CHAPTER 12
Grignon, France
Thursday, June 17, 1943
FROM THE COURTYARD before the library, Noor and the three men walked up the central path to Director Hoogstraten’s château on the hill. Noor left them to wheel her bicycle to the shed at the back. At her knock, a woman in a black dress with a frilly white cap and apron peered from the screen door of the kitchen.
“Anne-Marie Régnier,” said Noor.
The maid turned a latch, opened the door a crack, and a sleek black shape shot past Noor into the house and jumped up on the kitchen counter. A chef, hunched over an enamel bowl, started in surprise. “Chat lunatique!“ The gloom filled with the whisked rhythm of judiciously chosen imprecations.
The maid scooped the cat out of his reach and held it close, crooning, “Ooh, Mignonne, Mignonne!”
Noor followed the maid through the dining room, where a long table was set for lunch, then a salon with Louis XIV–style furniture, to Madame Hoogstraten’s sitting room.
Madame Hoogstraten, a kind-looking woman with sandy hair rolled fashionably high, rose from her escritoire and greeted Noor. A sautoir necklace of pearls flowed down her black dress, the tassel ending beneath her waist.
Mother’s style, worn in a French way.
The cat sprang from the maid’s arms into the open drawer of Madame Hoogstraten’s desk, evidently her accustomed spot.
Madame Hoogstraten asked Noor conversational but probing questions. “How old? Married? Ah! Engaged. Your fiancé is where? Ah, Londres. I was there a few times before the war—I love Walter Scott and Madame Tussaud. You too? Ahhh. You lived here how long? Ahhh! Many years. Your father? A teacher of philosophy. Which lycée did you attend? Ah! Not far from here—and afterwards? L’École Normale de Musique? Six years of the piano—you must be quick-fingered on the wireless. And after that? The Sorbonne. Of course. Vous avez reçu une bonne éducation. Vos parents vous ont bien elevée.”
Well educated, well brought up. This being verified, Madame was welcoming, showing Noor to the WC so she could wash her hands before lunch.
Madame’s questions had to be asked and answered, regardless of the SOE’s training and instructions. Passwords and code names could not replace instinctive ways of building trust, forming friendships. And the first requirement in her line of work was the trust of her fellow agents.
Laughter pealed from an inner room. Madame Hoogstraten’s brow furrowed. She went to the door and called, “Odile?” A laugh rang out once more. “Odile?”
A pixie-faced, dark-haired girl with striking green eyes came running, bubbling with barely contained mirth.
“What are you doing?” Madame Hoogstraten’s voice sharpened.
“It’s Monsieur Gilbert!” said Odile. “He told me to tie him up very tightly. What an ingenious agent he is—now he can’t get free!”
Madame Hoogstraten’s lips twitched. “Where is the monsieur now?”
“Là!“ Odile gestured behind her. “I tied him to the chair. I took the rope and wound it round him. I even tied his hands together behind his back …” She broke down in giggles.
“Free him immediately. It’s time for lunch.”
“Young people!” said Madame Hoogstraten. “Excuse her, please—she’s only seventeen.” Responding to Noor’s amusement, she said, “Odile doesn’t act like a child too often. In fact, sometimes I think her father gives her too much responsibility—but these days, who else can he trust? You’ll sleep in her room. If the servants ask who you are, say you’re my cousin, visiting for a few weeks.”
The men were now assembled in the salon. Professor Balachowsky produced a bottle of wine from his briefcase, opened it, and left it to breathe on the sideboard. Gilbert was a little rumpled but no worse for his misadventure with Odile, his grin raffish as ever. Behind him was a short, gloomy menhir of a man whom no one introduced. When they moved to the long dining table, Noor found herself motioned to a seat between him and Gilbert.
“Archambault.” The code name for the radio operator she was to replace. She had the feeling she had met him before.
“Madeleine,” she said.
The glare beneath his knit brows did not relax. A pause lengthened to the point of discomfort.
“She gave the correct recognition phrase, Archambault,” Émile said, taking his seat across from Noor.
Now she was sure she had met the gloomy man, years ago. “Be most careful,” Miss Atkins had said, “to stay away from anyone who could recognize you from before the war.” But Archambault was a member of her cell; she couldn’t avoid him.
“You were in my brother’s class at the lycée,” she said.
Archambault picked at his teeth with a toothpick. “Your brother’s name?”
It was a challenge question.
“Kabir Khan.”
“The Indian boy. How is it you remember me?”
“You were a tenor soloist in the choir, yes? You once sang one of my favourites, the Benedictus from Bach’s B Minor.”
His serious face lightened slightly. The memory of a time before the war made the difference, like the possibility of return to one who roams in a strange country.
“B minor—yes, key of passive suffering. For myself, I prefer his Agnus Dei aria. G minor, the key of tragic consummation. I have the record at home.” He put the toothpick away. “We will work together after lunch,” he said, as if according her a great favour. “We must tell London you have arrived.”
“My transmitters are not yet here.”
“We will use one of mine.”
“Is Prosper here?” asked Noor. The package wrapped in brown paper in the hidden compartment of her handbag must be delivered soon.
“You will meet him.”
Professor Balachowsky offered a first taste of wine to Monsieur Hoogstraten, and once the bouquet was pronounced acceptable, measured carefully into each long-stemmed glass.
“It’s a Vouvray—1934,” he said.
It was a gesture of welcome. Noor took a sip and smiled her thanks.
In London’s social circles the war would be intentionally ignored, like an amateur’s mural on the walls of a dining room, Hitler’s bombing being considered in very poor taste. But it was not ten minutes before the group at the château was deep in passionate discussion about the war. This was no social occasion, but a meeting.
