CHAPTER 2

Germany
July 1945

AGAINST THE FLUME and smear of a dying sun, the silhouette of a motorcycle rider rose over a ridge of dirt road. The sharp engine roar dropped and levelled. The rider’s gloved hands downshifted to avoid the scorched remnants of a tank blocking his way. The bike bounced over ruts and craters as Kabir swerved the pod of his sidecar around the shell-pocked hull. The Tiger tank was canted over its cannon, its mud-caked treads stilled in a ditch.

Kabir didn’t stop to examine the tank, or let thoughts of the Germans who must have died inside cross his mind, but goaded his rattling steed past. Showers sprang from spinning rubber as he furrowed a puddle. He shot a glance through spattered goggles at the jerricans bouncing in the sidecar and, gritting his teeth against flying mud and wind, headed into the darkening horizon.

Out of Strasbourg, Kabir had raced over a makeshift pontoon bridge crossing the Rhine with a moment of wonder. Only a few months earlier, before the Germans surrendered, crossing the Rhine at any point was unthinkable.

Faster, faster.

Past the Rhine, the road crumbled in patches, as if the very soil had soured beneath the tar-skin pasted upon it. Kabir’s Triumph sagged into valleys, zoomed past forests of pine. Detour upon detour drove him south to Freiburg im Breisgau, a city he knew only as a target objective last November, now almost conjured out of existence by Allied bombs—his bombs. As he drove through its high canyons of scorched rubble, the sight of a tiny, ragged girl foraging alone with a wooden bucket amid a mass of crushed possessions and twisted steel brought the Al-Fatiha surah to his lips:

“‘ … master of the Day of Reckoning,
To you we turn to worship
and to you we turn in time of need.
Guide us along the road straight,
the road of those to whom you are giving …’”

Now, as he sped past these patches of green and gold, it was difficult to believe he had just seen Alsatian hamlets like Gérardmer flattened to the level of its glacial lake by the retreating German army, seen the abandoned barracks, the gallows and gas chambers of Natzweiler-Struthof camp near Strasbourg, or the stone skeletons and smoky ghosts of Freiburg. The putrid stench of death at Natzweiler, mingled with the bomb-smoke and rain of Freiburg, lingered in his nostrils, saturated his lungs, an all-pervasive odour that the scent of lavender blooming by the roadside could not erase.

This was his first time on the ground through Germany. In his childhood, his father’s savings were reserved for passages “home” to India, not European excursions. And since 1933, Germany, though literate beyond Indian nationalists’ wildest dreams of progress, had become the sick core of Europe whence refugees flowed into France. Hitlerland was the omnivorous devourer of the hapless, the racially impure, the non-Gentile, the circumcised. But these beautiful forests, hills and fields of Germany seemed unblemished by German actions.

The motorcycle rattled past a sign—Stuttgart: 120 km—and approached an improvised checkpoint beside a maze of oil drums. A young American military policeman sauntered up, obviously expecting a courier on the motorbike. Noting Kabir’s rank, he snapped to. “Can I help you, sir?”

Kabir returned his salute and held out his pass and ID booklet. The MP studied the pass and looked uncertain. A lieutenant approached; they exchanged salutes.

Kabir raised his goggles, unbuckled his helmet, peeled off his gloves, while the lieutenant took the documents and read the pass aloud.

“‘This is to certify that the bearer, Flight Lieutenant Kabiruddin Khan of the Royal Air Force, is proceeding through Germany to locate his sister who was held in a German camp.’” He paused, glanced up at Kabir.

Kabir was intent on the road beyond the barrier, fist clenched about his gloves.

“‘It is requested that British, French, American and Russian military and civilian authorities assist Flight Lieutenant Khan in his task, and make such housing and mess facilities available, as well as radio, press and all other means which can help him locate his sister. A further request is made to permit his sister to cross the border with him on his return to his home in France.’” He again examined the signature and date on the pass for what seemed like an eon. “Which camp are you headed for, sir?”

“I don’t quite know. All I know is that my sister was deported to Germany.”

The lieutenant’s opinion of Kabir’s chance of success was expressed with a sigh, but Kabir was long past listening to the opinions of uniformed officials. He knew the odds were slim. Folded in his pocket he carried a list of the known concentration camps between the Alsace region and Berlin. And this list, without any German prisons, was three pages long. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross and UNRRA, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, had reminded him every day for weeks in Paris: one in ten people survived a camp. Searching for one woman among the millions displaced might be futile. But this was not just any woman. This was his sister, Noor.

Immediately after Germany surrendered, Kabir had obtained permission to return to Paris, where he waited for the transports bringing deportees and prisoners of war home to Paris. For weeks, in deepening amazement and horror, he met trains arriving at the Gare de l’Est each morning with hundreds upon hundreds of hollow-chested, shaven-headed returnees. Every day, at UNRRA headquarters, at welcome centres for returned deportees and at the Hôtel Lutétia, he examined and re-examined the cards and notes tacked to bulletin boards covering every wall, coming to realize with ever-mounting dread that while he was looking for one woman, many were searching for entire families. A lucky break had come a week before when he recognized an UNRRA worker. A former theosophist, she’d studied Sufism first at his father’s feet, then at Uncle Tajuddin’s, in the now-haloed years before the war, learning about the oneness of Allah and all other names for God. Straight away, he wheedled a list of German camps now under Allied control right out of her lacquered fingertips, requisitioned a motorcycle from an RAF base, obtained three weeks’ leave and a high-level pass, and came searching.

“Try Munich,” said the lieutenant, handing Kabir’s papers back with heavy finality. “There’s a collection centre there, run by UNRRA.”

“Thank you.” Gloves back on his hands, Kabir adjusted his helmet and goggles and gunned the engine.

“Good luck, sir.” The young MP waved Kabir through with a salute of triumphant camaraderie.

A short distance further, four men and two women carrying bundles and suitcases were climbing slowly into a Red Cross lorry parked along the road, facing Kabir. These anonymous survivors of the terror, weak from their time in the camps, still wearing their sacklike prison attire, were the liberated—“displaced persons,” or DPs—on their way to somewhere they once called or could now call home.

Kabir slowed, scanning their faces as they passed, searching for one familiar face, one woman’s face. Sympathy blended with revulsion. Noor—petite, gentle Noor—might be in such abject condition at that very moment. As they trudged past, a sob of desperation surfaced in him. He pushed it away. Insh’allah, Noor was alive. He began another du’a to add to all the others he’d uttered during the last few months, calling on Allah’s mercy for her.

Speeding to high gear again on the rutted road, a dust cloud lifting in his wake, he tried to recapture the bravado that had filled him like poppy-fume when he volunteered for the RAF, returned from flight school in Canada and began to fly bombers. Back then, in England, he was a refugee after the fall of France, and his British Indian citizenship gave him what he wanted most—the chance to fly. The destructive actions he justified multiplied daily as his tenets and personal code of conduct were suspended, superseded by the obligations of war.

