Paris, France
Sunday, July 4, 1943
LEAFY BRANCHES OBSCURED the curlicued iron gates of shabby houses lining the rue de Jolivet. The tiny brass nameplate still read Dunet. Feverish and wool-headed, Noor took the stone-flagged path and knocked at the arched wooden door she remembered only too well.
What had possessed her to return, like a criminal to the scene of a crime? She was making an exception to SOE rules, but Montparnasse was a long distance from Suresnes and other areas where she might be recognized.
Some events in one’s life stay forever.
And she had a problem again, a problem that needed a practical though illegal solution.
The woman framed in the doorway had faded a little in nine years. The mane of coarse hair falling to her elbows was greyer and sparser, but her face was the same, harsh with disappointments. Madame Dunet was a sage-femme, a midwife. Once a nurse at the American Hospital, she was competent as a physician.
Noor gave her name as Anne-Marie Régnier, and beyond noting that Mademoiselle Régnier was sans rendezvous—without appointment—no flicker of recognition came to the midwife’s eyes.
“Sunday is a busy day,” said Madame Dunet.
She was with a patient; Noor would have to wait.
A few copies of Pariser Zeitung in the dreary waiting room; Noor hadn’t known Madame Dunet spoke German. Four-year-old copies of the Herald Tribune and Vogue. No picture of Pétain on the wall. That only meant Madame Dunet was not a Pétainist; it didn’t mean she was a Gaullist or would sympathize with Allied secret agents.
Madame Dunet ushered a pale, middle-aged woman to the door and returned.
“Don’t ask me for a medical certificate for someone in a camp—I can’t give it to you. And if you’re Jewish, you can go to the Hôpital Rothschild. When was your last period?”
Madame Dunet showed Noor into her kitchen.
The same table at its centre.
“Tiens, now I remember you, girl! You asked if I could make the bleeding start again. You came with your sister—she wanted to be a doctor, oui? I remember her, because I too once wanted to be a doctor …” Madame threw back her hair and gave a rueful laugh. “And because you wore a long dress—a ball gown, maybe? Indian.”
That summer evening in 1934, Noor had worn a sari. Not because going to Madame Dunet’s was any celebration, but because Uncle Tajuddin, as soon as he discovered Noor’s love for Armand, decreed both his nieces must wear only saris and ghaghras. He didn’t order complete burqa as he didn’t want them mistaken for Arab girls, but a few months of Indian traditional garb, he said, would repel the desires of men like Armand.
“Maybe to hide it?” Madame Dunet demonstrated with her hands clasped low around an imaginary belly.
No, Noor’s stomach had been flat as ever that day. Although, if Uncle had kept her in her room much longer, she might have begun to show.
“You are still in France, girl?”
So Madame Dunet had no idea she had left France, ever been in London. Convenient; no explanations necessary.
Noor gave a heavy-lidded nod. “Oui, madame.”
“Have you come on behalf of your sister this time? Maybe a friend? Ah, the German soldiers are handsome, non? Eh bien, ma fille—vous avez encore un petit problème? Are you in trouble again?”
In trouble. A fist clenched about Noor’s womb again at the words.
“Non, non,” she assured the midwife. “I came to you because I knew you would be discreet. It’s dangerous to be a foreigner in Paris these days. You were always more concerned about helping your friends than with the law.” She sneezed.
Madame Dunet inclined her grey head with a knowing wink. “Mais, bien sûr, girl. I am discreet—you remember.”
As if she could ever forget.
A fabric screen stood at one end of the kitchen, a screen like the one that separated praying women from men at La Mosquée. Madame Dunet motioned Noor behind it and pushed a garlic-smelling apron after her.
“Can a medical certificate help someone escape a camp?” Noor asked. Every button seemed to have grown larger than its hole.
“Sometimes. Britishers and Americans in Vittel and Besançon camps have successfully used them, but it only gets POWs and Jews into more trouble.” Madame Dunet continued talking. “Bombs and air raids—I barely slept last night. The Allies should invade, have their battles and let us all go back to normal. The cosmopolitans who used to come here when their daughters were in trouble have deserted Paris. But you are still here, girl …”
Madame Dunet’s kitchen table was cold beneath her thighs, the way it was on a night nine years before. The midwife made Noor breathe deeply, tapped her breastbone with two fingers, listened to her lungs, her cough, nodded when she said she was spitting up blood.
“Influenza,” she confirmed. “Maybe pneumonia.”
“My father died of influenza,” Noor blurted.
“He was a guru from India, yes? Your sister told me. Medicine is so backward in India—he probably had astrologers for doctors. Susceptibility runs in the blood.”
