Odile paused only to draw a map in her copybook and mark the location of the letter drop, then her questions plunged off course. “You think Monsieur Gilbert is handsome?”
Noor hadn’t thought about it. “Mmmm, not really. He looks a little like Maurice Chevalier.”
“Oh, he has eyes for you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I think so. When he told the story of Lindbergh and how he wanted to be a pilot after that, he was watching to see if he was impressing you. But one can see you are not easily impressed.”
This could be true. Students at Afzal Manzil, the Sufi school, were prominent in their fields; discussions of philosophy, history, music, art and literature were common. Even in London, everyone she knew had impressive achievements, not only Gilbert.
“He doesn’t know me,” said Noor. “Besides, I am engaged.”
“Oho, you are engaged! Who is he? What is he like? Where is he?”
Noor sidestepped the entire flood with a spur-of-the-moment fabrication. “He’s a navy officer in London.”
“You have a photo?”
“No, Anne-Marie Régnier cannot carry photos of English navy officers.”
“Oh, of course. But that is so bad! It’s so difficult, no, not even to have one photo?”
“Yes, very difficult.”
Noor had carried a photo of Armand for a long time, until Uncle Tajuddin took it away from her in 1934. In 1939 it was replaced by another she had treasured, of Armand in his uniform during the Drôle de Guerre. It was left behind in her bedside drawer in England. But she needed no photograph to recall Armand’s thick-lashed eyes, or the expressive tenderness of his octave-and-a-half-span hands.
To Odile she said, “You like Gilbert?”
“No, I detest him. I don’t know why, I just detest him. Always asking questions about everyone. He’s not well educated—his father is a postal clerk and his mother a housekeeper. You know his flat in Paris? Just now his wife had it renovated. I said to Papa, where did she get the money for new curtains?”
“What did your papa say?”
“Oh, Papa trusts him because London trusts him. And we have need of his prouesse, you know, his spécialité. In spring, when Prosper brought him here to meet us, it was once a week, then twice a week, now three times a week. He organizes landings, and boasts he has never once had an arrest at a drop zone. So many flights—Prosper says he thinks the invasion is coming very soon, maybe this summer.”
“Prosper said that?”
“Yes, I heard him tell Papa—don’t tell him I told you. Oh, but you must know anyway …”
Noor tried to look as if she did.
“You go to meet Prosper tomorrow, yes? He’s a great man. Gentle and strong at once. And he doesn’t trust Gilbert either.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Prosper returned last night by parachute and Gilbert, the great Gilbert, knew nothing about it! Rien du tout!“ She was obviously delighted by Gilbert’s discomfiture. “Prosper arranged his flight with another organizer, ‘Marc.’ And he dropped in a field Monsieur Gilbert did not arrange.” Her tone turned mocking. “Eh bien, I think maybe Gilbert’s feelings were hurt, the poor man.”
“It’s late,” said Noor. “Do you think Archambault and Marius came for the canisters?”
“I went to the stables to meet them after dinner,” said Odile. “Actually, to meet one of the students.”
Odile’s rapid stream snagged, and the moment of silence drew Noor’s attention as no words could have.
“Which student?” In a gentle voice.
“The most handsome, of course. Louis de Grémont is his name.”
“De Grémont?” Noor emphasized the aristocratic appellation to tease Odile into confiding more details.
“Yes, de Grémont.” A pause, then Odile said, “I had to tell him I can’t marry him till Vichy falls. He said that could be years and years from now!” She sighed, looked away as if embarrassed. “But I had to tell him—I heard his family’s factories are supplying the Germans every day.”
“Maybe they have to,” said Noor, intending comfort.
Odile shook her head sadly. “I could accept that. But I went to their home once and saw a portrait of Pétain on their mantelpiece. C’est insupportable! No, no, no.”
“But Louis is not a Pétainiste, himself, if he is helping us.”
“Non, but … it is too difficult.”
Noor sat down on her bed, next to Odile. After a moment Odile’s thoughts found a new outlet.
“What is your real name?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I know it already. I heard you whisper it to Archambault. It’s Noor Khan, correct?”
