The Tiger Claw

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  Did the SOE reimburse people like Renée for board and lodging for its agents? She should have asked Miss Atkins, even if it meant discussing money.

  Why did she distrust Renée’s hospitality, paid or not? It seemed to rise from Renée’s love for Émile, not from a conviction that resistance was critical or that the three-year German Occupation could be ended by an Allied victory.

  She wouldn’t stay with Renée again if she could possibly help it. But Émile and Monique needed her services as soon as the transmitters arrived; that resolution wasn’t one she could keep.

  Forget about Renée. What of Armand?

  Armand might not remain for very long at Drancy but could be sent to work in Germany. Why had she not thought of this? Émile said, the day she arrived, “Many are being sent east by train—some say to be resettled, some say to work.” But he had not said when. Odile’s voice replayed: “All Jews are being sent east to work now, even the children.” But Odile too had not said when. Did she mean immediately, soon after they were arrested or … when?

  How long will the Germans keep Armand and Madame Lydia at Drancy? They have already been in the camp more than eight weeks. How can I know if they are still there?

  Noor was as divided as she had judged Renée to be. There was Noor Khan who needed news of her love, fearful of making some terrible mistake that might send Armand and everyone in her network deeper into the clutches of the Germans, and who must not contact a single friend who knew her or Armand before the war; and Nora Baker, alias Madeleine, trained operative—detached, careful, logical, cool. Both would return to Madame Gagné’s boarding house as Anne-Marie Régnier and somehow, insh’allah, find Armand before the Germans sent him away to work in the east.

  CHAPTER 16

  Pforzheim, Germany

  January 1944

  A KEY RATTLED in the lock, bolts drew back. I barely had time to hide these papers under the mattress before Vogel entered.

  Gloves in hand, coat over his arm, gull-egg blue eyes squinting through round glasses. The same brown felt bow tie upon which I fixed my gaze through hours of questioning at the avenue Foch, a new suit of worsted navy blue wool. Leather boots wet with snow. In spite of myself, I welcomed the scent of pine and fresh air he brought to my cell.

  I retreated to my cot. Rattle of chains as I sat down. Red-raw ankles extended, manacled fists in my lap.

  The former bank clerk’s pallid face loomed over me.

  He rode in a staff car from Munich. Came out of his way just to see me, having told Kommandant Kieffer that more information was needed from Princess Noor. Was I not pleased to see him?

  I closed my face and looked away. I don’t know what I look like, but it can no longer be my “exotic” features that attract Vogel. My cheekbones have edged to the surface. And my hair! Its sheen is long gone. It’s long, matted and crawling with lice. The clothes I am allowed to keep—two blouses, this skirt and a sweater—hang at chest, hip and thigh. My hip bones fit in the groove of my cupped hands. My stomach has flattened as if to meet my spine. What is my body, which the poet Kabeer called “but a skin sheet stuffed with bones,” worth to this man? He sees something in me or what I represent that brings him here each month, longing in his gelid eyes. He never touches me and comes only to talk in measured tones to his audience of one.

  “Writing paper is scarce, yet I authorized it for you. What have you written?”

  “A children’s story,” said a rasp with little resemblance to my voice. I speak in French to Vogel; his English is not as fluent as he believes. So it was not really a lie, because the word for my “history” and my “story” is the same in French—“histoire.”

  He thought it a harmless pursuit, like a game of solitaire. Something womanly to while away my time. Maybe it is. When I write to you, I am no Scheherazade performing for her life. Forgive me for not telling a happier tale, the kind of tall tale of American cowboy derring-do Mother loved inventing, or some Sufi fable replete with turtledoves, fountains, talking animals in deserts imparting wise sayings we forget to follow.

  “What stories were you told as a boy?” I asked, trying to imagine him smaller.

  “The usual ones … Hansel and Gretel,” he said in a musing voice. He was predictably flattered by my slightest curiosity about him. “Every night of ’39 in the POW camp I dreamed I was Hansel and couldn’t find my way home. I dropped breadcrumbs and the birds had eaten them.”