Flying over Germany once in daylight last winter, the spiky pines bristling from snow-covered slopes were like the bayonets of Great War soldiers buried alive in the trenches of Verdun. From twenty thousand feet the world had looked flat but for mountains, giving no indication of the 23.5-degree tilt affecting the experiences of each person below, or the ferocity of emotions that curdled all co-operation and compromise. And nothing below had presented the jigsaw of warring countries, delineated any boundaries or coloured parts of the soil Occupied. The surface flowed instead from grassy field to knoll, ridge, escarpment, cliff, sea.

But now, what had looked like green explosions erupting in sudden abundance beneath his wings had expanded to three dimensions—dense foliage flashing past his careening motorcycle.

Kabir acknowledged his motives, acknowledged that he would have, and had, killed for the joy of flying ever more wonderful machines, almost as complex as birds. How he loved that swift, fragile Mosquito whose engines and high-octane fuel propelled him across the Channel and back, through searchlights and puffs of ack-ack, almost as fast as the rotation of the giant planet beneath. Flying, he felt ever closer to the infinite Allah, ever conscious of the hidden Orient hemisphere, regretting only that he could never gain enough altitude to see it. Later in the war he had thought of himself as a birdman carrying seed, and the scattered markings on the fuselage of his Lancaster the coefficient of Indian bravery. High in his metal bubble, the lure of gravity had been his most pressing problem, gravity operating even in the aquamarine depths below, saving fish from sloshing away into space. The probability of Messerschmitts sharpened each reaction, increased his impetus to prove his role in the drama of Europe’s war.

It came to him now, as he saw these displaced people, that after each night’s sortie, while he could—allhamdullilah!—retreat to safety across that tiny moat heaving as if with uneasy dreams between the crone face of England and the sea-encrusted Continent, he’d been far above the sight and smell of blood, the effect of his work, that he’d been spared a single scream of the dying. While he feared only the blaze of sudden fall and a living cremation, or capture, the lives of the landbound had been a string of long moments of dread and privation.

And yet. Some intangible element within him and the survivors was indestructible; it had demanded of all of them that they survive these terrible years.

If Noor hadn’t survived, he would never forgive himself. If she was wounded or worse because of his bombs—Damn it, why had he bragged about Noor to Boddington? It was Kabir who introduced Noor to Nick Boddington—a journalist, so he’d thought—whom he met perusing The New York Times in the circular reading room at the British Museum Library. How anxious he’d been then to prove his loyalty to Britain, how anxious for Noor to prove hers too. It was 1942—must have been June, for it was shortly after Premier Laval said “I desire Germany’s victory” and broadcast his latest madness, a program to exchange six French workers for each French POW held in Germany. One of Noor’s stories for children was to be broadcast over the BBC, and he’d mentioned it to Boddington over a pint at the Café de Paris in Trafalgar Square. Surrounded by a babble of languages, including the halting, lilting English of refugees from all over Europe ordering themselves into old hierarchies, he’d enumerated Noor’s accomplishments: multilingual, children’s writer, pianist, qualified nurse, wireless telegraphist. Impressed, Boddington wondered out loud if his sister might be amenable to doing a little “liaison work” for King and Country—“very hush-hush and all that, could bring in a bit more pocket money, if you get my drift.” And Kabir said, “Yes, of course, but of course,” and gave friendly Nick Mother’s address where Noor could be reached.

And just why was he so anxious for Noor to take any position Boddington offered? Admit it now: was it that Boddington’s very hush-hush job brought in a few pounds more than a telegraphist’s pay, more than any nurse or secretary in London earned, and those few pounds more would help him support Mother, Dadijaan and their young sister Zaib? No, no, that wasn’t all. Admit the real reason: he meant to spare Noor the remotest chance she might be ordered to clean bedpans, swab blood, tend strange men. War be damned, at the time, he couldn’t stomach the idea that if Noor became a nurse on active duty, she, his sister, his unmarried sister, would touch, hold, bathe men’s naked bodies—unrelated men.

He could imagine Noor, gentle Noor, as a wireless operator for the Nursing Yeomanry, as Mother, Dadijaan and Zaib believed, but not as a secret agent. He couldn’t imagine his sister flying the Channel to France tucked in the gunner’s end of a Lysander.

Because Kabir still thought in French, preferring the solid logic of its verbs to the exception-dense mutt-quality of English, he could have asked to be assigned to the no-less-dangerous path of the Lysanders carrying guns, ammunition and operatives like Noor into France; bilingual pilots were in high demand. But like some other RAF men, he thought the Lizzies a mere bus service and remained with Bomber Command. When his bombardier released the four-thousand-pound cookies that stung the distant surface, none of them knew if the bombs had found their targets. Wind and speed affected their downward trajectory, and Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and his officers at Bomber Command had to wait for aerial reconnaissance photos taken in daylight, and coded dispatches from wireless operators like Noor, to determine the extent of enemy damage. Noor had sent such damage reports, reports on enemy strength, troop and supply movement, arsenals, artillery the Allies would encounter across northern France and beyond.

Brother and sister are tethered at the ankle, always running together in a three-legged race, striving to match one another’s stride, leaning on one another even as they pull away. Younger by two years, he’d leaned on Noor from the time he was ten and his father, Abbajaan, went “home” to India and never returned. All of them—Mother, Dadijaan and Zaib—had relied on her; so he was, well, affronted that she hadn’t leaned in similar fashion on him.

He was in charge of the family, and had been in charge since they all arrived in London. She should have consulted him when someone from Boddington’s hush-hush organization interviewed her! Instead, she just upped and volunteered to go overseas. In fact, she told no one she was being sent back to Paris. Until the fateful War Office letter, the entire family believed Noor was stationed in North Africa.

Noor could have, should have, confided in him if no one else. Forget the damn secrecy. Not a single letter from her since she left for France. Not one letter to Mother, Dadijaan, Zaib or himself in two years.

As dusk faded to darkness, the engine sputtered. Kabir slowed to a stop, dropped his foot to the verge of the road and dismounted. Coming around the bike, he stayed on tar to avoid land mines. He hoisted a jerrican clear of the sidecar with greater force than was warranted by its weight and used a rubber hose and metal funnel to pour the last few pints into the tank. He doffed his goggles and helmet, took a welcome gulp from a canteen, and swept the back of his hand across his moustache and stubbled chin. Then, chilled by some vague premonition, he reached into the sidecar for his RAF jacket.

Distant bells, rusted from five years of silence, sounded wavering tones against the evening air. They announced food and a place to rest nearby, raking Kabir in like a marker drawn across a map to a plotter’s magnet.

He was loath to stop, but stop he must. Besides being low on petrol, he was stiff and sore from long hours of riding, and needed information—if nothing else, confirmation that he might somewhere in Munich find a card or file with Noor’s name on it.

He guided himself by the tall steeple needling the sky, through the town’s brick-lined streets to the central square. Everywhere, the dispossessed shuffled and limped, helping the wounded or carrying their meagre belongings.

He stopped two Frenchmen in faded stripes and showed them his most recent photograph of Noor. They stared at her serious face, arrested by her direct gaze. Vibrant eyes, Kabir told them, black and fiery, just as in the photo. Her hair—long, wavy, jet black. He demonstrated her height at the level of his chin, no more than five foot three. Petite, he said, very petite; from a distance you could mistake her for a child. Perhaps they knew her by her Western name, Nora Baker? or her code names, Anne-Marie Régnier, or “Madeleine”?

