CHAPTER 30

Pforzheim, Germany
July 1944

NOTHING IN MY CIRCUMSTANCES has altered since the Allies landed but my capacity for acceptance, my perception of my own adaptability. I am as Sleeping Beauty waiting for her prince; all of us are waiting. Rumi could have been speaking to the Allies across the centuries: “Open the gates of the prison with the keys that spell Joy.”

Today the guard gave me so many white tickets to thread on strings, I barely have time to write before my light is extinguished. The tickets have tiny holes through which I thread cotton, then make a knot. She supplies a single measured thread with the ball of twine, and I have to bite each thread to that length. Finished, they look like price tags for hats and clothes. Though I’ve always disliked sewing, sometimes I look forward to this useless work—it keeps my hands busy and dulls fear, regret, loss, yearning, self-pity and anger, and the stench of the toilet in the corner.

Forty tickets an hour—that’s how many I can thread if I cut all the strings first and thread the tickets after. If I cut a single string and thread its ticket, I thread only thirty an hour. So I cut each string and thread its ticket, using inefficiency as my protest device. But today the guard’s eye was at my peephole at least five times, and I got no soup at midday till I had threaded enough to satisfy her. So I tried to concentrate on threading, threading tickets all afternoon.

This is how I felt once I made contact with Viennot and began to work in earnest. The first static and whistles as I turned the dial were as the greetings of slow-turning planets, a cosmic noise of jangled intentions, but after a few days my concentration returned, skill and speed improved. I was back to that incredible feeling of lightness as thought projected from my tapping finger to ether, and I became Madeleine. Night after night, my finger on the key, translating French to English, then to Morse dot-dash-dash-dot, and I could not know if the information meant anything to the receiving women in London, Miss Atkins, Major Boddington or Colonel Buckmaster. After transmitting, I came back to being Noor, Noor who must, as Anne-Marie, live with the consequences of her communications. Once Josianne and I had finished decrypting and deciphering, we had messages and instructions to courier all over Paris.

I made contact with Odile again. Since her father’s arrest she had become a little quieter, but had not lost her confidence.

Sometimes I thought all I was doing was waiting, waiting for messages, waiting for appointments in unfamiliar cafés with strange men and women from every occupation, every origin—people I might never have met in quiet Suresnes, or even in Paris, but for the war.

I felt connected to all my countries in this work—England and India, America, Russia and France. For once I was part of them all, necessary to the survival of nations, a finger-tapping sender connected to Colonel Buckmaster’s women radio receivers, and because I was working with people who needed my skills, no one would call me foreigner any more. But every minute I lived with the thought that my love had become foreign in his own country … the one we had called “our” country.

For both belonging and non-belonging, there’s no place like a war.

I disobeyed Viennot’s rules, of course—adding one more disobedience to my stream of disobediences—and renewed my lease at Madame Gagné’s boarding house in Drancy. Gabrielle, bartering more than tobacco ration coupons now at the Café Vidrequin, served me larger portions of food than she should have and took larger portions of drink than she should have. Her eyes were always puffy.

We never—I never—saw Monsieur Durand’s sad eyes again, though I went to Drancy every week and transmitted from there. Poor Claude continued to call me at Madame Aigrain’s, but now he called to say he had no news, just to have an excuse to call.

There were more transports, each of a thousand people. Each of a thousand Jews and resistants, some that left from Drancy station, some from Bobigny.

Once, only once, I was even angry at Armand. Why had he allowed himself to be captured? Why did he not resist more? And once he was at Drancy, why did he not try to escape? If he found his name on the list of deportees, could he not pretend to be sick, or fight legally not to go? But then Gabrielle explained what Monsieur le Missionnaire had told her, that the German quota of a thousand per transport meant if Armand found an acceptable excuse not to go, he would be condemning some other Jewish man to be transported in his stead.

The world is a barbaric place at present, ma petite—wait a while to enter it.

Gabrielle was there to comfort me if I ever saw your father, but I never did, though I stood by the gates and watched each convoy leave:

July 31

September 2

October 7

I watched unblinkingly. I watched to remember. I watched as if through the crocheted eyepiece of a shuttlecock burqa. Then back to work, after angry tears.

The work consumed me the way these tickets help to eat away time. All through August and September, Viennot attempted to meet me at his apartment, always mentioning that his wife was absent on vacation. He said he could fix my transmitter if it ever broke—and once upon a time I would have pretended to be very stupid, pretended I didn’t understand his advances, or that he was waiting for complete impoverishment to steer me down the road to selling my body. Instead, one day I explained that all I wanted from him was information. Information about the war as it was, not as I or Monsieur Churchill wanted it to be. And that if he expected to continue being paid by London, he should keep his suggestions to himself.

To my surprise Viennot took rejection well, merely saying, “You know I had to try,” as if a point of masculine honour had been at stake.

In England, I was trained to be a conduit, only a conduit. Told to ignore the content of messages—details about the movement of supplies, trucks, trains carrying tanks, troops, troop morale. But Archambault had taught me to grasp the significance of a message before sending. So I became familiar with the code names of Viennot’s sources, and their motives. Germans were paid well, and some of the French will live like colons once the Allies liberate Paris. I sent signals for entire power plants and engine factories to blow up. My messages caused patrols and sentries to be blown to bits, horses to stampede, mail to burn in acid, food and forage to be poisoned, time bombs to detonate in cars and trains, stocks of petrol to burn. And it was not that I hated, but that I had no alternative. And I wanted German destruction in proportion to the cavity that yawned within me.

I felt then as today that I will prove to them, to myself: ours is a love their bombs can’t shatter, that bullets can’t kill, even if they have deported my beloved.

I wonder if it made any difference that I, Noor, was hiding in Paris and from my purdah behind a radio was telling the Allies where to bomb, when to hit, provided damage assessments and reports of roundups.

But it was not only me—Josianne was at my side, decoding. Odile was my courier, thinking up a million excuses any time she was stopped after curfew. One night she had gone out to call her German soldier from a phone box because her mother wouldn’t let her call from home. Another night she was going to her sister who was having a baby and the doctor had no gas for his car. And my surrogate mothers Madame Aigrain and Madame Prénat supported, sheltered and fed us. The power and anger of our zenana steamed like an engine to its goal.

Every day, I dispossessed myself of self to find some characteristic, any small thing, in common with my assigned personas, Anne-Marie and Madeleine. Translating to English, encoding, transmitting, receiving, decoding, translating to French again—for all of us it was theatre without the drama or applause. This dance of pseudonyms carried me through to autumn.

In a few months, when the Allies release me and things are better, ma petite, I will work for Radio France. I’ll tell you stories on the air, using my own clear voice in place of code. Armand always said I have a beautiful voice, untrained but beautiful. I’ll take singing lessons, we’ll write a children’s newspaper together—we’ll call it Bel Âge.

Silence in my unaired cell now. In the distance a woman screams, “If there is a God, hear me!” Another responds with the Lord’s Prayer. The Latin words return us to our atavistic urge to believe, believe the crucial moment will come.

I hear the guard tramping towards my cell.

Allah hafiz for now, ma petite.