The Tiger Claw (17 page)

She cycled past a couple of well-dressed women incongruously carrying
panier
baskets. City women; their expressions said they would rather be elsewhere. They must be on their way to pick their own fruits and vegetables. A snub-nosed truck with a crooked tail caught her eye—a
gazogène
tractor. A few fields away, a shapeless woman in kerchief and clogs whacked an emaciated horse straining in the traces of a plough. Both looked as if they were weathering the nineteenth, rather than the twentieth, century.

Sweat prickled at Noor’s eyebrows, her eyes itched as if gnawed by the wind. Her thighs, strong as she was, were stiffening against her will, her calves threatening to knot into a cramp.

She dismounted, wheeled the bicycle to stretch her legs for a while till she came to an incline, then pumped up the low hill, riding the balls of her feet, crested the top and sat down, jarring on the husk-shaped seat, bruising her inner thigh once more.

Twenty kilometres had spun away behind Noor.

Only five to go.

Pedalling to Grignon, I had none of the hesitation that rises from knowledge; I had yet to come upon the peaks and troughs of circumstance. Yes, I had been told but did not comprehend how the war had made France a place where the ordinary and the dangerous could not be differentiated, like a desert where you cannot tell snake from rock, rock from cactus
.

I thought of the sketches and slogans Babette showed me. If you were her age in France then, you too might have written such praiseful essays to a worshipper of Death, would have been asked to draw your internal demons and call them Jews
.

But I put aside those thoughts. That day I was glad to be in France, nearer to Armand
.

My captor Vogel wants me to write stories for his children. But every story I’ve written since 1934 has been for you, ma petite. In 1938, I translated Buddhist stories you’ll read someday. My book is called Twenty Jataka Tales. I wrote my own stories for you, too, and they were published in the newspaper Le Figaro
.

Nineteen thirty-eight. Dadijaan had just arrived to stay with us when news of Kristallnacht rippled through Paris. A Jewish man traced the German deporter of his parents to Paris, and shot him. In retaliation Hitler ordered “spontaneous” demonstrations against
Jews everywhere. In panic for Armand’s family, I telephoned him again. Although four years had passed since our last meeting, it was as if we had parted the day before. I asked if he knew people, or was related to people, who were affected
.

“Of course I do,” he said
.

Once a week, after his piano students or practice, Armand had begun volunteering at the Alliance Française on the boulevard Raspail. He taught French to refugees and immigrants from Russia and Germany, mostly Jewish, and many whose only crime was to disagree with the Nazis. Stories poured in from his students after Kristallnacht, and though your father is an explorer, open to all faiths, not only Judaism, he was incensed. “Two hundred synagogues, Noor! A licence to loot and destroy ten thousand shops! Five million marks’ worth of shattered glass, and Hitler wants the Jews to compensate for damages, demanding a billion marks!”

In the piano room at Mademoiselle Nadia Boulanger’s, we turned to music for comfort. Music cannot tell if its performer be Muslim, Jew or Christian; French, German, English or Indian. All afternoon we played duets, improvising snatches of jazz, my knee touching his as we reached for the pedals. Afterwards we stopped at a Boulant restaurant on the boulevard St-Michel and ordered one crêpe for two. Then upstairs to your father’s apartment—bodies thirsting, clinging, desperate to love—but we were more careful this time
.

With Armand, I was unconscious of being woman, unconscious of him as man. With him I could act, and he had liberty to feel. I loved him for what he confided to me, the glimpse of his forbidden inner core, for the things I could say only to him when he shared my body and was enclosed by me. In those moments there was nothing impermeable between us, no trivial differences to separate us
.

His weight shifted above me and he said, “I am outside and inside you at the same time.” Then he kissed me, said how much he loved me. I must remember this
.

Joy and pain came together without distinction, joy in our interpenetration so that active became passive, pain that I could not
bridge the barrier of his skin to know how he felt—one day you’ll find such pain is part of desire, ma petite
.

“How does it feel,” I wondered aloud, “to be a man?”

You see, I could ask him such things
.

