The Tiger Claw (42 page)

As she left the café, there was a shout—“Mademoiselle!”—and it almost set her running. But instead, she assumed a madonna face and turned. A lean, lined face—the rag man. Gypsy features—as brown as Abbajaan.

“A soldier asked if I have seen a man in a white shirt, black pants, black beret.”

A hot floodlight seemed to centre on Noor.

“And have you?” she asked, voice low and quite steady.

“I said there are thousands dressed like that, but one such man came to me not five minutes ago and asked if I knew the time for the next train to Versailles. They seemed glad to know this.”

The Gestapo would probably round up every man so dressed in Versailles.

“Merci!” Noor’s eyes met his for a second of thanks, then she walked quickly away from him, realizing he had mistaken her for Jewish—why else would a woman buy a dress and change on the spot?

She would have to wait for a train. On a secluded bench beside a cluster of cypress trees, she devoured a lunch she’d never have found in Paris: a sliver of Camembert, a hunk of black bread and a wedge of
tarte tatin
. Swallowed without tasting, as if filling a dry well.

An hour later, she mingled with a crowd of revellers returning to Grignon station, and presented her papers to the German soldier at the checkpoint.

Fragile threads of rain turned to a shower. Noor kept her eyes on the soldier’s helmet, trying to convey by stance and posture that she fully expected to be waved through and onto the train. The soldier stood dry in his sentry box, and kept her and five others waiting just because he could, till Noor’s hair was plastered to her scalp and her brown dress clung. Till rivulets ran down her calves and her socks squelched in her shoes.

Her staged confidence must have been convincing; her papers were returned. She put them back in her bag and mounted the carriage ladder.

The train set off. Every compartment was full but one. She could sit opposite two stern-faced old women or stand where she was, in the corridor.

Another soldier swaggering down the corridor towards her. Another identity check.

Noor pulled out her headscarf. “Again you want my papers?” She made a show of wiping her hair and patting her face and neck with it. “They’ll get wet …”

His gaze slithered over her. Noor darted a glance of mute appeal at the two old women. Both leaned forward, frowning and staring at the soldier as if he were no bigger than a toddler. Abashed, he moved past Noor.

She entered the compartment and took the seat opposite the victorious women. “Merci, mesdames.” She smiled. They nodded back.

Noor closed her eyes and feigned sleep.

Agonized faces rose before her: two students dragged away to be shot—was that mock or real? were they alive or dead?—the student who refused to be blindfolded, Monsieur Hoogstraten’s brave face, Madame Hoogstraten’s tearful one, and faces of two Germans crowned with death’s head caps. Were they alive or dead?

The train sped back to Paris.

My hip bone grates against plank; throbbing in each stiff limb. I can feel my intestines moving, scouring their emptiness. Sour spit in my mouth—juices demand something to digest. Soon they will turn on the lining of my stomach. How will it feel to consume myself?

Perhaps every crucial moment has come and gone and your mother is forgotten
.

But this is still happening
.

Night is unending in my dungeon chamber, darkness packed above me. Pungent sealed air, eroding me, single occupant of its vacancy
.

Faces shuffle. Kieffer, Ernst Vogel, Pierre Cartaud. It was at Grignon that I first saw them. Vogel the interpreter and Cartaud the French milice chauffeur—men who would pursue me, each for his own reasons
.

Nerves at knife-edge, I returned, waterlogged and shivering, to Madame Aigrain’s. On the corner, a sleepy German soldier sat in his sentry box. A band of street urchins scampered by—children of the deported? orphans?—none of them taller than me. I matched their gait and passed the sentry box in their wake. Then I melted into the shadows, my eyes lowered to the strips of black tartan rain running in the gutters
.

One thought above all others: I must have killed a man today, perhaps two
.

High above the street, a double window slid down—shuk!—like a guillotine
.

At Madame Aigrain’s, the concierge stood waiting, the telephone receiver cradled in her hands. It was a taut-voiced Odile telephoning from a call box
.

