CHAPTER 20

Paris, France
Saturday, June 26, 1943

SACRÉ COEUR LOOMED LARGE on the Butte Montmartre under a bitten moon, the neon signs and street lamps of Pigalle made extinct by war. A clock tower’s hand pointed three minutes past nine. Noor walked quickly from the métro near the Place de Clichy towards a bridge. Her transmitter suitcase pulled at her arm as she descended a stone staircase to the avenue Rachel.

Beyond the large iron gates of the Cimetière de Montmartre, mausoleums crowded beside the path. Tall and narrow, like the checkpoints she’d encountered on the way.

Slam, bang, click. She closed and locked all the doors that must remain closed for efficiency—doors to imagination, worry, fear. But no door could be slammed on memory.

If there had been a cemetery like this one for Muslims in 1926, Abbajaan wouldn’t have been buried so far away, and she, Kabir and Zaib might have tended his grave. But at the time, Christians didn’t allow Muslims to be buried beside their kin.

When this war was over, she’d go to India with Armand. Introduce them.

The avenue des Polonais was a short climb up the hill past a bed of tulips, their purple brilliance dimmed to lavender by the moonlight.

Here the rich and famous slept together. Abbajaan lay alone in his marble dargah in a high-walled compound. By the time thirteen-year-old Noor went to India with Mother, Kabir and Zaib to bow her head at his tomb, Abbajaan had been buried three months. And no matter how much Noor had wept for that tomb to be opened so she could see Abbajaan’s body, she was hushed, soothed—and denied.

The fragrance of woodsmoke wafted by. She was a dark wraith slipping between mausoleums, invisible to any German.

Don’t think of Germans, think of something else.

To thirteen-year-old Noor, Abbajaan had joined the farishtas, become an angel. Later—all paths to Allah being valid—Hinduism, idol worship and all, brought the comfort of a temporary belief in reincarnation. But as for the Hindu custom of cremation, the very idea wrung Noor’s stomach like a sponge.

A half-uncle had once willed that he be cremated instead of buried like other Muslims, setting off a huge family conclave that eventually overturned the dead man’s will. The cremation of one man in the family could mark all of them as subject to Hindu law in the eyes of the British Raj, and while the Khan men didn’t mind honouring the dead man’s request, every woman in the Khan family was adamantly against losing her Qur’an-guaranteed right to inherit a fourth of her husband’s estate. They said respecting all religions was one thing, but practising all their contradictory customs and rituals at once was impossible.

A breeze, cooling after the hot day and the stuffiness of Madame Aigrain’s apartment, soughed and sighed amid the branches of old trees. Noor crept behind a stone bench and peered into the dark.

Mother brought Noor and Kabir here one wintry day when Abbajaan was giving a veena recital with his brothers at an Oriental revue in Montmartre. Mother turned up her collar and tugged at her single-breasted coat to double-breast it. Here, on this stone bench, she sent Noor with Kabir to search out the graves of famous composers Abbajaan said were Sufis who didn’t know they were Sufis.

Kabir found the grave of Hector Berlioz; Noor found Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone. She came back to tell Mother and found her with a handkerchief to her eyes. But Mother got up gamely and soon found Jacques Offenbach, the comic opera genius. Too bad Uncle wasn’t there to be scandalized; the idea of respecting the grave of the creator of the cancan!

But it was soon after those tears that Abbajaan began teaching Sufism and his music began its diminuendo.

Past the stone bench now, stone sepulchres looming on either side of the street. The iron grille gate of the Famille Ginot hung open as Émile had promised.

Checking to see no one was following, Noor slipped in, the door creaking closed behind her. Inside, an exquisitely carved statue of Mary leaned over two ragged cushioned kneeling pews. She hefted her suitcase up on the altar, flipped it open, drew aside the chemise she’d thrown over her transmitter, removed a torch, her code book and message book. She was about to thumb the switch on the torch when a phantom loomed from the shadows.

