The Tiger Claw (72 page)

CHAPTER 42

Paris, France
December 1945

R
ELENTLESS RAIN
drove Parisians underground to the métro, scoured monuments, washed away paint, dirt, tears, six war years. General de Gaulle was now President de Gaulle. Gas lamps hissed on smaller streets, electric lights had returned in several arrondissements. The better-off were buying marrons glacés and Christmas presents at Galeries Lafayette, trying to believe the years of war were over, that nothing was scarred, no walls bruised by ripped-away German posters, German signs. The barricades that had blemished streets during the Battle of Paris were gone, motor car taxis were back on the streets, ferrying Allied soldiers to the Louvre and the bordellos of Montparnasse. Some Frenchmen were heard muttering about an American occupation. Banners—
Vive les Alliés, Merci pour la délivrance—
were fraying.

The restaurant on the rue de Sèvres near the Hôtel Lutétia once had the best
tarte tatin
, but the menu chalked on the blackboard offered Kabir no such delicacy today. He consulted his watch, ordered two café filtres and waited.

It was time, American pressmen in Paris were fond of saying, to “move on.”

But how could a man with no news of his sister “move on”? Every day, he lost a little more hope, hope he didn’t even know he
had to lose. He had sought Noor across Europe as his obligation as a member of the Khan family. But he did miss her, too.

He missed the Noor he remembered, wanted her back exactly as he remembered her.

After questioning Vogel, he had gone to Dachau, but in all the tons of documents translated for trials, there was no mention of Noor, Nora Baker, Madeleine or Anne-Marie Régnier. She was a Night and Fog prisoner, one of an unknown number of the disappeared.

Pforzheim prison was still standing, though a mound of bones and little else remained of the town. The governor, when denazified and reinstated to his job, could only confirm she had been there from November 1943 to September 1944, and his prison ledgers said she was sent to Dachau. He led Kabir down the women’s block, now full of Nazi men, to an empty cell. There he pointed to the inscription,
I resist, therefore I am
. A date almost two years earlier, and her signature, so small, Noor.

The governor was delighted by his discovery and eager to please. He promised to contact Kabir if any further information ever came to light. But the discovery only raised more questions. What did
Noor
mean? What resistance could she effect despite imprisonment? Where was she now?

So many questions, how could a brother move on?

Even France couldn’t just move on. First, said Frenchmen, the
épuration
of “national sentiments.” Some said, “I resisted, why didn’t you?” Others said, “I didn’t resist, therefore it was impossible to have resisted,” and discounted tales of resistance as wild exaggerations of Communists. What was resistance? Which acts were collaboration? Which acts of collaboration were simply necessary for survival? Old scores had been settled in the first few weeks of liberation when those deemed collaborators were brought to the rough and ready justice of the gun. Things had improved a little: now there were trials.

Kabir looked up as a tall, thin man with the unmistakable shuffle and sepulchral eyes of the returned deportee came through
the door. A spectre reappearing, he looked around the room as if inquiring who had summoned him. The few diners in the restaurant fell to a silence in which discomfort was mixed with horrified compassion. Kabir rose to his feet.

No beard. But those blue eyes were unmistakable.

Kabir started forward, holding out his hand, then faltered when Armand Rivkin didn’t extend his. Rivkin’s hand, indeed his whole right arm, was bandaged. Awkwardly, Kabir closed the distance between himself and Rivkin with a half-embrace.

Bones knocked beneath the shoulders of Rivkin’s wet tweed. Kabir resumed his seat. Rivkin sat down.

A glass partition seemed to rise between him and the Jew. All they had in common was Noor—and loving the same woman, as sister or girlfriend, wasn’t grounds for friendship. Would Rivkin remember Kabir saying so in 1940?

Cigarettes were all Kabir had to offer. Rough fingers took one; it vanished into Rivkin’s pocket. Two steaming cups were placed on the table between them—coffee served with almost palpable triumph.

Rivkin shook his head.

