CHAPTER 18

Paris, France
Thursday, June 24, 1943

THE MOSAIC DOME of La Mosquée pressed into milky sky. The café nestled in the shadow of the grand mosque seemed to wake, as a few people entered its cedar-trellised courtyard. A fezzed garçon brought tea in a cone-lidded pot. Noor poured it into a demitasse and glanced at her watch.

Early, for a change. At 15:00 hours Professor Balachowsky would be waiting in the Jardin des Plantes, a short walk from La Mosquée.

A fine mist rose from the marble baths within the mosque compound and scented the summer air with an attar of rose. In the distance, the sound of oud strings joined the slow rhythm of a zikr ilahi. It was past Zuhr, but even if she had intended to say her Asar prayers, Noor couldn’t enter the mosque, mindful of her orders not to return anywhere she might be recognized. The café close to Allah was her compromise.

Snatches of Moroccan Arabic, close enough to Urdu and Qur’anic Arabic for her to piece together meaning: old men were passing a water pipe along with stories of their years of resistance to the French Protectorate. A few tables away, a calligrapher bent over his ink pot and paper, labourers hunched over a chessboard. A group of men talking in French bemoaned the difficulty of sending money to Tunisia and Algeria. Curious glances flicked in her direction from time to time.

Probably wondering what kind of woman she was, and what a girl of Noor’s age, alone and unclaimed, was doing here in public. With only a headscarf as hijab. Like Uncle Tajuddin, none of them would find Noor “Muslim enough” for their liking. Still, there was an unspoken bond she could rely on with Muslim strangers, even disapproving ones, and it was ingrained in them never to call a gendarme, German or French, for any reason.

Because of Ramzaan, only travellers were dining. Maybe she shouldn’t have ordered tea? But even without fasting, Noor was faint from lack of food. Worry for Armand and Madame Lydia had dulled her appetite at Madame Gagné’s table that morning. The tea might settle her stomach.

Monsieur Durand hadn’t come down to breakfast. Gabrielle said she would check up on him later. She scooped up Noor’s share of jam and threw two tobacco ration tickets across the table at her, saying anyone could have them, she didn’t need them; what good were they to anyone with Monsieur le Missionnaire gone?

Gabrielle had second thoughts this morning—like Noor. She might not have seen the children on the buses because they were sitting or because they were too small. Because they were facing the other side, because they were going too fast, because … because … Gabrielle would present herself at the gate today and ask for the children’s laundry. If the guards gave her any, the children were still within.

Such a simple and effective verification, that laundry request. Couldn’t Noor do the same? But wilfully presenting herself anywhere identification would be scrutinized more carefully than at street checkpoints was dangerous to her mission, to the network—no, she couldn’t.

Mint tea stung Noor’s tongue, burned all the way down.

Her clothes smelled of the tobacco-filled night of waiting, muscles remembered her panic-stricken running beside bus after bus. The rabbits’ blood had washed off her hands, but the image of skins tented over bones was indelible. Worst was the memory of Monsieur Durand’s eyes, his empty hands and his faith. “God will look after them.”

His dignity guided by example, guided her through the not-knowing.

Allah, you who know the suffering of Al-Hallaj, let not my Armand suffer hunger, wound or pain. Allah, if he has been sent to Germany, don’t let them treat him harshly. I would take his place, Allah. Let them take me, not him.

Now, more than ever, she must trust Allah to keep Armand safe, and hope Claude would confirm Armand had received her message. She took smaller sips and distracted herself with memories.

So many visits to this grand Moorish-style mosque when she was a child. There were so few Muslims in France in those days, and so few from India, that a glimpse of another Indian in the café at La Mosquée crinkled the tributary lines at Abbajaan’s eyes. Brimming with questions, he’d invite perfect strangers to his table and in mellifluous Hindustani or Urdu say, “Where are you coming from? Near Bombay? We are coming from the Kingdom of Baroda.”

Uncle Tajuddin, on the other hand … Uncle, whose duty to his half-brother’s legacy compelled his presence in this land of infidels, compelled him every day to wear his one pair of European shoes. Uncle was far too haughty to chat with Indian Muslims who frequented La Mosquée. To him Maghriben Muslims from North Africa were entirely beneath his noble station. And as for non-Muslims of all kinds—they were dhimmis, redeemable only by conversion.