Noor froze. Her heart hadn’t drummed like this in training or even when working at Grignon with Archambault.

Only Phono!

In silence, he helped her string the aerial through the broken stained glass window behind the Virgin. The tomb, barely three feet wide, wasn’t built for two agents formulating telegraphic sentences. Émile held a torch steady as Noor coded and pencilled the resulting message into the squares of her message book. The page began to look like a fragment of Suleyman’s magical shirt.

A few minutes later the Morse sequence bearing the terrible news propelled itself into the moonlit night. Then the final signoff, Madeleine.

“Madeleine,” directed Émile, “go into hiding for some days. I will tell Monsieur Hoogstraten, Gilbert and Viennot we have warned London. London will stop sending arms and agents.”

“You will continue without London’s help? How?”

Émile reeled in the aerial and returned it to the suitcase. “We can continue cutting phones, derailing trains, bombing warehouses and stealing factory job sheets, whether the Allies invade or not. Viennot will get us information from German officers—he’s in touch with the Free French.”

Noor tossed her code and message books on the transmitter, threw her chemise on top, closed the lid and secured both clasps.

Émile’s furious whispers continued. “Not a single German occupying France must be allowed to sleep easy in his bed while they billet themselves in French homes, steal our coal, grain and wine and ‘resettle us’ somewhere in the east.”

Noor put a finger to her lips.

Émile was not finished. “The tanks and guns may be with them, but we have no recourse but to fight, for our families, for the future.”

Carefully, he opened the mausoleum door, looked to left and right, and slipped out. Noor pulled the door closed and stood sweating, mentally counting to a thousand.

Émile is right—the French must shake off their chains. As long as the Occupation continues, resistance must continue.

For three days after Prosper and Archambault were arrested, Noor remained in Madame Aigrain’s spare room, lying low, following Proust’s self-absorbed characters through their jaded existence.

Her only respite from Proust was another quick evening foray to Drancy, back to the garage. Had Claude determined if Armand was still in the camp? Had he received her message? Was there any news?

“Non, mademoiselle, je suis desolé.” But he promised he would tell her immediately he learned anything. “I have my contacts,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper.

A dispirited Gabrielle served dinner at the Café Vidrequin and, when her German soldiers were gone, showed Noor a postcard on which was printed, Je serai transféré dans un autre camp. N’envoyez plus de colis. Attendez ma nouvelle adresse. “I will be transferred to another camp. Do not send any more parcels. Wait for my new address.” Gabrielle’s little nephew had signed the printed words.

Gabrielle had presented herself at the camp gates and asked for the children’s laundry. “They said there is no laundry. They said, ‘They have been deported.’”

She looked straight before her; it was Noor whose eyes brimmed.

“I can’t say how I felt when I heard that,” said Gabrielle. “I’ll tell you another time.”

Then she had requested an appointment with Herr Brunner, the new Kommandant; it was refused. No one would tell her which camp the children had been sent to. Her letters were returned by the camp post.

“The railway workers who come in here say those cars were bound for Metz,” she told Noor. “But after that they don’t have one single idea where the boxcars will be switched. Idiots! Don’t tell me they don’t know, enh! They have friends down the line, they could find out for me, if they wanted.”

Gabrielle’s anger at the Germans had deflected to people who were trying to help her.

And Monsieur Durand—poor Monsieur Durand. Madame Gagné said she had told him to leave. Her voice turned self-righteous, tinted with the certainty of a fortune teller gazing into a crystal ball. “If he’d told me where he was going, he’d be behind the camp walls by now.”

Back to Madame Aigrain’s little room in Auteuil, where she couldn’t think of anything more she could do for Armand but pray. She had to rely on Claude now.

By the third day, the forced inactivity was making her muscles crawl; her body was accustomed to hours of exercise. So when Monique insisted she attend their wedding, Noor gladly accepted. She needed a ceremony that celebrated love even as she yearned for her own.