The Tiger Claw

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  Vogel can show anger about injustice to Germans; they alone upon the planet are “people.” Perhaps the bombs that destroyed his home were from your uncle’s Lancaster. I do not know, but the possibility made me culpable for his family’s homeless state. I am the eldest and always feel responsible for Kabir, for the actions he has committed and those he may have.

  Vogel drew a picture of his wife and two children from his pocket. I have seen them before—his blonde wife who looks as beatific as a student “discovering” Sufism, his cherubic boys in short pants. Twins. Ten years old, as you might be today, ma petite. He said the one who looks like him is a naughty fellow, while the other is doing his part in the Hitler Youth.

  “How can you tell them apart?” I asked.

  “Sometimes it’s difficult even for me to know which is which,” he acknowledged. “I’m sending the younger one east to stay with a cousin, for the summer till we parade to Buckingham Palace. He’ll be safe there. They had a small raid last February, but that must have been a mistake—there’s nothing worth bombing in Dresden. The elder must stay to protect his mother from looters. They are everywhere now, many of them but a few years older than my son. Orphans of the war, most of them.”

  He showed me a copy of Munich’s National Zeitung.

  “We do not need more of Herr Goebbels’s fairy stories, Princess. Here the Führer himself says soon London will be ashes.”

  “What will you do after that?” I asked, feigning concern for him, trying not to think of London in ashes.

  “Return to Munich. The bank where I worked was owned by Jews, but now, Heil Hitler, it’s back in German hands. They will give me a new position when we win the war.” He had been listening to Nazi speeches again.

  He said “Heil Hitler” the way I say “Peace be upon Him” for the Prophet, and to him there was nothing blasphemous about it. He believes Hitler is another messiah, whose only problem is the quality of his apostles. Fearing the dungeon again, I said nothing.

  He said roughly, “Gilbert sends you his regards,” and waited, watching my face.

  I wanted to scream “Gilbert is a salaud! Un vrai con! Une ordure!” but I couldn’t admit to knowing him. I turned a waxwork face to Vogel.

  He slapped his gloves on his knee. “Read aloud, Princess.”

  I began reading the stories I’d written on onionskin. Vogel closed his eyes and I felt the one-second lag as he translated from English to German. It was a retelling of el-Rifai’s “Wayward Princess,” in which a king imprisons his daughter in a small cell to prove his will and law sufficient for justice and happiness to prevail.

  “Gutt, gutt.” Vogel swayed.

  I wondered, as I told it, if his twins will ever understand the meaning of that tale.

  Then I read a fable of my own, in which caged rabbits avenge themselves on rats, and another in which an Indian princess turns into a tigress and slays all the trappers who hunt her tiger for his claws.

  Vogel listened, purblind to allegory, metaphor and symbol. He didn’t count the sheets before he took them.

  What fable will he fashion about his actions in this war?

  Locked in my cell, once again I cannot celebrate Id-ul-Fitr with my family. I thank Allah he told the Prophet there need be no fasting for the ill. For I am ill indeed.

  I should be celebrating—the Allies have invaded at last. The news came hidden in a basket of laundered clothes brought to a prisoner by her daughter. Tapped in Morse, it crossed lead pipes between cells. Whispered down air vents, it must even have percolated to the poor woman now consigned to my dungeon cell. Emboldened, we shouted the news from one cell to the next. We sang, we hooted, we spat at the guards. My chains were of gossamer that day. The Germans feared we’d riot; the food trolleys didn’t come that day. By nightfall we sobered.

  The English, English colonials and once-colonized Americans invaded on June 6, 1944. D-Day—our Dream Day. I don’t know where they landed, but it is not, as the Germans expected, at the Pas de Calais. Messages racing in the walls say the Germans were surprised, overwhelmed; we hear they are retreating. I think of Prosper, of Archambault, of all the agents who gave so much for this day. Of Émile, who begged me to tell Colonel Buckmaster and Churchill that the Allies would have to invade and fight on the ground, not from the air. Is this Allied landing the crucial moment I felt coming?

  No, it is only the beginning of a new phase of war.