“So you know. Why do you ask?”
Odile abandoned one strategy midstream and took up another. “Will you go with us to church on Sunday?” The idle-sounding question seemed to have slipped out. It lay on the duvet between them, awaiting Noor’s response.
“Certainly, if I am not required to transmit that day.”
Noor had often attended mass with Mother and fellow students at the lycée, abstaining only from communion. Jesus Christ was a venerable prophet in the line preceding Muhammad, peace be upon them, just not the final one. Besides, as she and Armand often discussed, at church, mosque or temple one was praying to the same force: the spirit of creation.
“Oh, I am glad,” said Odile. “I was so afraid you would say no.”
“And if I said no?”
“Why, that would mean you’re a Jew.”
This was no time to try educating Odile; better to take her ignorance of the existence of religions other than the Judeo-Christian in stride. All his years in France, Abbajaan believed he could interest Europeans in his version of Sufism, a Sufism that included all faiths. He’d enlarged his ideas with French ones, but there was never any reciprocity.
“And then?” Noor prompted.
“It would be so dangerous for us,” explained Odile. “London has sent us three Jews already, and Papa was so angry, he said they must be assigned to a separate network.”
“Why was Monsieur Hoogstraten angry?”
“He said London was being careless. They do not understand that a Jew can jeopardize everything—we could all be arrested.”
Noor seized the opportunity to probe further, and Odile confirmed the situation Émile Garry had described to Noor the night before.
“Can one visit a Jew in a prison camp, as you visited your papa at Verdun?”
“Oh, mais non, Anne-Marie! They find out who is writing to them or sending them parcels, they arrest them. Even the Red Cross cannot visit the Jews in camps, because they are not POWs. They are locked up by Pétain like criminals—and the Red Cross doesn’t visit criminals in prisons.”
Yet some intrepid social worker had managed to enter Drancy. Some Red Cross volunteer had taken Armand’s censored postcard out of Drancy.
Bless that stranger.
“Have any Jews been released, as your father was?”
“Non, non. Jews are not prisoners of war—who knows what they are. All Jews are being sent east to work now, even the children.”
“Even children? Why? What work can children do?”
A moue of ignorance. “Children, old people, all being—how you say?—‘evacuated.’ Resettled. My Latin professor is glad—Premier Laval says for every three Jews sent to Germany, Hitler will release one French POW, and my Latin professor’s son is captive in Germany.”
“But Israelites are French—French-born Jews.”
“Non, but Jews are all not-French. Monsieur Laval revoked the citizenship of all Israelites naturalized after 1927. Now they are just Jews again. Émigrés.”
“Mon Dieu!“ said Noor, heart plunging. Wasn’t nationality a basic right? How could it be taken away? She didn’t know if Armand’s father had been naturalized, whether Madame Lydia had ever become a French citizen. Questions she should have asked Armand, but she had never
thought she would need to know. “But if their citizenship is revoked and they become foreigners, the Red Cross should be allowed to inspect their camps, no?”
Odile shook her head as if in wonder at Noor’s naïveté. She crouched by her bed and pulled. A wireless came into sight.
“I’ll try to get Honneur et Patrie or Radio London,” she said. “Better than listening to Radio Vichy’s propaganda.”
The dial turned slowly. The needle passed hisses and whistles till a cocksure voice announced each item of war news that Churchill wanted Hitler to know, then cricket news for the rest of the listeners.
They heard, “Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français,” and the personal announcements began: “The rabbit will nurse the pig …” “Tonight the suspenders will find their buttons …” Each surreal, nonsense-sounding phrase conveying vital information to resistants, triggering sabotage operations or a landing reception, confirming departures and arrivals of resistants, arms and intelligence dispatches.
And lastly, news of the colonies. “British field marshal Archibald Wavell became governor general of India today …”
Lord Wavell on his way to New Delhi would find three hundred million Indians who had been agitating for their independence from British occupation for nigh on fifty years, exactly as the French were resisting the Germans, but without arms drops, with no weapons but determination and their meagre flesh against British truncheons, machine guns and armoured cars. Had she been in India, carrying out the same actions as she was in France, Lord Wavell would label her a terrorist, not a resistant.