“Anne-Marie? You wanted to meet Papa tomorrow? But he has gone away—we don’t know how long he will be gone. Several people at the institute have been taken ill—it’s highly contagious. Monsieur de Grémont was asked to go into quarantine, but Papa said he didn’t need to—yes, the same de Grémont whose father loves Pétain so much.”

Her voice dropped to a bare whisper on the line. “Papa went in his stead.”

After a time she said, “I think Professor Balachowsky has gone to the hospital too. When I called his apartment, a strange voice answered. Madame Balachowsky telephoned and said he had no chance to smoke his pipe, but has taken it with him. Quite a few have already succumbed to the sickness—at least twenty or twenty-five friends. Maman? She is well, as well as can be.”

All the information I required was conveyed in her innocent-sounding chatter
.

She ended with “Uncle Gilbert is quite well—he says ‘keep in touch.’”

So I should check for a message at the letter drop behind the milk bottles at Flavien’s pawnshop. I could leave Odile a message there, too
.

“He is making arrangements, but you must wait till Saturday to find out the surprise. Uncle Viennot is well and sends his regards—you must telephone him, he misses you. Oh, I must tell you, I received a postcard from Phono—when I have my honeymoon, I will go to the Loire! What beauty is there!”

I wondered what “arrangements” Gilbert could be making—until that night, when, like a ghoulish noctambulist, I crept through the streets to the cemetery. At my appointed time, kneeling within the sepulchre of the Famille Ginot, I transmitted details of the Grignon roundup to London
.

I waited, crouched among the dead, till Major Boddington responded. He would send a Lysander for me on Saturday
.

I radioed back, “I cannot leave. I am the only radio operator left in northern France.”

My muscles ached, my head felt larger than La Mosquée’s dome. I was aflame, in a fever of anger at the Germans who had my leaders in their grasp, yet chilled with fear. I diagnosed my own symptoms: I was becoming sick, sick at a time when I so desperately needed all my faculties about me. Thought fragments collided; I fought for equilibrium
.

At last Major Boddington replied. I received, and quickly left the cemetery, taking the message back to safety at Madame Aigrain’s. There I decoded the first lines:

“Madeleine must leave. This is an order: Le Mans. Saturday 16:30 hrs.–.”

How could I leave, not knowing if Armand had received my message? I needed to be at Drancy, close to my love. But how could I stay if ordered back to England; it would be an act of
insubordination, even desertion. I could volunteer for another assignment, though. As long as the war lasted, London would need radio operators. I could return
.

Would I help anyone by staying?

Tethering loyalties asserted pulls in every direction
.

I could no longer transmit from Grignon, and there was nowhere to string an aerial from Madame Aigrain’s apartment. How often could I use the Cimetière de Montmartre for transmissions? I had moved one transmitter to Madame Gagné’s boarding house in Drancy, but now I was afraid to go out at all for fear of arrest—I had killed a German, maybe two
.

And I was in terror of myself, having learned the violence of which I was capable. Once more I had shattered the looking glass and seen the beast within
.

But I might endanger others if I stayed
.

I decoded the last line:

“Meet Gilbert at the Landowsky monument at La Place des Jacobins.”

Meet Gilbert? I was almost certain he had betrayed Prosper and led the Gestapo to Grignon. London just wasn’t aware of it yet
.

But surely I was wrong to believe a Frenchman would betray his countrymen to the Germans. It was just coincidence that Gilbert had told me to come to Grignon at ten A.M
.

Yet, why was he not present when the Gestapo searched every chamber of the institute?

What if Gilbert had me arrested at Le Mans? It would confirm my suspicions, but that would be small comfort. But London could not risk a Lysander and pilot for one agent—other agents must be returning with me. Gilbert couldn’t betray us all and remain above suspicion
.

I had to obey Major Boddington and travel to Le Mans on Saturday
.

Duty would separate me from Armand, separate us once again. But, I told myself, I was trained now. Madeleine, perhaps even Anne-Marie Régnier, would return to France
.