He gave a surprised laugh. I waited as his thoughts formed to the precision of words. “I was never anything other than a man—how can I answer?”

“But you must have thought about it.” My fingers slid over his short beard, chest, then down, committing his shape to tactile memory
.

“I’ve never thought about it,” he said, as if realizing. “I’m a man—that’s all.” His thumb moved at the wedge of my clavicle, massaging my back, returned to my throat. His fingertips followed my gold chain to my breasts, traced the gold frame of my tiger claw
.

“It’s cut from the carcass of a great beast slain by my ancestor, Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore,” I told him. “A tigress, perhaps. Maybe she was hunting or in defence of her cubs. I often wonder about the women who wore it before me for luck and courage. Armand, haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to be a woman? Today or perhaps in another time?”

“Never, chérie.”

“Or another man?” I ventured
.

He considered this, delving into childhood, adolescence, coming closer to now. “I have often wondered how my father felt when he arrived from Moscow after the famine.”

Your grandfather came to Paris in 1892 because every university in Moscow had filled its 3 percent quota for Jews. He dreamed of being an engineer—but except for the Great War, laboured the rest of his life on the line at Renault
.

“Did you ever ask him?” I said
.

“No, and now that he’s gone I can’t.”

Your father and I were both fatherless, you see
.

Armand rolled away, cupped his hand over a match, lit an Anoushka. That smell always reminds me of him
.

“My mother still has all his military decorations,” he said
.

I must tell you about your grandmother Madame Lydia, Armand’s mother. She was born a Catholic, and sometimes went to mass. But she took the ritual bath and converted to Judaism, and joined your grandfather in France. When Armand was born in Paris, she learned to raise him as a Jew. Armand took me to meet her the very first Rosh Hashanah after we met, and she accepted me immediately. I was born in Moscow like her, she said. She told me about the first time she made challah, and showed me the slippers she wore to dance Raymonda under ballet master Petipa in Moscow. But all she could get, when after long waiting she received her permis de travail in France, were parts in Folies Bergères revues. Of course, she wouldn’t take them; she preferred to manage the laundry department at the Hôtel Lutétia. She always had visitors to stay, and as I got to know her, I found they were ever more distant “relatives”—and so many came with children that Armand had to rent a second apartment, a garçonnière, where he could keep regular hours, composing. Someday, ma petite, you will taste her special kasha, her poppy-seed cakes, her borscht and blinis
.

When he first heard of our love in early 1934, my uncle shouted that he had no objection whatsoever to Armand’s religion and, not being Christian, had no tradition of hatred against Jews; that he objected only to Armand’s mother’s work “as a washerwoman.” If that one fact were different, he said, he might have agreed to our marriage, if only to save my tarnished reputation. But since Armand could not change his mother or her past (nor wished to, being so proud of her), my uncle’s impossible condition was just another way of forbidding our marriage; a way he could continue talking to his students about Sufi Muslim traditions of love and tolerance and the Universal God of all faiths, and at the same time continue promising my hand in marriage to my cousin Allahuddin in Baroda, even as he knew I wept in my room
.

“And you—you plan to leave me and return to Moscow?” I asked Armand, pouting a little
.

“I’ll take you to visit Moscow one day, but if my family wanted to live as subjects of Moscow and remain Russian, wouldn’t my father
have stayed there? Non, I don’t like the thought of Moscow controlling France. Those who care for the French people should govern it.”

“I have a Russian passport somewhere,” I reminded him
.

“That will save time when we visit—you won’t have to apply for one!”

We laughed together at bureaucracy then, never realizing how deep its tentacles could reach
.

I rose, wound a sheet around me and tipped the long mirror in the corner of the room upright. I let the sheet fall like a wing veiling me till he came close, put his arms around me from behind
.

“Which do you prefer,” I asked with the mirror before us, “me or your image of me?”

“You,” he said, resting his hands on my shoulders and kissing the nape of my neck, understanding both the question and my need to ask it. It would be the question I asked my brother a year later, but though Kabir also answered “You,” his actions showed he preferred the sister in his looking glass
.

