CHAPTER 28

Suresnes, France
Monday, July 19, 1943

NOOR ALIGHTED at the Val d’Or trolley stop at a little past ten in the morning. Fear currents flowed from the nape of her neck and branched across taut shoulders, down to the hand gripping the suitcase transmitter and the other looped through the handle of her handbag. Her sunglasses were slipping; she adjusted them.

See and do not be seen.

She wore Monique’s slacks again, because she had never worn slacks all her years in Suresnes. And a chignon; she’d rarely worn one while living at Afzal Manzil.

She could have walked directly up the rue de la Tuilerie to the green gates at the top of the hill, but in case Gilbert or anyone else was following her, she detoured through the coil and branch of Suresnes streets.

Read the landscape, read every lane.

Everything familiar must be seen with a sceptical eye. Poplar leaves jangled SOE handbook warnings at every corner: someone would recognize her, someone would notice she had returned. She paced streets that ran at forgotten purposes, and intersected seemingly at random, trying to understand herself as foreign even to this, the peripheral town she once called home. Foreigner. Foreign-born. She could be deported to a camp in a minute.

She turned towards the central square.

The mairie should have had swastika banners draped over its façade as at Grignon—but all that remained of the stately old building was a gaunt, skeletal outline.

Past a hedgerow at the corner of the square, helmeted heads and shoulders glided with not a single bob above some imaginary plane—German soldiers marching past.

She doubled back and forth through the little town. Bombs, German or Allied, had damaged the locks on the Seine, but the Pont de Suresnes, rebuilt after the 1870 war, was intact. Little girls wearing bows in their braids swung bare legs from windowsills of shell-pocked apartment ruins. The Coty parfumerie was busier, sleeker. Employees came and went from the Radiotechnique buildings. Little boys got their knickers wet in the stone fountain at La Place du Marché, as mothers and grandmothers scolded.

Surprising that Émile Zola’s bust still stood before the municipal library; he should be alive today to defend more falsely accused Jews. Avoid the library—many an hour spent there, with Armand. Avoid the shops too.

In the buvette on the rue de la Huchette, a few German soldiers were gathered around a radio, but only a few—some messages she sent mentioned entire divisions being sent to fight Russia now.

At the Café Val d’Or, where she had so often met Armand in secret, waiters were wiping tables and polishing wineglasses, readying for lunch. Scarlet tablecloths ballooned and flowed from deft hands, as if to enrage bulls. Outside the tabac, men discussed the odds on favourites at Longchamp. Not one gave her a second look as she passed—but why should they? They weren’t looking for her. Everyone was engrossed in their own affairs.

Afzal Manzil was still carved into the marble slab beside the green gates of her family home. Was this really where a little girl, then a young woman, called Noor had lived?

The rue de la Tuilerie was now Neu Rosenstrasse. In place of the hastily painted British Property sign, nailed to the green gates in 1940, was a black-and-white sign saying something in German.

She should have expected this. Renaming was ever the colonizer’s way in India too; the Germans were simply extending the “favours” of colonization to Europe. But she hadn’t expected it, and it irked her that she hadn’t, and a “little thing like that,” as Londoners would call it, was suddenly meaningful, sinister, one more example of German inhumanity.

The Sufis say one’s true home is a place with a name but no precise address. How many times did you say that to yourself when you lived in this “house of peace” that became your House of Grief?

She must try to imagine the homesickness of the German bureaucrat who had renamed rue de la Tuilerie. Imagine a civil servant far from home who longed for his family living in, say, Berlin, Hamburg or Munich on a street called Rosenstrasse.

Too charitable. The German bureaucrat was probably now living in Paris, might even be billeted on Neu Rosenstrasse, in Afzal Manzil, occupying her old home with other Germans.