What had Kabir been thinking of, ordering coffee? He had heard, then forgotten, that coffee was vitriol in a deportee’s stomach. Someone might be offering Noor coffee at this moment …

He ordered crème brûlée instead, and began.

It was less difficult than he’d expected, as if he had some obligation to tell Rivkin the scant details he had. Tie facts together. Perhaps draw conclusions, ask if Rivkin was worthy of this war, of Kabir’s sorties over Germany. The warrior in him and the part that was American was proud. We saved you, we liberated you, he wanted to claim.

But he couldn’t. How many sorties had he and his crew flown in formation over concentration camps, using their brilliantly lit perimeters as landmarks, never thinking, never thinking … War required that, required the suspension of independent thought.
He’d done it as well as any other skipper. Bomber Harris didn’t think bombing rail tracks into the camps was a priority, so Kabir and his crew hadn’t thought so either. Much as Churchill might solemnly aver today, the war now christened the Second World War wasn’t undertaken for humanitarian reasons, but for survival. And for the import of tea, cotton, silk, jute, sugar and all the other luxuries Empire made possible. Revenge, too. Bombing of German civilians as revenge for Dunkirk, London, Coventry—never forget revenge.

He couldn’t be accusing, facing Rivkin today:
You didn’t leave her alone as you agreed. I heard she wrote to you. But not to me. Now she is missing, may have been tortured, may have died for your sake
. It would sound as if he’d given up, leaped to a premature conclusion that Noor was dead.

Rain twisted and pressed against the windows.

“Have you heard from Noor since your return?”

“No.”

No, when Kabir wanted to hear yes. Yet he was glad. Glad Noor hadn’t called Rivkin, hadn’t written to him. If she was alive, she’d reach Kabir, yes, she would.

“Do you have any news?” asked Armand.

“No.”

Maybe she wasn’t dead, but she haunted him in his dreams. Last night she came dressed in slacks with a breastplate, like Jeanne d’Arc. He couldn’t say this to Rivkin either. Any comparison to Jeanne d’Arc of the voices and braggadocio would ring overly facile. Heroines from before the war didn’t seem to apply as models, cinema actresses played heroines who were nothing like Noor, and he couldn’t recall hearing of any Muslim woman quite like Noor. Anyway, why should Rivkin feel moved by Jeanne d’Arc? Today, Jeanne d’Arc symbolized a France that had rejected him and his community. Rivkin’s eyes said he and his kin had now prepaid for all assistance received or to be received from France.

He should tell Rivkin what Vogel said, that Noor had written to “A.” Should, but the words wouldn’t come. Rivkin might ask if
Noor had also written to Kabir. Then he’d have to say no, not one letter since she was sent to France.

Insh’allah, Noor would return, and if it was important, she’d tell Rivkin herself.

He took a sip of coffee.

He should express an interest in the camps. But living, life itself, in the kind of death camps shown in newspaper photographs was past his Imaginot line; he couldn’t formulate a question.

“How … how were you saved?” His voice sounded unduly loud despite the clatter of spoons and plates behind them.

No answer for a long time. Kabir sensed Rivkin’s mental scan of millions of words in French, English, Russian, Yiddish … sensed the successive failure of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs.

“There were no reasons with the Germans,” said Rivkin. “At Auschwitz, we called those who smoked their last cigarettes and became ready to die Mussulmans—a misnomer, of course. No one wants to die when he has something left to live for. Even hatred gives one a reason to live, not to die.”

Another silence.

“I’ll tell you someday. Not now.”

The man across the table was harder, more obstinate—and, yes, stronger—for having been rejected in so many ways by countries and communities. Kabir too felt harder, harsher, older. But Rivkin had been tested to the limits of human endurance, a test that must have allowed him a glimpse of his true self. Kabir envied Rivkin that glimpse, but he was very grateful—
alhamdulillah
—that he had not experienced the same.

What if the true self is not as beautiful as the Sufis believe? What if it is shamefully amoral? Rumi said the soul is here for its own joy, but what if the outcast and the outcaste souls are here only for their own survival?

