CHAPTER 22
Grignon, France
Tuesday, July 1, 1943
A TRENET SONG blared from a megaphone as Noor cycled past the toylike train station of Grignon and the swastika-draped mairie building and rode into the village square.
Two weeks before Bastille Day, the town was celebrating the feast of Saint Martin under a sunny sky embellished with a few puffs of teased wool. And under the eagle eyes of Marktpolizei circulating and watching the crowd. In one corner of the square, balls clicked in games of boules. In another, painted horses whirled children about a carousel. Puppet knights slew infidels on the Guignol stage; a little girl tugged at her mother’s sleeve, begging to join the watching crowd. A young man snapped his suspenders, flexing his biceps for the oblique glance of a passing shopgirl. Stilt dancers whirled like dervishes. A rag man cried, “Chiffons! Chiffons!” extolling the merits of his well-used wares. Girls and women carried baskets, buying and selling unrationed apples, turnips and Jerusalem artichokes at trestle tables, talking, listening, walking, their elders resting in the shade of willow trees. Boys in short pants dodged their mothers.
On any other day Noor would have stopped before the glove puppets or bought an apple for Babette. But after her narrow escape with the Garrys the day before, it seemed a dread flood was rising to drown everyone. The tightness in her chest said England, the SOE, friends she’d trained with, agents she had come to know in the PROSPER network, relatives of whom she was always aware—everyone she knew seemed more remote than India.
Monique’s borrowed slacks and blouse were more comfortable for cycling than any skirt.
If only there were some way to know that Monique herself, Émile, Renée and Babette had reached Le Mans safely.
And if she could have received one, just one, word of news from Drancy, just one word that Armand had received her tiger claw and message; but there was none. If it was selfish to think of Armand when Prosper’s arrest had endangered more than fifteen hundred resistants across northern France … so be it. Each of the fifteen hundred resistants in Prosper’s network had a raison d’être. Armand was hers.
Crossing the square would attract the attention of the Marktpolizei, so she detoured through a web of streets and alleys that predated Cartesian geometry; and each turn delayed her further. At last she was out of Grignon, pedalling down the bumpy country road towards the Institut National Agronomique, standing as she pedalled as if straining to remain above water.
A quarter past ten—Gilbert, wait for me!
Sparrow hawks chattered—kyow-kyow—from fir branches. Wagtails tchiked, flicked their white tails and fluttered away as she rode by vineyards. Her blouse clung to her back, her hands slipped on the handlebars. She stopped, took her beret from her handbag and tucked her ponytail into it. A welcome breeze cooled her neck.
Rolling fields bordered the roadsides for a mile or so, giving way to the gloom and woody scent of oak from a game forest. The stone wall and porticos of the institute came in sight.
Behind her, a shiny black shape roared and reared up. Noor swerved sharply as a Citroën swooped within an inch of her left knee. But her hands refused to surrender the handlebars, and down she went in a great jangle of metal to bone-jarring gravel.
Elbow-searing, hand-grazing gravel. Glimpse of a milice kepi on the driver’s head.
A pale face with round spectacles turned towards her. It flicked past as the Citroën swished away, leaving her bruised and winded with the bicycle coiled above her.
Noor scrambled to her feet, dusting off hands and slacks, searching for her beret, tucking her ponytail under again.
What satisfaction did they gain by frightening French people for sport?
But annoyance gave way to dismay as she saw the Citroën turn at the stone porticos and enter the institute.
Allah, don’t let this happen!
No need to look for any covert signals. The Gestapo had come to Grignon.
If she hadn’t been late, if she’d been minutes earlier, as Gilbert ordered, she would have been caught in the act of transmitting!
Noor pulled her bicycle erect, ready to mount. Émile had told Odile last night to warn the Hoogstratens, Professor Balachowsky and Viennot. And Gilbert—assuming there was any need to warn Gilbert. Following Émile’s instructions, Marius and the students must have hidden or moved every bomb, gun and bullet by now.
Archambault had told her to stay away, to use a public phone to warn others, and hide.
Out of the question. She needed details of what had happened or was happening at the institute to determine the damage and transmit the information to London. She had seen only one Citroën, but there could be more Gestapo coming, or Gestapo men already at the institute. She had to risk that.
She tried to advance her bicycle, but the front wheel was bent, so bent it mimicked a melted Dali clock. No time to straighten it.
She shook dust and pebbles from her clothes.
Steal through the woods, come around behind the greenhouse and the administration buildings. She’d seen the Hoogstratens’ cat walking the wall of the dry moat; the institute’s stone wall didn’t continue all the way around. Insh’allah, she could find her way.
No time to lose.
Noor lifted the front of the bicycle, with the basket and her handbag, balanced the weight on the back wheel and rolled it into the woods. A few metres from the edge she glanced back, searching for landmarks to orient herself. Then she retrieved her black kid gloves and binoculars and, from the concealed compartment of the bag, the loaded pistol.
