The Tiger Claw (16 page)

When I was growing up, anger in a girl was almost haraam—forbidden. In its place I allowed myself to feel only hurt or sadness—cover-up feelings, the bomb shelters of the powerless. I never acknowledged my anger when Abbajaan left us in Paris and died soon after in India, when Uncle Tajuddin lectured on tolerance but would not tolerate my marrying Armand, or even when I could not become your mother, ma petite—you who would be little Babette’s age now
.

But this time, when anger appeared on behalf of my beloved, I found my hands trembling with it, could even name it. Every moment of anger I should have spread over the years seemed to meet and knot inside me
.

In the years before the war I was, like everyone in France, all acquiescence and conciliation and non-aggression. I admired Monsieur Gandhi, whose non-violence was shaming the occupiers of India, for he spoke of brotherly love and said that differences between Hindus and Muslims will be honoured in a free India
.
With other followers of Sufism, I performed namaaz and zikr, meditating to heal the planet. We prayed for the miraculous enlightenment of Fascists everywhere—German and French, Hindu and Muslim. At the time, Monsieur Gandhi had not yet grown feeble from imprisonment, and the future of Muslims in a Hindudominated India still held promise. And the dictator in my family, Uncle Tajuddin, still quoted Abbajaan and Rumi
.

But where did conciliation and appeasement lead? First to losing you, ma petite, then to losing the one man worth calling husband
.

And so, my first night back in Paris, I swore to Allah: I resist all tyranny. Know this, little one, when your spirit returns from hiding in Al-ghayab, the great beyond. Say no to all oppression, whether it rise from those you love or from an enemy, for the shame and self-hatred your mother carries for not resisting when I was younger are worse by far
.

It was now too late for doubts. If I had wanted to be protected from the consequences of love and anger, from risk of pain and death, I could have stayed in London, remained a nurse or become a chauffeur in Fany, and no one would have said I hadn’t done my part for this war
.

Abbajaan said the Sufi trusts his intuition, following it where logic cannot go. He said life’s events lead you to encounter your nafs, your base self, and you must surmount it to find your true self
.

So I held my anger close that night, and by morning it had turned to renewed resolve: I would reach Armand and tell him to have faith. We will be together again soon
.

CHAPTER 11

Paris, France
Thursday, June
17, 1943

N
EXT MORNING
, Noor closed the door to the safe house behind her. Seven o’clock Berlin time, but a hesitant rose dawn was breaking over the grey roofs of Paris.

It must have been dark when Émile departed an hour ago. Their destinations were the same, but caution prescribed she leave and travel separately.

“Take this bag,” Renée said to him. “If by some miracle you find sugar, milk or butter …”

Émile promised Renée he’d return with fresh eggs.

Once Émile was gone, Renée served Noor a vile-tasting ersatz coffee and day-old croissants while aiming a stream of admonitions at Babette.
“Ne mets pas les coudes sur la table!”
and Babette took her elbows off the table.
“Tais-toi!”
silenced Babette’s shy stirring of conversation with Noor.

“Take the blue dress from the cupboard. Her socks are in that drawer. Give me the hairbrush,” she said.

Noor’s cover story about being a nursemaid seemed to have come true.

Though habituated to orders from officers, the implicit contempt in Renée’s voice irked her. That haughty tone was reserved by Dadijaan for servants in India, and by Mother for the maids in
Suresnes, but it went unused in London, where war afforded no such luxuries.

She was unlikely to meet Renée often during her three weeks in Paris, so there wasn’t much reason to object. Instead, as Renée sat before a mirror applying powder, Noor perched on the bed and peered into a jar full of
doryphores
, green locusts Babette had collected on a school outing. They plagued the crops, and the Germans enlisted schoolchildren to kill them.