And I could do one last service to the shattered
PROSPER
network. I could meet Émile in Le Mans to warn him about Gilbert
.

Someone in a distant cell is singing “The Partisan’s Song”—notes of mournful longing. The other prisoners join in until the guard silences all of them with shouts and threats. It is not only my orthodox uncle who cannot tolerate music, but those who proscribe every moment of another’s life. I return to my imaginary pen and ink
.

I felt no moral pain that those SS men might be dead, though they were beings of Allah like me. Why was I not in anguish from self-recrimination? Was it because they were German? Was it because they were Christian unbelievers? But no. Over and over I returned to the thought that flowed through me in that instant when I waited with the rifle and shot the second time:

A man with no compassion forfeits his right to mine.

Are my beliefs that simple? It explains how I find it in me to play the heartless princess before Vogel. Yet he is capable of love and kindness for his tribe. He carries his wife’s picture in his wallet. His children were both born in France, and could be French; he loves them still. So, blood supersedes borders when he wishes. I do not try to understand how men can come to be like him; but, as with Uncle, to be shunned by Herr Vogel would mean dire consequences
.

Once when Vogel came to see me, he showed me photographs from his wallet. Alongside pictures of his smiling wife and children he carried photos of Nazi doctors’ experiments on Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, POWs, criminals—dissidents of all kinds, he said
.

A prisoner buried vertically up to his chin in a hole, an SS man pointing his rifle at him. A naked woman suspended upside down with metal clamps about her ankles, her eyes gouged and bleeding. A man who leaned against his cage, legs folded, knees under his chin. With no trace of outrage Vogel said the man had received electric current to his testicles
.

I had to believe it happened: the camera certified the existence of what it recorded
.

Vogel thought I would be repelled by the sight of suffering. I was not repelled, but appalled: someone revelled in another person’s suffering. Someone must have held a Leica and coolly taken a photograph instead of rushing to the assistance of the tortured. Someone with a Roman blood lust
.

Blood pounded through my heart till it threatened to explode, imagining my Armand or your grandmother Lydia in such a hell. Vogel said such “experiments” have a purpose: to care for German soldiers who contract diseases on the Russian front. But I do not believe him. It is he who needs the suffering of others, he who needs persistent images of utter powerlessness to feel potent
.

Vogel lingered over each pitiful photo with lascivious perversion to demonstrate what my fate could be if I were not subservient. He reminded, “You are designated Nacht und Nebel—a Night and Fog prisoner who has disappeared. I need not account for you to anyone.” But for him, he wanted me to understand, I could disappear without trace into the laboratories of these Doctors of No Conscience, sacrificed “to preserve the Aryan race.”

Like Uncle Tajuddin, my captor poses as my saviour, my protector …

“I must verify your identity as an Aryan, Princess,” said Vogel. “The Reich has recognized all Indian POWs as honorary Aryans.”

If this is what it means to be Aryan, I thought, I want no taint of it. But I dared not say this to Vogel
.

“You are a spy. I could have had you executed. Instead, I treat you as a POW.”

“But of course I am grateful, Herr Vogel,” I said, avoiding the issue of whether I am Aryan. I aim for graciousness, and never to give in
.

Instead, I tried to interest Vogel in my mother’s blood, because it is more powerful at present. Euro-American blood. He called it Caucasian, though Mother’s stories of her lineage could not be more distant from the Caucasus. I warned Vogel the Americans are coming, that he must keep me alive to barter when the Reich falls. Mon Allah, let him never know what I learned in 1940 when I contacted
the American embassy in London: Mother, having married an “alien ineligible for citizenship,” is no longer American
.

But this is a technicality; Mother remains American in the lies I tell Vogel
.

Images from the past fade; the present must be borne again. In the finite space of my cell I vacillate between despair and liberation. Is this madness, this edgy feeling that the abyss of non-being yawns beyond the next thought? The connective tissue between intent and action is wearing away. Imprisoned here, without even the solace of knowing the writer of my lettre de cachet, speculations multiply …