by Susan Daitch
He knocks again, popping up like a rabbit who won’t stay in the hat. We defend small shops, he says. We’re against Jewish department stores.
If I might see the letter his brother, Mathieu Dreyfus, sent you, and a copy of your reply?
I respond very politely that I have not kept a record of my humiliation. He can send all the flowers at his disposal, but I can’t produce what was burned in 1920 when Lenin, I remind him, predicted the revolution would spread to Germany. That does it. He’s convinced he’s dealing with a dizzy blond who cares nothing about the fate of the republic, and red faced, he leaves again.
If I could trick Mathieu as I was tricked, I would take any opportunity to do so, even now. When I look around this house and see evidence of my own history: photographs of Monsignor Rivette with mother, a row of bronze elephants with small riders, mullahs or muftis, father’s medal collection, I become certain of my own innocence. I know a fortune could be made from my letters and their value grows every year, but it’s a fortune that will lay dormant, unamassed, dispersed into other coffers, unrecognized.
If you recover childish notebooks, adolescent letters, and scribblings assembled over years, a kind of record could be formed against me and constructed at such a time when I might be entirely disarmed. Death, stroke, senility: I will no longer be capable of defending myself against your memoirs. She was prone to tantrums and playing tricks. There have been nights when I’ve written endlessly, explaining everything from the first time I remember seeing you in your cradle to the image of the dock and the judge, Bertulus. I analyze and document every angle, anticipating every attack that might occur after I’m gone. The construction of my innocence kept a man on Devil’s Island, and I’d like the record to stay this way.
July 15, 1934
Dear Lille,
Two days after the break-in another event occurred, unrelated to it, as far as I can tell. I was pulling up weeds that line a path behind the house when Sylvie brought me a letter from a man who wants to see my papers. His letter was different from other requests I’ve received since establishing residence in Montreuil. Letters like this one come in fits and starts, but when they arrive, they make me feel less forgotten, almost a celebrity. Usually the requests are formal, impersonal, they mark the last step in a research project, when the applicant must leave the archives and actually talk to someone. His letter, however, was full of quirks. First, he quoted La Fontaine, as if this particular verse might be a sign of sympathy for my situation:
How I’ve always hated the view of the multitude,
Which seems to me prejudiced, hasty, and crude
And alien to God
Interposing between itself and things a distorting lens
And measuring other men’s
Stature by its own small rod.
I hate the multitude and small rods, too. Good idea. Second, he referred to the incident of the flowers sent to me from Mathieu Dreyfus under a pseudonym, Antoine Belmonde or Albert Dormonde. I don’t remember the name he used.
You remember the story; my maid accepted the card, unwrapped the crinkled, perhaps slightly used tissue paper, put the roses in water immediately. I looked at his card, white, plain, newly printed (I didn’t know how new) and wrote to thank this Antoine Belmonde, whom I’d never met. I wrote out one version, then copied it over and had the note mailed that evening. The name Belmonde had been made up, but the address was that of Dreyfus’s brother, Mathieu, and in this way I was uncovered and undone. Now he had a copy of my handwriting and could compare it to one of the notes attributed to his brother, a crucial piece of evidence in his conviction for espionage. The handwriting matched. I, or rather, Z, was the real German spy. Had telephone numbers been a common thing, I might have called Albert Dormonde to thank him for the flowers, and a sample of my handwriting would never have fallen into litigious and vengeful hands. Since my innocent forgery came to light I make it a habit never to write back, regardless of whether La Fontaine is quoted, Claudel, or the archbishop of Chartres.
The real spy, Esterhazy, used several pseudonyms, Z was the one he wrote under; “the benefactor” was another, but Z is the one I prefer. You might say I’ve been drawn to things that fly under invented banners, labels not really their own. You and mother thought we were introduced through some formal and legitimate arrangement, but the truth is we met on a train from Le Havre to Paris. He sat in my compartment while my companion was in another part of the train.