Was it a sin, Babette asked, to kill the pretty creatures she’d captured? Noor said what she believed: every being deserved life unless it harmed another. That remark drew a snort from Renée. Noor moved on to comfort Babette over a page in her sketchbook where the big-eared, smiling Mickey she had drawn had been defaced with a big black X. The words “degenerate art” appeared below. Babette began to read a homework essay she’d written in her copybook: “Our führer is Adolf Hitler. He was born in Braunau. He is a great soldier who loves children and animals …”

Noor was tempted to recite a La Fontaine fable in response, if only to ensure Babette would learn something French, something of her own heritage that would be more helpful in life than the biography of Adolf Hitler. But would a fable recited in school be grounds for punishment? German repression went beyond British disparagement and suppression of the indigenous in India, or French disparagement of Muslim traditions.

Instead, Noor applauded Babette’s efforts and began to read the slogans presented after the portrait of Hitler on the frontispiece of her schoolbook. One in particular caught her eye: “Common interest before self-interest.” Under it the Victory rune mark of the SS, presumably capable of defining “common interest” for its colonized people.

Then Babette was back, with her sketchbook turned to a page with a large check mark and no comment at all. It showed a bearded man with squinty eyes, thick lips, horns jutting from his curly black hair and a beakish nose.

“That’s a Jew,” said the nine-year-old. “They have flat feet, they walk differently.”

“
Mais non
, Babette. You don’t believe that? Surely you don’t?”

“Anne-Marie, you have to go now,” said Renée. “Babette, vas-y! Time for school.”

Babette turned Noor’s wrist to look at her watch, then nestled into Noor’s embrace. “
À bientôt
, Anne-Marie!”

Renée tucked Noor’s oilskin coat in the closet by the front door and showed her the flowerpot where a spare key to the apartment lay in case Noor needed to stay in Paris again, a gesture that compensated for her sharp remarks on Noor’s arrival.

Still, Noor was glad to be out of Renée’s home, walking past beds of cabbage and carrots to the gate, breathing fresh morning air.

Following instructions, Noor avoided the obelisk at the métro entrance in the Place d’Auteuil. She passed signs in shop windows:
Pas de sucre. Pas de lait. Pas de beurre
. The Seizième Arrondissement was not as busy at this hour as she remembered.

Loud, angry voices.

She rounded a corner and came upon a crowd of women standing in a ragged queue outside a
boulangerie
waiting as the baker rolled open his canvas awning. A few doors away a shop bore a sign,
Entreprise Juive
, in red. The colour signified the shop was now under Aryan ownership. Black, gouged holes said it had probably been plundered, its contents sold.

Where are its Jewish proprietors now?

Three dark maidens lifted the heavy dome of the Richard Wallace drinking fountain above their heads—much like poor women in India labouring on construction sites, except that these were not women of flesh and blood.

On the rue La Fontaine she passed an art nouveau house with a medieval turret and cast-iron balconies, then a park before a neo-Gothic chapel.

Trying to take a circuitous route to her destination, as prescribed by her instructors at Wanborough, was boring, and she
had blisters from all her walking the previous day. She headed directly to the avenue Mozart and the métro at the end of the rue Jasmin. She took the métro as far west out of the city as it extended, to the Porte Maillot. Following instructions again, she went to the Objets Trouvés and asked the man at the counter for a bicycle that was lost, and might now be found, giving the licence plate number specified by Émile.

The bicycle was wheeled out to her, along with a loudly delivered homily on the presence of thieves who would not hesitate to steal so fine a bicycle if mademoiselle wasn’t more careful next time. Noor hoisted her bag off her shoulder into the front basket and rode away into the summer warmth of the country.

Sunlight strengthened as Noor pedalled down the black ribbon of road past fields of rapeseed and wheat. Her hair lifted like a warm cape against her shoulders till she stopped, took a rubber band from her handbag, tied it into a ponytail and pedalled on.

How unthinkable that this beautiful land could be invaded. How could Paris have fallen before Hitler? But it had, and the fall divided all of Noor and Armand’s yesterdays from today.