She slipped the binoculars into her pocket and drew her gloves over scratched palms. The bicycle would be safe on its side beneath the toothed leaves and spiky yellow flowers of a mignonette bush. Noor piled ferns and underbrush, hiding it from sight. Then, inserting the pistol in her waistband, she set off stealthily through the woods.
Twenty minutes later, as Noor crept between trees under leaf-filigreed light, a man’s voice boomed through the woods.
“Attention! Attention! Every student and professor of the Institut National Agronomique,” it said in imperative tones, “must report immediately to the courtyard before the Grand Château.”
Noor drew closer. The megaphone repeated its directions louder.
At the edge of the woods, trees gave way to the grounds of the institute. Noor tensed into a squat behind large, hairy burdock leaves. Where the drive from the entrance of the institute flattened to join the courtyard, three private omnibuses stood side by side, doors open.
Professor Balachowsky’s expedition.
With the torso of an oak tree at her back, Noor raised her binoculars. The courtyard before the Grand Château swarmed with swastika arm bands, Gestapo police—the dreaded SD—and the black jackets and kepis of Vichy’s milice. She focused on a ring of rifles surrounding a bewildered, heat-wilted group of about two hundred young men and women dressed in the familiar blouse coats of the institute.
Parked at right angles to the buses, blocking the exit, were two German lorries on the drive. Two lorries holding about twelve SS men each: some could be searching classrooms or posted on exit roads leading to the fields. Noor adjusted her focus, swept the woods behind her, but saw no uniforms.
She let out her breath—even that seemed unnaturally loud—and sank down further behind the bush, inched into a cross-legged position as if seating herself before a veena.
Control your thoughts. Calm. Calm.
An open Mercedes with a swastika pennant on its front fender stood before the carved double doors of the Grand Château. Behind it was the Citroën that had knocked her off the road—and there was the milice kepi of its chauffeur. Below it, a sandy brown moustache and beard moved into the circle of her lenses.
A breeze ruffled the flower beds and lush green lawn between the Grand Château and the director’s château on the hill. Odile’s room in the director’s château was out of Noor’s line of vision. Insh’allah, the intrepid young courier was safely at her lycée at this moment.
The chef’s tall white hat and the maid’s frilly apron stood out in the crowd of students. Professor Balachowsky? Not in view. But there was a large hat and veil, then a chartreuse chiffon dress and pearls—that would be Madame Hoogstraten. Too far away to see her face.
But she could see Director Hoogstraten’s face. He was standing very erect before the wrath of a man tightly buttoned into the full regalia of an SS Oberstürmbannführer. Looking force-fed as a foie gras goose, the Gestapo captain shouted into his megaphone in German, in language obviously deafening but incomprehensible to Monsieur Hoogstraten. And to most in his audience.
The pale-faced man with the round spectacles approached Monsieur Hoogstraten and the Oberstürmbannführer. Taking over the megaphone, he stood a little behind the Gestapo captain and added French shouts after each shout in German: “We have been too patient with you. It is enough.”
Monsieur Hoogstraten looked mystified but unapologetic.
“You are the director of this institute. You will be held responsible.”
An SS man stepped forward, holding a stack of books to his chest. The SS captain read aloud, “Du contrat social.”
The leather-bound book flew from his hand like a white-winged bird and thudded onto the sandy courtyard.
“Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality in Mankind.”
The volume skittered across the ground and stopped at Monsieur Hoogstraten’s feet.
“Trotsky! Freud! Thomas Mann!”
Books—precious books, rare books—flew through the air.
“André Maurois. Henri Bordeaux.”
More books flew, slapped and smacked to hard ground. Noor squeezed her eyes shut, seeing other books, books that, when she was sixteen, flew from her bedroom window on the third floor of Afzal Manzil the day Uncle Tajuddin decided all books by writers unknown to him were to be banned, destroyed or thrown out.
“Banned books! Jewish authors!” said the megaphone.
Books about other religions, even ones bought by Abbajaan, were the first to land in the garden below, over Mother’s cries of outrage. Then Uncle enlisted Kabir to take down paintings from every wall of Afzal Manzil and stack them in dustbins. Soon these were joined by a tubby little Ganesh statue, memento of an elephant ride with her cousins in India. Noor felt Mother’s arm around her shoulders again, saw Mother’s clenched fists unclenching. Saw herself standing with her arm around Zaib.
Noor forced herself to look as the megaphone voice persisted. “In defiance of explicit instructions from the Ministry of Information, you have not removed these works from the institute library. This is why, Monsieur Hoogstraten, we no longer believe you know nothing about English arms and ammunition on your premises.”
The pale-faced man rested the megaphone on his shoulder after translating, and Monsieur Hoogstraten’s voice could be heard quite clearly. “We have been co-operative, Herr Kieffer,” he was saying. “We have invited you to search every classroom and sleeping chamber for yourself. Four hours and your men found nothing. Perhaps you have been misinformed.”
Herr Kieffer shot back via the interpreter, “The SS is never misinformed. We have always very good information.”