  News comes so slowly here. Our Morse messages say the Japanese invaded India two months ago, in March, using an army of Indian resistants led by Subhas Chandra Bose. Once upon a time Bose came to Afzal Manzil, to raise money to fight the British from “rich émigrés outside India.” But Bose was an idol-worshipping Hindu, Uncle said, so Bose left him empty-handed.

  Can we last till the Allies reach us? Where are the children of the mother who weeps for them each night? What will happen to the woman who worries for her old father, and the one who, like me, longs for her husband’s arms?

  Ramzaan should be the month when forgiveness is implicit in embrace, the month of repair, when wayfarers return home for Id, when one’s load is shared with others by action or telling, and nightly the Tarawih prayer heightens the force between us and our creator. It should be a time when the weary stop to remember how it felt to be safe, when hope in humanity is replenished. At this time last year I took the Lizzie from Tangmere—so full of hope, I might have been flying a magic carpet.

  By Id, that carpet had landed.

  The third-storey apartment on the boulevard Richard Wallace was light and airy, with waxed parquet floors. A candlestick telephone stood on a marble demi-lune table in the vestibule, an empty sideboard graced the dining room, a chandelier denuded of its crystal swung in the grand salon. One chair and a Bokhara foot-carpet remained. Major Boddington had omitted to mention the apartment was otherwise unfurnished.

  Thanks to Major Boddington, German officers and soldiers lived above me, below me, walked the corridor between my apartment and the lavatory. Yet he accused poor arrested Archambault of carelessness, Archambault who was probably being tortured by the Gestapo even while Major Boddington dined at Chez Clément. I remembered Archambault not as the man of quiet efficiency who trained me to transmit messages and watch for danger signals but as a solo voice in the choir when Mother took us to church in Suresnes.

  A walnut tree grew past the window facing the Bois de Boulogne, its limb close enough to string an aerial. This apartment was no more than a transmission location and a letter drop.

  Then I thought: perhaps it was part of London’s plan that I should be surrounded by Germans; no one would suspect me. I wanted to trust Major Boddington—he was my superior officer, he was privy to more than had been told me.

  Today, I burn to know where I made my fatal mistake. The only person who knew the telephone number at the Richard Wallace apartment was Major Boddington, apologist for Gilbert. Could he have told Gilbert and Gilbert told the Gestapo, who then traced the telephone number?

  When I ask Vogel, he says he’ll tell me the day, the very moment, I call him Ernst. So I may never know, unless the answer comes some other way.

  Downstairs, the concierge said the building was commandeered to billet German soldiers, but my apartment became vacant when many of them left Paris to fight at Stalingrad. Later, it was deemed too small for an officer, too large for a soldier. The German who’d occupied it sold everything—paintings, sculpture, furniture—before leaving. To whom did the apartment and its contents belong before the Germans came, I asked. The concierge’s eyes slid away. “Je ne sais pas.”

  How could she not know?

  From the tale of Monsieur Durand at Drancy, I knew the apartment must have been owned by Jews before the war.

  Where are they now?

  Two days later, Madame Aigrain’s concierge called me to her telephone. Claude said Gabrielle had given him my telephone number.

  And he said another convoy of buses left Drancy that morning, the morning of July 1
8. Nineteen hundred and forty-three years after the great Sufi master Jesu came to enlighten the world, organized Christian terrorists took more than a thousand people and loaded them on boxcars at Bobigny station because they were infidels.

  Fear, my Abbajaan said, comes from oneself. If one expects harm, harm will come. He said you can bring about events not merely by wanting them but by fearing them. Had I brought about the very event I feared, by fearing it so deeply?

  Claude couldn’t tell me if Armand was one of the passengers on the convoy. He couldn’t tell me if Armand was still at Drancy. He couldn’t tell me where the train was going.

  He just didn’t know.

  His tone was changing; the task he’d undertaken in a moment of sympathy was proving far beyond his powers. He had tried to impress me, but he was realizing how difficult it was, perhaps even impossible. The boy had wanted to be given the respect accorded to a man, had hoped to show a man’s achievements. And now he really didn’t care what happened to my “family friend”—he felt used. From my calls and inquiries he sensed, I’m sure, that this family friend was dearer to me than any in my family, and his enthusiasm seemed to ebb away.

