Paper Conspiracies

  Paper Conspiracies

  SUSAN DAITCH

  City Lights Books • San Francisco

  Copyright © 2011 by Susan Daitch

  All rights reserved.

  Cover and book design by Linda Ronan.

  Front cover photo: “Paris Exposition: night view, Paris, France, 1900.” Night view includes the Ponte Alexandre III. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Daitch, Susan.

  Paper conspiracies / Susan Daitch.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-87286-514-3

  1. Dreyfus, Alfred, 1859-1935—Fiction. 2. Trials (Treason)—France—Fiction. 3. Jews—France—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.A33P36 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2011014523

  City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,

  261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.

  Visit our website: www.citylights.com

  For Nissim

  Train-Eating Sun Blinded by Eclipse

  How many stories could begin, “What are you doing here, you’re supposed to be dead?”

  The door opens, light shines into the dark hall, and the curve of a cheekbone appears vaguely familiar. Other guests, innocent family members in the back of the room don’t notice the new arrival. You think it can’t be possible that he or she might only be visible to you. No, it can’t be. You shut the door, looking up at the transom, then down at the gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold to be sure no shadow has slid into the room.

  The encounter might take place on the street, in a train station, a busy intersection, a back alley, you’re supposed to be dead! What are you doing here? What do you want from me? Leave me alone, please. You’re in trouble. Calling the police is useless because a history of guilt and complicity on your part isn’t entirely buried and forgotten. Could the likeness be only a coincidental double, not the real person, not the actual birth-certificate-waving human, not the citizen who might have made your life a living hell? That’s how I felt at work when restoring old movies. Shadowy figures assembled into frames began to look familiar, to hum and vibrate with amorous longings, embarrassment, coyness, the desire for evening old scores, or simmering with rage, they fade into an indistinct background.

  A silhouette skating like a banshee over pebbled glass, a profile reflected in the rearview mirror of a parked car, I twisted around quickly, not believing it possible. Is that you? Wait a minute, let me be certain. I grew up the only daughter of two people who didn’t know where they wanted to or even could go, so they ended up in a small city halfway between New York and Montreal. Both of them, but my mother in particular, were not destined to feel at home anywhere. The idea of home stood on shaky ground: a house, an address on a steeply inclined plot of land on which sprouted a one-story house called a ranch but there were no palominos or branding machines on this idea of ranch. It was just a one-story house so you didn’t have to go up or down stairs. There were no grandparents, no uncles, aunts, or cousins. One distant cousin landed in Argentina in 1940, but his children were disappeared in that country’s dirty war of the 1970s, and he ended his life jumping from a balcony shortly thereafter. His letters, written in a hybrid of Spanish, Russian, and Yiddish were kept in a drawer along with tax forms, photographs, fliers for discounts at car washes. I was unable to read them completely, and no one was willing to translate his macaronics for me. In one letter I could make out Nokh a kish funa gonif, dezehl iber dayne tzende (If you kiss a thief, count your teeth) and figured someone was carrying on with someone they shouldn’t have, but the specifics of who was tangoing on the wrong street, I couldn’t make out. I’m not sure each page really revealed much anyway. The letters were murmured over when they arrived; a few years later my mother wept over them. Alone, sneaking the pages out of a drawer at night, I figured out some of the Spanish parts that referred to quotidian details of an increasingly frightened life, as if by burying the anticipation of death squads under details about a trip to the doctor’s, the fear might be buried, too. Houses broken into in the middle of the night, children going into hiding in country houses, in the jungle, in museum basements. My mother, a woman who fought chaos with chaos, snatched them from my hands, saying she’d heard all this before, and I didn’t need to hear it at all. When I turned fifteen, around the time the letters from Argentina stopped, she spent a lot of time wandering around a newly built windowless shopping mall looking for light switches (prices slashed), wrapping paper (after holidays), out-of-stock paint colors, and other semiuseless objects because you never knew when there would be shortages or how these things could become useful if flight or hiding became necessary. Both my parents were talented at putting mechanical detritus to good use: radio innards were used to fix the telephone, a turntable mutated into a gizmo used to stir prints in my father’s darkroom, a speaker made of plywood the size of a refrigerator box blasted music all over the house. As a child I was convinced they could turn a desert junkyard into a phalanx of robots. The one-story house became a vault for packages of jeweler’s screwdrivers (what if you have to fix a watch?), picture hooks (could pick a lock), rolls of tape of all kinds, and tins of sardines and vacuum-sealed bags of raisins with expiration dates from before the camera was invented. While my mother was preoccupied with this kind of shopping my father spent more and more time tinkering with electrical machinery and a homemade computer as big as a bathtub, with disks the size of dinner plates. Chaos reigned. No one would answer my questions. I only knew I was named for someone whose name began with the letter F, someone who was born in a town whose name was made up of consonants and couldn’t be found on any map.

  My mother couldn’t use an oven and cooked quickly over a stove, burning pots and pans, throwing them out whenever possible. Food that was canned or frozen presented a language that, for all its simplicity, held hidden dangers, the breaching of food taboos. What was she seeing in the turquoise packaging of a frozen macaroni-and-cheese dinner? The bits of bacon rendered it inedible, and the whole thing had to be taken outside and put in the garbage. The staring into space got worse after my accident, which wasn’t really an accident at all, but a letter bomb directed at all of us. I was the one who opened it.

