CHAPTER 13
Paris, France
Friday, June 18, 1943
NOOR CYCLED DOWN the boulevard St-Germain. Too quiet. No cars, some bicycles. Queues of tired-looking women and old men. Shuttered and sandbagged shops with signs: Rien à vendre—nothing to sell. More signs in German. Two milice gendarmes standing outside a Monoprix. Streets marked Germans Only, like streets in India marked Europeans Only. Where was the jaunty energy of Paris?
How often had she cycled in from the periphery, pedalling purposefully as now, to attend a lecture at the Sorbonne, meet Armand clandestinely or see Josianne and other friends. Paris was like London then, believing itself centre of the universe, law unto itself, colonizing and subjugating people of other faiths and climates across the globe. She’d never imagined herself participating in its future.
But though the city was backdrop to every image of Armand in memory’s eye, without him the romance of Paris was just a fable. Without his arms about her, what was Paris but row after row of sooty old grey-roofed buildings huddled about their inner courtyards?
What had become of Afzal Manzil, her family’s home and school in Suresnes? Was the British Property sign—painted hastily as Kabir honked the Amilcar’s horn, shouting that they must leave—still nailed to its imposing green gates? That house—site of fear, site of tears. She hadn’t been sorry to leave it. Or sorry that Uncle Tajuddin bundled away his one pair of European shoes and went home to Baroda.
She dropped her bicycle stand before a restaurant with an all but unnoticeable label: Chez Tutulle. Inside, she wended her way through a few early diners populating the tables and chairs in the dark cavern. An aproned maître d’ stood behind a hulking cash register, running his pencil down its ledger columns. Noor approached and asked in a low voice for Phono.
“I’m not familiar with Monsieur Phono, but if mademoiselle would like to leave a message?”
Noor rummaged in her handbag, contriving to drop a slip of paper with her password to the counter.
The maître d’ made his way through the tables, greeting customers as he went. Reaching a window, he glanced out, left and right, checking if she’d been followed. Then he returned with a brusque “Venez!”
Into steamy heat where aproned chefs and sous-chefs chopped and sautéed and stirred. Through thickets of shouted orders aimed at small boys with red hands who were clattering and sliding plates into large vats of water. No one glanced in her direction. Then into sunlight and open air in a bicycle lane behind the restaurant. Across the lane he unlocked a wooden door set in a stone wall. Noor followed as he ascended two flights of stairs.
She quickened pace behind the maître d’s long strides down a musky corridor in what seemed to be a boarding house. A dishevelled woman in a low-cut red velvet dress peered from a doorway as they passed.
All this secrecy was welcome; she wouldn’t want Uncle Tajuddin to know she’d ever been to a place like this.
At room twenty-nine, the maître d’ gave two knocks, paused, then two more knocks. A long pause.
Twenty-nine. I’m twenty-nine. Two plus nine equals eleven. Eleven is a one and a one, equals two. Two signifying man and woman together. Noor and Armand.
A glance at her watch. Seven minutes late.
The door opened a few inches to reveal the pencil moustache of Émile Garry. Noor slipped in, leaving the maître d’ behind.
Émile—Phono—led her past a puff-pillowed four-poster and opened a large armoire. Three-quarters of the hanging space inside was occupied by a woman’s colourful clothes. The rest—some shirts, a man’s suits in shades of grey. Émile placed his hands, palms outwards, between a feathered black silk gown and the front of a man’s shirt, and cleared a path. Somehow the back of the armoire slid magically away. Noor followed Émile into the cloying scent of Shocking from the gown in the armoire, to a whitewashed workroom lit by a skylight.
Archambault, Gilbert, Professor Balachowsky and a broad-shouldered man about five years older than herself broke away from an open wicker picnic basket. Each left his brown paper packet of bread, cheese and tinned sardines to rise from the table and greet her.
If asked later, she would have no difficulty listing everything in this room from memory: a carpenter’s bench and lathe, a small trunk in the corner blocking a wooden door. Expanses of once-white stucco walls unbroken by windows, adorned only with a 1943 calendar. Today’s date circled. Friday, June 18. Friday, day of juma prayers.
Gilbert swept back his forelock, came forward, took her hands in his. Noor withdrew her hands with a polite smile. She looked at Émile.
“Madeleine,” said Émile, “c’est Prosper.”
“Delighted, I must say,” said Prosper in English, the welcome in his firm handshake reflected in his brown eyes. The right height to blend with Frenchmen. Right colour hair, too: brown. Ears rather prominent—jug-ears, the English would say. But other than that, he wouldn’t stand out physically, even in England.
Prosper continued in French once she was seated with a packet of bread and cheese and a small measure of vin ordinaire before her.
Sunlight slanted into elongated rectangles on the wall. Prosper’s rapid French laid out plans for another drop, this time at Rosny sur Seine.
“Expect seven parachutes if you hear the BBC announce La route est belle on the twenty-first of June.”
“We need a reliable motor car. To be hidden in a garage near the field,” said Archambault.