I was traveling with a journalist, unsteady and truculent, who wrote under the name Boisandre for La Libre Parole, refuge for racial purists. Mother was suspicious of him, seeing through his moralism to the sponge underneath, but her chilliness only made him more attractive to me, his harebrained causes appeared ennobled, however quick he was to follow the crowd and do so badly. But with the help of his money I was finally able to leave the house, as you know. After a few months Boisandre appeared embarrassed to be seen with me in public. How was I an embarrassment? Did I say silly things, make trite observations? Did I wear the wrong clothes? I endured painful incidents in cafés, at concerts where he ignored me, pretended I wasn’t there, sometimes excusing his rudeness by saying that he was looking for someone, a contact, an official, anyone.
So I was still stuck with him when a stranger on a train introduced himself as Esterhazy and offered his card. With his hat pulled down Z resembled a caricature of a silent film scoundrel, or like a child who makes a face, showing off, not realizing that no one is fooled and Mardi Gras is over. His eyes barely showed, and he unbuttoned his jacket as if he owned the train. Despite the fact that he was so small, he slouched in his seat in a cavalier way as if he’d just arrived from the American West. How soon I forgot that first impression of childish authority, annoying and stupid, which presupposed the ease with which others could be taken in. He was right. Very often they were easily taken in. While we whispered in deep conversation Boisandre leaned out a window in the corridor, oblivious to me and to everything else. I was happy to be rid of him.
Esterhazy and I arranged to meet the following week in a café near the Gare d’Orsay. I had difficulty finding a cab and was so late I felt steam coming out of my ears. In the midst of a tie up I jumped from the cab and ran several blocks in anxiety, certain he would have given up waiting for me and left long ago. Had this been true, had we missed each other at that point, I would have been saved from a life of distress, but Z was a patient man. He waited for me. From down the block I could see him looking around, his large head turning toward the station entrance and then back toward the street.
Entering the café I tripped on a nearby chair leg, someone’s umbrella clattering to the ground. I was glad to see him, but there was something reserved and uncertain about the way he greeted me.
“Claire, what a surprise to run into you. I’m waiting for . . .” he hesitated, obviously strategizing on his feet.
He whispered, and I felt I ought to whisper in return without knowing why. As he lifted a glass to his mouth, the bottom part of his face turned green from absinthe. Later I tried to remember if he swallowed before he stood up to take my hand and pull out my chair. I decided he had. Swallow first, shake hands second. At times he gave the impression he might be departing any minute, but nothing was further from the truth. He had all the time in the world. A waiter with one eye fixed on the street brought me a drink identical to his. It must have been ordered before I arrived. I placed the trowel-shaped spoon over my glass, poured water through it, and watched the green liquid turn opal.
He took my hand, but no niceties initiated our meeting. He spoke directly with no prologue about his projects, which made little sense to me. His plans involved the army, and although I tried to appear attentive, it was only because he made me feel like a serious person, a woman who could be told about military maneuvers, and this kind of flattery, as you know, was where his charm lay.
Then he asked me for money. He spoke as if the thought had just occurred to him, but the request came in t
he form of a declarative sentence, I’m sure of it. “I’ve been doing favors for General X.” (I don’t remember who he named.) He owes me, but I haven’t been paid yet. I’m often abandoned this way, and left feeling cheated and unappreciated. They know how much they need me, how they rely on the information I bring in.”
I wondered why he was confessing to me, not realizing that the deadly combination of confession and sympathy had turned a corner and been brokered into a financial transaction. He took me into his confidence, and basking in his trust, I emptied my pockets. I gave him all of what I had. I wanted Z. He had my compassion and desire. I was nothing if not a willing dupe.
“I’ll only use part of this, the rest I’ll invest, and you’ll be paid back double the amount.” He said something about a horse called Pourquoi Pas who would double my money as nothing else could, yet though he spoke with assurance, he also sounded as if it was unusual for him to be destitute and gambling was, for him, a novelty. As I write about this now, the horse sounds like an obvious joke, and Esterhazy seems like a laughably bad con man, but I believed him, and though not a pushover at the time, I believed him easily.