“Your hand?”

Rivkin dug it deeper into his coat pocket. “It’s ruined. I cannot play again.”

A statement of fact.

“And your mother?”

“You remember, do you not, that my mother was a washerwoman?”

The emphasis was unmistakable, linking “washerwoman” to Uncle’s objections to marriage between Rivkin and Noor. Kabir’s turn to maintain silence; words would only wound further.

“The Germans found out my mother was born in Moscow and they wrote ‘Russian spy’ in her file. At Drancy she was transferred to the laundry to wash typhus-infected clothing, and I thought she had been deported or was dead. Washing clothes saved her from Auschwitz—she was quarantined and could not be sent away. She never contracted typhus, either … she boiled her own clothes every night. But then …”

Eyes that had seen too much met Kabir’s.

“She died last week.”

What to say? Rivkin’s suffering, his mother’s suffering, Jewish suffering, set a new standard by which the suffering of all people would be measured. Every colonial not called upon by his occupier to report for annihilation with one suitcase could now be told his suffering was not commensurate.

“I’m sorry.” He was sorry, and he was not responsible. Not for this part of Rivkin’s suffering.

Silence lengthened, weighted with unspoken memories.

The crème brûlée arrived and for no reason reminded him that Rivkin had once attended Uncle Tajuddin’s lectures. That he’d been a seeker, a self-styled agnostic.

“Perhaps it may help you to meditate? Look for the hand of Allah—God—in all things?” The kind of suggestion Abbajaan would have made.

“God!” Rivkin’s laugh was like the rubbing of dry bones.

A godless man. Kabir was curiously unsurprised, as if he’d known the moment he sat down. He’d never talked with a godless man, really.

“Were … are you a Communist, then?”

A trace of a smile crossed Rivkin’s face. “That’s the American in you, always worried about Communists. No, I may be an atheist, but I’m no Communist. I sympathize with Communists—how could I not?—my father was a worker at Renault. But I rethought Communism in the camps. I rethought so many things.”

Kabir had an urge to agree in some way—a minor point would do.

“It’s classless, much like Islam,” he said.

“Classless? From Auschwitz, the Russians sent me to two camps. And even there I found that even when everyone is dressed the same, fed the same, made equal by suffering, there is no such thing as a classless society. Stalin doesn’t want a classless society—he wants a society of workers. Wants to banish complexity, just like the Nazis. And where there’s no complexity, there can be no art—only propaganda.”

Maybe Rivkin was right. Abbajaan had banned Indian music from his life rather than simplify it for his Western followers. Later, Uncle had banned complexity, killing any hereditary urge Kabir had to compose music.

“So, I think it may be difficult to truly love an art—any art—and also be a Communist. Or a Fascist. But”—Rivkin’s voice acquired an edge—“Communist or not, a rational human being can realize God is but a human creation, a myth constructed to control and comfort the poor, the powerless and the dispossessed of the world. So—I have no faith at all.”

“I see,” Kabir said.

But he didn’t. This would really hurt Noor; in fact, it might be the one thing that could finally sever her from the clutches of this Jew. But why, Allah, why was she who had so much faith the one still missing, feared dead—while ever-doubting Kabir, and Rivkin, agnostic turned atheist, were alive and here today?

“When did you … I mean, why did you lose faith?”

He asked for comparison with himself, though losing faith in Yahweh and losing faith in Allah might be two quite different things.

Rivkin’s face gave Kabir nothing, for a while. Then he said, “I used to believe in that force that sent me music. But now … I hear no music. Another loss, beginning with that first loss—Noor’s loss, our loss.”

Eleven years ago—the child.

If only he could explain to Rivkin: A much younger Kabir had felt besieged, excluded from full participation in France. He had attempted to conserve his religious community.

Rivkin’s spoon scraped the small dish.

It wasn’t that you were a Jew. I was raised to respect your religion—we are all People of the Book. It was that my eldest nephew could have been Jewish, not Muslim, and Afzal Manzil might be inherited someday by Jews
.