“Mine,” volunteered Professor Balachowsky, chewing vigorously on the stem of his unlit pipe.
“What’s the cargo?” asked Gilbert.
“The usual,” Archambault replied.
“Mais, Archambault, can we make do with one motor car or do we need two? There will be seven parachutes this time.” Gilbert had exaggerated his tone as if speaking to a child.
A precarious silence.
Noor said, “Perhaps there are seven as my suitcase and transmitters are coming? They’re heavy but not very large. I want very much to get to work.”
This seemed to refocus the men’s attention on the project.
“We will make do with one motor car,” said Prosper. “We can’t risk two. Phono, can you obtain a permit for petrol?”
“Absolument.”
“Good. The reception committee will be Gilbert, Professor and …?”
“Some of my students,” said the Professor.
“Bien, Professor. Have them collect the cargo and hide it—just temporarily, till a secure location is identified.”
“Temporarily where?” asked Gilbert.
“Why must you know?” Archambault was openly challenging Gilbert now.
Gilbert gave Archambault his usual grin, but his eyes glittered behind his forelock. Prosper seemed about to say something but thought better of it.
“At Grignon, in the greenhouse this time, not the stables,” he said. It sounded as if he was voting to trust Gilbert.
Archambault stuffed his mouth with a huge bite of black bread.
Prosper continued, “Madeleine will courier a message from Phono to the Professor next Thursday, giving him the passwords for release of the cargo to a safer place.”
“Next Thursday.” The Professor consulted a small black book from his pocket. “I have an appointment with my tailor near the Jardin des Plantes that day—we could meet in the gazebo. Fifteen-hundred hours.”
“A tailor?” said Gilbert. “Please, Professor, refer me to any tailor who can obtain cloth these days.”
“Oh, it’s just an alteration, Gilbert,” said the Professor. “Too much room in my clothes. But you may certainly have his name.”
“Don’t give him any names,” said Archambault.
The Professor shrugged. “My tailor is sewing more Gestapo uniforms than alterations for people like me, Archambault. How else can he survive?”
“Ça y est?“ said Prosper.
Glances all around confirmed all the details had been covered.
“Next meeting?” asked Gilbert.
“You will be told,” growled Archambault.
“I swear it will be my pleasure to put you on a plane to England,” said Gilbert.
“I would leave tonight if I could.”
“Yes, I’m sure you would,” Gilbert sneered.
“But if I did, you couldn’t send messages to England—like the ones asking for gin and brandy.”
“Messieurs, messieurs!” said Prosper.
“Sunday night at the Jazz Club on the rue Pigalle, then,” said Émile, supplying a distraction to break the tension.
Prosper’s face lit up; plainly he loved jazz.
Émile continued, “I can introduce Madeleine to Viennot.”
“Excellent. I thank you all for coming,” said Prosper. “Leave one at a time. Carefully. You two: take the front exit. You two: wait five minutes, then exit through the alley door.”
Professor Balachowsky gave Noor a small bow and stepped nimbly through the armoire.
Émile said, “Madeleine, it’s too late to cycle back to Grignon today before curfew—tonight you must stay in Paris.”
“Or she can be my guest. At my apartment,” said Gilbert, giving Noor a flirtatious wink.
Archambault and Prosper exchanged glances. “No, Gilbert,” said Prosper. “Madeleine will stay with Madame Garry.”
Archambault jammed his hat on and bent to enter the armoire. Once his heavy footsteps stopped clomping in the wooden chamber, Émile drew a key from his pocket and squatted beside the small trunk.
“Put these two grenades in your handbag. Carefully, Madeleine. Take them to Renée’s for me. Give Babette my love. Tell her I’ll see her and Renée on Sunday. Tomorrow …” He looked up at Prosper. “For tomorrow I need thirty-two more blasting caps.”
Prosper spread large empty hands, a gesture that, performed by an Englishman, should have been incongruous. That it came naturally said he had been disguised as a Frenchman for many months.
“And our target is …?” Gilbert asked. He sounded almost too casual.
“We haven’t yet received that information.” It didn’t appear Prosper was trying to evade the question.
Gilbert gestured at Noor. “Didn’t Madeleine bring it with her?”
But Noor shook her head. London had sent no verbal message through her, only the package wrapped in brown paper. She was waiting to give it to Prosper in private, but maybe it contained the blasting caps Émile needed, or the name of their target.
“Just one moment.” Noor stepped into the dark armoire and crouched between the clothes. She took the package from the secret compartment in her handbag and returned to the room.
“I’d love to see where you were hiding that, mademoiselle,” said Gilbert with an elastic grin.
Noor ignored him and handed Prosper the package.
“Thank you.” Prosper took a jackknife from his pocket. He cut the string and slit the brown paper to reveal a button-down leather pouch. “Voilà! A detonator magazine. One—not two, unfortunately, Phono.”
Émile shrugged and took the magazine, which, Noor knew, gave him only sixteen of the thirty-two caps he needed.
“That’s all?” Gilbert sounded as if he had expected much more.