  I had used Claude—but for a good reason. Allah give me tauba, a good reason.

  I sank to my knees in the foyer. The concierge made me sit down, dabbed water on my face.

  Could Allah have brought me all this way only to send Armand away to Germany? Was there nothing more I could do?

  One long year later, here in my cell, I continue to believe, believe stubbornly in the impossible … I refuse to believe Armand is in a place like this …

  Armand, where are you now? Are you hungry, like me? Maybe you have found new friends, a new love because I said adieu. Maybe you have forgotten your Noor.

  Still, be protected, surrounded, nourished by my love.

  The guard served me oversalted soup and now ignores my cries for water. She’s trying to break my will, will that grows more bloody-minded by the day.

  My shackles have rubbed deep pink rings about my wrists and ankles. The ceiling leaks. I feel my hair growing, growing, my nails growing long and brittle.

  Water. My tongue is a Persian slipper in my mouth, and she doesn’t bring water.

  I shout for water, a scrubbing cloth, soap, a tweezer, fishnet stockings, lipstick and perfume. I laugh, laugh like an idiot.

  Now I write to keep myself from crying, begging.

  I am descended from the Tiger of Mysore. Tigers do not beg.

  Move into memory—where was I at this time last year?

  Last year, both July 4 and Id came and went and I could not celebrate them with Dadijaan, Mother and Zaib, nor congratulate Kabir on his promotion. There was no news of my beloved; he and your grand-mère Lydia had disappeared. Almost every member of the network I had come to assist was in the clutches of the Gestapo at the avenue Foch, or imprisoned elsewhere. Major Boddington reassured about Gilbert, but I still felt like an actor who had rehearsed for the wrong play.

  Weakened from the influenza, I had the curse. I cramped and bled as copiously as when Madame Dunet sucked your unensouled flesh from my womb. I was miserably angry at Madame Dunet’s revelations. How could I have been so foolish as not to see Mother’s hand holding sixteen-year-old Zaib’s, giving the money for my operation? I had not dreamed Madame Dunet’s bigotry might coincide with my family’s intentions. I was but a holder for my family’s expectations.

  What would I say when I met Mother and Kabir again, now my trust was shattered? Would I embrace them, kissing the air wide of ears that once heard my endearments? Perhaps I’d shake hands; both had shown themselves to be strangers to me. So just who were they when they weren’t playing their roles? They meant well, I’m sure, but by what right had they chosen for me?

  Everything was mixed up, everything going wrong.

  I had volunteered for a supporting role. Suddenly I had become primary, even essential. What did I say to Miss Atkins? “Everyone is capable of self-governance.” If that was really my credo, why was I now so terrified of operating alone, without someone to guide me, counsel me, lead me? All my life, elders and superiors had told me how to live, who and what to like, what to do, how to do it. And even if I didn’t obey every injunction, my rebellions were small, mostly verbal. Always, I had seen myself as I “should be” not who I was.

  Could anything Uncle taught guide me, anything help me to survive now? He had never foreseen his niece landing in occupied France, working for the British, tapping Morse messages to London about the plans and effects of battles.

  What and who should I be now?

  My first day in Paris, I thought I could “make my own instructions and follow them.” How simple it seemed then to give myself advice. No one had taken innocent people away on buses, no one in my network had been arrested, no one had torn apart Renée’s home, people had not been rounded up and—possibly—executed before my eyes, I had not wounded or killed any SS men, aeroplanes had landed and taken off again without being shot at. And through it all, I never believed my own mother or Kabir could betray me, choose for me, to serve their own purposes.

  After all that, what instructions could I make for myself?

  Who should I become now?

  The unmitigated present, with all its possibility of meeting the Archangel of Death at any moment and living in separation from my love forever, was far from my idealistic ideas of “doing my bit” for the pursuit of justice, with a preordained “happily ever after.” I had longed to hold Armand again, talk to him, tell him I love him, and instead I was all intention with no hope of success, all resolve without execution.