Good information from Gilbert or had the SS tortured it out of poor Prosper and Archambault?
An SS man ran up to the SS captain, stopped, gave the Nazi salute, said something in German. Herr Kieffer turned back to Monsieur Hoogstraten and shouted louder. The interpreter relayed the message in turn, shouting in French.
“You said we should check the stables. There is nothing in the stables.”
Be still.
Odile had warned her father in time.
Monsieur Hoogstraten took the megaphone and a deep breath, as if about to make a statement or exhortation to the students. Then he looked up at the interpreter as if suddenly struck by a bright idea. “Did you check the pigsties?”
The innocent-sounding question boomed over the crowd. The image of Gestapo men mucking in the institute pigsties, checking under offal and ordure for British weapons, was alluring. The students thought so too; snickers and laughs surfaced here and there in the encircled throng.
The pale-faced man snatched the megaphone back from Monsieur Hoogstraten. Even without her binoculars Noor could have seen Kieffer turning crimson. Sunlight glinted off the silver death’s head on his black cap. Kieffer turned to his interpreter and told him what to say.
The interpreter took a deep breath and shouted into the megaphone. “The director and students of this institute harbour terrorists and their weapons. Weapons that have been supplied by foreign powers for use against innocent Germans stationed here to protect France from its enemies. We have given you every opportunity to surrender these weapons peacefully, but we now have no choice but to show you what happens when you continue to support violence, sabotage and illegal activities.”
At Kieffer’s order two husky SS men reached into the crowd of blouse coats and dragged a young man of medium build from its edge. A young woman—perhaps the pleasant-faced one who had given Noor directions the first time she came to Grignon—cried out, but her friends held her back.
Noor went cold in the humid warmth of the undergrowth.
People who can throw books to the ground are capable of anything.
The SS men forced the young man’s hands behind his back and cuffed him.
Kieffer spoke, and his interpreter continued. A soft voice, calm, as if explaining the rules of Monopoly. “We hear that suicide holds traditional fascination for Catholics. Our scientists say this has become part of your psyche, a reaction against the modern world and full participation in the New World Order that the Reich is bringing to Europe. So, we will test your fascination by executing one student at a time. The choice is yours: if you wish the executions to stop, tell us, where is the cache of foreign weapons?”
A threat. A trick. Surely no one would execute innocent people at random.
These are students, civilians, citizens of a friendly power, a conquered power. A German ally—Vichy. Don’t give in, monsieur, don’t agree.
The interpreter held the megaphone out, inviting Monsieur Hoogstraten to call students forward by name or give them orders. But apparently Monsieur Hoogstraten had come to the same conclusion, for he shrugged and said clearly into the megaphone, “I cannot tell you what I do not know, Herr Kieffer.”
Upon hearing this in German, Kieffer shrugged too, and barked an order.
The two SS men shook the poor student. He attempted protest till a gloved fist smashed into his mouth and a knee into his groin.
They dragged him around the side of the château, out of sight.
The young woman began screaming. Someone shouted, “Salauds!”
Kieffer’s eyes were on Monsieur Hoogstraten. The director looked into the distance. Kieffer nodded to the interpreter.
The colourless man’s eminently reasonable voice began again, its undertone setting the leaves surrounding Noor quivering. “We have asked you to set an example for your students. If you do not condemn terrorism, you support it. By not co-operating, you are sending this young man to his death just as if you pulled the trigger. For the last time, where are the arms?”
Monsieur Hoogstraten shook his head as if completely baffled.
Everyone expected the shot, yet no one expected it. When it rang out, Noor almost left her skin. A commotion of birds rose to wing. A horrified murmur rippled through the milling, sweating students. The young woman gave a howling cry and fell to her knees.
Noor’s eyes blurred momentarily. But her trainers had said: “Every army holds mock executions to get information. We do it, they do it. The rounds are blanks. Don’t be deceived.”
They didn’t shoot him. Allah, let him live and I’ll read my Qur’an again from cover to cover.
Monsieur Hoogstraten looked unperturbed.
He isn’t deceived.
The poor young woman, who knew nothing of mock executions or blank rounds, continued her low weeping.
Kieffer spoke, and the pale face and megaphone turned to the students. “Your director is willing for all of you to forfeit your lives and your futures to protect terrorists and saboteurs. Perhaps he does not know any students who are secret terrorists, but you know who these are among you. You must speak now before you meet their fate.”
Monsieur Hoogstraten shook his head, and no one volunteered to betray his fellows. So a second student was hauled unceremoniously from his comrades.
Peasant stock, well built. Awed by the SS men.
He tried apology and pleas, and for a moment both Kieffer and the interpreter seemed to shift stance and consider him, as if both drew confidence from the man’s self-abasement. But then Kieffer jerked his head. The student fought, kicked and shouted, but he was handcuffed and gagged. Noor’s binocular-enlarged gaze followed as he too was dragged around the side of the Grand Château, out of sight.