When Abbajaan caught influenza in 1926, it was an equal scourge in France, one that couldn’t be healed simply by faith healers. But the midwife was unlikely to comprehend any similarity between Indian astrologers and the guérisseurs.
Madame Dunet gave Noor a dose of belladonna and a vial of smuggled American Prontosil to be taken morning and evening. She directed Noor to gargle with bicarbonate of soda and drink an infusion of linden flowers.
“I gave you tisane of linden after your operation. It was effective, non?”
“Oui, madame,” said Noor, though nothing Madame Dunet had given her nine years ago had helped mitigate the shame draining her heart, weakening every limb.
What was torn from me that day was only flesh, less than love. No child asks to be born or to die; ours was no exception.
Madame Dunet was speaking again, lecturing. She should listen politely.
“ … Mid-wives who help women deliver fine offspring understand the science of heredity. The arranged marriages of our ancestors produced a strong French race. But nowadays people do not acknowledge the value of blood.”
Heredity was the highest value of the Germans and Vichy. How could Madame Dunet still feel it was unavowed in the public mind?
“Madame Dunet, I thought you were a romantic,” said Noor with an effort.
“Romance? Romance led us to defeat by the Germans. Romance led to decadence, softness. We French alone among all of European colonists committed miscegenation with our colonials, tainted our blood with the black man’s and the Arab. Nothing like this would be possible in America, girl. When your mother married an Indian guru, in all of Europe the only country that would countenance their household was France.”
Her tone held shame rather than pride. Noor had never told Madame Dunet anything about Mother or her antecedents, nor had Madame Dunet and Mother ever met. Had Zaib told her? Before, afterwards, while waiting?
Anyway, it wasn’t true, for there were many other countries to which Abbajaan and Mother could have gone, but they didn’t. Where to begin correcting Madame?
Yet Madame Dunet didn’t appear a Pétainist, or a collaborator. Maybe she was simply someone categorical, accustomed to her categories.
She had come to Madame Dunet to be treated for influenza, not to be reminded of that painful day in 1934. It was highly indiscreet to mention a “stomach operation,” a crime for which mid-wives could be sent to the guillotine; Madame Dunet could still be arrested. The Vichy slogan Travail, famille, patrie glorifying work, family and country meant her operations were less acceptable than ever before.
“So when your mother came to see me, it was clear I had to help you.”
Noor had never told Mother about her “situation.” Surely there was some mistake.
“Mother came to you? Met you—here? Non, non. You mistake me for someone else, Madame.”
Mother, if she had known, would have begged Uncle’s permission for Noor and Armand to marry. And Noor didn’t want Mother begging Uncle for anything on her behalf.
“My sister made all the arrangements.”
Madame Dunet threw back her grey mane and laughed. “Your mother. A shrewd lady. Oh, she knew you’d never come if you knew she wanted you to do it, so she said she would give your sister the money. She said you’d never ask where it came from.”
Oh, Zaib! Though sworn to secrecy, Zaib had told Mother. Anger swept Noor. Anger at a previous version of herself—such ignorance!—such stupidity!
Madame Dunet was right, never once had Noor asked Zaib to explain how she collected the five thousand francs. And Mother, who always held the family purse strings, knew her eldest well. Knew Noor loathed discussing money, how she trusted Allah would bring it forth when necessary, never asked where money came from nor cared much where it went. How could she have been so juvenile, so very naive?
Madame Dunet’s hair splayed across her back as she hunched over the kitchen sink to wash her hands. The last time Noor saw her turn to that sink …
“I—I had no other way,” stammered Noor. She was back in that time of terror and clandestine inquiry.
She should not have come here today.
Soapy water slithered like mucous between the midwife’s hands. “Nonsense, mademoiselle. I tell all my Medeas there are alternatives. I told your mother what else could be done.”
That’s what Madame Dunet thought of Noor? No matter that it was her hands that performed the operation, Madame Dunet judged Noor a Medea. For Madame Dunet she was no longer Noor, with her own motives, constraints and love, but sorceress Medea. Armand was no longer Armand, who had affirmed her possession of her own body and stood by Noor whatever her decision, but a Jason abandoning his unborn child. But there had been no revenge or anger in Noor as in Medea, only sorrow.
What alternatives did Madame Dunet mean?
“She could have sent you to a convent. The nuns often raise ‘foundlings.’”
Noor’s head bowed into her open hands. No one had offered her such an alternative. Certainly Madame Dunet had not, nor had Mother.
“M-mother? She knew this?” Nine years ago Mother must have thought her not old enough, not intelligent enough, not worldly enough. Nine years ago Noor was not a person, just a problem.
“Of course. I discussed it with Madame Khan.”