Monsieur Hoogstraten passed the cheese soufflé along with the latest developments. “Terrible, terrible news: the Germans have arrested General Vidal.”
“Vidal” was a code name for the head of General de Gaulle’s Armée Secrète, taking shape for a little over six months, since late 1942. Noor had heard more about General Vidal’s second-in-command, Jean Moulin, the legendary Max, who had travelled undercover through France earlier that year, calling on disparate Resistance groups—Combat, Libération, Action Chrétienne and La France—to unite.
Monsieur Hoogstraten paused for a moment, then seemed to recover. “Judging from the large number of Sten guns, incendiary bombs and grenades we’ve received in the last few weeks, the Allies must surely be planning the invasion soon.”
He glanced at Noor as if seeking confirmation from the latest arrival from London. She gave him a blank look. He continued.
“More than 1,000 Stens, approximately 1,800 bombs and nearly 4,500 grenades—we are storing arms from the drops as fast as we can, but it’s difficult.” Worry flickered in his eyes. “There isn’t enough manure in the stables to cover it all—the Germans have taken most of our horses. Prosper tells me shipments will double this month, and double again in July.”
“Mon Dieu! We’ll have to double the manure, and double it again in July,” said Odile.
Madame Hoogstraten’s spoon tapped the table. A look of utter innocence came over Odile’s face.
“Archambault,” continued Monsieur Hoogstraten, “six more canisters must be disposed of tonight. Marius and two students will go with you.”
Archambault nodded.
“Where will you dispose of them this time?” Gilbert’s voice was worried.
“In the Seine,” Archambault said with laconic simplicity.
Monsieur Hoogstraten focused on Noor. “Madeleine, you will send messages only from myself, Émile or Professor Balachowsky.”
“And myself?” prompted Gilbert.
Monsieur Hoogstraten hesitated. “And Gilbert. Professor Balachowsky, please give us your report.”
“Only good news from the Versailles region,” said the Professor, chewing away at his unlit pipe. “From Rueil this time. On June 13 our saboteur blew up a barrack occupied by German troops. Thirty-eight German soldier casualties.”
A low cheer echoed around the table.
“None killed, unfortunately. At Argenteuil, on the fifteenth of June, a charge set by Émile destroyed a detachment of German military, wounding thirteen.” A second cheer fell away as the Professor added, “Unfortunately, three of them were French civilians, but … it’s a war. Every French martyr is one more step in the fight against the Occupation.”
He looked around. No one objected. He continued. “There is news from Dourdan that gives us courage. After exiting a cinema, spectators marched up and down the streets of the city singing the Marseillaise.”
Madame Hoogstraten offered Noor a tomato salad garnished with chervil, then a platter bearing a wheel of desiccated brie. It was Ramzaan, but she was travelling; she’d make up her missed days of fasting when she returned to London.
“For July 14, we plan an operation at Houdan—resistants will take back the Monument of the Dead and observe a minute of silence. Of course, there are demonstrations planned in Paris, some at Versailles. Please be very careful in the next four weeks. The Germans know well the symbolic importance of Bastille Day, and will be quick to make examples of any suspicious behaviour. Last week one of my men in Paris was arrested, not for listening to Radio London but for listening to General de Gaulle broadcasting on Radio Alger.”
“Ah, Gaullisme!” Gilbert rolled his eyes.
Odile said, “Then who shall we listen to? General de Gaulle is recognized all over the world.”
“But not yet by Monsieur Roosevelt.” Gilbert wagged his finger at her.
“Then Monsieur Roosevelt does not understand yet: Gaullisme is no longer incarnated in de Gaulle. It is no longer just a movement, a spirit, a tendency—but a spiritual force. One we can trust—unlike Vichy!”
“Mademoiselle Odile, neither your father nor I have elected General de Gaulle our leader.”
“Monsieur Gilbert, when the war is over, everyone will vote for him. Give me a vote and I will too.”
“Odile!” Madame Hoogstraten frowned.
Noor revelled in the rapid French flowing about her, surprised how deeply she had missed its melodic cadence during her three years in London. Not only French but the lively interruptions, the rapier thrusts of teasing between friends, and the tangential drift of conversations. Evidently the institute was better supplied with food than Renée Garry’s little apartment in Paris, and even this wartime meal was served with an élan Londoners might envy. What a pity she couldn’t belong to this group longer than her allotted three weeks. Their determination and dedication were contagious.
Gilbert was saying to Professor Balachowsky that when he was eighteen years old, he saw Lindbergh land at Le Bourget airfield. “The roads were jammed with cars, so my friends and I rode the métro all the way to the end, to Le Bourget–Drancy station.”
Drancy?
“There we waited and waited in a muddy field well past dark with a hundred thousand others. Of course, I didn’t know then that we were so many. All I could feel was the man before me and two more pressing on either side. Sometimes, while we’re waiting for planes from England now, it reminds me of that night—that same fear of danger, the same rush of excitement at the daring of the pilot in his little plane. Then we saw tiny dots, lights weaving and circling in the night.” A prone hand demonstrated over Madame Hoogstraten’s Limoges. “With just one man.” The hand wavered and descended slowly to the tablecloth. “And he landed! The first flight over the Atlantic! Thirty-five hundred miles in thirty-three and a half hours, with just a compass, an airspeed indicator, favourable weather and luck.”
Drancy was near Le Bourget airfield. Noor knew the airfield was somewhere in the industrial suburbs of Paris, but she had never been there. She listened closely as Gilbert continued.