Circling back on Neu Rosenstrasse to the top of the hill, Noor stopped before a modest red-brick house sitting beside its enclosed garden, patches of ivy climbing the stone walls. The wall was a costly endeavour and a nuisance to maintain, but Josianne’s father built it because his father had built one and his grandfather before him. Behind it he kept his wife and children, before it and its buffer space of garden, the world. Josianne’s father, a colonist in Algiers, died a year after Abbajaan, and at the lycée teenage Noor offered Josianne the comfort of a Petite Beurre biscuit at break time, and listened as Josianne talked about her father’s liver disease.

With no elder brothers, only younger sisters and a brother who left at eighteen to run the family vineyards in Algeria, Josianne was the one friend approved by Uncle, the only one Noor was allowed to visit in her home. To Josianne, then, Noor confided all the restrictions placed upon her. And Josianne endeared herself to Mother, obtaining permission for Noor. Together they had cantered through the Bois, attended open-air concerts beneath the metal girders of the Eiffel and roamed the Louvre. Later, it was Josianne who noticed, well before Noor herself was aware of it, that in the daily tide of Sorbonne students, Noor’s face glowed only for Armand.

Since her family’s flight from Afzal Manzil, the “next-door neighbours,” as Mother called them, had installed louvred windows and heavy curtains for blackout. Was anyone within?

Kneeling as if to adjust her shoe buckle, Noor glanced over her shoulder. No one on the street seemed interested in her. No one on the street resembled Gilbert. She straightened, unlatched the low gate in the wall. Beyond it, all the doors would be open; this was, after all, Suresnes, not Paris.

Josianne’s rusty bicycle with its painted wicker basket leaned against the wall. Noor let herself in. From an open window she spotted bony Madame Prénat, under a veiled hat in the back garden, supervising a gardener raking the prongs of a binette into soft earth. Noor wandered into the drawing room to wait.

Josianne’s oil paintings, still on every wall. The same three chairs in the drawing room: the armchair for Josianne’s departed father, Madame Prénat’s straight-backed chair and Josianne’s.

Josianne’s chair felt just right.

Josianne entered, carrying a porcelain bowl. Bobbed hair—three years ago it was long. A crisp pastel-blue linen dress, real stockings and platform shoes.

Josianne looked, and looked again. Then dropped the bowl with a great crash and let out a scream.

Noor jumped up and clapped her hand over Josianne’s mouth. But Madame Prénat came running, casting back her veil. She turned Camembert-pale and sank into a chair.

An electric rush of sheer gratitude and relief came over Noor as Josianne’s arms tightened around her. She came to tears, embracing Josianne and Madame Prénat in return. She was no longer alone.

A great mess of shattered porcelain and oatmeal had to be swept away and mopped up, the linen dress had to be spot cleaned and powdered. Twenty minutes later, all the exclamations hushed and questions began to flow.

Madame Prénat said she’d lost all respect for the Germans after their invincible General Rommel was routed at El Alamein. Their Thousand Year Reich wouldn’t last another year, she scoffed. “And you and others who escaped to the Riviera after the bombardments cannot imagine how humiliating life has been here.”

Emboldened by her words, Noor said, “We didn’t go to the Riviera, we escaped to England. Kabir and I joined the airforce. Now I’m with the Résistance Service des Renseignements.”

The Information Service. Madame Prénat’s face, all planes and angles above her lace collar, wore a look of amazement mixed with agitation as she took this in.

“That’s all you need to know.” Noor sounded determined, sure. Like a woman, not a girl, as she asked if Madame would take her in, give her a place to sleep, understanding the dangers involved? And a place to transmit?

“And no questions,” Noor added.

There was a weighty silence. Josianne’s hazel eyes gazed at Noor in wonder. Madame Prénat was hesitating. It was plain she really didn’t want to get involved; the Occupation had probably rearranged every person’s relationships as if they were anagrams.

Pretend to be brave; no one can tell the difference.

“There have been many executions, Noor,” said Madame.

From Madame’s expression Noor could tell she still thought Noor the trembling young girl she used to know.

