CHAPTER 33

Pforzheim, Germany
July 1944

BRAIN, HEART AND PEN—not one will rest. My hands were occupied all day today, stringing tickets and more tickets. Thoughts rushed like the trains that set my cot vibrating at night. When I finished stringing tickets, my pen called me to you.

A piping mezzo-soprano swells and ebbs down the corridor. I stop and listen: someone tried to assassinate Hitler, but our newswoman sings in French that he still lives. Stuttgart has been bombed, she sings. Paris is still waiting for the Allies, poor occupied Paris.

What do these events mean for Armand? What do they mean for me? Tell me, if you know.

The song communiqué begins again, this time in Polish. I hear the guard’s baton strike the newswoman’s cell door.

Screams, weeping.

Must my heart harden to survive? To feel deeply about a stranger when I can do nothing about her pain takes its toll on my courage. I write, trying not to wonder what our newswoman’s silence means.

I go back to the instant my own transmissions fell silent, the last that London operators heard from Madeleine.

The man standing in the doorway—to how many had he come, in warning, in nightmare or in person?

Agile with fear, I overturned both chair and transmitter and made a dash for the open window. My feet met the ledge and I was out in the cold, hair whipping into my eyes, sidling out on stone, plaster wall against my back.

The man stopped at the open window. “Fais gaffe!” he shouted. “Tu vas tomber.”

His accent: French as French can be. A milicien dressed in a Gestapo trench coat, a Gestapiste. He lit a cigarette and sat down on the sill to wait till I fell as he predicted, returned to the room or jumped.

Jump! Jump! I urged myself.

Three floors—I might have survived with a few broken bones, maybe even run away. But I looked down and my legs turned to stone. Grey mansard roofs stretched down the boulevard on one side, and on the other the milice gendarme sat smoking at the window.

Even had I a parachute, I couldn’t have jumped. Even if I had completed my parachute training, I couldn’t have moved a muscle. Your uncle Kabir might have flown like Superman, your aunt Zaib might have laughed in the milicien’s face. Mother would have offered the Gestapiste fifty francs or a bottle of cognac to disappear, Dadijaan could have fed him an earful that would make him remember his own grandmother. But your own mother’s legs turned numb. My chest heaved with angry tears, with anger at myself for cowardice.

Terror pushed me out on that ledge, but a far greater fear stopped me from letting go that day, from plunging down for the instant it would take to embrace death.

Do you know what it was, my darling? Today I see the reason, though I couldn’t then.

I saw myself teaching you enough Arabic to read the Qur’an, Armand teaching you enough Hebrew to read the Torah for yourself. I felt myself drawing a tiny hand through bangles, dressing you in a vest with appliquéd flowers, presenting you my tiger claw to wear, as Dadijaan had worn it before us. I was picking peonies for your hair, singing for you, teaching you the veena, writing nonsense stories to make you laugh. I was learning to laugh again. Armand’s blue eyes came before me, piercing my soul. He held you in the crook of his arm. I pressed my lips to his cheek and yours.

All this in a flash, looking down.

Do you see how powerful you are, ma petite? You, the hope of your return, stopped me from jumping. Then as now, your need to use my body gives it an obstinate desire to live.

Jump! I urged myself forward an inch.

But I couldn’t.

I hated my body for being so weak, for clutching at life so greedily. For fearing death, reuniter of all souls.

The moment passed and I understood myself anew, understood I was the sum of my every obligation and attachment. If I jumped, I’d never know if Armand still loved me. I had failed your father twice, I could not fail him again.

If I jumped, I’d never know: would Émile really kill Gilbert? Would Monique, Renée and Babette be lifted to safety? I’d never meet Mother and Kabir again to ask why they betrayed the tolerance our family preached to others. I’d never know if the Allies would arrive to liberate France, never see Zaib become a doctor, see Kabir become Pir.

So when a man who was my enemy reached out to save me, I gripped his hand. For a moment I was suspended in mid-air, with only a strange man’s arms supporting me, then I climbed back over the sill.

But once back on firm ground, I didn’t leave that apartment without a fight. The scuffle brought Wehrmacht soldiers onto the landing, cheering as if betting on a cockfight. More milice gendarmes came and overpowered me. They called the man in the trench coat Cartaud. Pierre Cartaud.

Arms jerked behind my back, my hands were cuffed. I stumbled downstairs, out of the building, into twilight. Cartaud sucked his hand where I had bitten him and said to his men, “This one is a desperado, a dangerous terrorist.”

I recognized that sandy brown beard and moustache now—he was the chauffeur at Grignon, who knocked me sprawling into the ditch, who stood by the Citroën as the megaphone blared. I had focused my binoculars on that face all the way down the hill when he led the maid back with Monsieur Hoogstraten’s suitcase.

A Black Maria rolled up, took me away. It wasn’t far to Gestapo headquarters at the avenue Foch. A cinema reel reverses and I see myself entering a mansion without invitation from its true owners.