“Non. Désolé,” they said. The Frenchmen had been held in a POW camp, not a concentration camp. They questioned Kabir in return about their loved ones. Kabir listened carefully, compassionately, but sadly shook his head as he had so many times before.

At a dry stone fountain before the church a peasant woman sat alone nursing a baby, a small basket beside her. Past her, thin, rough-looking men clustered around a small fire, cooking. Through the broken light from the remains of stained glass set in Gothic arches, Kabir saw a file of the forlorn thronging the centre aisle inside the church.

Dismounting, he wheeled the motorcycle to an alley around the back. He switched off the headlamp and began searching for a place to secure his bike.

Light glowed from an open door. A stable. A stable crowded with hollow-faced men and women, spreading jackets and saddle blankets on the straw in the stalls for the night. Polish or Russian flowed between them—he couldn’t tell. A few stared in hostile silence, some in frank curiosity. He moved on.

Ten paces past the stable stood a weatherbeaten garage. Kabir pulled a torch from his pocket and wrenched the door open. Flicked the torch on.

Someone gasped, and a ghost hand shot into view, palm raised, fingers splayed as if to halt him. The torch beam jerked in an arc. Another hand rose before him, then another. Kabir lowered the beam: half a dozen frightened faces below the forest of surrendering arms. German soldiers moving homewards, hoping to surrender to the British or Americans.

“Restez tranquilles,” he reassured them, and backed away from their visible relief. They were boys. Or maybe they just looked like boys to him. This damn war had aged him far beyond his twenty-nine years. If he spoke German, Kabir could have explained they had nothing to fear—that the Russian army was nowhere near this tiny town, that British, French and American troops had thousands of German POWs now and were no longer interested in surrenders, except of Nazis and other war criminals.

Did those boys realize that their suffering was the outcome of arrogance? that the battles of Paris and London, the bombing of Coventry and Dunkirk, made this necessary?

Necessary. How much retaliation had really been necessary?

In the alley, he switched on the headlamp again. Shadows loomed and shrivelled against the church walls—tattered scavengers sifting through rubbish. The beam illuminated an iron hitching ring embedded in the church wall. Kabir mounted, started the bike and guided it up to the wall in low gear. He took a fastening cable from the sidecar, looped one end around the frame, the other into the ring of the post, then snapped a Masterlock through both ends. The empty jerricans couldn’t be secured, but were hidden beneath the black button-down cover.

Why had it been his hands that guided a plane to where it could drop its payload on the most people? Women, like that one looking at him with deadened eyes. Children, like the street urchin looking like a starving beggar-child from India.

Kabir entered the church through a side door, fighting the urge to pull his collar to his nose against the reek of flea-infested, unwashed humanity. In Paris bistros before the war he’d played lighthearted games with friends, identifying the origins of tourists fed on buttered scones, kielbasa, sauerkraut or paprikashed goulash from their sweat—so different from people raised on wheat and brie. But here the pores of each man, woman and child excreted a common animal odour of rot, dirt, disease, feces and fear, indistinguishable in origin.

So many years since he was in a church or mosque, he’d almost forgotten the silence such places inspire. A U.S. Army chaplain stood near the altar with Red Cross workers dispensing hot soup in place of the sacrament, ladling it from a great cauldron to outstretched metal bowls. What of the German parish priest? Probably interned long ago in some Nazi camp.

Every inch of the church was covered by ragged travellers of all ages, kneeling, sitting, lying anywhere, everywhere, in pews, on the stone floor. Some sat, some lay pillowing their heads on rotten shoes, many coughing and spitting. Children wailed or played. Money-changers operated in the shadows, turning Reichsmarks and American military scrip to dollars and pounds. Money passed from hand to grasping hand.

As he had in other villages, Kabir queued with the rest, hoping the steaming cauldron was full enough to contain a share for him. Hushed voices rose and fell in a dozen languages and dialects around him:

“How far is the border from here?”

“Which border? Of this zone or of France? Maps change every day.”

“Please, is there an orphanage? This child is lost.”

“Did you hear Herr Truman came to Berlin, now the canals are clean? Ja, the Russkies made the Nazis haul out the dead first.”

“Pétain will be tried next. Oh, let the Maréchal reveal his ‘double game’ now. Perhaps he’ll be found dead, like Hitler and his whore.”

“Hitler dead? Not so—I hear he gave a speech on the radio.”

“My village is in Poland. Is there any Poland now?”

Someone clutched at his arm. “I have sister—she is pretty little virgin, she love officers,” said rotten teeth and a cunning smile.

Kabir shook the ghoul away in horror. His gaze flitted from face to face.

Noor, dear sister—where are you?

Kabir reached the front of the queue. The American chaplain sloshed lukewarm liquid into his bowl.

“Better than water soup,” rasped a shaven-headed scarecrow. His toothless grin made him look ancient.

Kabir’s hunger pronounced the soup and slice of Wonderbread worthy of Maxim’s.

He rinsed his bowl and spoon in a drum of scalding, soapy water, dipped it into another drum of boiling hot water and joined a queue for the slit trench at the back of the church. After a wash from a jug of hot water, he climbed to the second storey, spread his jacket as a prayer rug and did namaaz, hoping, as he had since his tenth birthday—the day Abbajaan transferred his mantle to his shoulders—that the prescribed motions would open the invisible connection to the Divine and leave in its wake the deep, abiding faith in the will of Allah that Abbajaan always had.

But on this night, as on every night, nothing moved within him. When he had completed each motion and prayer, he was still alone.

Someday your heart must awaken, he told himself sternly.

Oh, for the luxury of faith! But since the German invasion in 1940, when the war truly began for France, for Kabir and his family, he’d been awkward with Allah, finding it impossible to believe the Most Merciful would will the Western world into this state of barbarism.

Faith would rise because it must. The hiatus of war was over. Abbajaan’s followers would be among the displaced making their way home from concentration camps. They would return for Kabir’s blessing, his assurance, as Abbajaan would have given them, that Allah would recognize their sacrifices. He could not, like Edward VIII, say, “I hereby declare my irrevocable determination to renounce the Throne for myself and my descendants,” for he had no physical throne to renounce. The warrior in him balked at abdication, like the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, when so many needed Kabir as their organic link to the late Inayat Khan. Hazrat Inayat Khan. To tell them Abbajaan’s blood was no guarantor of continuing faith or understanding of Sufi thought would be cruel indeed after all their suffering. And Kabir and his family relied on the donations of the faithful to the Sainah Foundation—all of which meant that any such misgivings or crises of faith must, simply must, be quelled.

Suddenly overcome with fatigue, he returned to ground level and found a length of stone slab on which to lie, rolled his jacket into a pillow and used his cap to shade his eyes from the too acute angles of the Gothic arches over his head.