It’s a charade. Please, Allah, don’t let them shoot anyone. Allah, let it be so and I promise to give a month’s salary to immigrants at La Mosquée.
But a second shot fractured the stillness.
A hare scampered into the underbrush. A kite gave a high-pitched squeal and circled above.
The crowd of students was separating into stoics and lamenters. The SS men had the guns, but the few rebels in the crowd were becoming desperate. If every student was at risk, they had nothing to lose by trying to break away. But trying to escape would only justify the Gestapo in more deaths.
Please, Allah, no more!
Kieffer and his interpreter conferred. The wide circle of the megaphone eclipsed the interpreter’s face again. “It is possible you have trouble believing your senses. Perhaps you are superstitious enough to believe the two men whose deaths you heard can be resurrected by a little journey to Lourdes. We did not wish to execute people before the ladies …” He bowed slightly in the direction of Madame Hoogstraten. “But perhaps you will only tell us where are the arms if you see a man die here, before your eyes.”
Noor felt the words as if they ripped her in two.
Monsieur Hoogstraten must have felt the same. He was mopping his face with his handkerchief. He appeared to be pleading.
The interpreter pointed. Two milice gendarmes tore a third student from the crowd.
Noor scanned the student from head to toe in the bounded vision of her binoculars. This one was tall, his blouse coat tailor-made. Leather shoes, available only on the black market. A haughty carriage—no peasant here. He shook off the restraining hands of the milice gendarmes as if they soiled him, stepped forward himself.
Kieffer and his interpreter looked a little nonplussed. But the milice gendarmes were ready with cuffs, and soon the young man’s hands were manacled behind him. Kieffer gave an order and a gendarme stepped forward with a blindfold.
Students in the crowd backed away. Someone fainted from the heat and tension.
Oh, Allah, send your farishtas! Send all your angels now!
Now the bourgeois young man was refusing the blindfold. The milice gendarmes shoved him to his knees on the sandy surface of the courtyard.
A Luger appeared in the SS captain’s hand.
Monsieur Hoogstraten’s hand reached out and grasped Kieffer’s swastika-banded arm. The SS Captain shook him off. Monsieur Hoogstraten was now gesticulating, thrusting himself between Kieffer and the kneeling man. German and French were being shouted everywhere at once, and the anger of the French students was rendered powerless by the sight of the guns.
A gloved hand pointed the semi-automatic at the young man’s temple.
Noor couldn’t hear what Monsieur Hoogstraten was saying, but she could see his resistance crumbling, see it in the droop of his shoulders and the slight fall of his chin. Suddenly he raised his hands, then held them out.
A gendarme stepped forward and clinched the cuffs on him.
The megaphoned voice announced, “This student is pardoned. Your director has confessed to participation in sabotage and terrorist plots. He is a criminal. He is under arrest. He will show us the weapons. Until all the weapons are found, this institute is under Gestapo supervision. No one is allowed to leave the grounds.”
Monsieur Hoogstraten was a respected, upstanding citizen, not a criminal. He was a fighter in the legitimate, necessary jihad against the Occupation.
The young man was standing up, rubbing his wrists now, as Monsieur Hoogstraten was marched to the Citroën. There was no sign of the two students dragged out of sight.
Before getting in the car, the director turned and met his wife’s eyes.
More discussion and orders in German and French, and the Citroën’s chauffeur left the car. He escorted the maid uphill at gunpoint to the director’s château.
The SS men still ringed the students, administering a rifle butt where needed to assert control. What were they waiting for? Was the maid leading the SS man to the arms? No—if the arms weren’t in the stables any more, Monsieur Hoogstraten had probably told Marius to hide them somewhere off the premises. And for maximum humiliation, the SS captain would make Monsieur Hoogstraten lead them to the cache himself.
Did Monsieur Hoogstraten tell them the whereabouts of Gilbert or Professor Balachowsky?
Non. Pas possible.
A black-and-red widow spider was slinging sticky threads on a branch above Noor. She shifted carefully, quietly; its bite could be poisonous. A hornet buzzed past. Mosquitoes hovered over the burdock. Minutes dragged by with no change in the tableau in the courtyard. Noor checked the woods behind her again. Movement, uniforms?
Clouds had swirled into arabesques, readying for rain.
The maid and the milice chauffeur came back into sight, walking downhill from the director’s château. The chauffeur’s sandy brown hair and moustache centred in the circle of Noor’s binoculars. He carried a leather suitcase in his left hand, held the maid’s forearm in his right. He thrust her back into the crowd of surrounded students and took the suitcase to the Citroën.
With the suitcase stowed, the black car started, turned around and headed up the driveway.
Madame Hoogstraten’s tearful supplications had broken through the cordon of SS men. She intercepted SS captain Kieffer and his interpreter as they walked towards the Mercedes. The gendarmes, the soldiers and everyone in the crowd was watching her too.