“At Mont Valérien,” added Josianne. “They began soon after the old town crier came on his bicycle, rapping his double-faced drum, with the Ortskommandantur’s instructions for Suresnes. Fusillades sound almost every morning now.”

“Mostly godless Communists, je sais,” said Madame Prénat. “But the guns! If we are caught helping you—”

“Godless Communists, Maman?” said Josianne. “Each condemned man spends his last night before he is shot in the chapel. The Germans just call every resistant a Communist.”

Josianne’s sense of justice—strong as ever! But Madame Prénat must make her decision. To her generation Noor was not French, British or American, but Indian—via her very brown, bearded and kaftaned Abbajaan. Indians might be subjects of the British Raj, but to Madame they were not allies but from a not-Europe area, like Algeria, an area marked “Past here there be monsters” as on maps of old. Indians, whether living in or out of French Pondicherry, were subject to the European mission civilisatrice.

But Josianne’s sense of justice stemmed from Madame Prénat’s; Noor waited hopefully.

“Don’t chew the ends of your hair, Noor,” said Madame. “I still have to tell you that, or is it just because your maman is not here? Attends! Does Madame Khan know what you’re doing?”

Madame Prénat was susceptible to Mother’s ingratiating charm, a charm Mother had lavished on her, for Madame, a widow with a steady income from her husband’s well-invested Algerian fortune, epitomized Mother’s social aspirations. So much so that, years ago, Madame Prénat (completely ignoring that Mother was Christian) said that if she could live peacefully side by side with Muslims in Paris, French colons—colonizers—in Africa could live in peace with Muslims. If Noor said that her mother was aware of what she was doing, Madame Prénat would open her home.

So Noor said yes, Mother knew. But quickly added, “Madame, I insist on paying rent. Then you can deny knowing me at all. I will be a stranger who came to rent a room—nothing more.”

With Josianne nodding her bobbed head vigorously, Madame Prénat sighed yes.

And she would accept a token rent. She had been considering renting a room to a student, anyway. Every day, Madame said, she inquired at the post office, but no letters or money were coming from Algiers since the Allied defeat of Vichy forces. “Perhaps you can radio your superiors,” she said, “tell them to wire my son; perhaps they can find a way to send me my money?”

Noor offered her a maybe-smile.

She carried her suitcase transmitter upstairs to Josianne’s room. Josianne leaned against the windowsill, lit a cigarette and crossed her Dietrich legs.

“How long since you returned to France?”

“About a month and a half,” answered Noor, surprised by how much she had missed Josianne.

“And this is the first time you’ve come to see us? For shame, Noor!”

Noor laughed—the first time she had laughed freely since she left England.

Josianne was delighted that Zaib was studying to be a doctor, and not one bit surprised to hear of Kabir’s flying in the RAF and his promotion. Where were the friends they had known at the lycée and the Sorbonne? Josianne checked them off: married, married, married. As if marriage cut each girl’s life short. Which girls supported Pétain, which were secret Gaullistes? What of their husbands’ political leanings? Were any still single? Very few.

Few girls ever meet a man who can enlarge the soul, so they make do with a man who can enlarge their stomachs.

One had become a nun. And there was Josianne.

“I’m teaching, but only till I can get married … Sometimes I think my resistance is simple: I refuse to be sad, angry or unhappy… Écoute! I have one special proposal that interests me … You don’t know him, but he is the son of a colon family … I’m considering it, but I would have to live in Algiers—can you imagine leaving Paris? Oh, of course you can, because you had to. But voluntarily? Ah, but London is also the centre of the universe, non? And also, poor Maman, how can I leave her alone?”

The young man’s great-grandfather and Josianne’s had together cleared their three hectares of land (confiscated from Arabs, Josianne wryly noted) in the days when the French government was giving Frenchmen 1,200 francs, aid, free grains and free passage; and the young man was very eligible, having turned the property to viniculture.