He dreamed Noor sat writing at a table suffused with light. Yes, that was Noor, not his sister Zaib or his girl Angela—black hair strayed about that oval face. She paused, nibbling the end of her pencil the way she often did. She looked far past him down the way he had come, and wrote again, as if writing his deeds in the Book of Judgement. He floated between her and the light, and now he could read over her shoulder. She wasn’t writing in Persian script. No, she wrote in English. And in the language that was not Abbajaan’s, not their heritage, she wrote cruel truths about Kabir. Guileless, she wrote Kabir had betrayed her, sent her alone into harm’s way.

Kabir woke, heart in spasm as if a bugle called him to another freezing sortie over Europe. He sat up, quickly spitting to his left side, in case the Noor he’d dreamed of was the recorder of his deeds. If she was, there should be two of her—twin angels, the Kiraman Katibeen, pious writers writing diligently in the Book of Judgement. Couldn’t he even dream it right?

How is a man to know these days which deeds will finally be recorded as good, which ones as evil?

Light slivers of cobalt and scarlet filtered through shards of stained glass and stilled Kabir’s dreams the next morning. A shave, a cursory wash, a tin mug of coffee and three slices of unbuttered bread eased some of his stiffness. More refugees filed in, and the second storey came alive with crying babies and children as exhausted knots of people found places to rest. So Kabir gave up his space and jogged smartly up the bell tower’s hundred and six stone stairs for his Fajar prayers.

At the top, a small iron balcony suspended him over the central avenue of the town like a mullah in a minaret about to call the faithful. In the distance, fields amber with wheat rippled beside the road he’d travelled the previous evening. To the west, undulating hills rose to meet the Black Forest. He faced towards Mecca, towards Munich, and did his remembrance of Allah, praying this day to find Noor or, insh’allah, some clue as to her whereabouts.

Heartened with new resolve and urgency, he descended into the church again, thanked the chaplain for his stay and asked directions to the nearest U.S. motor pool for petrol. The chaplain drew a map locating it a few kilometres from the church and, yes, Munich might be a place to continue his inquiries about Noor.

In the cool sunshine of the alley outside, refugee women were removing their shoes and socks to wash clothes under a water pump. Except for their dresses they looked like poor women he’d seen in India.

He unbuttoned the canvas shroud covering the sidecar. Fumes were released from the remains of the petrol when he opened the jerricans. Not much left in them.

He put on his gloves and goggles, strode smartly around the motorbike, unlocked and released the cable, swung his leg over the bike and kick-started it.

Nothing.

Kabir swore softly in Hindustani and kicked the starter again.

Still nothing.

He swore in French. Kicked downwards again.

A cough and a backfire, then nothing.

Kabir dismounted. “Bugger it!”

A smart metallic report as his boot hit the wheel rim.

Delay, delay. Nothing to do but button down the damn canvas, retie the bloody fastening cable, relock the damn Masterlock, and set off on foot through the cobbled streets clogged with refugees to the U.S. Army motor pool.

An hour of walking and a ride in the back of an army truck brought Kabir to an officer to whom he presented his letter of authorization—possibly the most harried man in Germany, juggling transport and maintenance demands for several units.

“Motorbike? Not my specialty—but there’s a sarge back there who claims to know all about them. Guy with three up and one down.” His fingers traced chevrons on his sleeve. “Behind the deuce-and-a-half.”

In search of the lorry Kabir wended his way past soldiers in grease-streaked OD fatigues, through an obstacle course of vehicles in stages of diagnosis or dismemberment, past a field where bewildered British soldiers were learning baseball. He spotted the staff sergeant’s chevrons, three up and one down, under the open bonnet of the lorry, where he was teaching a private more about cussing than mechanics. A thoughtful, rotund face emerged, and a husky six-foot-three snapped to attention and the reflex of a salute as Kabir approached.

“At ease, sergeant.”

Kabir returned the salute, then explained, pointing back to the village. The sergeant nodded and sent the private scurrying for spare parts, a tool kit and some cans of petrol. Then back to the harried officer for permission.

“I should make you walk like us infantry,” the officer bantered with jovial disrespect. “But you RAF guys sure put on a helluva fireworks display for Hitler, so I guess old Uncle Sam should loan you a Jeep.” To the sergeant, “You get your black ass back here ASAP, get it?”

“Yes, sir!”

A Jeep pulled up and Kabir swung into the passenger seat beside the sergeant. They bounced back to the gate, past a guardhouse and back onto the road.

“Where’re you from, sir?”

A question Kabir detested.

He could have said he was from London, where he’d sported his British India passport through five years of war. He could have said Baroda, the tiny kingdom in India where his grandfather’s ancestral home was presumably still standing. He could have told this Dravidian-faced GI the name of any city in the world and, given people’s ignorance of geography, the information would have the same non-effect.

But Kabir had lived in Paris most of his life. Other men kept their beloved girlfriends or wives before them as they fought, but not Kabir. For him, Afzal Manzil—house of peace—the house Abbajaan left to him and the Sainah Foundation, was sacred ground worthy of battle. And so, because he had most to claim and most to lose in Paris, he answered, “Paris.”

Paris. Paris and all of France, abandoned but fixed in still life for four years in Kabir’s memory, had been held hostage by the Germans. His city had endured unspeakable deprivation, pain, secrets and shame. But he’d “done his bit,” as they said in England—by bombing its marshalling yards when ordered.

“But you’re in the RAF? ‘Scuse my sayin’, sir, but you don’t look English.”

“My father was from India.”

The sergeant appeared either confused or unenlightened by this. Kabir tried again.

“You know, the place Christopher Columbus was looking for.”

The sergeant swerved to avoid a pothole. “Columbus was a Wop, wasn’t he, sir? Like Mussolini—no sense of direction.” He squinted down the macadam road. “Never met anyone, and anyhow no officers, from India.”

“And I’ve never met any Negroes to talk to.”

“Yeah? Lots of us in London, sir.”

Kabir shook his head. There were swing clubs in London where, to the chagrin of their British mothers, women lily-white as Angela went dancing with Negroes, but he’d never frequented them.

“I saw Indians in London, sir, but if you’ll ‘scuse my sayin’, you’re not real dark, and you don’t wear a turban. I did figure you was too polite to be American.”

“My mother is American,” said Kabir. “From Boston.”

“Uh-huh! Thought so. You’re a mulatto.”

The Jeep tilted into a decline, then accelerated again. Kabir accepted the label warily, never having applied it to himself before.

The sergeant said after a while, “Must be some lady, your ma, marrying your pa.”

Kabir smiled polite assent.

“No, I mean it—that’s one gutsy lady. You ever see your white folks in America?”

“No,” said Kabir. Mother’s family was opaque to him, absent from her spoken recollections, which always began from the day Miss Aura Baker packed one portmanteau and a hat box and caught a steamer from Boston Harbor to London town, arriving at the Sufi Music Centre, which was at that time Abbajaan’s only doorstep, and proposing marriage. Family lore continued that Abbajaan had warned her he was a dervish, that bread and water were to be her lot, but it didn’t deter Mother. And for eight years, while Abbajaan tried to perform Indian classical music to ever sparser audiences in England, she said he’d been right about the bread and water.