“Nothing about the target, so we can expect that information at Archambault’s next scheduled receiving time,” said Prosper.
“Tonight,” said Gilbert.
Prosper gave a reluctant nod at the deduction, and glanced at his watch. “You must leave now.”
Émile retrieved a black device with trailing wires from the trunk, placed it in the picnic basket and covered it with brown papers from their lunch. Gilbert closed the lid over the picnic basket and fastened it, put his arm through the handle.
“Madeleine, wait here,” said Prosper, buttoning the leather pouch.
After seeing Émile and Gilbert through the armoire, Prosper returned, pouch still in hand. “At this moment, Madeleine, what you’ve managed to smuggle into France will be far safer with you than with me.” He’d relaxed into English as if he’d slipped on a pair of old slippers. “So put this right back in your purse and I’ll collect it next week. Very valuable, and not explosive—that’s all you need to know.”
Noor nodded.
“Now, your first task is to find two rooms to let. New safe houses—we cannot use the institute at Grignon much longer. Try the banlieue. Rents are lower past the fort walls, and there are fewer Jerries on the prowl in the factory districts. Find a room close to a train or métro line. I expect you’ll raise bloody little suspicion—you do look awfully French, if you don’t mind my saying.”
No, she didn’t mind his saying. It quite restored her confidence after Renée Garry’s comments and Archambault’s questions.
“Excuse me again.” She returned to the armoire, carefully removed the grenades from her handbag, stowed the leather pouch away in its secret compartment, then replaced the grenades and arranged her headscarf over the lot. She returned to Prosper.
“Too heavy?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re not French, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“Archambault tells me your father was the leader of a cult. Had a big home in Suresnes.”
“Not a cult, sir. He was a musician who taught religion and philosophy.”
“A swami and a musician? A Gandhi with music?”
“Some similar ideas, sir, but my father was a Muslim.”
“Not a separatist, are you?”
The word contained semitones Prosper seemed unaware of. In light of Britain’s pilfering colonial commerce, she sympathized with a people wanting independence from their empire, but “separatists” wanted Mr. Jinnah’s land of the pure, Pakistan—a paradise Uncle Tajuddin might appreciate, but no better than prison for herself.
She would live in France with Armand once war conditions improved, and never again fear becoming cousin Allahuddin’s third wife in either India or a theoretical Pakistan. And surely Prosper was only asking for reassurance that she would be loyal for this mission.
“No, sir, not a separatist.”
“Have enough money?”
“For now, sir.”
“Right, then. Off you go, Madeleine, old girl. Quickly.”
Prosper ran his hands through the close-cut hair over his large ears and resumed his seat at the table as if expecting another visitor. A beam of sunlight slanted over his head.
On leaving Chez Tutulle, Noor caught the tram bound for the Gare de l’Est, descended to the scarlet gates of the métro and presented a ticket from the booklet in her heavy handbag. Consulting a wall map, she caught a train going in the direction of Amiens. She had the afternoon for her first mission, to find a room to let. A room suitable for transmitting and as close to Armand in Drancy as could be. From there, Allah would show the way.
The underground train gradually emptied as it crept to the periphery, terminating at Porte de la Villette. Next came a train that chuffed along the surface at escargot pace. Noor was the only passenger in the carriage by the time it reached Le Bourget–Drancy.
The gendarme at the station would ask her to open her handbag, heavy with grenades.
Look confident.
Noor held her crumpled ticket and papers out for inspection. She came here every day; this was just another visit. The gendarme waved her through without a second glance. She climbed a stone staircase to a bridge that doubled back over the tracks. Below her, the conductor turned the sign on the engine; its direction now read Paris instead of Amiens. The long, soot-blackened train rumbled away beneath, leaving her standing on the bridge feeling suddenly lone and small.
She shouldered her handbag and walked purposefully towards some shops in the distance. A boy of about fifteen with a checked beret angled over curly brown hair cycled past, and Noor hailed him for directions to the village centre. He pointed straight ahead.
Where should she wait for an omnibus heading into Drancy?
“On the avenue.” The boy adjusted a leather satchel about his neck and touched his beret in farewell. “Avenue Jean Jaurès.”
Standing at the omnibus stop brought no omnibus, and impatience set Noor walking again. How far away was the camp? She had to find it, rent a room nearby if she could, and get all the way back to Renée’s apartment before curfew.
Sometimes you have to trust strangers.
In a park, children swung and climbed under their mothers’ watchful eyes. Noor chose a kind-looking woman about her age, cooing from beneath a purple hat into the wicker hood of a perambulator, and sat down beside her. She asked, as if it were the most normal question in the world, if madame could tell her the way to the internment camp.
The purple hat lifted from the pram and cocked in Noor’s direction. Brown eyes looked Noor over, gaze resting pointedly on Noor’s starless lapel.
“You have someone there?” the woman whispered, as if the Germans had listening devices everywhere, including children’s parks in broad daylight.
Noor’s desperate silence said yes, she did. She could only hope the woman loved someone dearly enough to understand.
