Zelda | Walter RUHLMANN

At first, it’s always the same. You know where you are going. You know things are going to happen the way you expect them to. Then, after a while, it slips. You can’t control anything. Things go wrong.

We are in the attic.
The room is rather neat. Zelda cleans it every evening. Quietly. Very calmly. She’s used not to making a sound. Not to making herself noticed. You can’t make yourself noticed.
It’s very dangerous. It’s so hazardous. It could be fatal.
Since they have taken the neighbors away, since her own parents have disappeared, she is quiet.
For her they had disappeared a longer time ago, but she can’t accustom herself to their real abduction.
So Zelda hides herself behind a servant’s apron. She does the housework, she washes the dishes, the linens, she serves at the table, she dresses up Madam, she plays with Pauline, the daughter, less with Julien, the son, older, less inclined to games, more sullen, less cheerful...
Madam. This woman fascinates her, she’d like to look like her, but how could that be possible.
The large flat is bright and situated in the heart of the city.
The city, the Nazis have settled in for two years now. Life is hard. The goods are scarce. Yet, Sir, Madam and the children always have meat for dinner.
She’d like to eat meat once in a while.

I imagine her in the evening, in her bed. She tries to remember the taste of meat. She must have eaten any for three or four years. Since she left home, since her father, the old fur trader Rissenstein sent her packing.
She had become too free and too libertine.

She knows Madam watches her undress sometimes.
Madam is a Russian. She is from the aristocracy. The White Russia. That which fled from the Reds. That of the tsars and criminal princes.
Madam’s name’s Cassandre. Sir’s Arthur.
Zelda Rissenstein works for the Fauberts. In Paris. In 1942.

So it’s the war everywhere in Europe. The concentration camps. The Resistants. The prisoners. The coupons. The children go bare foot down the streets. The grey colors of a city looking for itself. Everyone thinks you’re so happy here. Are they really?
The army of occupation is here, too often, too visible, it doesn’t seem it wants to let loose.
People disappear. People we don’t want on the French territory. People who the present régime wants to get rid of. The collaborationists give them to bring war prisoners back. We send the unwanted people away; we have the nation’s sons back. Families have a father, a brother, a son back home, it’s nice, and it’s comforting. The Caring Father* makes sure his citizens are well. That’s for the best. Indeed, those against whom we trade the prisoners, who gives a damn about them, they’re nothing, we don’t want them home, they’re scum, rubbish, robbers, liars, people we suspect.
Look at them, their nose, their eyes, their low forehead, their sharp chin, the black clothes they wear. How awful!

The state did well to neglect them, to suppress their jobs, to displace them, to forbid them being French.
Where are they sent by the way? Who cares? They disappear, that’s good enough. So we get our dear children back home.

Zelda hears all this when she goes to the market place, when she goes for a pack of cigarettes for Sir, when a letter needs sending.

Yet she knows she shouldn’t go out so often. She puts her life at risk any time she steps outside.
Where these people go, Zelda knows it well. Cassandre told her: “Zelda, my child, don’t try to go out, don’t rebel against us, you’re well off with us. Do you only know what they do to people like you? They make them work till exhaust. They practice experiment on them. The other ones they kill and burn them.”

How can Madam know all this? Cassandre. The Oracle. How can you believe such things?

Arthur came in Zelda’s attic last night. He only listened to her while she was sleeping. But while he was watching on her, he found a small bottle of perfume on the bed-side and remembered it was one of Cassandre’s.
He now knows what he had always suspected, this girl is a robber, her beauty stole his senses, and she didn’t just steal his heart and soul.
But he won’t say a word; Cassandre didn’t seem to complain from the disappearing of this small bottle of perfume.

On the following evening, Sir comes home late. Cassandre is alone in her bed. The children are asleep.
The bell rings in the attic and Zelda goes downstairs to show herself in front of Madam. Cassandre greets her dressed in a night gown. She is naked underneath this light piece of cloth.
Half-open, it lets Cassandre’s smooth and white legs show off.
- Go back upstairs my child, go back to your room.
Zelda walks up the tiny staircase. She goes back into her dark attic where only the fragile light of a candle helps her to see in the darkness.

Madam comes in the attic. She’s still wearing her satin night gown but it is wide-open now.
She slowly undresses her servant and drives her hand in the grey cotton panty.
Zelda recognizes there long gone sensations.
Cassandre’s hand join Zelda’s, spread on her breast and rubbing her nipples erected towards Paris grey sky, towards the yellowish ceiling of the dark attic.

Sir has come back home, but they haven’t heard him.
Sir had but one idea in mind. Get out of this freezing cold air, go up to see little Zelda and keep her company a bit of night, warm up against her, forget the horror.
Through the half-open door, he can see his wife, bare-naked, her head resting between Zelda’s thighs. He watches them, an unaware peeper. Zelda felt his presence. But she didn’t say anything; she lets the fire burn her.
What else is she thinking about? About her parents? About what happened to them? About the lost joy? About the joy she found again under Cassandre’s expert tongue.
She comes.

Arthur left them to their easy flow; he went back downstairs. He hanged off the phone. In a short time, life is going to collapse into horror.
He himself won’t be left unharmed.
An hour later, maybe it took them less time, the Gestapo is in the flat and two officers ran up the stairs driving them to the attic where Cassandre and Zelda have fallen asleep.
They are brutally woken up by iron wrought hands that cut their delicate bodies.

When the officers go out, taking both women with them, Arthur thinks about his brother, Armand. Armand is far away now. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
He doesn’t know yet that he will join the two ladies in the Gestapo office tomorrow.

The future will be coarse for them three.
The year 1942 will be soon closing but three long years will follow.
When the souvenir of Zelda is not so insistent in his memory, Arthur will be en route to join Armand and try to forget his past completely.
Cassandre will have gone to other banishment places in the Siberian inferno.
Zelda died a long time ago. I helped her give birth to the child she was unknowingly expecting.
Both died in my arms, blown away by tiredness, hunger and cold.

1st published in French at http://revue.hauteurs.free.fr/zelda.html
Translated into English by the author.

*Philippe Pétain, chief of the French collaborationist government (régime de Vichy) during WW2 - from 1940 to 1944.

Comments

[Robert]

Enjoyed.

[aurora]

A fantastic, haunting write.