“We rushed past the restraining ropes so fast that those in the front could have been killed by his propeller, and we were all shouting ‘Vive Lindbergh!’ and clapping, and I was waving my hat as if I’d gone mad. None of us slept that night. We were raising glasses to Lindbergh in every bistro in Paris.”
When Lindbergh made the first crossing of the Atlantic, Kabir was only eleven, yet that epic flight, and that of Bellonte and Captain Costes soon afterwards, had changed the course of her brother’s life as it had Gilbert’s.
“The next morning we went to the Hôtel de Ville, and I watched the president shake hands with Monsieur Lindbergh and give him the Orteig Prize. It was a great moment, a moment when I knew here”—he struck his breast—“that I would be a flyer.”
“And Monsieur Lindbergh greeted you by name?” Odile snickered, setting off a bout of verbal sparring with Gilbert.
Noor could visit Armand at Drancy simply by taking the métro!
She would excuse herself that very moment, leave now.
But Archambault was looking at his watch. “Time to transmit.”
Neither war nor Occupation had affected the midday ritual of her childhood milieu. This three-hour lunch would have lasted a maximum of an hour in London.
Monsieur Hoogstraten rose, saying to all and no one in particular, “I will be in my office.”
This permitted all to rise.
“I have a meeting,” said Professor Balachowsky, excusing himself with a small bow to Noor. “I am organizing a student expedition in a few days. We shall discover and classify many insects,” he promised with touching enthusiasm.
“Anne-Marie,” Émile Garry whispered, “Prosper will meet you tomorrow morning.”
He took a leather-bound notebook and pencil from his pocket and drew a small map, wrote the password. He showed it to her and, once she nodded, tore them to pieces.
“I am expected in Paris,” he said to all, putting notebook and pencil away. “Mais, nom de Dieu! I almost forgot—” He foundered in embarrassment. “Madame Hoogstraten, I was wondering, are there … perhaps … if you can … spare some eggs?”
Madame Hoogstraten nodded graciously. Émile brightened.
When again ready to leave, he whispered to Noor, “Tomorrow, 11:00 hours, Chez Tutulle. Take extra precautions. Be sure you are not followed.”
Noor followed Archambault out of the director’s château, across the wide drive leading downhill into the institute. He collected Marius at the institute’s garden shop, then led her towards a greenhouse whose shining glass roof nestled beneath chestnut trees. Two huge desert palms framed the doorway. Noor hadn’t seen desert palms this size since her stay in India.
“Monsieur Hoogstraten wants to grow one plant from each corner of the world at the institute,” said Marius.
“Mind the nettles,” said Archambault.
“Enh! No nettles here,” said Marius. “Those grow in the ditch by the road.”
Noor followed him into dim, glazed verdure.
Scent of humid soil, flowers … green. The fragrance of the Prophet’s colour.
“We can’t transmit from in here,” said Archambault.
“Too much metal?”
Archambault nodded, continuing past neat rows of Latinlabelled plants, then stooping to exit by a small door. Emerging into sunshine again, Noor stood on a patch of unkempt grass in a courtyard formed by high surrounding stone walls draped with ivy.
Archambault turned to Marius. Marius stepped forward, clasped the ivy in two callused hands and held it back like a curtain, revealing the door to a small stone garden shed—so well concealed, Noor hadn’t noticed it bulging the ivy. Archambault unlocked the door and led Noor across a wedge of sunlight into cool darkness.
The cabbage smell was Marius, the hint of Old Spice, Archambault. What did she smell like to them?
A torch clicked in Marius’s hand and light spread over the plank floor to the legs of a desk and chair, swung up to a shuttered square—a window set in the stone wall—then back to illuminate a jumble of spades and trowels in the corner. Archambault lifted away some of the implements, revealing a suitcase. He placed it on the desk and thumbed the clasps. Marius opened the shutters. Sunlight streamed over the four compartments in the suitcase: the power supply dials, the short-wave transmitter and receiver, and a spare parts kit. A now obsolete OSS-issue SSTR-1 radio. She was more familiar with her own SOE-issue transmitter, a Mark II suitcase radio about half the size of this one, and considerably lighter.
“We can operate off the battery for these few messages,” said Archambault. He reached over Noor’s head to a shelf above the door and retrieved two exercise books—his code and message books. He and Marius strung the radio antenna out of the window, carefully hiding it in the ivy.
“I’ll be on guard outside, on the road,” said Marius.
Once Noor heard the ivy scrape across the door, she moved to the window. Outside stood Marius’s hunched figure—hands in his pockets, a Gauloise drooping along with his moustache, standing watch for enemy uniforms beside the nettle-filled ditch.
“Encode, please.” Archambault pulled the headphones over his ears and plugged the cord into the receiver.
Noor took a pen from her handbag and began referring to the crib sheet in his code book, writing down in the message book the resulting coded letters to be transmitted in successive squares of five blocks across.
“You must decide by reading the whole message before you begin if this one is worth your freedom. Some messages, they might be worth one person’s freedom, tu sais, Madeleine?”
Noor nodded.
“Send quickly. We are the only radio operators left in the north now. The German mobile receivers located all the other transmitters by taking bearings on their signals. They are swift and deadly in triangulation. My colleague in Reims was arrested two days ago after transmitting for less than five minutes.
“Your double security check authenticates your transmission. If you’re caught and tortured, you may reveal your bluff check when you can’t bear the pain any longer, but try never to disclose your true check. If the true check isn’t transmitted after each line, operators in London will assume this radio has fallen into enemy hands. But if ever you are in haste and have to dispense with the checks, as I have on several occasions, they should know your fist by now.”