But Armand’s answer reassured me, and we returned to the stillwarm sheets and held one another as we talked
.

“Have you ever wanted to live as someone else for a while, just to see if you could do it? Transcend your self, my Abbajaan used to say …”

But your father was, as the French say, bien dans sa peau—comfortable in his skin. More than I was, then
.

“No. I am human and a Jew,” he said. “Every day I hold fast to that belief.”

Armand didn’t need to explain. Even before Kristallnacht, new German restrictions for Jews were broadcast every day, wherever Hitler ruled, restrictions Uncle and so many others in France didn’t notice
.

“Not in France,” I tried to reassure Armand. “Kristallnacht would never happen in France. France is different. Remember the Rights of Man, and Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, non?”

“I hope you are right,” he said
.

But I was wrong, so very wrong, for it did happen in France. The things we thought could occur only in Germany happened
.
Tolerance vanished overnight the moment war was declared the next year, and like many French people who had read articles about the “Jewish Peril,” Uncle began to talk about Jewish conspiracies, even quoted the Qur’an. But I know my Qur’an—Abbajaan taught it to me very well. I didn’t need Uncle to quote it, nor was there such hatred in it as he said, for Jews or any others. The unbelievers it speaks of are those who, professing Islam or not, have never yet touched the spirit of Allah. And for each concession I made to intolerance in my home, appeasing and placating Uncle Tajuddin and his campaign to keep our family’s blood pure, the world conceded to and placated Hitler and his Nazi thugs. It wasn’t long before your father sat in the bunkers warding off the disease of purism that would soon invade France
.

When your spirit enters this world, ma petite, may you remember this: If you speak of tolerance while planting a hedge between yourself and your neighbour, as my uncle Tajuddin did, as many in France did, your hedge will one day be replaced by a fence, then a low wall, then a high wall, and finally fortifications
.

A short distance past the train station and the swastika-draped front of the mairie building, through the market square, and the village of Grignon was left behind.

Every Hindu temple she’d seen in India had its swastika, a health charm—
swast
being Sanskrit for “health”—so common it was woven into the fabric of women’s saris. Even in Europe the twisted cross was older than tyranny itself, ubiquitous, spokes bent right for male power, left for female. But for the Germans it meant one power only—male. What ego! Red for blood, white for Aryan purity and black for Hitler’s intent to obliterate “others.” Mr. Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League of India, must feel the same terror of extinction as Noor at this moment, watching the power of the
swastika rising in India. For the first time she understood Mr. Jinnah’s fear of a Hindu mobocracy that could, if independence came, set out to annihilate Muslims in India, and why Mr. Jinnah was agitating for a separate homeland he called Pakistan.

More and more separation, bane of our very existence. What a terrible idea
.

Rolling fields bordered a stretch of bumpy country road. Past the fields the road flowed into the gloom and the woody scent of a pine and oak game forest. The road behind her was empty; no one was following.

She set her shoulders and cycled on, arriving at high stone porticos marking the entrance to the Institut National Agronomique.

Inside, ancient trees swayed above her. A familiar scent whiffed past. Horses—a stable. Long dark blouse-coats—students walking by the road. Noor squeezed her brakes, stopping beside a pleasant-faced young woman wearing clogs and carrying a clipboard.

“The library? Straight ahead past the director’s château you’ll see the administration buildings in a horseshoe to your right. The classroom buildings are the long ones on your left. Pass them and turn left at the crossing. You’ll be in front of the Grand Château. Enter at the far end, near the woods. The library is upstairs.”

Noor thanked her, wiped her brow with her handkerchief and continued. Handlebars bumped beneath her sore palms as the road ran downhill past a large greenhouse and a shuttered shop. Past the horseshoe of the administration buildings her mount settled as the road widened into a crossing. Noor dismounted beside flower-framed, rectangular lawns and wheeled her bicycle across the expanse of a courtyard where, a few decades ago, horses must have pawed the ground in anticipation of the hunt. The brown-and-cream façade of the Grand Château of the institute towered above.