The door to her cell was flung open. It was agony to sit up, but Noor didn’t want to look weak.
A big man, heavy-footed, his uniform crisp and buttons shiny, strode in.
‘I am Kieffer, head of the Paris Gestapo,’ he said in thickly-accented French. He was holding a piece of paper. ‘So, mademoiselle. I heard you had a little outing. Did you enjoy it?’
Noor glared at him.
‘This is a document.’ He fluttered the paper at her. ‘A promise that you will not try to escape again. If you sign this, you may stay here in Avenue Foch.’
Noor didn’t bother looking at his paper. ‘I will not sign it.’
It hurt to breathe, but nevertheless she inhaled deeply. She wanted her voice to be strong.
‘I will always keep trying to escape, because that is my duty. If I signed your – your document, it would be a lie. I do not lie.’
Kieffer whacked the side of his leg with the paper. His eyes were chips of granite. ‘I see. Too bad.’ He called an officer to the cell. ‘Mademoiselle is going to Pforzheim Prison. See to it at once. She is a highly dangerous prisoner. Nacht und Nebel – Rückkehr Unerwünscht.’
Noor knew what that meant: Night and fog – return not required. She was going to ‘disappear’. None of her friends or family would know where she was. Noor’s vision began to blot out and everything became fuzzy.
Abba, please help me, she thought. I need your strength. One of his songs wound its way into her mind, an Indian raga he’d taught her, and it was as if he were there with her.
Calm now, she squared her shoulders, and raised her chin in defiance. She would not give Kieffer the satisfaction of seeing how upset she was.
Armed guards seized her and threw her into an army truck. She was driven through the night across France and into Germany to her new prison.
Pforzheim was a huge institution, a chunk of architecture. She was shoved into a cell set apart from others by fences and locked gates, and bolted in.
Noor stood, numb, looking at her new home. The iron bed had a worn mattress, no thicker than an old blanket. A rusting bucket stood in the corner – her loo. The room was dank and dark, weak light coming from a tiny window high above, and it stank of urine, and air that had been breathed too often.
She’d only been there a few minutes when the door was unlocked. There was clanking as two guards brought in some lengths of chain.
‘Get up!’ one ordered, kicking her feet.
‘Say please,’ Noor retorted in German.
‘Don’t speak!’
They handcuffed her, chained her ankles together and her hands to her feet. The heavy iron was cold and pressed against Noor’s bruises and cuts. The door was banged close, and with the slam of the bolts, any seedlings of hope Noor might have had were viciously stamped out.
Tears smarted Noor’s eyes. ‘Stop it,’ she told herself. She wiped them off on her shoulder, the chains clanging as she did so.
Her days were endless, broken only by the visits of the male warden who brought her bowls of thin gruel to eat, and the female warden with hands like potato graters who fed her and cleaned her. The lights went off in the early evening, and long nights would then follow long days.
Noor grew steadily weaker. She forced herself to walk backwards and forwards across her cell, the weight of the chains becoming increasingly difficult to bear. It was only the thought of her family, and her memories of Abba’s wise teaching, that kept her mind straight.
Noor was waiting one afternoon for someone to collect her used metal bowl when she noticed scratching on the base. When she held it up to the light, she made out some writing.
There are three girls here, it said.
Noor laughed out loud. She’d heard activity in the corridor outside her cell.
How could she reply? She needed something sharp. She darted a glance around the room. Nothing. Could she somehow use her handcuffs? No, but her finger nails were long and brittle. They might do.
She tried.
Yes. Her writing looked like runes, but it worked. You are not alone, you have a friend in Cell 1, she replied.
They sent messages to each other. Sometimes it took days to receive them when the bowls were used by other prisoners. Noor tried to keep her spirits up by making up stories in her head, and remembering those that Abba had told. But in the long, cold nights, misery would often overcome her, and she would weep into the prickly blanket.
The daylight hours began to shorten again. Noor reckoned she must have been there almost a year. Late one afternoon, the female warden scuttled into her cell and removed her clothes. She gave her a rough, sackcloth garment to wear instead.
‘Why – what is happening?’ Noor asked, breaking the rule of silence.
‘You are going,’ the warden said.
‘Where?’
The warden shrugged her hefty shoulders, bundled up Noor’s clothes and left.
I am leaving, Noor wrote, without hope, on her bowl. She knew that her next destination was unlikely to be pleasant.
That evening, Noor was unchained and pushed down the corridors and out of the prison. They stepped outside, and Noor stopped to breathe the autumnal air. She felt weightless without her shackles, as though she might be carried off by a breeze.
‘Schnell! Quick!’ the guard shouted, rapping her on her shoulder blade.
‘One moment,’ Noor said fiercely. She looked up at the sky. So much light all at once dazzled her eyes. But there was something she wanted to see before she would allow herself to be shoved into the waiting car.
Seconds later, a bird flew across the evening sky as though it had been summoned. Noor looked at it until she couldn’t see it any longer, sending with its free wings a message of love to Amma, and to her sister and brothers.
Then she nodded, throwing off the guard’s hand on the back of her neck. ‘I am going,’ she said, getting into the car.