All Abbajaan’s inclusionary ideas were “non-Muslim” for Uncle. He was shocked to find Abbajaan teaching that Islam was one way but not the only way to God, shocked that Abbajaan permitted his daughters, wife and women followers to dress and “express themselves” as they felt, and to imbibe wine. While Abbajaan searched for seven levels of meaning, deep metaphors and symbolism behind the words of the Qur’an, his half-brother was a Qari, a reciter for whom the Qur’an was a set of sounds and commands with a single interpretation—his own. For Abbajaan, Islam laid down unattainable ideals that everyone could aspire to; for Uncle, it was not simply a religion but an ideology from which there was no dissent, only heresy.

Allah would be merciful, but his representative in the Khan family was not.

Oh, she should be kinder to Uncle even in memory. He banished himself from his home and family and the comfortable life of a raees, a landed gentleman in India, to be exiled in France—a country with ways he didn’t comprehend, speaking a foreign language he considered crude; to run a school of Sufism preaching in English about tenets he didn’t believe, all to feed and care for his half-brother’s family. Thankless family, too. Each resenting him for not being Abbajaan, resenting him, poor man, for not even coming close.

“Duty! Honour!” he’d remind Kabir each morning, in a melancholy voice.

Mother put aside her own yearnings for casseroles, peach cobblers and the like, tolerating Uncle’s need for goat curry and Surati lentils—but then, she couldn’t survive without him even so far as to write a cheque; and without his guardianship and lectures there would have been no Sufi school. But no amount of experimentation or employing of immigrant chefs helped her prepare pilau or okra the way he liked it. The only “Indian” cookbook Mother had in those days was by an Englishwoman who gave recipes for mulligatawny soup and “keggeree.” When Noor or Zaib tried to help, it only extended Uncle’s lengthy lectures on cooking—though he couldn’t even boil an egg for himself. Nine years of those lectures, till Dadijaan’s arrival in 1938.

Dadijaan’s cooking soothed her half-son’s culinary cravings, but Mother had to live with her constant disapproval. Still, Dadijaan was a fount of fascinating stories of when Abbajaan was young, stories Noor translated for Mother. And Dadijaan’s faith in Allah called to Noor’s as Uncle’s never could.

Mother and Dadijaan will see one day they had someone they both loved, in common.

The calligrapher was fanning his ink dry. The labourers finished their chess game, traded colours, lined up their men again and began anew. If she weren’t concerned about attracting notice, she might have moved closer to watch the nuances of play. But the men might be like Uncle—so unaccustomed to the presence of unrelated women, they’d be highly uncomfortable if she so much as took a step towards them.

Noor glanced at her watch. She would wait ten minutes more.

Uncle Tajuddin’s reactions were extreme and individual, unique to him. The chess players might be quite unlike him.

Uncle couldn’t see much individuality in the French. “What is individual about these bourgeois Parisians?” he would ask. “If they questioned themselves ‘why?’ before they bought a new dress or coat, instead of ‘why not?,’ wouldn’t they have more for the poor? Women buying long jackets one season then short the next, all at the same time. Women with finger curls today, no finger curls tomorrow, as if they shared one brain among them! Men taking mistresses instead of helping indigent women by marrying them! French women willing to live out their lives in ménages à trois but gasping in horror at polygamy. The challenge,” he said, “is to find happiness within the constraints of your society, not to throw off all restraint. Creativity,” the courtly old gentleman would pronounce in his flowery Urdu, “requires the constraints of form to find expression.”

But the constraints Uncle spoke of were those of his childhood in Baroda, not Paris, and the customs he wanted to re-create were the idealized feudal life of the fifteenth century, customs no longer practised even in India except in the courts of nawabs. By twelve, Noor had read and discussed the Qur’an enough with Abbajaan to know that restraints on women’s conduct and marriage were inventions not of Allah but of the mullahs who succeeded the Prophet. And so from the age of fifteen, when Uncle arrived, Noor’s creativity, and that of Zaib, lay in finding detours around his limits.

Noor sipped her tea almost to its dregs.

For instance, when, to Uncle’s horror, Zaib “expressed herself” on her eighteenth birthday, in the hammam behind this café, by henna-dyeing her hair auburn, Uncle promptly punished Noor for “allowing” it. Reprisals were always his way. But the corner of Noor’s mouth rose recalling how Zaib stubbornly kept to her auburn hair, even in London, long after Uncle had returned to India. Putting it in Christian terms for Mother, Zaib said her disobedience was a sin but one Noor had already redeemed on her behalf.

Noor and Zaib would chat for hours in the steamy women’s hammam and afterwards order tabouli, lamb kebabs and flaky honey cakes. None were available today—not only because of the war, but because of Ramzaan.