The woman reached into the pram and adjusted her baby’s bonnet. Out of the side of her mouth, never taking her eyes off the baby, she said, “Continue walking down the avenue Jean Jaurès. Take the right fork in the road after the mairie. You’ll see the watchtowers. Bonne chance.”
Noor controlled her urge to run down the avenue, and set off at an even pace.
She was Anne-Marie Régnier on her way to meet her aunt. Aunt Lucille—Tante Lucille. Tante Lucille had a history of malingering illnesses. Tante Lucille had acquired a number of dearly guarded possessions that might be willed to poor Anne-Marie if Anne-Marie tended her well. Her dear old tata began to play the harp—badly—developed a dislike of strangers, a love of bone china figurines, and lived in Drancy instead of where she belonged, with Anne-Marie’s family in Bordeaux, because her son was killed nearby at Meaux in the Great War, and she now refused to leave. It was like the game she and Kabir played as children, making up stories and motives and histories for people they saw on the métro.
A turreted watchtower came into view against the brilliant blue sky, looming over six parked German military lorries. Factory workers walked or wobbled past the camp gates on threadbare tires as if accustomed to its presence. For so many, as long as they were not within, Camp de Drancy was a place to cycle by.
What were the cyclists thinking?
At the lycée Noor’s teachers often blamed the ills of the world on the inflow of immigrants, immigrants coming to France from anywhere, everywhere. Foreign-born people like herself who lived in Paris, and even those like Armand, born in France of naturalized parents. But for immigrant Jews they reserved a special distaste.
The words of popes, abbés, curés and pastors over centuries, not the words of Jesus, had paved the road to this camp. Artists, writers and politicians down the centuries re-enacted the crucifixion of Jesus “by the Jews” in paint, prose and palaver. Could one blame any one Frenchman for the anti-Semitism that created this camp? That one … or that one, beret pulled low over his brow?
Armand had been more afraid for Madame Lydia than himself, yet both were now behind the walls of Drancy. It might be worse for Madame Lydia: Russia had joined the Allies, and Madame Lydia had a Russian accent.
How could Maréchal Pétain and his premier, Laval, believe that the people behind those walls deserved such treatment? That someone like Armand, born in France, someone who composed music from the wind, whose every performance gave nothing but joy, posed a danger to France? Or to anyone?
When war was declared in ‘39, France incarcerated thousands of non-citizens, using amorphous words like “patriotism” and “prevention of terrorism.” War, said everyone, required the imprisonment of immigrants and refugees from Germany, Poland, Russia—anywhere, especially if they were Jewish. People like Pétain said the French could no longer afford equal rights for citizens and non-citizens. Or even all citizens. People like Pétain said democracy’s unending debates and strikes had crippled the country.
What had Armand and Madame Lydia done to the French, Pétain or the Germans? Nothing.
How often had newspapers said even “Israelites”—Jews like Armand, born in France, speaking French—were “unassimilable,” and Noor had dismissed them because the French were wont to say the same of Muslims. The peeves and pettiness of the French rose from the same dark core as centuries of crusades and Christian hate-mongering against Muslims.
If the French didn’t have Jews to blame, they’d have chosen the Muslims.
Yet how could she judge a single French man or woman harshly when her own elders, elders of the one family she had believed free of hatred towards any group, those who preached tolerance of all religions and spoke of the melding of East and West, rejected Armand when it came to marriage?
But what was that cyclist thinking about people behind those walls as he passed them by?
Noor was near Armand. Right now it was all she could do.
A bell sounded as she entered a tabac with standing room for two before its grimy counter. She asked the reedy proprietor leaning on his elbows from his stool behind the counter if he knew of any rooms for rent. He listened and allowed her to finish about Tante Lucille before remarking, “There are so many like you, mademoiselle.”
Plainly he didn’t believe in Tante Lucille, but by now Noor had convinced herself by the telling. “My aunt prefers that I live near her, you see.”
The proprietor swept a rag over the counter with a gnarled hand. “Wait,” he said. He opened a door behind him, barked out, “Claude!” then resumed his seat, folded his arms across his chest again and glared at her.
A checked beret poked through the door; it was the boy she’d stopped for directions to the village centre. The proprietor and Claude conferred about the possibilities for rental.
“Go with him on his bicycle,” said the proprietor.
Claude brought the bicycle to the front of the tabac and held it steady as Noor hopped on the metal carrier, handbag on her lap. She clutched at his coat, smelling rain and sweat and the acrid scent of his fear mingling with her own. The boy rode slowly past the lorries, the turreted watchtower, a long, long, four-metre-high wall topped with rolls of concertina wire, another watchtower fifty metres from the first, and another long wall.
For three years Noor had consoled herself in London by telling herself the incarceration of non-citizens and Jews in France was a temporary measure, but that now seemed terribly naive, too comforting, an idea these forbiddingly permanent camp walls and watchtowers did not support. These towers were built with French labour to inhibit foreign-born and Frenchman alike, with Vichy collaboration. Escape from behind those walls seemed impossible, even to her trained eye. What if the “temporary” measure became life imprisonment for Armand and others like him? But no, no—Armand and Madame Lydia would be released soon, certainly when conditions improved. The Germans had no reason, no reason at all, to keep them.