Women walked by in dusty shoes, smelling of lilacs, hair the color of nougat, half-hidden behind umbrellas or broad-brimmed hats. One turned and looked in our direction as if she recognized Esterhazy from somewhere. The world seemed sleepy, on the verge of spring. I did worry about the money a little. I’ve never been that naive, but told myself this was the only time I would lend him anything. It wasn’t, but as we sat in the café I felt the anonymous women who looked at him knew something I was blind to. I wiped my face, thinking it might have become smeared or dirty from an unconscious brush up against something, what? I stared at Esterhazy as he gestured for the waiter. He looked like someone familiar with clandestine arrangements, like procuring abortions in foul-smelling but expensive apartments. If the woman dies a slow, agonizing death, it’s nothing to do with him. He’s long gone out the back door, hand in his pocket. He’d only been the arranger, but remembers everyone’s names because you never know when this information might be important. But on that first day, knowing he was a man who probably hid a distasteful side only added to my curiosity.
He paid the check out of what I gave him, and swimming in his Zeus-like smile, I was certain he wouldn’t ask me for money again. Having none left, and convinced his need was enormous (which it was) I didn’t dare ask him for a few francs to get home, and so walked all the way from Gare d’Orsay.
The next time I met him in Parc Montsouris. I had difficulty finding the place we had arranged until I recognized the slouching figure waiting on a bench at the end of a lane. I put my hand on his shoulder, and although he told me he was glad to see me, he didn’t look in my direction as I sat down. He remained steadily focused on some children sailing boats as if he was in great psychic pain, too great to let anyone near him.
“My superior officers laugh at my innovations as if I’m some kind of crackpot not worth bothering with, then they steal my ideas while I rot in the poorhouse. They have me followed. They play with me. See that woman on the far bench? I see her every day, and it’s no accident.”
He still wouldn’t look in my direction. If a child had fallen in the pond, I don’t think he would have really seen it, much less leapt from the bench to offer rescue. I had the feeling it was entirely possible, and even likely, that he would be meeting another man or woman after I left. He would say exactly the same things while never moving from the same park bench. He could perform all afternoon before a steady stream of visitors who were strangers to one another. Powerless and intimidated, I traced a loopy pattern in the dirt with the toe of my shoe. He made me feel that men in bowlers hid behind the trees, eavesdropping and taking notes. The men were quick, they disappeared as soon as one turned around, never dropping or leaving behind the hats that sat high on their heads.
“Listen, Claire, I don’t know if you understand the gravity of my situation. The French General X and German Attaché Y dangle carrots in front of my nose, big money, yes,” he nodded. “They trip over themselves to get their hands on the services I offer, but the handsome payments promised on Friday seem always to be postponed when Friday comes around. ‘We have to wait and see how your artillery lists compare to . . .’ To what? In a blast of chumminess they try to cheer me on with cognac and cigars, but have I been paid yet? No. My information is first class, believe me, and they know that it is, but since I’m paid in promises, all my resources have been depleted, dried up completely. For me to be reduced to asking a woman like you for a temporary loan is a sin. They need me, I’m invaluable to their operations, they need to know what one another is up to, but my expenses, as far as General X and Attaché Y are concerned, have as much weight and consequence as spun sugar. What am I to them? A clown? It’s the great irony of my life that I have to stoop to their level for a few francs. My humiliation knows no bounds.” Then he acted as if he was deeply lost in thought, irretrievably lost in dismal contemplation, and I got the distinct impression I wasn’t wanted. I began to walk away, but he called after me.
“I’m at your mercy, Claire. I had to use all the money you gave me just to maintain myself in the middling style to which I’m accustomed, and instead of returning with double or triple your original loan, as I’d intended, I sit before you completely broke.”
“I can’t give you any more.”
