The Tiger Claw

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  “If you had a child and an old house to look after, you might understand,” said Renée. “Today I had to move that heavy chest in the kitchen and carry a sack of wood chips down to the cellar by myself. I planted carrots, cabbage and turnips in the kitchen garden—now I have to harvest them. Like a peasant, myself!”

  The carrot soup was bitter. Only hunger and politeness allowed Noor to swallow it.

  Work wasn’t a burden; it was an opportunity to contribute to and participate in the world. Attitudes like Renée’s were preached to Noor’s cousin-sisters growing up in zenanas in India. How could Noor commiserate with Renée’s helplessness?

  “I always wanted many children,” Renée went on. “But look—I’m thirty-nine. If my husband doesn’t return soon, I will be left with but a single child.”

  Worse could happen to a woman than having only one child, and if Renée had travelled beyond Europe, she might readily imagine it.

  But then, I didn’t begin resisting dependence till I understood that being protected required me to forfeit a piece of my soul. Renée must not have realized that—yet.

  The day she earned her Red Cross nursing certificate, Uncle had been furious! One would think she had joined a brothel instead of learned basic first aid. He roared that she would bring down her family in the eyes of the world, that a daughter of his khaandaan, the feudal House of Khans, should never be educated past her baccalaureate, should never work outside the home. His rage was so much grander than any potential earnings; her little certificate had threatened Uncle’s fragile core. But Uncle knew, as she did, that with that certificate Noor would never be completely dependent on him or Kabir.

  “I said you must have left at least three children behind in London if you are twenty-nine, but Monique said you are not married.”

  “My fiancé is in London,” said Noor, for consistency with the story she’d told Monique.

  “He gave you permission to work, then? Permission to leave the country?”

  Noor kept her face pleasant but gave no answer. French law might still require women to obtain a man’s permission to work, travel and marry, but not so in England. So Noor hadn’t asked anyone.

  “Your parents allowed you?” Renée suggested.

  “My father is no longer alive,” Noor replied.

  “That is a pity,” said Renée. “My father disappeared fighting the Germans. We were told he was buried alive while digging a tunnel near Vauquois. Émile was quite small, I was thirteen.”

  “I too was thirteen when my father died.” To satisfy Renée’s sense of propriety she added, “My mother gave permission.” Knowing all the while that Mother knew nothing of her present whereabouts.

  “You have sisters and brothers?”

  “One of each.”

  “Your brother, he is in the army?”

  “No.”

  “The air force?”

  Noor didn’t hesitate. “No, he’s a teacher.”

  “And your sister?”

  Renée seemed warmer tonight. Playing the enigmatic spy would only rekindle distrust.

  “She’s studying to be a doctor.”

  “A doctor!” said Renée. “I pity her husband and children—she has a suffragette mentality.”

  Be quiet. Be quiet.

  Playing the veena, singing, horseback riding and writing stories for children, Noor had expressed herself far beyond the houseful-of-children terminus to which Uncle’s marriage plans led; and insh’allah, Zaib would go further along that path, if Noor and Kabir could find the money for it. War brought opportunities as well as hardship, opportunities Uncle could never imagine. Zaib had Mother’s drive: she wouldn’t waste a single one.

  Uncle would have approved of Renée as fit to befriend his nieces—one reason Noor would never have invited Renée to Afzal Manzil for his approval.

  Perhaps Renée was simply bewildered and annoyed by choices and decisions. But no, it was more than that. Renée stubbed out her cigarette and lit another, saying, “I have no one but Émile. And with Guy captive in Germany, I am afraid for him. For every act of sabotage, the Germans execute ten Frenchmen. The guns are never silent at Mont Valérien.”

  “Mont Valérien?” Noor felt Armand’s coat beneath her shoulders again, remembered their special spot under the tall chestnuts, the night of their clandestine marriage.

  “The Germans shoot Communists and resistants there.”

  What desecration of a beautiful, sacred spot! Even without her memories of Armand, Mont Valérien was sacred to the memory of the soldiers buried there.

  “I lived near Mont Valérien.”