By “fist” Archambault meant her distinctive style. Yes, London operators certainly did know her fist; it had taken as long for women there to adjust to the rhythm of her dots and dashes as for Noor to improve to high speed. From years at the veena Noor’s natural rhythms varied from five, seven, nine to ten-eight time. Like Abbajaan’s, like Armand’s.
Jasmin has played her flute.
The message squirted a thousand miles around and across the Channel in Archambault’s rapid hand relay of dots and dashes to the attuned headphones of one of three hundred women in radio intelligence near London. A few seconds on the air, and Miss Atkins and Colonel Buckmaster would have the message on their desks in a matter of hours.
More messages, some over two pages long. This time Archambault encoded and Noor sent them in rapid succession. Afterwards, Archambault returned his code and message books to their hidden locations. Noor drew the antenna back and closed the shutters to signal Marius. Archambault stowed the suitcase, locked the shed door and led Noor back through the greenhouse. Marius was already back at work in the institute shop.
“Marius told me a white van was seen prowling Grignon village yesterday,” said Archambault. “Grignon is becoming too dangerous—you must find other safe houses where you can transmit. I must teach you our safety precautions quickly. A moon plane is coming for me a month from now. London has ordered me to return for retraining.” He straightened a bicycle leaning against the stable wall. “What made you volunteer for this assignment, Madeleine? Your father is a sultan, n’est-ce pas?”
Noor suppressed a laugh. Her family of courtier musicians were noble indeed, but several steps down the scale from all the maharajas, sultans and nawabs that populated the minds of Europeans upon mention of India. Should she exploit such ignorance, as Mother did? But denial would bring little illumination to Archambault.
“My father taught philosophy,” she said. “And yes, he was from India—he is no more.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Your brother—he was named after an Indian poet, I think. Once, he said his sister was going to be a writer for children. Was that you? We were both little more than children ourselves, and I remember thinking how wonderful it would be if someone wrote stories for us. But then I grew up.”
“I did too,” said Noor with a smile. “But I still write stories for children.”
“Pardon me, mademoiselle, but it does seem strange to see you back in France, and in the Resistance. I sent a message a few days ago about some Indian troops taken prisoner by the Germans. They wear patches of orange, white and green with leaping tigers. The patches say Free Indians.” He paused, waiting.
It was understandable that some Indians would join any enemy of their exploiters; but at the moment, either Archambault needed a radio operator or he didn’t.
“Of course, I remember your mother—American, oui? The Americans are with us now … Well, you must have your reasons.”
“I do,” said Noor. “Probably similar to your own.”
“I was in England visiting my father’s family when the war broke out.”
“Your father is English?”
“Yes, and my mother, she is French. They needed bilingual people, and I wanted the chance to learn about radios. Maybe, when things get better, I’ll open a radio repair shop. But now … I’ll be back tonight to help with the canisters. Have you been told the danger signals?”
“No.”
They headed uphill along the drive leading out of the institute, Archambault walking his bicycle. Halfway to the stone porticos he turned around.
“From here you can see the top-storey windows of the director’s château and the main château. If the curtains are drawn back in either one, it means danger. If it is dark and a candle is shining in either of those windows, that’s also a sign of danger.”
“Then?”
“Then stay away. Get away as fast as you can and warn others in the network. Use a public phone if possible. Then hide. Later, find out what has happened and transmit the details to London. You understand?”
Yes, she understood.
“À la prochaine, Madeleine.” And he cycled away.
So many cautions! Necessary, but each administered a dose of contagious fear.
Noor wandered into the stable. Several empty stalls. Horses requisitioned by the Germans, Monsieur Hoogstraten had said. A few muzzles poked from the stalls as she walked past, and a roan with a white diamond on his forehead gave her shoulder a wet nibble. Too old for horsemeat, and he wouldn’t have much speed before a cart. Cheek against his mane, Noor took in the scent of hay, horses and manure.
Armand, how I wish I could transmit a message to you as I just did to London. Tapping it out, knowing you are there to receive. A short message. How to encode it? To whom would I entrust it? What should I say? Perhaps: “I am near; have hope, my love. We will be together again.” But anyone could say that. Some pattern you will recognize like a radio operator’s fist, a message you would know could come only from me.
Beneath the slanting eaves on the top floor of the château, Noor faced the casement, clad in a borrowed frothy pink nightgown. The dark hand of blackout had spread through the village of Grignon and lay across the woods surrounding the director’s château. Grasshoppers, like small violins, began the staccato rhythm of mating calls.
“I used to go to the cinema to learn English. I will speak English with you. You like the cinema?” Odile’s chatter in English mixed with French followed Noor in a steady stream. “Gilbert said Gone with the Wind was in the theatres in London—he told me the whole story. In French the book is called Autant en emporte le vent. It is a good translation. After I read it, I made a dress from my bath curtains, just like Scarlett. Then the BBC said Ashley Wilkes was shot down by the Germans—that is so sad, no? Gilbert says he was on a spy mission—ha, how does he know? But you can tell me, what is the goût du jour these days?”
Noor turned back to Odile, who had arranged her limbs in a languid pose, like Ingres’s Odalisque, on one of the two beds. Odile burbled on, not waiting for an answer.
“Here we have mostly German films. Ils m’ennuient! And the Germans bore me too. You know the first time I saw the Germans? It wasn’t from this front window but from that side window, the oval one. I looked out one morning and there were two planes chasing one another in the blue sky, a French and a German one. And mon Dieu! our horses were grazing below in the fields as if nothing was happening. Of course, I didn’t actually see a German in the plane, so I should say I saw my first German many days later—on a motorcycle in Grignon.”