  “Where will we go? Rio?” My father grew angry at my mother’s hysteria, useless and irrational, as far as he was concerned. “Shall we join your cousin whose children were dropped out of a helicopter over the Atlantic Ocean?”

  “You’re always the last one to get it. You stay behind until the wolf is at the door, until his tail wallops the glass, and then it’s too late.” My mother dumped the contents of her bag on the floor, looking for her keys so she could make an exit. “Frances, were you going through my things again?” I’d just gotten out of the hospital and I wasn’t going anywhere. Half my face was bandaged over, my hair hung limply out from under white strips of gauze.

  We weren’t going to go anywhere. My father had a stable job teaching biology in a high school. In the spring when he got to the unit on evolution a few of the English teachers who were creationists would somehow have sniffed this out and, during lunch, they would try to convert him, but in this task there lay madness. Perhaps they saw the classroom charts that mapped relationships between family, species, and genus laid out in green and blue lines like the veins of a leaf. In Darwin’s theory of natural selection they saw the cosmos reduced to chaos. The collector of beetles and carnivorous plants who rode a tortoise in the Galapagos opened the universe to random terror. This cracked my father up. He didn’t take the creationists seriously. He might notice them peering at him as he rode into the parking lot on his motorcycle, but he never described them
in condescending terms. As far as he was concerned, the argument could be parsed into two obviously warring camps: evolutionists whose soldiers could refer to the Salk vaccine, the H-bomb (even though it had to be tested many times and even though it could be said to be a dubious achievement), walking on the moon. The soldiers on the other side drove their stake into ground with the solidity of the Everglades, and though they unfurled their banner with conviction, it was true, what did they have to brag about really? Galileo under house arrest because he wrote that the sun was the center of the universe? My father lit a Marlboro and tapped ash into a glass ashtray in the shape of the Apollo 11 rocket.

  To my mother the creationists were nauseating, a grave affront. Pour water on them and they would melt into the floor in a plume of smoke. To her they were all complicitous bombers, and she longed for cities with narrow streets set at odd, unpredictable angles where the shadow of Nosferatu or a golem gliding across a wall would be as prosaic as meeting a friend in a café where you could talk about movies, plays, show off new clothes, and gossip in a language all your friends understood. Your feet made noise on the pavement instead of the silence of asphalt parking lots. After the letter bomb she embarked on fits of driving, traveling to the far-flung provinces of provincial life. On her journeys she discovered apple stands and strip malls, cut-rate carpet dealers and fish fries, public libraries set up in defunct churches, and covered bridges on unmapped roads.

  My initial fifteen-year-old response was to try to blend into the town my parents had picked out of nowhere. I daydreamed in school, drawing relentlessly in notebooks, the margins of textbooks, on desks. I still have a few of those sketches of futuristic cities based on my mother’s stories of buildings honeycombed with crowded apartments which I imagined were Gaudí-like, glittering with tesserae, built like huge stalagmites. It was a means of imagining my way out. In the meantime I made an attempt to be anonymous, but the project was useless. After the letter bomb I realized it was impossible to hide behind ordinary clothes and straightened hair that only lasted for a few hours before it boinged back to its curly state. I went to Ravi Shankar and Nina Simone concerts, but if I cheered when she exhorted the crowd by saying if a few white men can run this country you can take over this university, nobody cared or noticed my enthusiastic response.

  I encountered my own equivalent of the creationists. My classes were full of small-town boys, mediocre athletes with buzz cuts and monosyllabic names whose lives seemed fixed if not gated. My parents blinked and saw the lot of them crammed into Mr. Wizard’s Way Back Machine. All of them were the descendants of the Gaston who had joined the Children’s Crusade and all were ready to march on infidel-filled Jerusalem if their draft number came up. The letter bomb proved it. I wasn’t so sure. What happened when they, these boys who knew little of life beyond the next town, ended up in Vietnam, Beirut, the Persian Gulf? One bearlike boy who read Soldier of Fortune magazine bragged he would go to Afghanistan or Zaire, names he proudly mispronounced. The ingredients for explosives lurked in their cellar workshops, with how-to manuals hidden in drawers full of jock clothing; they were my suspects. I never knew exactly which one or ones created me, turned me into a target, one-eyed and angry, with no effective means of striking back at them. My parents who looked like Persians with Boris and Natasha accents made me an easy mark. My mother, in particular, was a sitting duck for mimics, and I knew it. Since I’d lost an eye to the anonymous letter bomb I was a sitting duck myself.

  In school I had wanted to study Latin and Greek — as if dead languages might explain how images were first connected to words. I imagined hectoring mobs of things (lions, columns, arenas, aqueducts, toga pins, constellations) marshaled into categories: nouns, verbs, syntax — but my family insisted that I do something practical, so I studied the most insubstantial thing I could think of: light.

  The job posting was the stamp on my ticket: Library of Congress Film Restoration Project, Paid Internship.