  “Everything has changed.” Anger born of crumbled expectations filled Renée’s voice. “We are hostages abandoned by our men. They could have fought harder. Now the Germans will be here forever.”

  “Oh, no, Renée! It is not the fault of French soldiers. Listen, everyone says the Russians won at Stalingrad. That should give us hope. Even Napoleon couldn’t conquer Russia, yet that insane Hitler believes he can! And so many like Émile are working to free France. The Allies have landed in Africa. The war cannot last forever.”

  “Allies in North Africa—huh! Comme tu es naïve! They’ve cut off supplies from our colonies. Today I paid eighteen francs on the black market for dates—a few months ago they cost four. I can’t even find figs to fill our stomachs! You’re too young to understand, Anne-Marie. Jews and immigrants led France into this war, and now the Germans imprison us all.”

  Change the subject.

  “What work did your husband do?”

  “Before the war? Guy was an engineer, like Émile. For years I told him he should get a government position, but he said private companies paid more. Maybe more when times are good, but when he became a POW, they stopped sending his salary. Now if he had been a civil servant as I begged him, the government would have paid it to me. You know how much is my allowance? One hundred and forty francs per week and just half of Guy’s army pay. Can any woman survive on that and buy milk for a child? Each parcel I send Guy costs me 250 francs—and does the government give me extra rations or textile points for him? No. Guy was saving to buy me a car, but now I’ve spent almost all our savings. I sold my mother’s Daumier at an art auction for only sixty thousand francs—and this too is all gone. I might have to sell this house. In the Stalag, the Germans don’t even give Guy clothes—I had to send him shoes in the last parcel. Oh, that was the worst! I told the social worker I know of wives who get much more. It’s a disgrace.” Renée held out her hands, palms upwards. “Are these the hands of an engineer’s wife?”

  Noor gave a sympathetic murmur as she rose from the table.

  Prices and scarcities had dominated every discussion in London over the past three years too. But it did seem Renée wasn’t being paid by the SOE. Miss Atkins hadn’t instructed Noor to offer Renée payment for her hospitality, or said how much. Should she offer Renée money? Did she have enough SOE funds to do it? There’d be someone, insh’allah, to whom she could apply if funds ran low.

  But Renée might be insulted by an offer of money. And Noor hated discussions of money; it received far too much importance.

  “I won’t be staying very long,” she said, intending comfort.

  In the bedroom, Noor carefully removed the grenades from her handbag, returned to Renée, and gave her Émile’s directions to hide them till Sunday and his message of love for Babette.

  Pforzheim, Germany

  January 1944

  The guard plays with me—she cheats me of bread some days, brings it late on others. There is no complaint department. I announce to myself I am a dervish living on bread and water. That doesn’t stop me from remembering the taste of cardamon chai, a morsel of sweet jalebi, the scent of beef bourguignon—anything other than soup.

  I drag my chains around my sealed cell in a stumbling approximation of exercise. I touch the walls—they feel warmer than me. I listen for patterns of explosions, patterns in the pulsing rush of nearby trains. I se
arch for meaning in the scuttling of insects.

  But I come back always to my paper, pen and ink. Why, and for whom, do I write? I fool myself, I pass the time. I add nothing to the world, I give no one pleasure or pain. Why render the past for you, spirit I never knew, may never see? But what else can I do? Sit here and look at the scratches on the plaster, worrying that I may meet the fate of those who’ve suffered in this cell before me?

  A true Sufi would embrace this chance for solitude, meditation, silence. A true Sufi would use this time, focus on her beloved and the Divine Beloved, and pray for the annihilation of Self.

  Abbajaan taught that separation from the Beloved, from Allah, is the greatest sorrow, that pain of which Rumi and other Sufi poets wrote. In my separation from Armand, I fathom an element of their anguish, for in the vast landscape of past emotions no pain is quite like this. The yearning for the beloved, human or transcendent, is its own pain and its own joy, varying in intensity, constant in its presence.