Noor swirled the tea leaves gathered at the bottom, then decanted the dregs into her saucer. The clumped, dark leaves were supposed to guide, but assigning meaning to their random shapes required a gymnastic imagination. Letters referred to names of people. Was there an A? Not that she could find. All she could see were flags or squares—warnings. But warnings of what? When? All in a clockwise spiral: events were coming towards her, around her.

Noor glanced up. Everyone seemed to be engrossed in his own work or play. Too quiet, perhaps, but quite as normal as she remembered.

Zaib would interpret happy endings from her tea leaves; Zaib was so much better at adjusting to the world the way it was. How matter-of-fact Zaib had been the day she accompanied Noor to Madame Dunet’s home. Four years younger, the sixteen-year-old took charge. Somehow she had five thousand francs, all counted and ready in an envelope, for the midwife. More money than Noor had ever seen in her life. Zaib held Noor’s hand all the way across the Bois de Boulogne, held her close as Madame Dunet applied the suction, washed her clothes afterwards.

Strange how my secret, shared at Madame Dunet’s, brought us closer.

The warnings, the warnings. What could they mean?

The red-fezzed garçon who took her order—was he a collabo? Or were the chess players? What if the place she felt safest was the one place she wasn’t?

Stay alert, stay vigilant!

Abandoning her attempt to decode the tea leaves, Noor paid the garçon, arranged her headscarf about her neck and made her way across the street, through the tall gates of the Jardin des Plantes, past a wooden signboard that announced No admittance to Jews.

Inside the Jardin des Plantes, regiments of riotous flowers from all corners of France and many other countries stood upright in their oblong beds, neatly classified and separated beneath the sculptured trees. The Germans had yet to invent a method of transporting these fragile beauties to Germany.

In the distance, starched white plumage—a nun shepherding a line of girls in neatly pressed, pleated skirts. Noor slowed for a long-eared white rabbit mincing across her path, its leash, then a very old gentleman in a top hat, his face like Monsieur Durand’s abject one. Then past a couple who, oblivious to a barbed wire blockade beside their bench, were entwined in a passionate kiss.

A pair of cocky young men with slicked-back long hair, long coats and drainpipe trousers passed carrying a bundle: a cat wrapped in a small straitjacket. The poor animal would soon be passing for rabbit in black market bistro tureens. “Lapin rôti au four … au poivre … au fenouil.”

Professor Balachowsky was bowed over a bed of pensées. Noor murmured the all-clear password as she walked past. The Professor straightened, put his pipe in his mouth. In a few minutes he joined her in the privacy of the gazebo.

The exchange was to be quick. The map, marked with an X to show the burial spot for the arms canisters dropped two days earlier at Rosny, passed from Noor’s hand to his. She whispered the code words that would authorize release of the smuggled canisters for transfer onwards from Grignon.

Quickly, Noor pulled the letter she had written to Zaib from her jacket pocket. “I would be obliged, Professor,” she whispered, “if you would give this letter to Gilbert before the next landing.”

But the Professor was pale behind his unlit pipe. Sweat beaded above his worry lines.

“What is it, Professor?” said Noor. “Are you not feeling well?”

He jerked his head. “Max was captured by the Gestapo in Caluire, near Lyons. Go to Phono immediately and tell him. Say it is very possible the great Max is no more.” He turned away, slump-shouldered.

Max. Jean Moulin.

“Wh-when was Max captured?”

“Three days ago—June 21. Hélas! He was tortured horribly. Horribly. But I know he did not speak—why would he speak now? The first time the Boche tortured him, three years ago, you know he slit his own throat with a splinter of glass rather than sign his name to lies. But it is too much to expect that he will resist and survive a second time. Or escape again.”

Noor laid her hand on the Professor’s arm; a bone-deep tremor went through it. She helped him to a bench in the corner of the gazebo.

Professor Balachowsky seemed to struggle to master himself. “Je suis fou! We all know this happens but never think it will happen to someone like Max. I only met him once, but …”

He sat up straight. “When the Germans came, I thought, ‘I’m just an old professor teaching about insects—what can I do?’ Then I heard of Max and I thought, ‘My grandparents came from Poland and bought a vineyard, but I’m as French as Monsieur Hoogstraten.’ Monsieur Hoogstraten’s grandparents were Dutch, you see. So as soon as he returned to Grignon from the POW camp, I asked, ‘Director, what shall I do?’ Little did I know Director Hoogstraten had been in the Resistance for more than a year, since the Battle of France … But it was all because I heard the story of Max.”