“And ‘scuse my sayin’, sir, but I don’t believe you ever will see them.”

“Why’s that, sergeant?”

“Heck, sir—when your father’s a coloured man, that’s real tough for white folks to swallow. Where I come from, there are laws against it. Your pa could get lynched for less in my hometown.”

The Jeep made a detour between the drums of an unmanned roadblock set up to slow traffic. The sergeant kept his eyes on the road.

“Most unfortunate,” said Kabir.

Lame response—as if fortune were to blame for man-made laws.

His kaftaned Abbajaan was brown, not “coloured” or “black.” Kabir was nine when he first learned that the United States had only two classifications, white and black, for all people. Abbajaan had returned from a performance tour to the States, annoyed by reviewers who devoted more inches to “the lightness of his coloured skin,” his “exotic dress and accent,” than to the music he so cherished. America, said Abbajaan, had the strange idea that what it called “freedom” was possible without justice in society. Pity had surprised Kabir, a pity he’d never forgotten, imagining Abbajaan’s discomfort in the midst of his moneyed white followers in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

“He’d be a Hindoo, like that Mr. Gandhi, right?” The sergeant was speculating again.

“A Muslim,” Kabir corrected. “Like Mohammed Ali Jinnah.”

“Oh, I get it, like Elijah Mohammed. A heathen, anyways, for your ma’s white family, right, sir?”

Kabir acknowledged this, though Mother had converted to Islam immediately upon marriage, whereupon the words “infidel” and “heathen” became applicable to her blood relatives, certainly not his father’s. Yes, it was possible, indeed probable, that Mother’s family saw Abbajaan and himself as heathens.

Still, it was no business of this stranger.

“You don’t speak like a Negro, sergeant.”

“‘Scuse my sayin’, sir, but you don’t either.” A giant guffaw followed.

Kabir smiled thinly, holding on as the Jeep bucked and slid sideways beneath him. When he was five, Abbajaan had sung a few anti-Raj songs that drew the attention of British authorities. He’d been obliged to flee London, like the Prophet to Medina, and so the family had moved to Paris. The sergeant’s comments were making Kabir glad Abbajaan had chosen Paris over Boston. In Paris, among Abbajaan’s rentier followers, blood distance from royalty, even petty royalty, was the measure of excellence, while skin colour went unnoted.

“I talk white, like you, sir,” the sergeant confided with pride. “Been working on it a few months now.”

“You have?”

The sergeant nodded. “When I got to London, it hit me right away: the enlisted men in the British army talked in their different accents, but their officers talked like they’re all on the BBC. That got me thinking. I started noticing how I talk. Realized that on the telephone, on the radio, even when they couldn’t see me, they could hear the colour of my skin. So I figure I’ll just talk different—fool ‘em whenever I want.”

“Been here a long time, then, sergeant?”

“A little over a year now. I was with the Red Ball Express, hauling gas and ammo from the depots to forward airfields. Got assigned to the pool afterwards—I’m a natural with machines.”

The sergeant had supplied le sang rouge de guerre—the red blood of war—when the Allied armies sped past their supply lines in late 1944. His endless hours of driving in convoys and each five-gallon jerrican he hauled had saved Allied forces from stalling on their way to the Rhine.

“How long before you go home?” Kabir asked the question foremost in every serviceman’s mind since Mr. Truman had declared a Day of Prayer throughout America and diplomats were back in split-tailed splendour on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Don’t mind if I never go back, sir, though I’m a native son. Think I’ll just settle down anywhere there ain’t no Whites Only signs. Not Germany, even though the women are real easy pickin’s here now we’re allowed to fraternize. Many of them have never seen Negro Americans like me. We tell ‘em we’re night fighters and they all doggone believe it! I’d live in Paris, maybe. Negroes do well there—I’ll have a club of my own. Can’t do that in Mississippi without a Colored sign, you know, sir. But then again, maybe you don’t know, seeing as you pass.”

“Pass?”

“Pass for white, sir.”

The Jeep ploughed past a scorched, roofless cottage. A sagged-faced woman shouted after them, pointing to her cart filled with pots, pans and clocks for sale.

Kabir kept his face impassive and looked away. His aspirations had so far been better served by identifying with Mother’s race than with Abbajaan’s. No reason to admit this to a stranger. And “passing,” as the sergeant called it, only takes one so far: Kabir wasn’t entitled to American citizenship, since Mother had lost hers by marrying an Asian Indian. American laws expressed the wishes of Mother’s family perfectly. An occasional letter arrived when a relative died, and once, a parcel had sailed across the Atlantic from an aunt in Boston.

“Right now, I must get to Munich,” he said, showing the sergeant his photograph of Noor. “I’m searching for my sister. I know she’s still alive.”

“Amen, sir. She’s about your colour; don’t you worry—she’ll be just fine.”

The spire and bell tower of the village church came into view. The Jeep closed in on its destination, dust barrelling in its wake.

“Can I ask you a question, sir?” said the sergeant as they turned into the village and bumped into the central square. “You have any trouble with the white folks in your unit?”

“In the beginning,” said Kabir, “but after a while the important thing is flying, fighting and bombing, and how well you do it.”

He wanted to add, “You have to fly better, do everything better, be more anxious, show more courage, and shout louder for King and Country,” but he was an officer, and such confessional remarks would establish an equality he wasn’t sure he wanted.

Kabir never imagined himself, and certainly not Noor, fighting for England. England was too full of lords and ladies still posturing and preening in clubs while mocking the French for their defeat and betrayal of democracy, and Indians for their nonviolent struggle for independence. His equal presence in the officers’ mess had required an effort of mental inclusion that was beyond his fellow British citizens, the normal hazing, mocking and teasing that would have broken formality becoming an extension of imperialism in the hands of the hazer, so that they and he all found themselves playing roles in a very old script.

It didn’t help that he couldn’t fit their image of an Indian—too tall, too fair, not Hindu, not Gurkha, not even Sikh. A Muslim. A Sufi Muslim, they sniggered—“sounds delicious.” And Kabir would explain earnestly and proudly. Uselessly, too, for not one, if questioned, could have repeated anything he said over tankards of beer. He became accustomed to this. It gave him the freedom to indulge in reverie out loud, to reminisce, pontificate, even pray, without concern his words would change anything or be remembered by his mates. In place of friends he gathered followers, as Abbajaan once did, prolonging his own life and career by showing unstinting appreciation to his flight crew and those who maintained his aircraft.

“You’re right, sir—I always say, if you’ve got the grits, serve ‘em.”

Kabir pointed the way to the alley behind the church. The sergeant shifted to second gear and turned. The Jeep approached the motorcycle against the church wall.

“And the white misses, sir? Would they go out with you if they find out you ain’t really white?”

Actually, the few English girls he knew would do what their mothers never dreamed of. Especially Angela. She listened to Kabir, loving his strangeness—his dark, wiry moustache, slim hands with tapering fingers, his straight white teeth. Angela listened as he vowed, when the war was over, to return to France and spend the rest of his life like a travelling curator, exhibiting Abbajaan’s Sufi ideas: peace, love, tolerance. Above all, tolerance—the simplest idea, the most difficult to teach.