Noor could steal away now. She had the information she had come for, and would send it to London right away: Monsieur Hoogstraten had been arrested. He had agreed to reveal the location of the arms. Gilbert and Professor Balachowsky were still at large. Archambault’s transmitter and her own were likely to be discovered soon if they hadn’t been already; she would tell London both were likely in enemy hands. In any case, they were useless without the security check known only to Archambault and herself.
Madame Hoogstraten’s pleading was now directed at anyone within hearing.
Noor slipped her binoculars back in her pocket, adjusted the pistol in the waistband of her slacks and crept from the bushes. Behind her, words of the megaphone became indistinguishable, then faded. Every rustle and crunch reverberated among the lofty trees. She drew close enough behind the institute’s administration buildings to look through the windows: the Germans had emptied offices and classrooms of people. Crouching, she moved swiftly through the shadow-patterned woods on a course parallel to the institute driveway, heading back to the road.
She could cross the unpaved road past the courtyard wall surrounding the tool shed she and Archambault had used for transmissions. The squat shape of the greenhouse lay beyond it. Was Marius still free?
Two SS men stood on guard at the corner, backs to Noor, rifles slung over their shoulders, watching the drama in the courtyard at the bottom of the hill. She could steal across the road and the nettle ditch and continue into the woods—they would never notice.
But just in case …
She drew the pistol from her waistband and moved quietly, keeping her eyes on the SS men.
Halfway across now.
Suddenly, a black shape darted between the Gestapo men. The Hoogstratens’ cat was streaking right towards Noor. An SS man was turning, and she was galvanized into a dash for the cover of the woods. A yell, then another, and both were running down the road towards her. Noor jumped a ditch just as sound-burst stole the peace of the woods.
They’ll split up, to cut you off before you reach the institute wall.
Cover? Cover? Low land. Rock? Tree?
She dropped behind an uprooted tree and turned in one movement, thumb flicking the safety catch off, the heavy steel finger of the gun steady in both gloved hands.
Wait, wait till he’s closer.
The death’s head wouldn’t stop coming.
Point—shoot.
Noor squeezed.
The recoil knocked her clasped hands upwards and to the left. The SS man suddenly went down in the ditch among the nettles, a look of disbelief on his face. His rifle flew from his hands, through the air, landing a short distance away.
A second shot, this time from the direction of the greenhouse. Not too far away.
Take his rifle. Now!
She jammed her pistol into her waistband and, without knowing she was going to, bounded in a single fluid movement to the rifle, scooped it up and away.
Then she was off and running again, the rifle grasped tight across her ribs, lungs pumping, heart slamming. Heels jarring against ground, wind whipping her hair against her cheeks, and a huge darkness opening its mouth behind her.
Run faster, run before darkness.
Crashing thud of jackboots to her right. Coming closer, closer.
Muscles flexed, blood rushed. Danger heightened awareness: she wouldn’t reach the road alive. Was that the rat-a-tat-tat of her imagination or a gun firing?
Not in the back. Not to be shot in the back like prey run to ground. She must turn, turn and face her enemy, look him in the eye.
So she turned, dropped to the ground, to face the second death’s head. On her stomach and barely breathing, the rifle stock wedging into her shoulder. The bolt drew back with a loud click, the bullet sprang from its magazine, slid into the chamber. It waited—she waited—till he came crashing through the woods. And when he was in range, the rifle came up by reflex. Steady. The bullet cracked and flew.
The death’s head grabbed his chest, went down.
A man with no compassion forfeits his right to mine.
The shots would soon bring other SS. A massive hunt would begin. And if either of the two she had fired on remained to describe her …
Run! Run!
She threw the rifle into the undergrowth and was scrambling over rocks and roots, then running crouched between trees, taking cover behind bushes and too-slender trunks. Leaves and branches flicked and scratched her face, tore at her blouse.
Seconds later, Noor reached the edge of the woods. And the road. She took a deep, gulping breath.
Get your bearings.
The porticos of the institute jutted up to her right.
I am not a trembling kind of woman.
But she was trembling like a sheet of foolscap.
She knew very well what happened to anyone in France who shot a German. Even if you missed. The same that happened to Indians who shot Englishmen: arrest and execution. More immediate here, that’s all. But contrary to Herr Kieffer’s speculations on the suicidal desires of people he wanted pliant or dead, she would stay alive. For Armand.
She hadn’t shot a man; she’d shot a Nazi who stood by and watched innocent students executed.
Had she killed one or both of the SS men? If she had killed one, could the wounded one describe her? If so, Kieffer would have soldiers stopping every train, bus, automobile or bicycle between here and Paris, searching for a woman in a white blouse and black slacks.
She hoped she had killed them both.
But then she’d have two deaths to atone for on the Day of Judgement, not just one.
Merde!
Keeping the road in sight but staying within cover of the woods, Noor retraced her steps to where she’d hidden the bicycle. She retrieved her handbag, hid the pistol in its secret compartment and covered the bicycle again. She would tell Odile where to find it.
Noor peeked around the side of a tree, looking up and down the country road. Empty. But now what? Run from the cover of the forest in her buckled two-inch heels, all the way back to Grignon? She hadn’t seen any dogs with the Gestapo, but if they were searching, dogs would be let loose very soon.