Maybe Dadijaan would be a little happier today. She might be hopeful that the next governor general of India would re-evaluate Mr. Churchill’s boat denial and rice denial policies. Maybe Lord Wavell was different. Maybe he wouldn’t consider Indian millions dying of famine “acceptable losses” in this, the war for the world.
Pforzheim, Germany
December 1943
I wish I had learned to fight oppression as early in life as Odile, but I didn’t have her confidence at seventeen—and I couldn’t imagine myself riding to Verdun all alone when I was fourteen. When I was seventeen, I cried all day after Uncle Tajuddin reprimanded me for opening the front door of our home for a man—as if I could have known before I opened the door that the man was not our relative. When Uncle shouted at me for wearing a pair of red shoes I’d borrowed from Josianne, I took them off and ran barefoot to my room, and cried because I wanted so much to please, wanted everyone, even Uncle, to love me.
Odile! So different. She reminded me of Mother—the most adventurous woman in our family.
A bricolage of images comes, each rising like a Poussin painting from a miniature tableau. The five of us around the table for the evening meal always served, American style, at seven; Josianne’s family served dinner at eight. The light changes from image to image, streaming, swelling, decaying. But our positions never change. Practical, ambitious Mother at the head of the table, spinning yarns, a Yankee Madame Defarge knitting the threads of her narrative around our Indian blood till her stories fulfilled their Oriental promise. In her stories Abbajaan was transformed from itinerant court musician and dervish to “Pir”—Indian sage, preacher of Sufism—a spiritual master privy to the mystical secrets of living connection with the infinite compassion of Allah. Kabir was called Pirzada Kabiruddin, the closest word to Prince that Mother could tease from Abbajaan’s repertoire of Muslim titles. Little Zaib loved to call me Pirzadi Noor-un-nisa, for then she could play at being Princess Zaib-un-nisa. And when the students came to the summer school that year, Mother christened Abbajaan “Hazrat,” his new title of respect, and all the students were “mureeds.”
Sometimes, ma petite, parents are captured in the web of their own stories, and retell the past to match their times and needs. That was Mother, Aura Baker, your grandmother from Boston who never told the cover story of her lineage the same way twice. Only to me would she speak of her first day in the orphanage a month after her mother died. She was vague about where her father vanished—something related to gambling debts. Sometimes she’d tell of her life after the orphanage, living with her older stepbrother, our uncle Robert and his wife, slowly becoming his unpaid domestic servant.
I always believed Mother and I had a special bond, but later I learned we never did. She was the teller of tales, I the listener and her confidante. I kept my own hopes and dreams secret from Mother from the time I met Armand, and she never knew, because she never asked.
Let me tell you how Mother and Abbajaan met. It was highly symbolic: Abbajaan was looking in one direction and walking a different one, the way he often did, and their paths collided. He could have collided with anyone, Mother said, but he’d collided with Aura Baker on Maverick Street in Boston—she was fond of retelling this. To Abbajaan such encounters manifested the laws of life and Allah’s undefinable aims, but to Mother almost every person and every thing was Opportunity.
In the short version of their meeting, the one reserved for the public, they met while he was playing the veena on tour in America. This version did not mention that she invited him home to dine, it being Thanksgiving, when the tale of the Mayflower pilgrims was making its yearly round at the schoolhouse and it was appropriate to invite a troupe of Indians to dinner, if only to mitigate the error of Columbus. But Abbajaan and his brothers were the wrong Indians for the story, and so Mother compounded Columbus’s error instead of honouring tradition.
Mother eschewed both History and Geography, being prone, in 1910, to the American conceit that the world was in need of a demonstration of how to melt people in a large pot devised expressly for the purpose. I’m joking, of course. But really, she was overwhelmed by Abbajaan’s dark strangeness, his respectful manner. She was enthralled by his lilting English and elevated him instantly to maharaja status, the better to introduce him to Uncle Robert. So Uncle Robert found an Indian from the Princely State of Baroda at his Thanksgiving table, a dark, intense, golden-turbaned man with praises for everyone flowering on his courtly tongue, in a fitted black brocade coat, strings of pearls dangling on his chest.