Past the last watchtower Noor looked back. Her mouth suddenly felt like a parched hole—a machine-gun silhouette turned towards them. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Claude was approaching a five-storey red-brick building lurking behind a chestnut tree, a dilapidated structure that leaned in on itself, as if no one had entered it since the Great War. He cycled around the side, down a sun-variegated lane to a gate in a low wall. Noor jumped off as soon as his brakes squealed.
She followed him into a patch of lawn criss-crossed with lines of hanging laundry, past cabbage and potato plants, a vacant pigpen and an untended flower bed where tough little forget-me-nots braved the sun.
“Madame Gagné!” he called.
A woman in a sacklike dress came to the door, wisps of white hair straggling about her face.
“Have you a room for rent?” Claude asked.
“A hundred and fifty francs a week.”
Claude whistled, glancing slyly at Noor.
Noor was elated enough to open her handbag and offer Madame Gagné the hundred and fifty francs immediately, but the bargaining instinct Mother complained she’d inherited from Abbajaan reminded her that one should show interest but not too much.
“It’s expensive, but it’s the best,” said Madame Gagné. “With a view. It’s occupied right now, but the tenant is moving. You could move in next week.”
Noor looked at Claude. He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head; too high.
“Seventy-five francs,” said Noor, and held her breath. What if Madame Gagné refused? She told about Tante Lucille and how very sick she was, how she needed to be near the dear old lady.
Madame Gagné shrugged her complete disbelief. “Sale Juive!” she muttered. “I told you it has a view. One hundred francs and food coupons for your breakfast. That’s my final offer.”
Noor ignored the epithet; it was probably useless to protest she was not Jewish. At four hundred francs a month, the price was a hundred francs higher than Monique had mentioned for a clean room, but any safe house was good for only three or four weeks. All Noor cared about was having a room close to Armand.
She nodded, and the door opened.
“Return for me in half an hour,” she said, pressing an SOE note into Claude’s palm. He gave a quick grin, touched his beret in appreciation.
Madame Gagné wended her asthmatic way up seventy-two creaking stairs to a room on the fourth floor. Between wheezes she told Noor she was from the Midi but had lived in Paris twenty-five years—not long enough to feel or call herself Parisienne, but enough to long for Paris whenever she visited her cousins at home. Noor ignored the implied invitation to share her own origins and asked, were there any other rooms to choose from in the boarding house? Madame Gagné shook her head. The internment camp was excellent for business; every room was full.
“No one complains,” she said, “even when the searchlights keep them awake at night. I serve breakfast from seven to nine. Some men—probably Jews—have such an appetite, if you’re not downstairs early, there’ll be nothing left to eat.”
She led Noor into an attic room, overheated from its proximity to sun. Its only furnishings were a cot-like bed and a desk. As Madame Gagné had emphasized, it had a view—one small window recessed into the slanted wall. And from it Noor could see over the camp’s wall, see the U-shaped, five-storey concrete structure that was Camp de Drancy, see clusters of men, women and even small children in the central courtyard—prisoners all.
She was so close, so close. Yet too far to recognize one man among the rest.
“The children—wearing the yellow star.”
“Of course they wear it.” Madame Gagné coughed at her elbow. Her long ears had picked up Noor’s involuntary whisper. “Jews who get caught not wearing the star are imprisoned and sent east to Germany.” She looked pointedly at Noor.
Best to ignore the comment as if it was no concern of hers.
Noor studied the chestnut tree growing before the house. It offered a convenient branch that almost touched the window, a branch on which to string an aerial.
The sheets were clean, even if the duvet smelled of spilled wine and clandestine ardour. With some pride Madame showed Noor the timer light switch that would give a maximum of fifteen minutes of light, if there was electricity. Then she led Noor down the corridor to the lavatory.
“On this floor you share with Monsieur Durand, but often he is gone. He says he travels through France selling X-ray machines—but I think he only sells rabbits, that’s what I think. I tell him what I told you: Jews caught not wearing the yellow star could be denounced. But he pretends he is hard of hearing.”
Returning down the corridor, Madame Gagné pointed to another room. “This one is Gabrielle’s room—she’s a waitress at the Café Vidrequin—don’t believe anything she says.”
Rabbits are sweet and harmless. And anyone named for Angel Gibreel deserves a listening before judgement or dismissal.
“The bathroom is downstairs on the first floor.”
Noor took the long iron key from Madame Gagné and counted out the rent in counterfeit francs. She must make contact with Armand. Insh’allah, she would think of something.
“I will stay three weeks,” she said. “By then I’m sure Tante Lucille will be better.”
Madame Gagné sniffed.
Noor sifted through the friable soil in the flowerpot, found the key and let herself in.
“Je suis seule ce soir avec mes rêves…”
Léo Marjane’s mournful voice spun from the grooves of the record and flared from the gilded horn of the gramophone, amplifying the emptiness of Renée’s drawing room.
