The Tiger Claw (25 page)

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:

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

P
IANO 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.

One moment, just a moment, of surrender to the music and her eyes began smarting. From the cigarette smoke? No. The lyrics. All about separation and heartbreak.

Three short weeks for this assignment, and here she was, five days after landing in France, two days after renting a room in Drancy—but no contact with Armand. She took a deep breath and focused on the shiny trouser knees of the clarinetist, the grey of the drummer’s pre-war white shirt, the threadbare droop of the saxophonist’s bow tie.

Fair hair stood out even in the gloom—German bureaucrats towering a head taller than the average Frenchmen. Earlier she had noticed only the Germans in uniform.

Look out for taller men. Be more observant, more aware!

Something else—

The musicians were all Europeans. In every jazz club she and Armand frequented before the war, she could not recall one such as this, where the band had not a single Negro musician. Most Negroes had probably fled France, and those who stayed must have been interned.
Bien sûr!
Many were American citizens, like Mother.

The singer circled back to the chorus, the song faded. Lights brightened in their sconces.

Noor approached the bar. Émile Garry—Phono—stood beside a glass of absinthe, nonchalant, acting as if he came here every Sunday evening and had no appointment with anyone called Anne-Marie.

“
Un café noir,” said Noor
.

The barman pointed to a sign: twenty-eight francs. An astronomical sum. “It’s a dry day tomorrow, but not today,” he suggested, meaning there were alternatives to black coffee.

At such prices her money wouldn’t last three weeks. For a moment Noor reconsidered. But an aperitif would be more expensive. She repeated her request.

Émile’s coat sleeve brushed her upper arm. The reassuring tightness of his biceps. Phono—just a name recited by Miss Atkins six days ago in London, now a friend pretending to meet her by chance.

Could she see the door from here? Escape if necessary? The escape route: through that kitchen door, into the courtyard behind and over the wall, Émile had said.

She spread her dress-skirt wide as she took her seat, to discourage anyone from sitting too close. No mistakes. Of any kind. A single mistake might bring arrest not just for herself but for her contacts. There should be a list of all the mistakes a secret agent shouldn’t make.

Darkness spread across the club again. An instrumental stretch unfolded in accord with itself, notes improvising their way out of the spotlight to an unknown destination.

Abbajaan improvised on the veena for hours when she and Kabir were small. Music was his métier, his true vocation, but Indian instruments and music proved incomprehensible to Western audiences. Mother had urged him to simplify the music. Who could blame her for that? But eventually Abbajaan had refused. Making his music any simpler for Western ears, he said, degraded the devotion to Allah that underlay each note. By the time she was nine and learning the veena from him, Abbajaan could talk for hours about that devotion—people paid to hear him speak—but refused to play in public any more, and bitterly resented the loss of his art.

Instruments were incidental to Abbajaan and Armand; how they sounded was everything. If Abbajaan had been alive, he would have welcomed Armand, whatever his heritage, improvised with him, allowed his presence to enrich their family.

“May I join you, mademoiselle?”

Noor shrugged assent, as if Émile were a total stranger. Émile pulled a chair close enough to whisper in her ear without leaning, then almost deafened her by shouting.

“
Viennot, mon ami!
I haven’t seen you in months!”

“Or at least since last week,” said a wry voice behind Noor.

A pair of bushy black eyebrows, a mop of dark, curly hair and a half-sniggering grin installed themselves beside Noor.

“Please, do not insult the
patron’s
intelligence, Émile. And remember”—Viennot lowered his voice—“there are enough Gestapo here who know me quite well.”

Émile seemed about to retort when a German officer in a black uniform entered. Silence swept across the table, in fact across the room. Noor narrowed her eyes. SS. Death’s head on his cap. Sicherheitsdienst, or the SD—police officer of the SS. He joined a suet-faced German bureaucrat wearing round spectacles. People went back to their conversations.