Noor listened with interest as she took her freshly washed blouse and lingerie out of a basin and hung them behind the chamber door to dry. She only needed to prompt Odile with a nod, at most a word or two.
“But when I saw the planes, immediately I thought of Papa. You know why that was strange? Because he was at Verdun that very instant, and later I learned that I thought of him at the very moment of his capture.” A second’s pause emphasized so amazing a coincidence.
“He was captured at Verdun?”
“Yes. Maman fainted when we heard the news. But I got on a vélo and cycled to Verdun to find him.”
“Cycled from here to Verdun?”
“Yes, three days, sleeping by the road. I had to find out if my papa was alive or not, you see. And when I got there, I found him in the prison camp, and he was so surprised to see me, he forgot to be angry.”
“Did they let you see him? Did they let you bring him home?”
“Mais non, he wouldn’t leave his men. But he gave me a letter for Maman, and all his men gave me letters for their wives and fiancées and mothers, and so many other men wrote to their families. I put all their letters up here in my dress—I had no breasts then.”
Odile didn’t have any breasts to speak of three years later, either, but Noor let this pass.
“Like this, I carried all their letters past the guards, smiling sweetly at them.” She hitched up her dress at the waist so the top ballooned over her belt and she gave Noor an exaggerated smile, batting her eyelashes in demonstration, then lay down again on the duvet.
“That’s how I carried them home. It took me months to send them, because of course all mail was censored by the Boche. When my father was released, he vowed: no matter how many years it takes, nor how many pay the price, we cannot allow France to be occupied by the Germans like a country of savages in Asia or Africa.”
After only three years of Occupation Odile’s passion was like Mr. Gandhi’s when he spoke of the hundred-year British occupation of India.
“So ever since, I’m a courier for Papa, after school. I bring Archambault’s messages, and probably I will bring yours too. Papa says I have a good memory—I only write down very long ones.”
The seventeen-year-old slip of a girl had been risking her life almost daily for three years on every road, at every Gestapo checkpoint.
“Tiens, if I call you and say ‘Keep in touch’ like an American in the cinema, it means you must check for a message behind the milk bottles at Flavien’s pawnshop in the Troisième arrondissement. And you can leave messages there for me.”
“With pleasure, Mademoiselle Odile,” said Noor gravely.
Odile paused only to draw a map in her copybook and mark the location of the letter drop, then her questions plunged off course. “You think Monsieur Gilbert is handsome?”
Noor hadn’t thought about it. “Mmmm, not really. He looks a little like Maurice Chevalier.”
“Oh, he has eyes for you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I think so. When he told the story of Lindbergh and how he wanted to be a pilot after that, he was watching to see if he was impressing you. But one can see you are not easily impressed.”
This could be true. Students at Afzal Manzil, the Sufi school, were prominent in their fields; discussions of philosophy, history, music, art and literature were common. Even in London, everyone she knew had impressive achievements, not only Gilbert.
“He doesn’t know me,” said Noor. “Besides, I am engaged.”
“Oho, you are engaged! Who is he? What is he like? Where is he?”
Noor sidestepped the entire flood with a spur-of-the-moment fabrication. “He’s a navy officer in London.”
“You have a photo?”
“No, Anne-Marie Régnier cannot carry photos of English navy officers.”
“Oh, of course. But that is so bad! It’s so difficult, no, not even to have one photo?”
“Yes, very difficult.”
Noor had carried a photo of Armand for a long time, until Uncle Tajuddin took it away from her in 1934. In 1939 it was replaced by another she had treasured, of Armand in his uniform during the Drôle de Guerre. It was left behind in her bedside drawer in England. But she needed no photograph to recall Armand’s thick-lashed eyes, or the expressive tenderness of his octave-and-a-half-span hands.
To Odile she said, “You like Gilbert?”
“No, I detest him. I don’t know why, I just detest him. Always asking questions about everyone. He’s not well educated—his father is a postal clerk and his mother a housekeeper. You know his flat in Paris? Just now his wife had it renovated. I said to Papa, where did she get the money for new curtains?”
“What did your papa say?”
“Oh, Papa trusts him because London trusts him. And we have need of his prouesse, you know, his spécialité. In spring, when Prosper brought him here to meet us, it was once a week, then twice a week, now three times a week. He organizes landings, and boasts he has never once had an arrest at a drop zone. So many flights—Prosper says he thinks the invasion is coming very soon, maybe this summer.”
“Prosper said that?”
“Yes, I heard him tell Papa—don’t tell him I told you. Oh, but you must know anyway …”
Noor tried to look as if she did.
“You go to meet Prosper tomorrow, yes? He’s a great man. Gentle and strong at once. And he doesn’t trust Gilbert either.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Prosper returned last night by parachute and Gilbert, the great Gilbert, knew nothing about it! Rien du tout!“ She was obviously delighted by Gilbert’s discomfiture. “Prosper arranged his flight with another organizer, ‘Marc.’ And he dropped in a field Monsieur Gilbert did not arrange.” Her tone turned mocking. “Eh bien, I think maybe Gilbert’s feelings were hurt, the poor man.”
“It’s late,” said Noor. “Do you think Archambault and Marius came for the canisters?”
“I went to the stables to meet them after dinner,” said Odile. “Actually, to meet one of the students.”
Odile’s rapid stream snagged, and the moment of silence drew Noor’s attention as no words could have.
“Which student?” In a gentle voice.
“The most handsome, of course. Louis de Grémont is his name.”
“De Grémont?” Noor emphasized the aristocratic appellation to tease Odile into confiding more details.