Stucco clouds advanced in a solid line on Grignon. The starchy brilliance of the day wilted before their marshalled prowess.
Think!
Thinking didn’t help.
But then, in the distance, came a blustering, popping engine sound—thankfully, not the purr of a Mercedes. As if ordered up by Allah, a fat, rusted autobus approached.
It could have Gestapo men on board, it might be stopped by the Gestapo along the way. She’d worry later; this was the best and fastest way away.
Noor stepped from the cover of the woods and waved. The bus drew closer, came up to her and trundled past. Noor shouted after it, ran behind it.
Now it stopped, waited till she caught up. Noor flung herself on and clung to the rear railing, searching the forest and each passing vineyard for pursuing men in black. She glanced down the centre aisle: too few passengers to hide between and too many to make a quick exit possible.
An unmarked stop beside a field. No Gestapo.
A woman moved past Noor. “Excusez-moi, monsieur,” she said.
Monsieur? Of course, monsieur! The Gestapo and the milice wouldn’t be looking for a woman in black slacks with her ponytail netted in a black beret. They’d be looking for a man in a beret wearing a white shirt and black trousers.
The autobus coughed on—much too slowly for the pulse racing in Noor’s temple—spewing wood-fuel fumes over passing vineyards. Dogs barked in the distance, but no roadblocks barred the bus. By the time it listed to a halt, depositing its passengers on the outskirts of Grignon village, Noor was controlled and purposeful, if a little queasy from gazogène fumes mixed with nervous tension.
She drifted casually from the bus stop to the fair. She mingled with the crowd, marvelling that they could not hear the bounce and judder of her heart.
Scan the area.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Noor rummaged through the rag man’s wares, counted out francs, sous and centimes, and in the water closet of a café wiped her muddy shoes, sent slacks and blouse down the towel chute, let her hair tumble down and changed into someone else’s brown flowered dress.
The disguise released her from herself; she was calm again.
As she left the café, there was a shout—“Mademoiselle!”—and it almost set her running. But instead, she assumed a madonna face and turned. A lean, lined face—the rag man. Gypsy features—as brown as Abbajaan.
“A soldier asked if I have seen a man in a white shirt, black pants, black beret.”
A hot floodlight seemed to centre on Noor.
“And have you?” she asked, voice low and quite steady.
“I said there are thousands dressed like that, but one such man came to me not five minutes ago and asked if I knew the time for the next train to Versailles. They seemed glad to know this.”
The Gestapo would probably round up every man so dressed in Versailles.
“Merci!” Noor’s eyes met his for a second of thanks, then she walked quickly away from him, realizing he had mistaken her for Jewish—why else would a woman buy a dress and change on the spot?
She would have to wait for a train. On a secluded bench beside a cluster of cypress trees, she devoured a lunch she’d never have found in Paris: a sliver of Camembert, a hunk of black bread and a wedge of tarte tatin. Swallowed without tasting, as if filling a dry well.
An hour later, she mingled with a crowd of revellers returning to Grignon station, and presented her papers to the German soldier at the checkpoint.
Fragile threads of rain turned to a shower. Noor kept her eyes on the soldier’s helmet, trying to convey by stance and posture that she fully expected to be waved through and onto the train. The soldier stood dry in his sentry box, and kept her and five others waiting just because he could, till Noor’s hair was plastered to her scalp and her brown dress clung. Till rivulets ran down her calves and her socks squelched in her shoes.
Her staged confidence must have been convincing; her papers were returned. She put them back in her bag and mounted the carriage ladder.
The train set off. Every compartment was full but one. She could sit opposite two stern-faced old women or stand where she was, in the corridor.
Another soldier swaggering down the corridor towards her. Another identity check.
Noor pulled out her headscarf. “Again you want my papers?” She made a show of wiping her hair and patting her face and neck with it. “They’ll get wet …”
His gaze slithered over her. Noor darted a glance of mute appeal at the two old women. Both leaned forward, frowning and staring at the soldier as if he were no bigger than a toddler. Abashed, he moved past Noor.
She entered the compartment and took the seat opposite the victorious women. “Merci, mesdames.” She smiled. They nodded back.
Noor closed her eyes and feigned sleep.
Agonized faces rose before her: two students dragged away to be shot—was that mock or real? were they alive or dead?—the student who refused to be blindfolded, Monsieur Hoogstraten’s brave face, Madame Hoogstraten’s tearful one, and faces of two Germans crowned with death’s head caps. Were they alive or dead?
The train sped back to Paris.
My hip bone grates against plank; throbbing in each stiff limb. I can feel my intestines moving, scouring their emptiness. Sour spit in my mouth—juices demand something to digest. Soon they will turn on the lining of my stomach. How will it feel to consume myself?
Perhaps every crucial moment has come and gone and your mother is forgotten.
But this is still happening.
Night is unending in my dungeon chamber, darkness packed above me. Pungent sealed air, eroding me, single occupant of its vacancy.