  Vogel spent almost a year during the phony war he calls the sitzkrieg with other German nationals in a French POW camp, until his countrymen invaded. I think that year changed him from a cosmopolitan francophile to a rabid follower of Hitler, fanatically German as only an expatriate can be.

  He mused on in his soft voice. “I would search and search, believing I would find the end of a ball of twine that could be unravelled to lead me home. But I never found it—Why am I telling you this?”

  Because I listen, I answered mentally. Vogel and I have met many times for my “interrogations,” and if I begin by asking questions instead of answering, I learn more.

  “I ask the questions. Kommandant Kieffer says compassion is making me soft.” He stood over me—stood too close—cleared his throat and began with the usual ones. “State your true name.”

  “My true name is Noor. Princess Noor Inayat Khan.”

  You know I am no princess, but Mother taught me well to spin a yarn, though she could never teach me how to knit. My trumped-up title brought stupid Vogel, ignorant of the Orient, importance in his Kommandant’s eyes, as if a little royalty rubbed off on them. Both are comically feudal, like so many Europeans once the veneer of National Socialism, Fascism, Communism or Democracy scratches away.

  “Why don’t you join us, fight against British imperialism?”

  “I do not want to follow Germans into Fascism.”

  “But, Princess, the triumph of the Aryan can be yours as well—but if we cannot establish beyond doubt that you are Aryan, I have to regard you as non-Aryan. Perhaps even a Jew.”

  A hoarse hack of a laugh burst from me. I am Rapunzel, Rapunzel who can let down no blonde hair, nor can spin straw from my flea-infested mattress to gold, for the fair skin he perceives before him results from a tangled bloodline. Isolating the Caucasian blood of my mother would mean disavowing the Pathan and the Persian, the Dravidian, Maratha, even African strains in my past.

  “There is no room in your Aryan heart for people like me. You said yourself: I am the ultimate threat, the mischlinge—the mixed breed.”

  “Listen to me—Germany was a great power until the Jews made us their target. Poor Germany! Jews in every country finance our enemies. But we will resist them, we will drive them from the world …”

  On and on—words that sickened my soul, set my teeth chattering with anger. Who is victim, who the perpetrator, who is the oppressor, who the oppressed? Today his fulminations pinned me in a paradox: he sustains me in this cell even as he presses inexorably forward, turning my beloved to demon.

  “Do you know a single Jew?” I said at last.

  Vogel waved the question away. “You, the English, the Americans—I do not understand how you think. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, not the Germans. Americans should be fighting with Germany, against the Bolsheviks. Why, why do you hate us Germans so much?”

  Vogel asks about Germans, but he wants to know if I hate him. He wants my hate; he would like it better than my indifference. Fear and respect come parcelled with hatred. I answered Vogel once only—that it is not Germans who are hated everywhere but their rabid nationalism, their forcible occupation and rapacious plunder of other countries, their bombing of innocent people, their acts of barbaric cruelty.

  Strange that I rely on Hitler’s purist orders for protection from Vogel’s ardour; I should have been silent, the way I used to be whenever Uncle shouted at me, years ago. But the peace of silence is only temporary; something reckless rose in me that moment.

  I said, “I do not hate Germans, but I f
ear becoming like them.”

  “All Germans,” he said in a calmer voice, “are not like Kommandant Kieffer—many are cultured—enlightened.”

  “Enlightened! Enlightened people wouldn’t follow a madman.”

  Allah, what made me say that?

  Vogel took a deliberate step forward. I braced for his fist.

  “The Führer is no madman!” Rage reverberated in his voice. “He’s brilliant. Brilliant!” And his ice-stiff gloves lashed across my face. “A cultured man. A lover of Wagner, Fauré, Gluck, Schumann and Bach.”

  The composers Vogel loves, the same Armand loved. Love of music doesn’t ensure enlightenment or tolerance.

  Hot blood oozed from my cut lip. I swayed like a reed. The walls closed in.

  He persisted. “What do you gain by silence, so many weeks of silence?”