  That night, in the small bedroom at Renée’s, I searched my heart for sympathy with Renée for her similar separation from Guy, but her feelings were mixed with an anger I could not comprehend, an anger dwelling just beneath her suffering, waiting for direction. I had seen such anger mixed with sorrow and helplessness before, in Mother, your grandmother, left alone in Paris like Renée, without a husband and with children to feed. Mother blamed Abbajaan no less than Renée blamed Guy, first for leaving her, then for dying in India.

  Yet how dissimilar were my reactions from Renée’s, to the same events. The war and my escape to London freed me from Uncle Tajuddin’s plans for my marriage to cousin Allahuddin, and taught me to rely on my own wits and actions, while Renée was defeated at thirty-nine and blamed the enemy du jour for her unrealized potential. She seemed to experience every event as one more addition to a stream of affronts and inconveniences directed at her, and at no one else. She wanted security, safety—changelessness.

  Maybe because I am ten years younger, I still feel hope. My responsibility to you, ma petite, is to better the world before Armand and I ask your soul to return.

  I had failed to say my prayers all day, and felt out of touch with Allah. So by the glow of a lantern placed between my bed and Renée’s, I rested on one elbow and filled a sheet of onionskin with a letter to Kabir, asking him to pray to Allah on my behalf.

  Bhaiya, brother mine, I wrote:

  Allah has guided me to a place where hope and despair show their faces alternately. Pray that I have courage enough for this mission, and that we are united forever with those we love when this unending war dies down. I cannot write of the present, but since the present is but an echo of the past, I will write about the past.

  Remember when we were children, Josianne and I would chase you and Zaib through dim rooms at Afzal Manzil after Abbajaan’s students had gone home, how we played catch about the stone fountain at the end of the lane? And the garden where Abbajaan passed his mantle to you—you were only ten. I remember Mother sitting at her desk with her ledgers, frowning about finances, then putting on her bright smile to greet the students. Always she could play many parts, simultaneously.

  And there were other actresses. Remember the time Zaib and I were at the cinema laughing at Arletty in Fric-Frac while you made excuses for us to Uncle. How glad I am to this day that he believed you!

  Remember the shared times, brother of mine.

  Say a du’a for me, forget me not,

  Noor.

  Kabir was flying missions over Europe; it was not the time to remind him that my memories of shared times were not all beautiful. I don’t know all that was said between your uncle and your father when they met in 1940, only that Kabir refused to see what was special about Armand. Kabir’s heart turned from me at the very moment I needed his love most, when he agreed with Uncle that marriage to cousin Allahuddin would be the best cure for my love for a Jew.

  I signed that letter “Noor,” but I could have signed Anne-Marie or Madeleine so long as I called him “brother.” I have known your uncle Kabir a few years longer than he has known himself, but Kabir has never known Noor, only the role called “sister.”

  I sealed the envelope, put it in my handbag and returned to bed. Renée knelt beside the lantern and the small tongue of flame grew dim, then vanished.

  She lay down and I lay awake, thinking long and hard of the white walls and gun towers surrounding Camp de Drancy. Armand’s letters flashed before me as if on a cinema screen. The one from Cannes, saying only that he and your grandmother Lydia were safe. Then the one from Nice. Then finally the card from Drancy in April. No message sidled between the blackened lines, I could make out nothing that said he wished we were together.

  And how, when I had said “Adieu,” did I expect Armand would write at all, for was it not I, your cowardly mother, who agreed that afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne, agreed because Armand wanted it so, that we must forget one another, forget eight, almost nine long years of love and waiting?

  Maybe his cards were but tributes to nostalgia for our friendship; he has always been my friend first, my closest friend.

  Could I ask one wish of a genie, I thought, I would return to that moment in the Bois and say, “I do not want safety; we are only safe when nothing more can happen to us. I am your wife: I share your fears, your burdens; your people are mine. If they and you are not safe, no one is safe. I will be with you always.”

  Allah, my love had survived even our dashed plans for life together. I could not—still cannot—bear to think of Armand suffering, without adequate food, needing clothes, shoes. Was it possible? The night I wrote to Kabir, I still believed such suffering could not happen in Europe, could not be inflicted by Europeans on Europeans. Like Odile, I too believed that kind of suffering is only inflicted on the colonized in places like India and Africa.