Why would Mother have forgone such an alternative? Could she not have provided money for the nuns instead of money for Madame Dunet’s stomach operation?
“And Monsieur Khan.”
Noor looked up. Her tongue almost refused to obey. “With Uncle? You met my uncle?”
“I don’t know any uncle, non, non.”
Uncle would have shown Noor to the door immediately, had he known. Mercifully, Noor’s shame must have been kept from him.
“You met my brother then?”
“Oui, oui. A young man, very handsome. Your brother Monsieur Khan.”
“And what did my brother say?” She hoped to hear that Kabir had argued with Mother, argued to allow Noor to marry Armand immediately.
But Madame Dunet said, “Your brother was adamant—he didn’t want any niece or nephew of his baptized.”
Words like blows.
“But our mother was raised a Christian!” She was reeling; how little had she known Kabir.
“Oh, I was there when your brother reminded Madame Khan she was now a Muslim, even if his father had permitted her to go to church.”
Permitted? A thunderclap in her heart as anger and sorrow came together. How could Kabir say that? Abbajaan always encouraged Mother—and everyone else—to go to any house of worship that inspired awe. If she couldn’t comprehend the motives of a person with whom she shared two parents, was it possible to understand any other being?
We are all doomed to be exotic, each to one another.
Madame Dunet wiped her hands and made a sucking sound against her teeth. Then, as if revealing the intricate arrangements of a great practical joke, she said, “Your mother and I understood one another. She understands blood too, you know? I told her, not one more Jew should be allowed to enter the world.”
No anger any more; nausea washed through Noor. Mother was not present to be confronted with Madame’s revelation, Mother who always criticized Europeans and Indians for emphasizing bloodlines. Madame Dunet could not have stated such bigotry nine years ago as openly as today. As with Renée, Vichy had loosened the midwife’s tongue by sanctioning and blessing such statements. Her words were supplied by editorials in Je Suis Partout, maybe they had even altered the midwife’s memory of her own actions. She had arrived at a surreal defence of at least one of her operations, one of the few defences that would be acceptable to Vichy. How many more would she explain the same way?
And Madame Dunet was implicating her in a vile hatred of Jews, a hatred she presumed Noor and Mother shared with her.
Why did Madame Dunet need to tell Noor this, so many years later? Knowledge worming its way beneath Noor’s skin. Madame wanted her to acknowledge that if she had a half-Jewish child or had simply been married to a Jew, she could be deemed a Jew under current Vichy laws, laws more stringent and anti-Semitic than the Germans required. Wanted her to understand that the gates of Drancy and Compiègne and Pithiviers would stand waiting to devour her today had Madame not saved her.
No feeling of gratitude stirred in Noor. At this moment she wanted above all only to be with Armand, in his arms—man and woman in a phalanx of two.
Madame Dunet’s lips moved in a silent, carnivalesque movie. The dreary kitchen was dissolving into pointillist frames.
Was she Medea, or was she Noor? Was she but the effect of her family and its decisions for her, or was she Noor? She had not challenged their desires years ago. She had taken the safest route—name the crime, for crime it was then and now: to have Armand’s child aborted before it could come into the world. And Madame Dunet was correct, without her ministrations Noor might have been interned today, with Armand.
“Stay in bed for a few days, Mademoiselle Khan. See me again in a week if you still have fever or delirium.” Madame Dunet opened a cigarette case, removed a cigarette. A lighter flicked. A flame leaped and burned in the gloom.
In a waking, walking stupor, somehow Noor was outside, back on the path, then in the street, almost running before the evening blush of the sky, under the pooling shadows of deep-rooted trees.
Here in the dungeon, where night follows night, I toss in a fever-dream as I did for days in the little cupboard at Madame Aigrain’s. No sound, no paper comes between us at this moment; my spirit speaks to yours across Al-ghayab.
A taste like the medicine the midwife gave comes again.
Talking to Madame Dunet battered my senses. I searched for false notes, but Madame Dunet had never claimed to be tolerant; her actions were consistent with her political beliefs, distasteful as I might find them. But as for Mother, and Kabir—the hiatus between discourse and actions astounded. I can say it to myself now where no one hears me, to myself if to no one else: I was ashamed of them, and ashamed for them. Their actions showed coinciding reasons to see me as a woman but never as Noor. Mother: her aspirations to bourgeois respectability. Kabir: the newly won masculine authority of majority.
Of course, they must have felt they did what was right, but …
The most important decision I ever made was chosen as they willed. Then, was it mine or theirs? They were munafiqs—hypocrites, talking and preaching tolerance while acting from prejudice.
Allah, I pray for hidayat: guide them to narrow the gap between their beliefs and actions.
