script at all. She had probably scribbled this mess of a letter herself. I didn’t know what to say. The loopy lines meant nothing at all.

  “If you can read, you can make out the message.” Auguste nearly tripped on a step as she rolled her eyes.

  I pretended to read it and agree with her. “Oh, my God,” I said, cynically imitating my mother. Madame Bastian looked up at an apartment building that seemed to lean over the street as if it would collapse onto us.

  Auguste explained to me that when she worked at the embassy she was often employed privately by the ambassador’s family and his staff to carry personal messages to different parts of the city.

  “They thought I was stupid, and so they trusted me. I could go anywhere in their offices and private suites. Behind doors closed to nearly everyone I watched women paint their faces, bottles and pots of color fanned out in front of them.” She smacked her lips at her imaginary reflection, evening out non-existent lip rouge. “I might stand by dumb like a piece of furniture while they spoke about private things: love affairs in which the love was not returned or the desired one was caught with someone else; they talked about debts from gambling, debts from bad investments. I heard it all, but they carried on as though I was dumb or wasn’t in the room at all. Then, because they trusted me to be ignorant and obedient, I’m handed sealed letters, and off I go. But I’m not without feelings and curiosity.” Auguste switched to the present tense for a moment and mimed someone handing her a letter, which she took with a bow.

  “I travel across the city. All kinds of doors are open to me with a wink. When notes are delivered, the envelopes are often torn open while I wait, although some men and women throw them aside carelessly as if I were an ordinary postman who didn’t know anything and wouldn’t talk. Not so. I couldn’t get used to gloves, coats, flowers thrown at me to dispose of. I didn’t like being reprimanded, and I knew how to be indiscrete for a price.” She made a talking gesture with her hand, opening and shutting fingers as though her hand were a mouth, then she lowered her voice and took on a confidential tone.

  We had stopped in front of a hardware store for a moment, its window full of gadgets. I rocked back and forth, shifting weight from one foot to the other. I wanted to appear cavalier when I was actually spellbound.

  “In the embassy, especially in the evening, I saw all kinds of things, indescribable acts. I saw men kissing each other behind frosted glass, women swimming naked in the embassy fountain at night.” She put her hands over my ears, just for a few seconds, then went on. “I was supposed to burn the papers I collected in the German embassy trash, but I didn’t, I harvested them. In the middle of the night I left with my cônes under my coat. The code word for my papers was cônes.”

  At rue Not
re Dame de Lorette we passed a stand that sold newspapers, that was all, but she became nervous and wanted to go back. We turned around, she didn’t speak again, but when we reached our courtyard my mother was standing at her station, arms crossed. Madame Bastian didn’t say a word to her, proceeding to shamble up the stairs as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She leaned heavily on the banister and put all her tired weight on each foot as if she might go rolling backward in the wind. When the door shut behind her, my mother started to shake me by the shoulders.

  “Do you like throwing money out the window? Because what you’ve done, missy, amounts to the same thing.” She grabbed me by the collar. “Someone’s going to recognize Madame Bastian and take her from us, then where will you be?”

  “What are you talking about? She’s been living on the streets for years. She’s not your prisoner. Either everyone knows who she is, or no one does, and no one cares.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to move out of this building and live in a nice place?” My mother was employing the stupid question technique.

  I was exasperated, felt too old to be hit and badgered, and could sense she was tired. I twisted free, running out the door toward the part of rue Notre Dame de Lorette where women chased drunks away while taking the arms of others.

  “Take this scarf, Madeleine. You’ll freeze.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  I looked back and saw her standing in the street, but I kept running, tripping into someone’s legs only to be pushed away with a shove. I knew a few tenants had somehow squeezed the truth from Auguste. She paid no rent and was given free meals. This did not sit well with Madame Gilberte and the others. It may only have been a matter of time before they found out who she was, a former charlady who worked at the German embassy decades ago. I pieced together that she had stolen something valuable from the Germans, but when I asked her, all she would say was right under your nose. The last year she worked had been before the World’s Fair, the Exposition of 1900.