  I heard a sniff, then another; Renée must have thought me asleep. I wondered if I should try to comfort her, but some griefs and longings are private, like my grief for you, my longing for Armand. When these come upon me unpredictably, there is no bargaining with them. I hide them beneath distractions, resolutions and activity.

  Eventually I fell into exhausted sleep and dreamed I was searching for Armand, when suddenly I began falling from a great height, that a man I did not know reached out to save me. Then I was suspended in mid-air with only a strange man’s arms supporting me.

  I woke sweating, wondering which of my countries I was in, and why my tears were still falling.

  CHAPTER 14

  Paris, France

  Sunday, June 20, 1943

  PIANO TRILLS TRICKLED into the summer night from the Jazz Club on the rue Pigalle. Inside, knots of men and women clustered at tables before the crimson-curtained stage. Among them, one … two … three Abwehr officers and one Luftwaffe. The low-level danger alert resounding in every cell since Noor left England transposed itself a semitone upscale.

  Actually, a little danger and excitement were welcome. All day Saturday she was learning procedures from Archambault in the tool shed at Grignon. Encoding, tap-tapping in spurts to transmit, receiving and decoding messages—no time to return to Drancy. In the evening she had roamed room after room with ghastly decor in boarding houses beyond the perimeter of Paris, searching for one suitable for transmissions. But each had its flaws, and with less than half the métros and buses in operation the search took hours she would rather have spent at Drancy making discreet inquiries.

  And today—a long day. Early morning mass with Émile, Monique and Renée. Noor left their church full of faith, trust and hope in Allah, uplifted by the hymns she’d sung and the communion she’d taken to allay any latent suspicion in Renée. Consuming the body and blood of anyone, leave alone Hazrat Issa, left her feeling a bit like a cannibal, but at least she wasn’t struck by lightning for being a non-Catholic yet taking communion. She’d said mental rakats while kneeling and standing for hymns—Allah would understand.

  But then Émile and Monique
left and Renée made it clear she expected Noor to mind Babette at a merry-go-round in the park, and peel potatoes and carrots for dinner. In mounting frustration Noor had even done Renée’s mending—she, who had always detested sewing—and boiled cauldrons of water for Babette’s bath in the evening. So she was glad to be here; one might think Renée had permitted her the evening off.

  Where was Émile?

  The foyer was dense with many hues of women’s perfume. Despite the club’s location in the red-light district, the women looked respectable, a few wearing real silk stockings instead of beige leg paint. Noor’s white cotton dress, borrowed from Renée, was appropriate; so too the lemon silk headscarf that framed her tiger claw. Still, if Zaib were here, the sisters would have chanted the old line in unison, “Uncle Tajuddin would never approve!”

  If I did only what Uncle Tajuddin approved, I’d accomplish nothing at all. But Zaib and I could have been kinder; all poor Uncle wanted was to do his duty by us, for his half-brother’s sake.

  Hitler disapproved of “schräge Musik”—he’d banned jazz from the airwaves. But here his officers were, enjoying its “decadence.”

  Paintings quilted every inch of faded wallpaper: a curvaceous nude knelt in her gilt frame beside a landscape in dabbed brush strokes, a Senegalese mask frowned cheek by jowl with an Erté-style drawing, an experimental abstract nudged a Surrealist rendering of some waking dream—so diverse, they must have been traded by artists in settlement of bills.

  She sauntered past the hat stand like a regular patron, into a smell of vinegar pickles and burnt raclette.

  The curtain rose, and a stoic, smoke-husky voice began an imitation of Piaf. Lights dimmed till a single spotlight constrained the sombre hope of the song. Cymbals clashed, gently marking phrases in the bass player’s tempo pump-pump-pumping beneath the melody.

  She had been to other jazz clubs—in Montparnasse, for instance. Surreptitiously, of course, for fear of Uncle. With Armand, with friends like Josianne. Before the war.