Madame Aigrain brought lace handkerchiefs dipped in eau de cologne and damp linen towels, and plied me alternately with soup and hot milk. I wandered, delirious, in an inscape of anger mingled with remorse. I have no memory of that time till the twenty-seventh day of Ramzaan. Last year it fell on July 12.
On this day one should pardon those who have wronged us.
I who could not pardon Mother and Kabir implored your soul’s pardon for me. You were silent all day; there was only Hazrat Issa faintly smiling from the wall, his sacred heart open and bleeding. Then came the Night of Destiny, when the Qur’an was revealed. The night all fates are sealed, the night one waits for angels. Madame Aigrain had retired when suddenly I sat up in bed. I heard a baby.
A baby crying alone.
It had to be you, the part of me that comes from the creative chakra of the cosmos. Meri jaan—the part of my self that is truly alive. You cried, you screamed, and I could not console you. Did you weep for the clay of the body I denied you, or for the world?
Forgetting the curfew, I ran downstairs and stood in the doorway. The dark, glistening street was illuminated by a single torchlight from the sentry box on the corner.
There was no baby, no baby crying there.
I turned my face so Madame Aigrain might mistake my tears for rain. She led me back to bed.
Tell me, what should I have done ten years ago, ma petite? If, as Madame Dunet said, there were nuns who would look after a foundling—I did not know them. I swear.
But to have you, touch you, then renounce you forever. Would not that have been worse, worse for both of us?
I tell you, I was never afraid of the pain of your birth. Love and fear, rather than chains or bars, bound me when I stopped your soul. In 1934, I imagined you entering your body in the sixteenth week, imagined your heart pumping, taking shape within me. I imagined you forming eyes, lungs, a spine. I thought I felt the long rope of a placenta growing between us, sending nourishment from my inmost recesses to yours. I talked to you as I’m doing now, and you could not express any reason why you needed to be.
Why does any child need to be?
Was it a homicide I did that day, or an act of love for you and Armand? The divine and demonic met in me; years have blurred memory and left only what I wish to remember.
What I wish to remember is love.
Had I let your soul arrive, what would you have seen in my womb? A darkness as deep as the dark in this cell. What would you have heard? Sounds like I hear now: pipes gurgling, the exhalation of the tall building breathing around my trapped body. You would have been as dependent on the cord that fed you as I am on that single outstretched arm with its bowl of soup.
On the Night of Destiny your crying no longer permitted my evasions: I stopped my child’s soul from entering the world by taking away its defenceless piece of my flesh. At twenty, I was capable of deliberate destruction.
My lips are bloody as those of Kali, who gives life and takes it away.
Would I make the same decision again? I lay shivering beneath the coverlet and thought about this for many hours, as if I were playwright, director and actor in my own story.
Enfin, the answer was yes. To bring you to a world in which a woman must have permission before she may love—that was, to me, a sin beyond any the Prophet, peace be upon him, had foreseen. To disallow your father from knowing you because he was Jewish—this would have been an injustice to him and to you.
In that answer I found some peace. You must have understood my thoughts, for by dawn you no longer cried.
I have this time-away-from-time to think, ma petite, think about what makes a human. It is not merely being born, or surviving, but being cherished, receiving love in enough measure that it becomes our obligation to pass it on. Love, caring—these are the true signs of life, not only flesh. The capacity to feel as others feel. To suffer, even vicariously. By this measure, you were not human.
By this measure, none of us have yet become human, for we are numb to pain that is not our own.
Hope is a dangerous luxury in this place that has killed so many of my illusions, but one illusion remains: I will be ready to receive you next time. The twin angels, Kiraman Katibeen, will record better deeds in the Book of Judgement to balance against the harm I inflicted on you, on myself. If not, my jihad-al-akbar, that war I fight against the forces of destruction within me will be lost.
When Armand learned of you, he said, “We’ll have a little girl, we’ll call her Shekinah.”
Shekinah—feminine spirit. Ma petite ruh—yes, that will be you.
I feel his smile tug at my heart. I grow from inside.
But do I hear footsteps and muttering? Was that a hollow bucket crashing against a wall?
“Is someone there? Is anyone there?” I call.
There is no answer, no human who answers. The war could be over, but no one would know I am here. Vogel is not required to account for me. By Hitler’s command, he doesn’t have to keep any record of me and other Night and Fog prisoners. Armand, Mother, Dadijaan, Kabir, Zaib—no one will ever know I am here. I’m just a combatant who has disappeared, an enemy forgotten in this stinking hole.
Is the world destroyed, and no voice but mine left in the universe?
Everything is collapsing.
Allah, my heart is breaking once more.