And damned difficult to learn.

“No,” he replied. “But it made no difference to my girl.”

“You got a picture?”

Kabir snapped the catch of the locket on his watch, showed him Angela’s rose-touched, dreamy smile. Angela’s coquettish eyes, so unlike Noor’s direct gaze. Kabir could all but see those lashes fluttering. Fine rippled locks—light grey in the photo, but the sergeant had made a mental correction to gold.

“She gonna marry you, sir?”

Kabir closed the locket with a broad smile. “Haven’t the faintest idea, sergeant. I’ll ask her when I return to London.”

The sergeant grunted sceptically. Kabir jumped off the Jeep as it slowed to a stop. The sergeant heaved his bulk out and took his tool kit from the back. He squatted and stared solemnly at the motorcycle engine.

“Just think, sir,” he said, “you and I gotta go to all this trouble because a bunch of Kraut, Eye-talian and Jap white folks wanted to take over the world from the other white folks.”

Kabir nodded, though he’d never thought of the Japanese as white. And the war with those chaps was far from over; the U.S. fleet had just begun bombarding the main islands of Japan. In three weeks’ time Kabir would have to report for duty and could be sent to the Far East to bomb Japan. At least he wasn’t a fighter pilot who’d be called on to intercept those suicidal lunatics strapped into their bomb-loaded planes. What did they call themselves? Kamikazes.

His view of the war was rather different from those of his fellow officers. As a colonial, born in Britain of a father from an Indian princely state subservient to the Raj, he felt Britain’s historic lust for power and its rule in countries it occupied to be only slightly less virulent than Germany’s, and scoffed internally at the English view of themselves as being less racist, more humane than Hitler. Over the last four years more than three million Indians—many Muslims like himself—died of starvation in British India, thousands in the streets of Calcutta, from deprivation far worse than any he had witnessed riding through the villages of France or Germany, many times worse than privations in blitzed and bombed London. After the bombing of Chittagong and Calcutta, Churchill’s “Rice Denial policy” and “Boat Denial policy” diverted rice from the people to war-related industries; and in London, when only the tiny expatriate Indian community had protested and shouted “Famine!” it was Churchill, demigod to Kabir’s fellow officers, who refused to extend UNRRA’s war relief to His Majesty’s brown subjects. So Hitler caused the deaths of yet-uncounted millions by his actions, Churchill by inaction.

Was there a difference, Kabir wondered, excepting opportunity and method?

A ragtag band of blond-haired waifs gathered around the Jeep, the youngest about five, the oldest fifteen. Holding hands, whispering. He didn’t have to know German; they were debating what could be filched or begged.

The will to survive is amoral.

These children and every other survivor had a tale. Stories the newspapers could not know. They’d tell them someday, in pubs and bistros, in beer gardens and boarding houses, to anyone who would listen.

Kabir was as responsible as Churchill for the rain-filled craters in German cities. Somewhat responsible for the lost stares of these children. But now that he was on the ground, on the Continent, a single line from Mr. Gandhi’s prison cell resonated louder in Kabir than all the stentorian speeches of Churchill. When asked his opinion of Western civilization, Gandhi said, “It would be a good idea.”

Small errors compounded. The German interpretation of Darwin, and the loss of faith all over Europe, that loss of faith of which he too was guilty. Errors hardened into assumptions that clogged the arteries of intelligence, scarred the sensitivity of synapses, till European minds travelled only pre-grooved pathways. Infidel armies were drawn into battle, each fighting for their collective hallucinations and territories.

Kabir’s family had the misfortune of being caught between them. Hitler first outlawed Sufism in Germany, whether practised by Muslims or anyone else. Then, when his armies swept through Holland, the Sainah Foundation at The Hague was raided by the Gestapo and Abbajaan’s followers were arrested, thrown into camps. Before that happened in France, Kabir and his family escaped, and soon he and Noor found themselves fighting “for England.”

The motorbike stood motionless, and Kabir, in a fever to be on his way, paced the alley. Children followed like dogs sniffing at his ankles. Eventually, the sergeant, using wrenches, spanners, swear words and new spark plugs, completed surgery.

Some other time, what my Indian half shares or cannot share with the heritage and experience of this helpful, generous black man must be discussed. But now I can only ask Allah’s blessing upon him and hurry on, for Noor’s sake.

The bike sputtered and fired back to life. The sergeant exchanged three full jerricans for the empties in Kabir’s sidecar, handed Kabir a few K-rations and diverted the children by tossing a K-ration packet across the street. A brown hand engulfed a darker one briefly, warmly, before the Jeep swung away down the alley.

The motorbike thundered away from the village milling with woeful, bargaining refugees, and headed in the direction of Munich.

Kabir placed a trunk call to Zaib from the Messerschmitt factory at Gablingen Kaserne, now a U.S. military base. He’d been in this area in 1942—one of his first operational raids, and against a military target, the Augsburg MAN plant. In daylight, at very low level. Seven of the twelve Lancasters in his squadron were shot down, his own severely damaged.

It was soon after these early raids that city centres became Sir Arthur’s targets. City centres were all one could see and hit at night—was that Kabir’s fault? Harris called it terror bombing. Rays from searchlights criss-crossed as his plane screamed over them, and the cities became caskets of jewels as his bombs exploded.

Banish the image.

“Dr. Zaib-un-nisa Khan, please.”

Zaib might be the very first doctor in their family. Definitely the first woman to become a doctor. Still unmarried—probably touching unrelated men, wounded soldiers, every day.

Her voice, so much like Noor’s, kindled a painful ringing in his inner ear. “I’ve been on the telephone all day, talking to the Central Tracing Bureau of the Red Cross, the War Office, Miss Atkins. No one seems to know anything. They keep mentioning the Official Secrets Act and all that.”

“And Boddington? Did you talk to Boddington?”

“Yes. He says he last met Noor in Paris in July.”

“July? This is July. Or did he mean last year, before the liberation of Paris?”

“Non, non, Kabir. Écoutez! July of ‘43.”

Two years ago! Information like starlight—it told you the star was alive light years ago, but was that star still pulsing?

“Did you ask if she sent any letters? Any that may not have been forwarded to us?”

“Of course I did. He said there were none.”

“And then?”

“He was vague after that. I got the impression he wasn’t at liberty to say.”

“Damn it, Zaib, the war is over. Why the secrecy now?”

“Don’t swear. Where are you now?”

“Augsburg. On my way to a refugee collection centre at Munich. How’s Mother?”

“She doesn’t eat much. Dadijaan isn’t even arguing with her. The two of them are sitting together in the drawing room.”

“Together?”

He couldn’t remember Mother and her mother-in-law, Dadijaan, ever sitting together voluntarily, not since Dadijaan first arrived in Paris in 1938. When Mother married Abbajaan in 1913, she received a Muslim name, and it was assumed she would uphold her husband’s religion and traditions. So whenever there was a chance of Kodaks and photo bulbs, she dressed up in a sari. Abbajaan would send the resulting family photo “home” to Dadijaan in Baroda. And all through Mother’s sole two-year visit to India as Abbajaan’s widow, she had worn saris. And so Mother completely and unwittingly misled Dadijaan to believe she wore saris every day, all day, as did Dadijaan. In Paris.