“But you’re not sure Max is dead.”

“I hope so, for his sake,” said the Professor, looking away. “The Gestapo chief in Lyons put him on display for fellow prisoners—all with the Resistance, so they smuggled out messages as soon as they could. They said he was in a coma. Swollen lips, head in bandages. Knuckles broken, face beaten to an unrecognizable pulp, eyes dug in as though they’d been punched through his head—Oh, please excuse me, mademoiselle! Enfin, it was the last time our Max was seen alive.”

A cold sickness crawled over Noor.

“The Germans must be delighted,” Professor Balachowsky said after a silence. “Without Max, the Free French groups will return to sporadic sabotage. Well-meaning, but scattered and uncoordinated.”

“But it is all fighting the Germans—isn’t that important?” Noor hoped to lead him back to hope.

The Professor gave a ruptured sigh. “Anne-Marie, it is only in the past few months we began to benefit from working together. If we derailed a train, the network with a well-placed worker made sure phone lines were cut so there was more time to get away. If we planned to blow up a building, another network might verify it would be full of Germans. It’s taken three years to create what we have today—codes, supply lines, maps of secret passages, courier lines, workshops, escape routes and safe houses.”

He glanced right and left, then spoke even lower. “In the beginning we were just schoolboys playing with matches. Printing newspapers, pouring water into German petrol tanks, making grand symbolic gestures, risking our freedom and our lives just to paint V-for-Victory signs on street corners—pinpricks to the Germans! It’s only now that no German feels safe anywhere in France. Every time they climb aboard a train, mount a truck or a bus, they fear the Resistance will call down English bombs upon them—or set their own charges.”

“By Resistance, do you mean networks like ours, or the Free French?”

“Both. I was at a meeting where we all agreed to co-operate—the only time I saw Max, standing there with his white scarf covering the scar. Heard that strange voice.”

Miss Atkins had said the SOE only co-operated with the Free French “when we have to.”

“Why would The Firm co-operate with the Free French?” asked Noor.

“Vous savez, the Free French have gathered information for General de Gaulle that The Firm could only dream of gathering for Churchill. Free French networks extend everywhere in France, and know the right questions to ask and whom to ask in every village, and because they ask it on behalf of a Frenchman, General de Gaulle, people are glad to help. But when people know their answers will be sent to Churchill and the English, they think twice.” The Professor sounded almost envious of the rival intelligence group.

A sooty pigeon fluttered into the gazebo and pecked about, searching for crumbs.

Noor reached into her pocket for the tobacco coupons Gabrielle had given her, and held them out to the Professor.

Professor Balachowsky’s gloom lightened for a moment. Without a word he pulled his pipe out of his mouth and pointed to a tiny hole at its tip.

A miniature poison dart gun.

She nodded, still holding out the coupons.

He took them with a grave “Merci,” then straightened, wiped his brow with a large white handkerchief, then his moustache and grey goatee. “First Vidal, now Max. But we carry on. There is nothing else to be done. We’ll come through this, Anne-Marie.”

He stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets and took a deep breath. “Archambault said your transmitters and suitcase arrived. It was so amusing …”

In a teasing whisper he recounted that one parachute got caught in a tree, breaking open Noor’s valise and festooning the drop zone with her white lingerie. Archambault and the others had to hunt all over for the clothing. The valise was now strapped shut and taken to Grignon.

Noor might have been embarrassed except that the jovial tale of her unmentionables was so obviously told to mask Professor Balachowsky’s greater woes.

“I’m most thankful that the delay didn’t give the Germans time to reach the drop zone,” she said. She and Émile would make separate trips to Grignon to move the transmitters and her personal belongings. Noor would conceal one transmitter at Madame Gagné’s boarding house at Drancy, the other in Renée’s cellar. The last would be transferred from Grignon to the boarding house behind Chez Tutulle.

The Professor seemed recovered now. Noor kissed him on both cheeks as they parted.

“Haiya-‘alas-salah! Haiya-’alas-salah!”

The azaan was ululating from La Mosquée’s minaret as Noor left the Jardin des Plantes. As she hurried down the rue Monge, the full import of Professor Balachowsky’s news rippled up inside her. A tidal wave chased her down the métro stairs and crashed against her solar plexus.

Allah! If the great Max, the one man who knew every leader of every Resistance network in the country, has been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, how long can our network last?