“Renée?”
“J’ai perdu l’espoir de ton retour …”
A match scraped. Shadows danced a gavotte around a candle. Renée, in a chenille rose-vine print robe, reclined on a chaise longue, a framed photograph and a hanky on her lap. An abandoned game of solitaire was spread across the card table.
“Anne-Marie, Émile telephoned to say you would be coming tonight. Oh—hours ago!”
Renée sounded less peremptory tonight, or Noor had caught her at a vulnerable moment.
“Oh, Renée, am I late again?” Noor presented her with a posy of drooping forget-me-nots carried all the way from Madame Gagné’s garden.
“Very pretty, Anne-Marie.” Renée took a leather-bound ledger from the desk and pressed some flowers between its pages. “You really shouldn’t wander about alone. Only prostitutes walk the streets so late. You almost missed the curfew.”
“I’m sorry,” said Noor. “Is Babette asleep?”
“My friend Madame Aigrain is looking after her tonight,” said Renée. “Just nearby.”
She arranged the rest of the flowers in a fluted vase, then brought Noor a bowl of carrot soup, a chunk of rye bread and a tiny slice of Camembert.
“Beautiful china,” remarked Noor of the blue-flowered soup bowl and plates. It was impossible to compliment Renée on the soup.
“My grandmother’s Gien.” Renée joined Noor at the table.
“A lovely memento,” said Noor, her hand rising involuntarily to the tiger claw beneath her blouse. Dadijaan’s wizened brown face came to mind.
“Huh. I was not indulged,” said Renée, “but my grandmother did leave me this house as my dowry—and I promised her I will never sell it.” She gave a great sigh. “It’s going to fall apart around me.”
Noor said, “My grandmother always indulges me. I wish every little girl had one like her.”
“My mother pampers Babette,” said Renée. “Too much—it’s not good for the child. She must learn she can’t have everything because she wants it.” Her eyes gazed far away. Then a smile lit her face for a moment. “Guy—my husband—spoiled me. He did everything for me, everything I have now to learn and do myself.”
“But now you are less dependent, non?”
Renée gave a sharp, sardonic laugh, lit a cigarette. “It’s natural to be dependent. All these responsibilities—they are for men.”
Whenever Uncle began another lecture about the “natural” dependence of girls, Noor and Zaib retorted that their father trusted women initiates in Holland, Belgium and America to carry his teachings forward, and he always said women’s dependence had no basis in either nature or the Qur’an. But it would annoy Renée to disagree.
“If you had a child and an old house to look after, you might understand,” said Renée. “Today I had to move that heavy chest in the kitchen and carry a sack of wood chips down to the cellar by myself. I planted carrots, cabbage and turnips in the kitchen garden—now I have to harvest them. Like a peasant, myself!”
The carrot soup was bitter. Only hunger and politeness allowed Noor to swallow it.
Work wasn’t a burden; it was an opportunity to contribute to and participate in the world. Attitudes like Renée’s were preached to Noor’s cousin-sisters growing up in zenanas in India. How could Noor commiserate with Renée’s helplessness?
“I always wanted many children,” Renée went on. “But look—I’m thirty-nine. If my husband doesn’t return soon, I will be left with but a single child.”
Worse could happen to a woman than having only one child, and if Renée had travelled beyond Europe, she might readily imagine it.
But then, I didn’t begin resisting dependence till I understood that being protected required me to forfeit a piece of my soul. Renée must not have realized that—yet.
The day she earned her Red Cross nursing certificate, Uncle had been furious! One would think she had joined a brothel instead of learned basic first aid. He roared that she would bring down her family in the eyes of the world, that a daughter of his khaandaan, the feudal House of Khans, should never be educated past her baccalaureate, should never work outside the home. His rage was so much grander than any potential earnings; her little certificate had threatened Uncle’s fragile core. But Uncle knew, as she did, that with that certificate Noor would never be completely dependent on him or Kabir.
“I said you must have left at least three children behind in London if you are twenty-nine, but Monique said you are not married.”
“My fiancé is in London,” said Noor, for consistency with the story she’d told Monique.
“He gave you permission to work, then? Permission to leave the country?”
Noor kept her face pleasant but gave no answer. French law might still require women to obtain a man’s permission to work, travel and marry, but not so in England. So Noor hadn’t asked anyone.
“Your parents allowed you?” Renée suggested.
“My father is no longer alive,” Noor replied.
“That is a pity,” said Renée. “My father disappeared fighting the Germans. We were told he was buried alive while digging a tunnel near Vauquois. Émile was quite small, I was thirteen.”
“I too was thirteen when my father died.” To satisfy Renée’s sense of propriety she added, “My mother gave permission.” Knowing all the while that Mother knew nothing of her present whereabouts.
“You have sisters and brothers?”
“One of each.”
“Your brother, he is in the army?”
“No.”
“The air force?”
Noor didn’t hesitate. “No, he’s a teacher.”
“And your sister?”
Renée seemed warmer tonight. Playing the enigmatic spy would only rekindle distrust.