“Yes, de Grémont.” A pause, then Odile said, “I had to tell him I can’t marry him till Vichy falls. He said that could be years and years from now!” She sighed, looked away as if embarrassed. “But I had to tell him—I heard his family’s factories are supplying the Germans every day.”
“Maybe they have to,” said Noor, intending comfort.
Odile shook her head sadly. “I could accept that. But I went to their home once and saw a portrait of Pétain on their mantelpiece. C’est insupportable! No, no, no.”
“But Louis is not a Pétainiste, himself, if he is helping us.”
“Non, but … it is too difficult.”
Noor sat down on her bed, next to Odile. After a moment Odile’s thoughts found a new outlet.
“What is your real name?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I know it already. I heard you whisper it to Archambault. It’s Noor Khan, correct?”
“So you know. Why do you ask?”
Odile abandoned one strategy midstream and took up another. “Will you go with us to church on Sunday?” The idle-sounding question seemed to have slipped out. It lay on the duvet between them, awaiting Noor’s response.
“Certainly, if I am not required to transmit that day.”
Noor had often attended mass with Mother and fellow students at the lycée, abstaining only from communion. Jesus Christ was a venerable prophet in the line preceding Muhammad, peace be upon them, just not the final one. Besides, as she and Armand often discussed, at church, mosque or temple one was praying to the same force: the spirit of creation.
“Oh, I am glad,” said Odile. “I was so afraid you would say no.”
“Why, that would mean you’re a Jew.”
This was no time to try educating Odile; better to take her ignorance of the existence of religions other than the Judeo-Christian in stride. All his years in France, Abbajaan believed he could interest Europeans in his version of Sufism, a Sufism that included all faiths. He’d enlarged his ideas with French ones, but there was never any reciprocity.
“And then?” Noor prompted.
“It would be so dangerous for us,” explained Odile. “London has sent us three Jews already, and Papa was so angry, he said they must be assigned to a separate network.”
“Why was Monsieur Hoogstraten angry?”
“He said London was being careless. They do not understand that a Jew can jeopardize everything—we could all be arrested.”
Noor seized the opportunity to probe further, and Odile confirmed the situation Émile Garry had described to Noor the night before.
“Can one visit a Jew in a prison camp, as you visited your papa at Verdun?”
“Oh, mais non, Anne-Marie! They find out who is writing to them or sending them parcels, they arrest them. Even the Red Cross cannot visit the Jews in camps, because they are not POWs. They are locked up by Pétain like criminals—and the Red Cross doesn’t visit criminals in prisons.”
Yet some intrepid social worker had managed to enter Drancy. Some Red Cross volunteer had taken Armand’s censored postcard out of Drancy.
Bless that stranger.
“Have any Jews been released, as your father was?”
“Non, non. Jews are not prisoners of war—who knows what they are. All Jews are being sent east to work now, even the children.”
“Even children? Why? What work can children do?”
A moue of ignorance. “Children, old people, all being—how you say?—‘evacuated.’ Resettled. My Latin professor is glad—Premier Laval says for every three Jews sent to Germany, Hitler will release one French POW, and my Latin professor’s son is captive in Germany.”
“But Israelites are French—French-born Jews.”
“Non, but Jews are all not-French. Monsieur Laval revoked the citizenship of all Israelites naturalized after 1927. Now they are just Jews again. Émigrés.”
“Mon Dieu!“ said Noor, heart plunging. Wasn’t nationality a basic right? How could it be taken away? She didn’t know if Armand’s father had been naturalized, whether Madame Lydia had ever become a French citizen. Questions she should have asked Armand, but she had never thought she would need to know. “But if their citizenship is revoked and they become foreigners, the Red Cross should be allowed to inspect their camps, no?”
Odile shook her head as if in wonder at Noor’s naïveté. She crouched by her bed and pulled. A wireless came into sight.
“I’ll try to get Honneur et Patrie or Radio London,” she said. “Better than listening to Radio Vichy’s propaganda.”
The dial turned slowly. The needle passed hisses and whistles till a cocksure voice announced each item of war news that Churchill wanted Hitler to know, then cricket news for the rest of the listeners.
They heard, “Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français,” and the personal announcements began: “The rabbit will nurse the pig …” “Tonight the suspenders will find their buttons …” Each surreal, nonsense-sounding phrase conveying vital information to resistants, triggering sabotage operations or a landing reception, confirming departures and arrivals of resistants, arms and intelligence dispatches.
And lastly, news of the colonies. “British field marshal Archibald Wavell became governor general of India today …”
Lord Wavell on his way to New Delhi would find three hundred million Indians who had been agitating for their independence from British occupation for nigh on fifty years, exactly as the French were resisting the Germans, but without arms drops, with no weapons but determination and their meagre flesh against British truncheons, machine guns and armoured cars. Had she been in India, carrying out the same actions as she was in France, Lord Wavell would label her a terrorist, not a resistant.
Maybe Dadijaan would be a little happier today. She might be hopeful that the next governor general of India would re-evaluate Mr. Churchill’s boat denial and rice denial policies. Maybe Lord Wavell was different. Maybe he wouldn’t consider Indian millions dying of famine “acceptable losses” in this, the war for the world.
I wish I had learned to fight oppression as early in life as Odile, but I didn’t have her confidence at seventeen—and I couldn’t imagine myself riding to Verdun all alone when I was fourteen. When I was seventeen, I cried all day after Uncle Tajuddin reprimanded me for opening the front door of our home for a man—as if I could have known before I opened the door that the man was not our relative. When Uncle shouted at me for wearing a pair of red shoes I’d borrowed from Josianne, I took them off and ran barefoot to my room, and cried because I wanted so much to please, wanted everyone, even Uncle, to love me.