  I was charmed by the idea of working in film, but intensely camera shy and happy to work as a kind of handmaiden to “the industry.” All right, I thought, at least I have a hand or an eye in something. Here, I wouldn’t be a target, wouldn’t be stared at, few questions asked, go on with your business, please. The process of learning how to put a brush to aged celluloid gave me a sense of professional identity, saved me from the night shift at a movie-rental shop with a large independent section, answering urgent questions about matrixchopsockeystarwarsdirectorscut. Now I had a hood I could pull over my head, a burrow, a bunker, a fallout shelter with a periscope.

  I left for Washington at the end of the summer so my departure could be confused with going off to school, and it was still hot, but in a last gasp kind of way. Department store windows displayed artificial leaves while children on our street still ran through hoses and hydrants in brilliant fuchsia and purple bathing suits. My mother said good-bye at the house; seeing me wave from the window of a train was not possible for her. I kept looking out the car window all the way to the station, armoring myself against her resentment and despair, her sense of betrayal that chased me no matter how much my father, imitating Peter Lorre, said full steam ahead, Frances. Since we were early my father and I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the station.

  “What do you think about Cuba?” he asked, stirring and staring into the parking lot.

  “What do you mean, what do I think about Cuba?” My father, who was a very calm man, was making me nervous.

  “They’re looking for science teachers.”

  “You can’t go to Cuba. You’re a United States citizen. If you moved to Havana you’d never be able to come back.”

  “I’ve left a lot of places that I can’t and don’t want to return to.”

  “You’ve lived in Israel. You won’t be let in.”

  “That was a long time ago. Maybe they won’t notice.”

  “What about Mom?” The point I feared was that she occupied one of the places he didn’t want to return to.

  “I need to get away from here. Between the creationists who guarantee me a life in everlasting hell, who think petri dishes are something you hang from a Christmas tree, and your mother, who mistakes family photographs for expired discount coupons and tosses them out, I think for me, personally, it’s time for a change.”

  There was no arguing with him. I didn’t know if he would apply for Cuban citizenship or not, but I knew now that I was leaving, he would as well.

  “I want to give you something before your mother makes a clean sweep of everything in the house.” He handed me a faded sepia photograph of a small girl, about four years old. I turned it over. On the back was written F. Baum, 1940. This was my father’s sister.

  “So keep this in a safe place.”

  Our conversation dwindled in the minutes remaining. Finally he dropped me at the station then went back to his machines. I didn’t want to get on the train, didn’t want to see him return to his mammoth computers, coverless radios, old turntables spinning wildly on the cluttered floor. By giving me this photograph I’d never seen, he was tearing some part of me away, as if to say, you’ll never be able to come back here, and you’ll never be able to leave. The train pulled out of the station, and the red brick apartment buildings, the flyblown variety stores already giving way to Kmarts and then Walmarts moved out to the horizon as if they were on conveyor belts, parts of changing sets.

  In Washington in a cheap, hastily rented studio apartment I put my tiny aunt’s picture in a frame made in China and set out to learn the art of conserving film.

  This kind of resuscitation required a steady hand and a life in dark rooms. When beads from a sweater bought in a thrift shop, for example, fell onto an editing table, jamming a reel, it was, for the actors, akin to an avalanche of glass. Every thread, hair, drop of coffee had to be kept out of the danger zone. In my position as assistant to a film archivist at the Library of Congress I wasn’t paid much, but I soon became a skilled surgeon of lost performances, an ambulance
driver for long-dead actors.

  What about my own ghosts? They lived and died in a town I never saw; they drank coffee in bare provincial cafés, had lives circumscribed by rituals and holidays whose meanings organized each year like shifting but predictable constellations. Yet when I watched movies and cartoons made before 1939 I couldn’t help but pretend to inhabit those faces known only through photographs, wondering if they had watched these too, and in that projection back, the ghostly clusters took on a mixture of strange and familiar features. Also, and this makes their summoning even more troublesome, they appeared horrifyingly modern, not part of someone’s acute but aged set of memories. The murdered live next door, or almost. You can’t say: look at their clothes, they belong in another time, because with their fairly well-cut suits and dresses in geometric prints they look as if they could live in the same cities I have lived in, travel in what are essentially the same kinds of cars, respond to the same news of elections and atrocities, although this is impossible. What I mean is they have become personalities I’m capable of trying on although I never met a single one of them. They died before I was born. If this sounds arrogant it’s only because they’ve been at my door persistently, despite my family’s need to look the other way.

  The new city engulfed me, and I plunged into my job with intensity. Taking on the role of the animating but anonymous power that revitalized Buster Keaton as his eyes grew sadder and (I thought) more disillusioned, or pumping up a flimsy, short-haired Myrna Loy revealed an odd kind of romance I sometimes had with these images. Or maybe it was a case of antiromance, the romance of solitary, imaginary pleasures. I used to notice old men and sullen boys in movie houses and wonder how far removed I really was from them. What kinds of illusions did I labor under? It’s a job, I kept telling myself, one I felt fortunate to have.

  “Hello, this is Alphabet Films, please hold.”