“She’s studying to be a doctor.”
“A doctor!” said Renée. “I pity her husband and children—she has a suffragette mentality.”
Be quiet. Be quiet.
Playing the veena, singing, horseback riding and writing stories for children, Noor had expressed herself far beyond the houseful-of-children terminus to which Uncle’s marriage plans led; and insh’allah, Zaib would go further along that path, if Noor and Kabir could find the money for it. War brought opportunities as well as hardship, opportunities Uncle could never imagine. Zaib had Mother’s drive: she wouldn’t waste a single one.
Uncle would have approved of Renée as fit to befriend his nieces—one reason Noor would never have invited Renée to Afzal Manzil for his approval.
Perhaps Renée was simply bewildered and annoyed by choices and decisions. But no, it was more than that. Renée stubbed out her cigarette and lit another, saying, “I have no one but Émile. And with Guy captive in Germany, I am afraid for him. For every act of sabotage, the Germans execute ten Frenchmen. The guns are never silent at Mont Valérien.”
“Mont Valérien?” Noor felt Armand’s coat beneath her shoulders again, remembered their special spot under the tall chestnuts, the night of their clandestine marriage.
“The Germans shoot Communists and resistants there.”
What desecration of a beautiful, sacred spot! Even without her memories of Armand, Mont Valérien was sacred to the memory of the soldiers buried there.
“I lived near Mont Valérien.”
“Everything has changed.” Anger born of crumbled expectations filled Renée’s voice. “We are hostages abandoned by our men. They could have fought harder. Now the Germans will be here forever.”
“Oh, no, Renée! It is not the fault of French soldiers. Listen, everyone says the Russians won at Stalingrad. That should give us hope. Even Napoleon couldn’t conquer Russia, yet that insane Hitler believes he can! And so many like Émile are working to free France. The Allies have landed in Africa. The war cannot last forever.”
“Allies in North Africa—huh! Comme tu es naïve! They’ve cut off supplies from our colonies. Today I paid eighteen francs on the black market for dates—a few months ago they cost four. I can’t even find figs to fill our stomachs! You’re too young to understand, Anne-Marie. Jews and immigrants led France into this war, and now the Germans imprison us all.”
Change the subject.
“What work did your husband do?”
“Before the war? Guy was an engineer, like Émile. For years I told him he should get a government position, but he said private companies paid more. Maybe more when times are good, but when he became a POW, they stopped sending his salary. Now if he had been a civil servant as I begged him, the government would have paid it to me. You know how much is my allowance? One hundred and forty francs per week and just half of Guy’s army pay. Can any woman survive on that and buy milk for a child? Each parcel I send Guy costs me 250 francs—and does the government give me extra rations or textile points for him? No. Guy was saving to buy me a car, but now I’ve spent almost all our savings. I sold my mother’s Daumier at an art auction for only sixty thousand francs—and this too is all gone. I might have to sell this house. In the Stalag, the Germans don’t even give Guy clothes—I had to send him shoes in the last parcel. Oh, that was the worst! I told the social worker I know of wives who get much more. It’s a disgrace.” Renée held out her hands, palms upwards. “Are these the hands of an engineer’s wife?”
Noor gave a sympathetic murmur as she rose from the table.
Prices and scarcities had dominated every discussion in London over the past three years too. But it did seem Renée wasn’t being paid by the SOE. Miss Atkins hadn’t instructed Noor to offer Renée payment for her hospitality, or said how much. Should she offer Renée money? Did she have enough SOE funds to do it? There’d be someone, insh’allah, to whom she could apply if funds ran low.
But Renée might be insulted by an offer of money. And Noor hated discussions of money; it received far too much importance.
“I won’t be staying very long,” she said, intending comfort.
In the bedroom, Noor carefully removed the grenades from her handbag, returned to Renée, and gave her Émile’s directions to hide them till Sunday and his message of love for Babette.
The guard plays with me—she cheats me of bread some days, brings it late on others. There is no complaint department. I announce to myself I am a dervish living on bread and water. That doesn’t stop me from remembering the taste of cardamon chai, a morsel of sweet jalebi, the scent of beef bourguignon—anything other than soup.
I drag my chains around my sealed cell in a stumbling approximation of exercise. I touch the walls—they feel warmer than me. I listen for patterns of explosions, patterns in the pulsing rush of nearby trains. I search for meaning in the scuttling of insects.
But I come back always to my paper, pen and ink. Why, and for whom, do I write? I fool myself, I pass the time. I add nothing to the world, I give no one pleasure or pain. Why render the past for you, spirit I never knew, may never see? But what else can I do? Sit here and look at the scratches on the plaster, worrying that I may meet the fate of those who’ve suffered in this cell before me?
A true Sufi would embrace this chance for solitude, meditation, silence. A true Sufi would use this time, focus on her beloved and the Divine Beloved, and pray for the annihilation of Self.