  What use was anything I had done? I didn’t even know if Armand still cared for me. How foolish to believe he would recall my tiger claw, or that my note would convey meaning, should he receive it. My beloved deserved that I write him a book, not just a few words.

  Allah was asking too much of me. Much too much.

  I could not help it; I lay alone in Madame Aigrain’s room without Armand to hold me and I became a child again, weeping, weeping all night. I wanted the mother who would brave the world for me and Zaib when we were small, the one who hadn’t cared if she and Abbajaan lived on bread and water, the one who read me fairy tales she’d read as a child. I wanted the loving, generous-spirited brother I once had, the Kabir I once knew. I wanted Dadijaan’s teaching tales, her fighting spirit. Even Zaib—anyone of my own.

  I cried a pool of tears. They let me cling to my troubles for a while.

  Then at dawn each motion of my Fajar prayers reminded me to praise and thank Allah I was alive, healthy again, having recovered from the influenza that had claimed Abbajaan. I was not in want, not fighting in the jungles of Burma or crossing an African desert. Though I had been forced to flee my home I was not forced into hiding as Armand, Monsieur Durand, Émile, Monique, Renée and little Babette had been.

  I was not being starved in India, I was not deported.

  I was not the only woman—or man—whose beloved had disappeared. When his master disappeared, Jalaluddin Rumi was transformed into love itself and, though far from the physical form of his beloved, became sure they were one single light. So too, I became stubbornly sure my love, my husband, was alive. And that he, who called me to my highest self yet loved me even after learning of your body’s destruction at my hand, who loved me dearly for almost nine years though we could not be married in the eyes of the world, still cared for me. That I was bleeding meant my body was sound, that Armand and I can re-create ourselves in you, despite Madame Dunet’s ministrations and intentions.

  That morning I did a zikr of gratitude that I had not been arrested by the Gestapo, gave thanks that Allah had saved me from their clutches, saved me from execution, not once but three times. How dare I still fear death?

  When Kabir and I were small and grieving for Abbajaan, Mother explained death in a comforting way. Endless sleep, that is death, she said.

  Your father said once that the world wil
l never finish arguing if there is an afterwards. To him, there is no such thing. He is no Café de Flore existentialist, but a seeker for the source of his creativity. He said it could be that we live and vanish like music into air. He loved the idea in the Zohar that one’s body is a kinnor, letting a divine melody vibrate through it till one day the melody comes to its end.

  As for me, life is an obstacle course like the ones Josianne and I rode in the Bois, and death the final jump to which I am riding my body headlong against time, a dark wall hiding a great trench, and just when I say “Un, deux, allez-hop!” my horse will balk, pull up short, digging its front legs into friable soil. And I’ll go over the wall, into the trench, alone.

  When I was afraid—of heights, of dogs, of any man who shouted at me—Abbajaan would remind me he had named me Noor, Light of the Soul. The light required to dispel the world’s fear. But I never aspired to dispel the world’s fear, I just needed to dispel my own. When that fear was gone, Armand said, I could compose my own life and live within its music.

  My mind shifted like a restive horse. All night I moved and retreated from my options, like mercury. My neck and shoulder muscles were taut as veena strings.

  By dawn in Madame Aigrain’s closet room I began to think more clearly. I realized something I must remember here in my cell today: as long as I live, I must use every advantage Allah has given me.

  I could not yearn for the mother and brother I once had when the Noor they knew as daughter and sister was no more.

  If every man or woman dies only at an appointed hour—then of what use is it to fear? The Sufis say we should “die before we die,” facing the world without renouncing it or declaring it all illusion, so that when the Archangel of Death comes, we will be ready and eager.

  I reminded myself the greatest of Sufis, Al-Hallaj, suffered nine years of torture and trial, suffered his hands and feet to be cut off, and then was crucified. Execution at the hands of the Gestapo is not the worst that can happen.

  What is worse is not resisting injustice. What is worse is denying that Allah created suffering that we may learn.