When Armand came home on leave from the Maginot line early in the spring of 1940, he asked again, had Uncle Tajuddin agreed to their marriage?

“No,” Noor said, “but he will, or Kabir will.”

“Noor,” he said, “we’ve known each other almost nine years—nine years of loving, meeting, parting and hoping in secret. How long can we wait?”

“I know,
chéri
. But my family is everything I know. How can I live and never see them again?”

Blue eyes looked into hers. “I don’t choose for you,” he said.

“Could you leave Madame Lydia and never see her again?”

“Noor, each of us has the right to live without fear. Your uncle, your mother, your brother—they hold you hostage but call it love. We could marry in Switzerland, in England or anywhere outside France, if you gave yourself permission.”

It was true, Armand said, that Europe was regressing to chaos, but not as far back as some Neanderthal era in which men dragged away the women they wanted by the hair, or sweated the labours of Hercules to win the damsel of their desires. Nor was he a Svengali, as Uncle and Kabir seemed to think, casting Noor in the role of his feeble-minded dupe. They were, Armand said, civilized people in a civilized country with progressive ideas and relations that surely could be reconciled. But at the time, the stakes were higher for Noor than for Armand. Armand would gain a wife; Noor would lose a family.

“Someday,” said Armand, “you’ll choose whose life you’ll live—the life your family planned for you or one of your own.”

Hoping those two lives could be one, Noor ventured to ask Kabir to meet Armand. But Kabir …

Armand came into my life to free me from fear, to teach me laughter, generosity and kindness. Through his actions he taught me the principles: my life is my own, my soul and my body my own. But claiming my own life or body was just a lovely idea when Uncle Tajuddin was arranging to marry me off in India
.

A firebud of hope bloomed within her.

What was impossible then might be possible now
.

The only animals grazing today were sparse and scrawny. The fields she remembered—for instance, on that day Abbajaan took the whole family to Versailles in the Amilcar for a picnic—were full of dappled, cud-grinding cows, puffy black-eared sheep and powerful percherons.

At Versailles, Abbajaan had walked past foaming fountains, left Mother preening in its sumptuous Hall of Mirrors and the guide extolling the Sun King for spending sixty million livres to build that temple to himself. He didn’t show his children the secret door where Marie Antoinette escaped from the revolutionary mob, or the diary entry where, on the day of the storming of the Bastille, Louis XVI wrote “nothing happened,” but stood in the marble courtyard to show his children where the king greeted his subjects from a balcony. There Abbajaan explained
the concept of
darshan
, how the sight of an enlightened being or the king, assuming him to be enlightened as the maharaj of Baroda, brings the one who sees—in the Sanskrit term, the
dixit
—a blessing.

Noor and Kabir dutifully tried to imagine a blessing from the chicken-legged Sun King.

“Try,” Abbajaan continued, “to become people who see beyond what your eyes tell you. Use all your senses, and your
ajna
, your third eye. See the invisible—Al-ghayab.”

Kabir and Zaib had played hopscotch in the courtyard as he spoke, but Noor was old enough to understand.

A wind-breaking row of poplars provided a cool patch of shade, then she was out in the open again. She took deep lungfuls of air with each wheel-whirring movement, but even so, her hands were soon sliding on the handlebars.

Boys walked the footpaths between hedgerows, carried rakes and hoes far too large for them. A man bending over a shrub straightened as she passed, the curve never leaving his back.

Where were the young men? In England, she, Mother, Dadijaan and Zaib had slept many a night in Mother’s basement kitchen armed with pumps, buckets and Dadijaan’s good luck amulets, and often said namaaz over the boom and smash of falling bombs and debris; but the sight of strong young men like Kabir in the streets, in small towns, almost all in uniform, was comforting. In Paris, and here, young Frenchmen had been spirited away—some, like Armand, to camps in France, some, like Renée’s husband, to Germany.