Odile! So different. She reminded me of Mother—the most adventurous woman in our family.
A bricolage of images comes, each rising like a Poussin painting from a miniature tableau. The five of us around the table for the evening meal always served, American style, at seven; Josianne’s family served dinner at eight. The light changes from image to image, streaming, swelling, decaying. But our positions never change. Practical, ambitious Mother at the head of the table, spinning yarns, a Yankee Madame Defarge knitting the threads of her narrative around our Indian blood till her stories fulfilled their Oriental promise. In her stories Abbajaan was transformed from itinerant court musician and dervish to “Pir”—Indian sage, preacher of Sufism—a spiritual master privy to the mystical secrets of living connection with the infinite compassion of Allah. Kabir was called Pirzada Kabiruddin, the closest word to Prince that Mother could tease from Abbajaan’s repertoire of Muslim titles. Little Zaib loved to call me Pirzadi Noor-un-nisa, for then she could play at being Princess Zaib-un-nisa. And when the students came to the summer school that year, Mother christened Abbajaan “Hazrat,” his new title of respect, and all the students were “mureeds.”
Sometimes, ma petite, parents are captured in the web of their own stories, and retell the past to match their times and needs. That was Mother, Aura Baker, your grandmother from Boston who never told the cover story of her lineage the same way twice. Only to me would she speak of her first day in the orphanage a month after her mother died. She was vague about where her father vanished—something related to gambling debts. Sometimes she’d tell of her life after the orphanage, living with her older stepbrother, our uncle Robert and his wife, slowly becoming his unpaid domestic servant.
I always believed Mother and I had a special bond, but later I learned we never did. She was the teller of tales, I the listener and her confidante. I kept my own hopes and dreams secret from Mother from the time I met Armand, and she never knew, because she never asked.
Let me tell you how Mother and Abbajaan met. It was highly symbolic: Abbajaan was looking in one direction and walking a different one, the way he often did, and their paths collided. He could have collided with anyone, Mother said, but he’d collided with Aura Baker on Maverick Street in Boston—she was fond of retelling this. To Abbajaan such encounters manifested the laws of life and Allah’s undefinable aims, but to Mother almost every person and every thing was Opportunity.
In the short version of their meeting, the one reserved for the public, they met while he was playing the veena on tour in America. This version did not mention that she invited him home to dine, it being Thanksgiving, when the tale of the Mayflower pilgrims was making its yearly round at the schoolhouse and it was appropriate to invite a troupe of Indians to dinner, if only to mitigate the error of Columbus. But Abbajaan and his brothers were the wrong Indians for the story, and so Mother compounded Columbus’s error instead of honouring tradition.
Mother eschewed both History and Geography, being prone, in 1910, to the American conceit that the world was in need of a demonstration of how to melt people in a large pot devised expressly for the purpose. I’m joking, of course. But really, she was overwhelmed by Abbajaan’s dark strangeness, his respectful manner. She was enthralled by his lilting English and elevated him instantly to maharaja status, the better to introduce him to Uncle Robert. So Uncle Robert found an Indian from the Princely State of Baroda at his Thanksgiving table, a dark, intense, golden-turbaned man with praises for everyone flowering on his courtly tongue, in a fitted black brocade coat, strings of pearls dangling on his chest.
Uncle Robert immediately forbade Mother to have anything to do with Abbajaan ever again.
But Mother wasn’t a trembling kind of woman, as I was. As soon as she was twenty-one, she ignored Uncle Robert’s edict and followed Abbajaan all the way to London. And when they married there, Mother took a Muslim name, Rukhsana, to uphold Abbajaan’s religion and traditions. She knew next to nothing about his religion or traditions, but she loved him so much, she was willing to uphold anything Abbajaan held dear. She went with him on music tours the first few years after they were married—that’s how I was born in Moscow—but a few years after he moved to Paris, Abbajaan began travelling alone, returning to Paris in the summers to teach Sufism.
That was your grandmother—Mother before Abbajaan returned to India. When we returned to Paris, having paid our respects at Abbajaan’s tomb and toured the major Sufi shrines, she learned a different courage. Every time Uncle made his dutiful offer of marriage to his half-brother’s widow, she mustered copious widow’s tears and Uncle Tajuddin’s own traditions against all his gallant propositions of co-wifehood. She went into weeks of self-imposed purdah, emerging from her seclusion periodically to confront him with the courage of a squirrel facing down a Doberman. Poor Uncle Tajuddin! He’s probably still bewildered by her rejection of his well-intentioned charity. For five years she was as a Shia waiting for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, as Penelope weaving by day and unravelling by night, and she was ever and also Aura Baker, always imagining the next story for her children to live.
Mother would have loved being undercover at Grignon.
In the lavatory at the château, after my ablutions, I slipped the cover off my jacket button, referred to the compass beneath and faced southeast towards the Ka’aba. I used my headscarf as hijab and knelt on cold tile in the first motion of my Tahajjud prayer. Abbajaan would tell us—your uncle Kabir, your aunt Zaib and myself—that if we couldn’t find time for five prayers, a remembrance of Allah once a day was better than none. The Tahajjud prayer time, when one can speak one’s mind to Allah, from whom all favours come, always refreshes me.
That night at Grignon, I dreamed that masked demons danced around Odile’s room. One bore the face of Gilbert, which metamorphosed into a mask with the haunted eyes of Renée Garry. I thought such nightmares terrible then—but they shrink to nothing compared with the one I live here. Vogel and I are enchained together in a nightmare whose shared space has become this room no bigger than a water closet, ten feet by six.