“Who’s asking you?” He was suddenly infuriated, and it was a frightening spectacle. “Don’t flatter yourself. Do you think I’m sitting on this bench waiting just for you? Any minute after you leave,” he looked at his watch, “which should be soon, the archivist from the Section of Statistics, Felix Gribelin, will arrive, wearing his predictable dark blue glasses as if I’m some kind of disease you can’t look at straight on. He will be accompanied by Major General du Paty de Clam himself, in black silk gloves and a fake beard. They look like a pair of clowns, and I’m at their mercy.”
“Are they going to pay you?” I didn’t mean to sound skeptical, but it was difficult to disguise my tone of voice.
“I think it’s time for you to leave.”
Confused and hurt, I left him sitting on the bench. I believed him, but was unsure whether I should empty my pockets once again. The walk out of the park was long, but as I reached the street I heard footsteps behind me. It was Esterhazy breathing hard, trying to catch up.
Perhaps someone altogether important but anonymous had failed to show. I know he did meet his connections in the park, but more likely he was growing tired of his pose on the bench and hadn’t expected me to leave. Taking my arm as if he hadn’t heard anything I’d said and forgotten his own temper, the simple truth was that he didn’t want to miss a free ride. The cab ride was short; he spent half of it chastising himself, then asking me for another loan. Again, I gave him what I had and did so without thinking. He was well dressed and spoke of opportunities that would surely work out soon.
“What I haven’t told you, Claire, is that I’m working on the goose that will lay the golden egg.”
He had information about the Syndicate. You remember the Syndicate. Mother used to rant about the Syndicate, urbanist financiers who control the banks and the theaters. More well informed than she, Z made me feel that I was one of the few women clever enough to understand such a conspiracy, and therefore could be included in knowledge of a dangerous secret. He had confidence in my intelligence. I was sure he would pay me back. We began to meet more frequently. Somehow he managed to rent a large apartment, far from where he lived with his wife it would turn out, and offered to let me live in it. I never knew how the payments were made but eventually made sure my name was on the lease. During the Dreyfus affair it was to this address that the archivist from the Section of Statistics was sent with a message for Z: You’re in trouble, but you have powerful friends who will protect you.
Whenever I received a letter from him, there was a moment before I opened it when I could imagine that though the env
elope was addressed to me, the letter inside would begin with salutations to someone else. He often signed his messages with only the initial Z, and with Z no transaction was ever straightforward: listening to his speech or reading his letters was always an act of interpretation.
Around the time I moved into the apartment he sent me a photograph of a Japanese woman taken, the caption read, in Yokohama. He explained the woman was a prostitute who, like the others she worked with, was forced to use a dialect which would mask and ultimately obliterate the tones and sentence constructions of her regional speech. If a woman escaped she would be identified by the accent and grammar she had been forced to acquire and would immediately be sent back to her master in Yokohama. I didn’t ask him how he knew this story. I understood I was to become complicit, and therefore trapped, but felt I would risk everything for Z. I would learn any dialect he proposed. Was I embracing a concoction of shackles dreamed up by a paranoid? No, replacing one grammar with another was a pleasure, as far as I was concerned.
Underneath Z’s explanations for his bankruptcy and misunderstood nature there was some truth, or some need, even if he wasn’t telling me exactly what that need might be. Never having enough went hand and hand with another obsession, one that was an absolute reality to him: his talents and abilities went unrecognized in France. In the privacy of my apartment, behind locked and bolted doors, he would grow repetitive, his bitterness and debt burgeoned in tandem. He would walk from room to room, pick up small objects, examine them and return each figure or book to its place. He liked to lie on the floor, stare at the ceiling, and carp.
“My ideas are neglected yet you can’t imagine who dogs my footsteps, who repeats my confidences. Powerful people chase and flirt with me in urinals and private opera boxes, then, in cafés, in the street, those same individuals go to great lengths to disown our relationships. Such lousy actors who feel they must pretend they don’t know me are themselves laughable.” He was lying on the carpet, leaning on his elbows and smoking, bitterly looking for refuge, licking his wounds. His forays into the tiers of power and money and the numerous rejections that followed were meticulously preserved (by him) and much rankled over. The cycle of hope, rebuff, and inevitable disappointment would never end.