  But why, ma petite, why could I not be silent now? My life depends on it. I am tired of silence, tired of listening to men like Vogel. Still, I wrapped myself in it again.

  He offered to remove my chains. “I could take you to Munich. I would give you a hot bath, a soft bed, a candlelight dinner. The Residenz Theatre is performing As You Like It.” Like a guardian serpent, he’d protect me, interpret my rebellious “exotic nature” to his Kommandant, if I just …

  The sentence trailed away, but I could complete it: if I propitiated him daily, kneeling before him in adoration, offering my subordination, asking to be interpreted by him alone.

  If I, of my own volition, called him Ernst.

  I don’t pretend to comprehend the home or society that grew a man like Vogel. All I can tell you is that his kind have been rewarded daily, have multiplied across Germany, Austria and even France, in a grotesque farce beyond any imagined by Molière.

  I pressed a finger to my bleeding lip and looked away. I had no trouble fetching tears. It had the desired effect: my captor turned to penitent.

  “Forgive me, Princess. I am greatly distressed. My wife and children—indeed all of Munich—are being bombed by the RAF by night, the Americans by day. Now I must get back to Paris.”

  He put the pages I gave him in his breast pocket without counting them, without verifying them against my guard’s count. He put on his gloves and coat. He shouted and she came running, braids shining gold above her SS epaulets.

  “Wie, bitte?”

  “Place this prisoner in solitary confinement,” he said, then uttered the dreaded words, “Pas de privilège.”

  The door slammed behind him. The SS woman has gone to prepare my punishment cell and I have pulled these papers from the mattress to write.

  At this juncture where past and present meet, eternal child outside time, you are Hope. Without you, reason might desert me in the unknown geometry of the dark, where there is nothing to witness, nothing to comfort, but remembered images. Reason might give way to the terror Vogel wanted me to feel when he told me my file was marked “Nacht und Nebel.” By his will I can disappear into the “night and fog” with no trace. Without you, terror would brand my mind, incarcerating it along with my body. Perhaps my story will remain for you—a mother’s myths from which all others come.

  I look at the wall. Blank wall with scratches.

  I take up my pen and scratch five small words with no apologies to Descartes. Five small words that join the scratches of other women on these walls: “I resist, therefore I am.”

  Then the date, as close as I can speculate and calculate: January 12, 1944. Only days since my thirtieth birthday.

  I sign it and this page with my true name, Noor.

  Now I wait to be taken down to the dungeon.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 17

  En route to Drancy, France

  Monday, June 21, 1943

  RUSTED GIRDERS, smoking chimneys and cavernous warehouses replaced the cream and grey buildings of Paris rushing past Noor’s carriage window. Beneath nearly closed eyelids she studied her early morning travel companions: the worried-looking woman who’d asked if this was “the potato or the bean train;” the two younger women who’d responded in unison “the bean train;” the old man at her left with his empty macramé bag—probably on his way to forage for food; the German soldier about Noor’s own age who gave up his seat for the old lady in mended espadrilles; the white-lipped little boy on her right who hadn’t taken his eyes off the soldier since the journey began.

  And if the little boy’s mother didn’t stop staring at Noor’s bag, the soldier might notice. Was it too large, too expensive-looking? Perhaps too full?

  Carry an empty basket next time.

  This time, when the train stopped at Le Bourget–Drancy station, Noor knew her way to the centre-ville. But she had no plan. Gauzy blue skies veiled inspiration; she was a cavity of indecision. Inspiration, Abbajaan said, comes to those who prepare themselves. But how to prepare herself?

  Get information. Use the tradecraft of secret agents.

  Watchtowers of the internment camp loomed ahead.

  Don’t attract attention. Take the back streets.

  But there was the tabac door, held invitingly open to cool the little shop. She stopped and asked the owner for Claude to take her to the boarding house again.

  “Mademoiselle, a customer who returns is impossible to refuse.” He went to the back and shouted for Claude. “It’s the mademoiselle you said had such pretty eyes.”