Uncle Robert immediately forbade Mother to have anything to do with Abbajaan ever again.
But Mother wasn’t a trembling kind of woman, as I was. As soon as she was twenty-one, she ignored Uncle Robert’s edict and followed Abbajaan all the way to London. And when they married there, Mother took a Muslim name, Rukhsana, to uphold Abbajaan’s religion and traditions. She knew next to nothing about his religion or traditions, but she loved him so much, she was willing to uphold anything Abbajaan held dear. She went with him on music tours the first few years after they were married—that’s how I was born in Moscow—but a few years after he moved to Paris, Abbajaan began travelling alone, returning to Paris in the summers to teach Sufism.
That was your grandmother—Mother before Abbajaan returned to India. When we returned to Paris, having paid our respects at Abbajaan’s tomb and toured the major Sufi shrines, she learned a different courage. Every time Uncle made his dutiful offer of marriage to his half-brother’s widow, she mustered copious widow’s tears and Uncle Tajuddin’s own traditions against all his gallant propositions of co-wifehood. She went into weeks of self-imposed purdah, emerging from her seclusion periodically to confront him with the courage of a squirrel facing down a Doberman. Poor Uncle Tajuddin! He’s probably still bewildered by her rejection of his well-intentioned charity. For five years she was as a Shia waiting for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, as Penelope weaving by day and unravelling by night, and she was ever and also Aura Baker, always imagining the next story for her children to live.
Mother would have loved being undercover at Grignon.
In the lavatory at the château, after my ablutions, I slipped the cover off my jacket button, referred to the compass beneath and faced southeast towards the Ka’aba. I used my headscarf as hijab and knelt on cold tile in the first motion of my Tahajjud prayer. Abbajaan would tell us—your uncle Ka
bir, your aunt Zaib and myself—that if we couldn’t find time for five prayers, a remembrance of Allah once a day was better than none. The Tahajjud prayer time, when one can speak one’s mind to Allah, from whom all favours come, always refreshes me.
That night at Grignon, I dreamed that masked demons danced around Odile’s room. One bore the face of Gilbert, which metamorphosed into a mask with the haunted eyes of Renée Garry. I thought such nightmares terrible then—but they shrink to nothing compared with the one I live here. Vogel and I are enchained together in a nightmare whose shared space has become this room no bigger than a water closet, ten feet by six.
I could pray five times each day in this cell, but I don’t. How can I dare devotion, now I have lost my freedom, when I never thanked Allah on my knees five times a day for it before? Instead, I perform only the Tahajjud prayer late at night, and pray for Armand, your grandmother Lydia, Mother, Dadijaan, Kabir and Zaib.
Even so, Fajar, Zuhr, Asar, Maghrib and Isha—the prayer times—sustain me through each monotonous day. It was Fajar when the pale dawn mist filtered through the iron bars and the bell rang to wake all the women along the cellblock. The guard came to unlock my hands; she turned away while I used the toilet in the corner of the cell, then turned back to shackle me again. On pain of the dungeon, regulations forbid me to look directly at her or the other SS woman, who pours a foul-tasting liquid in my wooden bowl and gives me the wedge of bread I get once a day.
The clang of iron doors and shouts of guards said women prisoners were filing out of cells into the corridor and out into the freezing courtyard. I stood on tiptoe on my iron bed so I could see them walking slowly in circles, one behind the other, never touching. As for me, I am taken into the courtyard alone once a week for exercise, never allowed to speak to anyone except Vogel.
When the clinking of keys stopped, it meant the women had been returned to their cells, and I allowed myself half the bread, saving the remainder for its fragrance. Then silence as Zuhr began. When, standing on the bed again, I saw the barbed wire fencing above the courtyard wall become one with its shadow, I knew only a single hour had passed. And that it was time for warm swampy gruel: a second bowl of swedes, crushed peas and a paste of sour cabbage. When it came, I committed each morsel to memory. The guard collected my bowl and I returned to the odour of previous inmates permeating the thin straw of my mattress.
The Tiger Claw Page 15