Abbajaan taught that separation from the Beloved, from Allah, is the greatest sorrow, that pain of which Rumi and other Sufi poets wrote. In my separation from Armand, I fathom an element of their anguish, for in the vast landscape of past emotions no pain is quite like this. The yearning for the beloved, human or transcendent, is its own pain and its own joy, varying in intensity, constant in its presence.
That night, in the small bedroom at Renée’s, I searched my heart for sympathy with Renée for her similar separation from Guy, but her feelings were mixed with an anger I could not comprehend, an anger dwelling just beneath her suffering, waiting for direction. I had seen such anger mixed with sorrow and helplessness before, in Mother, your grandmother, left alone in Paris like Renée, without a husband and with children to feed. Mother blamed Abbajaan no less than Renée blamed Guy, first for leaving her, then for dying in India.
Yet how dissimilar were my reactions from Renée’s, to the same events. The war and my escape to London freed me from Uncle Tajuddin’s plans for my marriage to cousin Allahuddin, and taught me to rely on my own wits and actions, while Renée was defeated at thirty-nine and blamed the enemy du jour for her unrealized potential. She seemed to experience every event as one more addition to a stream of affronts and inconveniences directed at her, and at no one else. She wanted security, safety—changelessness.
Maybe because I am ten years younger, I still feel hope. My responsibility to you, ma petite, is to better the world before Armand and I ask your soul to return.
I had failed to say my prayers all day, and felt out of touch with Allah. So by the glow of a lantern placed between my bed and Renée’s, I rested on one elbow and filled a sheet of onionskin with a letter to Kabir, asking him to pray to Allah on my behalf.
Bhaiya, brother mine, I wrote:
Allah has guided me to a place where hope and despair show their faces alternately. Pray that I have courage enough for this mission, and that we are united forever with those we love when this unending war dies down. I cannot write of the present, but since the present is but an echo of the past, I will write about the past.
Remember when we were children, Josianne and I would chase you and Zaib through dim rooms at Afzal Manzil after Abbajaan’s students had gone home, how we played catch about the stone fountain at the end of the lane? And the garden where Abbajaan passed his mantle to you—you were only ten. I remember Mother sitting at her desk with her ledgers, frowning about finances, then putting on her bright smile to greet the students. Always she could play many parts, simultaneously.
And there were other actresses. Remember the time Zaib and I were at the cinema laughing at Arletty in Fric-Frac while you made excuses for us to Uncle. How glad I am to this day that he believed you!
Remember the shared times, brother of mine.
Say a du’a for me, forget me not,
Noor.
Kabir was flying missions over Europe; it was not the time to remind him that my memories of shared times were not all beautiful. I don’t know all that was said between your uncle and your father when they met in 1940, only that Kabir refused to see what was special about Armand. Kabir’s heart turned from me at the very moment I needed his love most, when he agreed with Uncle that marriage to cousin Allahuddin would be the best cure for my love for a Jew.
I signed that letter “Noor,” but I could have signed Anne-Marie or Madeleine so long as I called him “brother.” I have known your uncle Kabir a few years longer than he has known himself, but Kabir has never known Noor, only the role called “sister.”
I sealed the envelope, put it in my handbag and returned to bed. Renée knelt beside the lantern and the small tongue of flame grew dim, then vanished.
She lay down and I lay awake, thinking long and hard of the white walls and gun towers surrounding Camp de Drancy. Armand’s letters flashed before me as if on a cinema screen. The one from Cannes, saying only that he and your grandmother Lydia were safe. Then the one from Nice. Then finally the card from Drancy in April. No message sidled between the blackened lines, I could make out nothing that said he wished we were together.
And how, when I had said “Adieu,” did I expect Armand would write at all, for was it not I, your cowardly mother, who agreed that afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne, agreed because Armand wanted it so, that we must forget one another, forget eight, almost nine long years of love and waiting?
Maybe his cards were but tributes to nostalgia for our friendship; he has always been my friend first, my closest friend.
Could I ask one wish of a genie, I thought, I would return to that moment in the Bois and say, “I do not want safety; we are only safe when nothing more can happen to us. I am your wife: I share your fears, your burdens; your people are mine. If they and you are not safe, no one is safe. I will be with you always.”
Allah, my love had survived even our dashed plans for life together. I could not—still cannot—bear to think of Armand suffering, without adequate food, needing clothes, shoes. Was it possible? The night I wrote to Kabir, I still believed such suffering could not happen in Europe, could not be inflicted by Europeans on Europeans. Like Odile, I too believed that kind of suffering is only inflicted on the colonized in places like India and Africa.
I heard a sniff, then another; Renée must have thought me asleep. I wondered if I should try to comfort her, but some griefs and longings are private, like my grief for you, my longing for Armand. When these come upon me unpredictably, there is no bargaining with them. I hide them beneath distractions, resolutions and activity.
Eventually I fell into exhausted sleep and dreamed I was searching for Armand, when suddenly I began falling from a great height, that a man I did not know reached out to save me. Then I was suspended in mid-air with only a strange man’s arms supporting me.
I woke sweating, wondering which of my countries I was in, and why my tears were still falling.