Faces shuffle. Kieffer, Ernst Vogel, Pierre Cartaud. It was at Grignon that I first saw them. Vogel the interpreter and Cartaud the French milice chauffeur—men who would pursue me, each for his own reasons.
Nerves at knife-edge, I returned, waterlogged and shivering, to Madame Aigrain’s. On the corner, a sleepy German soldier sat in his sentry box. A band of street urchins scampered by—children of the deported? orphans?—none of them taller than me. I matched their gait and passed the sentry box in their wake. Then I melted into the shadows, my eyes lowered to the strips of black tartan rain running in the gutters.
One thought above all others: I must have killed a man today, perhaps two.
High above the street, a double window slid down—shuk!—like a guillotine.
At Madame Aigrain’s, the concierge stood waiting, the telephone receiver cradled in her hands. It was a taut-voiced Odile telephoning from a call box.
“Anne-Marie? You wanted to meet Papa tomorrow? But he has gone away—we don’t know how long he will be gone. Several people at the institute have been taken ill—it’s highly contagious. Monsieur de Grémont was asked to go into quarantine, but Papa said he didn’t need to—yes, the same de Grémont whose father loves Pétain so much.”
Her voice dropped to a bare whisper on the line. “Papa went in his stead.”
After a time she said, “I think Professor Balachowsky has gone to the hospital too. When I called his apartment, a strange voice answered. Madame Balachowsky telephoned and said he had no chance to smoke his pipe, but has taken it with him. Quite a few have already succumbed to the sickness—at least twenty or twenty-five friends. Maman? She is well, as well as can be.”
All the information I required was conveyed in her innocent-sounding chatter.
She ended with “Uncle Gilbert is quite well—he says ‘keep in touch.’”
So I should check for a message at the letter drop behind the milk bottles at Flavien’s pawnshop. I could leave Odile a message there, too.
“He is making arrangements, but you must wait till Saturday to find out the surprise. Uncle Viennot is well and sends his regards—you must telephone him, he misses you. Oh, I must tell you, I received a postcard from Phono—when I have my honeymoon, I will go to the Loire! What beauty is there!”
I wondered what “arrangements” Gilbert could be making—until that night, when, like a ghoulish noctambulist, I crept through the streets to the cemetery. At my appointed time, kneeling within the sepulchre of the Famille Ginot, I transmitted details of the Grignon roundup to London.
I waited, crouched among the dead, till Major Boddington responded. He would send a Lysander for me on Saturday.
I radioed back, “I cannot leave. I am the only radio operator left in northern France.”
My muscles ached, my head felt larger than La Mosquée’s dome. I was aflame, in a fever of anger at the Germans who had my leaders in their grasp, yet chilled with fear. I diagnosed my own symptoms: I was becoming sick, sick at a time when I so desperately needed all my faculties about me. Thought fragments collided; I fought for equilibrium.
At last Major Boddington replied. I received, and quickly left the cemetery, taking the message back to safety at Madame Aigrain’s. There I decoded the first lines:
“Madeleine must leave. This is an order: Le Mans. Saturday 16:30 hrs.–.”
How could I leave, not knowing if Armand had received my message? I needed to be at Drancy, close to my love. But how could I stay if ordered back to England; it would be an act of insubordination, even desertion. I could volunteer for another assignment, though. As long as the war lasted, London would need radio operators. I could return.
Would I help anyone by staying?
Tethering loyalties asserted pulls in every direction.
I could no longer transmit from Grignon, and there was nowhere to string an aerial from Madame Aigrain’s apartment. How often could I use the Cimetière de Montmartre for transmissions? I had moved one transmitter to Madame Gagné’s boarding house in Drancy, but now I was afraid to go out at all for fear of arrest—I had killed a German, maybe two.
And I was in terror of myself, having learned the violence of which I was capable. Once more I had shattered the looking glass and seen the beast within.
But I might endanger others if I stayed.
I decoded the last line:
“Meet Gilbert at the Landowsky monument at La Place des Jacobins.”
Meet Gilbert? I was almost certain he had betrayed Prosper and led the Gestapo to Grignon. London just wasn’t aware of it yet.
But surely I was wrong to believe a Frenchman would betray his countrymen to the Germans. It was just coincidence that Gilbert had told me to come to Grignon at ten A.M.
Yet, why was he not present when the Gestapo searched every chamber of the institute?
What if Gilbert had me arrested at Le Mans? It would confirm my suspicions, but that would be small comfort. But London could not risk a Lysander and pilot for one agent—other agents must be returning with me. Gilbert couldn’t betray us all and remain above suspicion.
I had to obey Major Boddington and travel to Le Mans on Saturday.
Duty would separate me from Armand, separate us once again. But, I told myself, I was trained now. Madeleine, perhaps even Anne-Marie Régnier, would return to France.
And I could do one last service to the shattered PROSPER network. I could meet Émile in Le Mans to warn him about Gilbert.