I could pray five times each day in this cell, but I don’t. How can I dare devotion, now I have lost my freedom, when I never thanked Allah on my knees five times a day for it before? Instead, I perform only the Tahajjud prayer late at night, and pray for Armand, your grandmother Lydia, Mother, Dadijaan, Kabir and Zaib.
Even so, Fajar, Zuhr, Asar, Maghrib and Isha—the prayer times—sustain me through each monotonous day. It was Fajar when the pale dawn mist filtered through the iron bars and the bell rang to wake all the women along the cellblock. The guard came to unlock my hands; she turned away while I used the toilet in the corner of the cell, then turned back to shackle me again. On pain of the dungeon, regulations forbid me to look directly at her or the other SS woman, who pours a foul-tasting liquid in my wooden bowl and gives me the wedge of bread I get once a day.
The clang of iron doors and shouts of guards said women prisoners were filing out of cells into the corridor and out into the freezing courtyard. I stood on tiptoe on my iron bed so I could see them walking slowly in circles, one behind the other, never touching. As for me, I am taken into the courtyard alone once a week for exercise, never allowed to speak to anyone except Vogel.
When the clinking of keys stopped, it meant the women had been returned to their cells, and I allowed myself half the bread, saving the remainder for its fragrance. Then silence as Zuhr began. When, standing on the bed again, I saw the barbed wire fencing above the courtyard wall become one with its shadow, I knew only a single hour had passed. And that it was time for warm swampy gruel: a second bowl of swedes, crushed peas and a paste of sour cabbage. When it came, I committed each morsel to memory. The guard collected my bowl and I returned to the odour of previous inmates permeating the thin straw of my mattress.
Some days, though not today, the guard brings me white paper tickets, string and a knitting needle I have to use to string them together. A purposeless task I barely manage with my chains. Zaib was always a better needlewoman than I.
Most days now, since Vogel authorized paper and pen, I manage to write to you.
When the shadow of my pen doubles, Asar will have passed. And with it, two, perhaps three, hours? Maghrib, earlier and shorter at this time of year, will begin at the last slotted rays of lukewarm sun. I will bang my chains on the door to demand an oil lamp or that the naked bulb be lit. The flap door will drop for a brief moment. There will be water for the basin, another bowl of the same soup. And when a stray star winks through barred fog, it will be time for Isha prayers, and I will have outlived another two hours of captivity. Only then will I allow myself to chew the last of the hard brown bread, to help me through the lice-infested dark.
When I came to this cell, I passed many days and nights furled into a ball as you were in my womb, dwelling on my multiple failures. But now I find I am not alone. With me are the reformers, anarchists, nihilists, the mad, the pacifists, the utopian Communists, the atheists, and devout women of all faiths. This is a zenana, an Auratstan, a place of segregation. Here we silenced women wring our collective hands at our state, and outside the world goes on with its killing.
Bombs crash in the distance. We call out in hope the Allies are coming closer.
As I write, a woman is singing the news in French. The guards cannot stop each teardrop note from carrying. “The Allies bombarded Munich and Dusseldorf again. Churchill, Marshal Stalin and Roosevelt met in Teheran and demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender.”
But the Germans won’t surrender without an invasion on the ground. And it’s too late this year, too cold now. Insh’allah, the Allies will come with spring.
It would be comforting if I could believe that Allah placed Vogel in his role as captor and I in the role of prisoner, that every feeling, every moment is predetermined, that the outcome of this charade with Vogel is predestined, but no strand of logic strains that far—the Allah I love cannot be so cruel.
Our conversations, when Vogel comes, eventually drown in his terror and mine—terror of the perverse violence and rage of which he is capable against his “Princess” for whom he professes only the deepest concern and love. But your mother has known the love of an honourable man, and so I recognize Vogel’s “love.” Like Uncle Tajuddin’s, it is love of his own power, love of my dependence on his every whim. Out of “love” Vogel invokes German orders and says my bondage is for my “safe custody,” just as Uncle Tajuddin once invoked custom and the Qur’an for my “protection,” as the British “defend” India, starving millions while reciting odes to the white man’s burden.
When I think of this war, I am glad I delayed your soul, for you would have entered the world Vogel and Uncle Tajuddin prefer, a world that wants its bloodlines pure, its people destructive or acquiescent.
Often, Armand comes to visit me, teasing, his voice smiling. Today I could swear he was in one corner of my cell, leaning with furrowed brow over a chessboard, Anoushka in hand. Another time he was at the piano. “Sing, Noor! Sing—with me, or alone—but sing.”
When your father and I marry again, ma petite, there will be singing. Singing of love in many languages. I won’t wear white. I see myself in the red-and-gold lehnga Dadijaan promised me. Armand will wear his black formal jacket and a red cummerbund as he does when performing with an orchestra. We’ll stand beneath a chuppah, drink from the same glass and smash it; our valima celebrations will last till dawn.
Before we bring you back again, we must try to make this world a better place. You are the essence of our future, our future together. When you enter your body, let it be when your parents and others like us are free to marry, keeping our own faiths, and honouring one another’s just as my Abbajaan taught. Armand and I will travel with you to the Kingdom of Baroda, to India, Russia and even Jerusalem—may the lands of our forefathers someday be free.
Soon millions of Germans will celebrate the birth in hiding of a Jewish child—Christmas is coming, ma petite. I remember Christmas with Mother when Abbajaan was alive. But once Uncle Tajuddin arrived, there were no more Christmas decorations.
Outside, the first light fuzz of snow must be growing on the fields. Westwards, in the Alsace, snow-fur will lie heavy on frozen stems. But here, these 360 degrees, the chains I wear and these words I write to you are changing me. So gradually, I scarcely notice.