“Maman says if I marry him, it won’t be for long—I’d be a supporter of Ferhat Abbas or some other radical and he’d send me home to live with her. But until recently he sent me postcards and letters from Algeria, always asking …” She turned a little, cigarette in hand; smoke gusted from the window.

Tremendous fighting had taken place across Algeria, but Josianne didn’t seem particularly anxious for her colon. For Josianne, all men were flawed but alike in their need for Josianne; she was still single because her difficulty lay in choosing. Whereas Noor found her Armand at seventeen, and ever since needed and wanted no other.

“Et toi? You have a new amour? English, perhaps?”

“Yes, he’s in the navy.”

“Oh, I must hear all about him.”

Noor would have to invent a whole fantasy Englishman, but later.

“And Armand?”

Noor told her about the cards she had received in London.

“Mon Dieu, at Drancy!”

This stopped Josianne as if Armand were one of their school friends who had married. So Noor wouldn’t tell her she had been to Drancy or say anything about sending Armand a message and her tiger claw. She would be silent about her morbid fears, her anxiety, her waiting, hoping to learn if Armand was still there or deported to Germany. She had put Josianne and Madame Prénat in enough danger without revealing details of her connection to an internment camp.

Josianne tucked her hair behind her ears, as if demonstrating how Noor should listen. “Anyone can be arrested for any reason, and without reason. Even Henri Sellier. He’s still at Compiègne.”

Something shrank within Noor. The mayor of Suresnes—popular, progressive, even powerful. The similarity to Armand brought no comfort. Unless—

“When was he arrested?” she asked.

“Oh, about this time last year—no, the year before. Yes, the summer of ‘41.”

“And he is at Compiègne? Still there? Not sent to Germany?”

“Oui, oui. You remember his wife? He sends her a label every month, and she sends him a parcel.”

Someone Jewish was still in a camp, still able to send word to his wife.

Noor felt light enough to dare anything. She placed her suitcase on Josianne’s bed and thumbed it open.

“This is what women are wearing in London? It looks just like our lingerie,” said Josianne, holding up a frothy satin slip.

“It’s French. A soldier ordered me to open my suitcase on the métro this morning. I told him it was a cinematograph—he believed me! Mon Dieu, when I thought what could have happened, I was so nervous! I stopped at Galeries Lafayette to buy this as camouflage—my own went to England by mistake a few days ago. Josianne, may I borrow some clothes?”

“Toujours, mon amie.” Josianne pointed to a chest of drawers in the corner.

She gazed at the dials and wires of the transmitter, then looked up at Noor. “You know how to make this work?”

Josianne declined, positively refused, to understand anything with levers, dials or switches. She probably still couldn’t drive a car, and even had trouble using a telephone. The transmitter was of no interest, but the code books and encryption keys intrigued her. Noor explained they were like the Rosetta stone.

“You want to learn how to decipher the messages?” said Noor. “I could teach you—it wouldn’t take you more than a few hours to learn. You could assist me.”

“Bien sûr! You remember, non? I love secret messages.”

“Shhh!” said Noor, as if Uncle Tajuddin had some special hearing device that could listen all the way from India.

But yes, Josianne had carried messages between Armand and Noor, to and from Afzal Manzil, right under Uncle’s nose. What would Josianne, her closest friend, say today if she knew the truth about Noor’s “stomach operation”? If she suspected it, she had never said so. What would she say if told of Madame Dunet, and five thousand francs, and Noor’s years of shame and pain? Josianne would no doubt keep her secret, but—

“Shhh!” said Noor again, more for herself.

Josianne moved her nightstand against the window. Noor placed the transmitter on it, stringing her aerial out, twining it through the ivy. The fragrance of quince at the edge of Afzal Manzil’s garden mingled with Josianne’s Chanel.

Afzal Manzil was just her house, not really a home.