The discovery, on arriving in Paris, that her daughter-in-law, her son’s widow, Rukhsana Begum née Aura Baker, habitually bared her legs beneath a dress evoked Dadijaan’s deep and abiding suspicion. From that moment, Mother, American though she was, began to personify the East India Company, the British Raj, the marauding West and all its depredations. Mother remained oblivious, continuing to wear dresses every day and saris as fancy dress in Paris, and then not at all in war-tossed London. Dadijaan’s distrust had never abated. And it didn’t help that Mother often forgot namaaz if she was working or the cinema beckoned.

Zaib gave a small laugh that turned into a sniff. “Yes, together. And it’s Sunday, but Dadijaan hasn’t gone to Hyde Park.”

For two and a half years Dadijaan hadn’t missed Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park on Sunday, not to listen to speeches in English, which she understood perfectly well, but to make her own passionate denunciations of Mr. Churchill, in court Urdu mixed with Gujarati. Standing on a box six inches above English soil, she could shout what she knew: that Churchill was denying rice to the hungry, denying boats to fishermen, that his policy was to starve His Majesty’s subjects in India into submission for the English war. That it had no effect was Mother’s main objection; she liked actions to have quick and measurable outcomes.

“I told Dadijaan the Khans are a hardy lot. Right, bhaiya? I said, see how many missions Kabir flew, and he’s still alive.”

“Subhan-allah. Did it help?”

“Oh yes, she told Mother all about the Tiger of Mysore again.”

Kabir allowed himself a small laugh.

Damn brigand Tipu Sultan—not an exemplary ancestor. Tiger or not, he still wound up dead, his children taken hostage by the Brits. Mother needs stories with better endings.

“Mother never understood a word,” said Zaib.

“Poor Mother,” he said. “You’d think she could comprehend elementary Urdu by now.”

“She doesn’t have to.”

Zaib had never learned Urdu or Hindustani for the same reason—she didn’t have to. Like Noor and Kabir, she could read Arabic enough to read the Qur’an, but learning other languages had to be linked either to sticks or carrots; she didn’t feel anything was worth learning for itself. If Zaib had known Abbajaan, and hadn’t come of age when Uncle Tajuddin ruled at home, and then during a war, she’d be different.

All of us would be different, but for the war.

“Zaib, before I left Paris, I called U.S. Military Command several times and asked if any of Noor’s names—Noor Khan, Nora Baker, Anne-Marie Régnier or Madeleine—appear in files from Gestapo headquarters at the avenue Foch. I thought perhaps the Nazis didn’t have a chance to destroy them before they fled Paris. Call them again.”

“I did. They said the Americans have the files. The ones from the avenue Foch and the rue des Saussaies.”

“Where did they take them?”

“Top secret, they said. They’re going to find all the Nazis in Germany and try them. Don’t want the same chaps in power again. Determined to replace the entire bureaucracy of Germany with new people. Prescription for anarchy, if you ask me.”

“I’ll call you soon.”

“Allah hafiz.”

As he replaced the black earpiece on its hook, a wave of anger welled up so high that his hands trembled.

Why is it Noor? Why not Zaib?

Dreadful thought! And about little Zaib, their baby sister. Zaib, who didn’t barge through society’s norms like Noor but worked at helping people cope with them. Daily, Zaib encountered pain and disease to be healed; she left philosophy, symbols, spirits and significance to Kabir. But she could be relied on to keep up appearances. And she was as determined as he to find Noor.

Noor. Abbajaan’s favourite.

Abbajaan was open and warm with Noor in a way he never was with Kabir, teaching her the veena, allowing her to massage his feet when he returned from touring, serve him warm salt water for gargling after a day of speeches. But then, Noor loved Allah and worshipped easily and naturally, whereas Kabir could see beauty in the poetry of the Qur’an, but …

Long after Mother had put him and Zaib to bed at night, young Kabir listened for the periodic clink of chess pieces, Abbajaan’s childlike laugh, then Noor’s low murmur to see if they would embark on another game. By the time he was old enough to play chess, his Abbajaan was gone.

Once, when Kabir was fourteen and Noor sixteen, he dreamed Noor was lying on the grass. And in the dream, he, Kabir, was glad at her dream-death. Glad! The self-knowledge released by that dream still filled him with horror. How could he resent so beloved a sister at one and the same time as he felt himself willing to die in her stead?

Envy? Noor was the only one in the family who could join Abbajaan in the loneliness of his experience of India, the experience Abbajaan never could communicate to Europeans. The only one who could play the veena with him. When Mother, desperate for money, moved the family to Baroda for two years after Abbajaan’s death, Noor absorbed India naturally, as if born there, whereas young Kabir was painfully aware that though he knew his Qur’an better than any of his Indian cousins, he wasn’t Indian enough; the cousins all dubbed him a lousy batter and an even worse bowler.

And he didn’t need Mr. Freud to tell him what the dream meant: hatred for the part of Noor that was most like himself. Yes, it had taken Kabir years to name it, but he knew it now. It was the shared part that was “too damn Indian.” Today he could even name the source of his gladness as a child wandering in that dream: with Abbajaan gone and without Noor, his family would now be European, look European in every way.

It was just a dream; he could also refuse to remember it.

And besides, even if Noor was older, Kabir was the eldest son, the son on whom Abbajaan bestowed his mantle. Abbajaan chose him to bridge the gulf between earth and heaven for his followers. Of course, that choice followed the Sufi silsila tradition, but the memory of his initiation ceremony was still comforting.

Kabir searched the K-rations for a vitamin biscuit—a “cookie.” He replaced the chocolate bar, chewing gum, cigarettes and lima beans in the sidecar. Perhaps he could barter them for information in Munich.

Large drops wet his jacket like spit from the sky.

He mounted the Triumph and took to the road again.

On his way to the U.S. Office of De-nazification in Munich, Kabir rode right through the ground floor of a shattered building, unable to see any difference between the scarred outside and the building interior. Stalagmite shapes loomed over roads reclaimed by grass and the buzzing of insects. The reverberation of a single scream might bring every brick and stone to knee level.

The cathedral was completely gutted. A place referred to as the Brown House was damaged badly but not destroyed, and the priceless collections in the Pinakothek had received a direct hit on a date matching an entry in Kabir’s flight log. Everywhere, clearing crews of Nazi prisoners and large-boned women in scarves were loading rubble from gargantuan fallen monuments at a steady pace, but anyone could see it would take years to restore what bombs had destroyed in an instant.

A peddler jiggled the tray suspended from his neck, calling, “Eggs, eggs!” as Kabir approached the Rathaus, the richly ornamented town hall in the Marienplatz. The mechanical clock began its glockenspiel performance as he climbed the stone stairs inside. Soon he was shifting his weight on a hard wooden chair sized for a child, in a modest room with the scrawled label U.S. Office of De-nazification. There, a very young-looking captain from Chicago to whom he’d been referred by Zaib listened to his story without comment, then laughed with a cynical timbre that placed him closer to Kabir’s own age.