  Claude’s face popped around the door, flushed pink to the roots of his brown, curly hair. Noor gave him a bewitching smile, accelerating his tint to scarlet.

  She hopped sidesaddle on Claude’s luggage carrier, bag on her lap, and steadied herself with one hand about his waist. Claude began pedalling down the avenue.

  Even his neck had turned beet red.

  Don’t laugh.

  “How is your Tante Lucille?” asked Claude.

  “Oh, the same, thank you. Kind when she has good days, unkind when she is in pain.”

  Claude was approaching the turreted watchtower. Claude had passed the watchtower.

  Just another part of the landscape.

  “Does your aunt take medicines for the pain? Laudanum, perhaps?”

  “She should, but who can find laudanum these days,” said Noor.

  Past several lorries parked at the entrance gate like dogs sniffing for bones.

  “Everything can be found, for a price.”

  His tone was meaningful. A new avenue opened before Noor.

  Allah! Sometimes all one has to do is be present and not give up.

  Careful. A hunter who traps a tigress tricks her with a branch-covered pit.

  “Was that your papa?” she asked.

  “No, he is not my papa. My papa is still in Germany.”

  “In a camp like this?”

  “Mais, non! Not like this! A Stalag, widening roads, building irrigation canals in Germany. Drancy is for Jews.”

  How different were conditions for French soldiers who were now in POW internment camps and for Jews in internment camps? How should Claude know?

  “And you are—how old?” He was tall but malnourished. Perhaps fifteen?

  “Seventeen, mademoiselle.”

  Seventeen—only a few short months from being called up for the Relève and sent to make weapons for the Germans. Unless he was fortunate enough to be employed in an essential industry in France.

  “You look older, Monsieur Claude,” lied Noor.

  His chest puffed at her compliment.

  “Where is your mother?”

  “Here, in Drancy,” he said. “I carry messages from the tabac when I’m not working at the automobile garage—I’m apprenticed to the mechanic there.”

  Young Claude wasn’t black marketeering for a fat pocketbook but to survive. Still, he could be working for the Germans. He could be trying to trap her, trap her into divulging her own interests.

  Keep your inquiries general.

  High walls passed the bicycle. And passed and passed. How very many people there must be like Noor, whose
loved ones had disappeared into that camp.

  Lorries, pedestrians, very empty shops on the other side. But perhaps she could find work close to Armand.

  “There must be so many jobs that need to be done at the camp,” she said.

  “I’ve asked,” said Claude. “But the prisoners are forced to do everything.”

  “And what about deliveries? Couldn’t you help deliver food, clothing—letters?”

  Claude grunted. “These days? Every camp gendarme who comes to our repair shop is trembling for his job. One of them told us a new director has been appointed. A German this time—SS.”

  “Why? Don’t the Germans believe we can guard our own people?”

  Sound casual! Sound indifferent!

  Unwittingly she had used the first person plural nous. Using nous when her family’s inclusion in France was tenuous at best had always felt inappropriate. But it came naturally with her outrage at the treatment of people with whom she’d shared her childhood.

  “Oh, we guard them well,” said Claude. “But we aren’t deporting the Jews to Germany fast enough. The gendarme said the new Kommandant has vowed to change that.”

  “How long are prisoners kept here before their deportation to Germany?”

  There—she’d asked it. A simple question, dropped easily into the conversation.

  Claude shrugged. “It depends. Maybe a few weeks, a few months. The gendarme said the Kommandant was appointed because there have been no shipments from Drancy to Germany since March. The French director intended to, but they’d no coal allotment for prison transports. He said the new Kommandant was enraged that not a single convoy has left Drancy in three months.”

  Allah! If no one was sent to Germany since March, there was a chance that her Armand and Madame Lydia were still at Drancy. Armand’s postcard was dated April. Hope brightened the sooty façades of passing houses and shops.

  But hadn’t Monique said fifteen thousand Jews had been rounded up in one week? Where were the Germans housing them? Suddenly the long walls of Drancy appeared far too short, the whole camp shrank in her mind.