Mother often said of Afzal Manzil: when people give you gifts, you have to live with their choices. It had wounded Dadijaan’s pride to learn the house was donated by a benefactor, a bourgeois woman who found peace in Sufism and the comfort of a direct relationship with a universal God.

Branches and weeds tangled on the stone walls between the adjoining gardens. A rusty barbed wire was strung along the top—by the Germans, Josianne said. A riot of colour clustered around the oak tree; Abbajaan’s transplanted flowers were holding their own.

The garden grotto. Abbajaan standing there again in a long cream-and-gold kaftan. The guests were there again. The music, the clapping. Abbajaan unfolded a man-size pashmina shawl for everyone to see. Embraced ten-year-old Kabir. Drew back. The shawl remained, draped across Kabir’s shoulders. Twelve-year-old Noor sitting in the audience between Mother and Zaib. Kabir looking down at her, his changed expression. Something had reversed who was elder, who was younger, who gave permission and who must ask.

Behind her a chair scraped, distracting her momentarily.

Back to looking at the garden. But Abbajaan, Kabir and all the guests had vanished into the present.

Her gaze climbed to the door set at the top of its walrus-moustache staircase. She saw herself at thirteen, fourteen, seventeen. Standing again at the mouth of its darkness.

Noor closed her eyes and let imagination turn the walls of Afzal Manzil to glass. On the ground floor the rooms flowed around a central courtyard.

Remember happy times.

She was back in Abbajaan’s recital room, sitting cross-legged on frayed kilims as Abbajaan taught her to play the veena, though he’d long since given up performing and composing himself. “Dil mein Ali, mere man mein Ali Ali.” She was listening to Amir Khusrao qawallis sung over the ripple and pulse of the harmonium by visiting singers from India. She was at the chess table across from Abbajaan, she was playing hide-and-seek with Kabir and Zaib, she was learning namaaz along with Mother, she was pulling on white stockings and gloves to attend church with Mother.

But other memories came unbidden. She had opened the front door for an unrelated man and she was confined in her room, crying. She was wearing a pair of red shoes borrowed from Josianne; Uncle was shouting, she was kicking them off, running to her room. She was reading in an upstairs room and Uncle Tajuddin was standing at her bookshelf, and her books were flying like birds from the window, fluttering, slapping down into mud.

Discovering love, perhaps not enough love for Allah but certainly love for Armand. Like Dom Pérignon discovering champagne—as if she were drinking stars. She was tiptoeing downstairs to sneak out without Uncle seeing her, she was slipping in unseen, she was standing by the telephone, whispering. She was standing in the bathroom looking into the mirror, wondering what in the world to do, where could she go, how could she start the bleeding again.

Back through Madame Dunet’s recent revelations, back to now. Noor’s eyes opened wide.

Downstairs, the gardener came in with a basket of newly dug beets, and the same mouse of a maid who had worked under Madame Prénat’s thumb for years greeted Noor as if she had never left, and washed the beets for lunch.

In honour of Noor’s return, Madame now took over the kitchen. Josianne helped her cut the tops and bottoms from the purple bulbs, and a caramel fragrance filled the house as Madame Prénat roasted them over a gas flame, then tossed them in sour cream, dill and lemon juice to balance sweet and sour. Once grace was said, they tasted like the concentrated sweetness of the earth. Josianne declared the bread a little dry and paste-soft in the middle—the firewood could have run out beneath the baker’s oven, she said—but when served with wedges of Camembert and a bottle of Domaine Suresnes, it was delicious.

Neck and shoulder muscles relaxed, breathing came easier. Gilbert didn’t know she was here, no one of the SOE knew either. She could receive and transmit here. She could trust Josianne and Madame Prénat—far more than Gilbert and Major Boddington, anyway.

She had made the right decision to contact Josianne, though it ran counter to Miss Atkins’s instructions. It felt right, even if the SOE handbook might someday list contacting old friends while on assignment under “Where Operatives Go Wrong.”