“Find her in three weeks? Christ! Lieutenant, you sure set yourself one helluva task.”

But if Kabir didn’t leave Munich tonight, he couldn’t report for duty in Paris on schedule. Upper echelons would believe he’d delayed or even deserted, fearing confrontation with the Japanese. It would match their prejudices against Indian men and confirm their worst opinions of refugees from France.

So he must, he had to, return on time to Paris.

“Know how hard it is to find a single person?”

“I know,” said Kabir.

The captain’s eyes were bloodshot from sleeplessness or drinking or both. Kabir knew his own eyes had the same crazed look from days of filling in international tracing requests, quizzing forced labourers, former POWs and other refugees at the Deutsches Museum, sending telegrams and telephoning Zaib from the American base.

“You’ll need months of leave, buddy. Maybe years. Tell me, how many camps can you go to? How many prisons? How many mass graves can you search?” The captain rose and turned to the map of Europe on the wall behind his desk. “You saw the buildings of Natzweiler, right? Wasn’t that discovered by the French? The Russians came upon this place—here.” A forefinger alighted on a single, tiny red push-pin. “It’s called Auschwitz. You wouldn’t buh-lieve me if I told you what they found. And you Brits liberated Buchenwald and Belsen in April. Then we stumbled over the horrors of Ohrdruf.”

Jab, jab, jab.

Kabir had seen photographs in the newspapers: piles upon piles of skin-and-bone dead. But he could not, would not, believe Noor was among those people.

“Then Dachau. And Dachau wasn’t just a camp for Jews; it was for anyone the Nazis disliked—Poles, Russians, Gypsies, Catholic priests, homosexuals, and dissidents of any kind. It goes on and on … For three months we’ve been uncovering primary concentration camps, sub-camps and work camps, and prying folks out of civilian prisons.”

Kabir leaned closer. The entire map of western Europe behind the captain’s desk was prickled with a constellation of tiny red and blue push-pins. He sat back, stunned.

“We’re just trying to clean out the Nazis in Munich, but there’s too many of them and we’re awful undermanned.”

“I was told your office has the files captured at Gestapo headquarters in Paris.”

“I haven’t received any. Pleased to know I can expect some, though.” He paused, then continued in a kinder voice. “Look, pal—flight lieutenant, I mean. If your sister was an agent for the British, the Nazis would have labelled her ‘Nacht und Nebel.’ That’s a ‘Night and Fog’ prisoner. She could be anywhere in Germany. God forbid the Russians have moved her to one of their camps. There were many—no, I’d say mostly—French and Italian Jews among the prisoners liberated from Auschwitz, and many of those are still DPs and haven’t arrived home yet, coz guys like you did such a great job bombing bridges, railroad tracks and stations across Europe. Or they can’t find rail cars or … I dunno, there’s always some darn Limey, Frog or Russkie excuse.”

Kabir’s arms and shoulders felt like rock, ready to attack this destroyer of hope. The captain tore the wrapper off a pack of Lucky Strikes and propped a cigarette in Kabir’s direction, as if to soften the impact of his words. Kabir raised a hand, refusing on principle.

“Some DPs aren’t well enough to travel, two months after liberation. If she’s still alive, Lieutenant Khan, she might be in a prison, in a camp or under medical care. You don’t know, do you? You can’t know.”

It wasn’t “if” Noor was alive—she must be, she must be. But if she was, surely she would contact him, send word to him in care of the RAF? A Red Cross message, a phone call? The captain’s words rang true. Kabir rested his elbows on the desk and clasped his hands at moustache level, desperate to unite thoughts and body.

The captain continued in a kinder tone. “The Nazis weren’t ordered to keep records of Night and Fog prisoners, but that don’t mean squat. Amazing how much the bastards wrote down ‘bout what they did and to whom. Always afraid some bigger bastard might raise questions, accuse them. Here—” He pushed an index card across the table at Kabir. “Fill it in. I promise you, if we find anyone matching her description, or anyone who can tell us about her, I’ll contact you personally. Immediately. Best I can do.”

The captain was asking Kabir to acknowledge and accept powerlessness in the face of chaos. Passivity. Fate.

Hope crumpled beneath the weight of reality, then turned unaccountably to anger.

Noor, you brought this on yourself; you are responsible.

Noor wasn’t his only obligation. He had three women to support on his pay: Dadijaan, who sent all the house money she could get her hands on to Muslim charities for the millions starving in India; Zaib, for whom he should arrange a marriage with some Muslim who could be persuaded to overlook her tending unrelated men—and soon, or she’d follow Noor’s example and ally herself with some totally unsuitable man and commit the same mistakes; and Mother, who, since the letter from the War Office saying Noor was missing, had lost her legendary organizational efficiency, energy and optimism.

If only he could be all places he was needed at once.

Kabir managed to fill in the card, shake the captain’s hand, salute and mumble thanks that sounded grateful. Outside the captain’s office, he threaded his way between desks. Shoulders cradling telephone receivers each bore the flaming crusader sword insignia of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Outside, their businesslike, optimistic drawls yielded to the calls of street peddlers vying for attention from passing hausfraus. A Rosenthal lamp, a dinner jacket, a music box—scavenged and looted goods to be bartered and sold. Even fresh eggs, here and there. Shirts, shoes, a pair of patched trousers. One hawker balanced a lone tomato on his palm, loudly boasting its matchless beauty.

Survival of the fittest often means survival of the loudest, the most bumptious.

Neither term described Noor.

What more could he do but report for duty on schedule? He’d call Zaib, Mother and Dadijaan on his way back to Paris. He would say: Noor must be alive, insh’allah she’ll return home to Paris, she’ll telephone, she’ll write. He wouldn’t wonder if Noor might write to someone else if she was alive—to her friend Josianne Prénat, or that Jew Armand Rivkin.

He would try not to remember the meeting with the Jew, five years ago, that meeting he hadn’t mentioned to Zaib. Climbing to Rivkin’s apartment on a cold spring day, a weight in his pocket. Just before the May invasion, before the battle of northern France, before the fall of Paris. Holding that envelope out, saying, “Leave my sister alone.” Try not to remember the packet of money that never changed hands. He couldn’t imagine where Rivkin was now.

Zaib wouldn’t give up, of that he was sure. She’d continue writing letters and telegrams of inquiry.

Of course, if Kabir was sent to the Far East, he’d go. But if, insh’allah, he was demobilized, there was Afzal Manzil to be reclaimed in Paris. He would restore it, bring his family home from London. After that, he would decide whether to reopen the school. Could he muster enough faith to preach Abbajaan’s beliefs? Perhaps. That is, if any in Europe would pay to learn again about tolerance and love.

No recourse at present but to endure, wait, watch, hope, pray, write letters—women’s pastimes. But there was also work to be done.

Kabir skirted the edge of the crowded Marienplatz, made his way through a tent city sprouting behind the Rathaus, and returned to the Triumph and its passengerless sidecar.