Someone in a distant cell is singing “The Partisan’s Song”—notes of mournful longing. The other prisoners join in until the guard silences all of them with shouts and threats. It is not only my orthodox uncle who cannot tolerate music, but those who proscribe every moment of another’s life. I return to my imaginary pen and ink.
I felt no moral pain that those SS men might be dead, though they were beings of Allah like me. Why was I not in anguish from self-recrimination? Was it because they were German? Was it because they were Christian unbelievers? But no. Over and over I returned to the thought that flowed through me in that instant when I waited with the rifle and shot the second time:
A man with no compassion forfeits his right to mine.
Are my beliefs that simple? It explains how I find it in me to play the heartless princess before Vogel. Yet he is capable of love and kindness for his tribe. He carries his wife’s picture in his wallet. His children were both born in France, and could be French; he loves them still. So, blood supersedes borders when he wishes. I do not try to understand how men can come to be like him; but, as with Uncle, to be shunned by Herr Vogel would mean dire consequences.
Once when Vogel came to see me, he showed me photographs from his wallet. Alongside pictures of his smiling wife and children he carried photos of Nazi doctors’ experiments on Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, POWs, criminals—dissidents of all kinds, he said.
A prisoner buried vertically up to his chin in a hole, an SS man pointing his rifle at him. A naked woman suspended upside down with metal clamps about her ankles, her eyes gouged and bleeding. A man who leaned against his cage, legs folded, knees under his chin. With no trace of outrage Vogel said the man had received electric current to his testicles.
I had to believe it happened: the camera certified the existence of what it recorded.
Vogel thought I would be repelled by the sight of suffering. I was not repelled, but appalled: someone revelled in another person’s suffering. Someone must have held a Leica and coolly taken a photograph instead of rushing to the assistance of the tortured. Someone with a Roman blood lust.
Blood pounded through my heart till it threatened to explode, imagining my Armand or your grandmother Lydia in such a hell. Vogel said such “experiments” have a purpose: to care for German soldiers who contract diseases on the Russian front. But I do not believe him. It is he who needs the suffering of others, he who needs persistent images of utter powerlessness to feel potent.
Vogel lingered over each pitiful photo with lascivious perversion to demonstrate what my fate could be if I were not subservient. He reminded, “You are designated Nacht und Nebel—a Night and Fog prisoner who has disappeared. I need not account for you to anyone.” But for him, he wanted me to understand, I could disappear without trace into the laboratories of these Doctors of No Conscience, sacrificed “to preserve the Aryan race.”
Like Uncle Tajuddin, my captor poses as my saviour, my protector …
“I must verify your identity as an Aryan, Princess,” said Vogel. “The Reich has recognized all Indian POWs as honorary Aryans.”
If this is what it means to be Aryan, I thought, I want no taint of it. But I dared not say this to Vogel.
“You are a spy. I could have had you executed. Instead, I treat you as a POW.”
“But of course I am grateful, Herr Vogel,” I said, avoiding the issue of whether I am Aryan. I aim for graciousness, and never to give in.
Instead, I tried to interest Vogel in my mother’s blood, because it is more powerful at present. Euro-American blood. He called it Caucasian, though Mother’s stories of her lineage could not be more distant from the Caucasus. I warned Vogel the Americans are coming, that he must keep me alive to barter when the Reich falls. Mon Allah, let him never know what I learned in 1940 when I contacted the American embassy in London: Mother, having married an “alien ineligible for citizenship,” is no longer American.
But this is a technicality; Mother remains American in the lies I tell Vogel.
Images from the past fade; the present must be borne again. In the finite space of my cell I vacillate between despair and liberation. Is this madness, this edgy feeling that the abyss of non-being yawns beyond the next thought? The connective tissue between intent and action is wearing away. Imprisoned here, without even the solace of knowing the writer of my lettre de cachet, speculations multiply …
Did Gilbert betray me? Could Prosper have done so? Or was my betrayal planned by Major Boddington and his comrades? Someone else?
Trolley wheels on stone. My stomach churns in hope of food. A chink of light shines at eye level and someone shouts. A bowl of cabbage soup comes towards me at the end of a woman’s arm. I fall upon it like an Indian denied rice since ‘41. I try to imagine the SS woman’s eyes, her nose, what she believes she does and why.
What choices did she make that caused our paths to cross? Without German, I cannot ask her, and she wouldn’t respond if I did.
I begin a zikr, silent of necessity. The recollection of Allah from the heart, from the bottom of my heart. “Huwallah-ul-lazi la ilaha illa huw-ar-Rahman-ur-Rahim-ul-Malik-ul-Quddus-ul-Salam-ul-Mu’min-ul-Muhaimin-ul …” When I come to the eighth name, al-Muhaiminu, the Preserver, I can go no further. “Al-Muhaiminu, al-Muhaiminu, je me souviens de toi, je me souviens de toi.”
Ma petite, what if I am too late in begging Allah to be delivered from the troubles I’ve created? What if even Allah can’t rescue me?