The Tiger Claw (2 page)

Above her, the window brightened.

The guard was at the door. She unchained Noor’s manacles so she could use the toilet. Did not glance at the bed. Did not shout.

The flap door dropped for Noor’s morning bowl, sawdust bread. A single bulb lit the cell.

Begin, “Once upon a time there was a war …?” No. She would write
une histoire
, not the kind her captor had in mind, but for someone who might read her words in a time to come:

I am still here
.

I write, not because this story is more important than all others, but because I have so great a need to understand it. What I say is my truth and lies together, amalgam of memory and explication. I write in English, mostly, English being the one language left in the ring. Other languages often express my feelings better—French, Urdu, Hindustani. And perhaps in these languages I could have told and read you stories better than this, your mother’s story. But all my languages have been tainted by what we’ve said and done to one another in these years of war
.

When the flap door dropped that evening, Noor dragged her chains to it and placed two sheets on the open tray. On one she had written the Sufi tale about the attraction of a moth to a flame, on another the one about the young man who came knocking at his teacher’s door and when his teacher asked, “Who is there?” cried “It is I” and was told, “Come back when you are nobody.”

She could see the guard glance at the English writing then thrust the sheets in her pocket without examination. The pad of onionskin lay upon the cot behind Noor, but the guard didn’t enter to count its remaining pages.

So, the next day, Noor wrote another paragraph, and another:

With that first creation of Allah—the pen that Vogel has allowed me—poised over the ink pot, then over the page, I wonder what to call you. Little spirit never whispered into this world—une fée. In Urdu I would call you ruh. Feminine. Ma petite ruh. We all begin feminine in Al-ghayab, the invisible, before we enter our nameless bodies
.

I imagine you, ma petite, nine years old, looking much like me and as much like Armand, expectant and still trusting. Encourage my telling as any audience encourages a teller of tales, though I may tell what you may not condone, what you may not believe, or what you cannot bear to know. I write so you can see me, so Armand will appear again by the telling
.

CHAPTER 2

Germany
July 1945

A
GAINST THE FLUME
and smear of a dying sun, the silhouette of a motorcycle rider rose over a ridge of dirt road. The sharp engine roar dropped and levelled. The rider’s gloved hands downshifted to avoid the scorched remnants of a tank blocking his way. The bike bounced over ruts and craters as Kabir swerved the pod of his sidecar around the shell-pocked hull. The Tiger tank was canted over its cannon, its mud-caked treads stilled in a ditch.

Kabir didn’t stop to examine the tank, or let thoughts of the Germans who must have died inside cross his mind, but goaded his rattling steed past. Showers sprang from spinning rubber as he furrowed a puddle. He shot a glance through spattered goggles at the jerricans bouncing in the sidecar and, gritting his teeth against flying mud and wind, headed into the darkening horizon.

Out of Strasbourg, Kabir had raced over a makeshift pontoon bridge crossing the Rhine with a moment of wonder. Only a few months earlier, before the Germans surrendered, crossing the Rhine at any point was unthinkable.

Faster, faster
.

Past the Rhine, the road crumbled in patches, as if the very soil had soured beneath the tar-skin pasted upon it. Kabir’s Triumph sagged into valleys, zoomed past forests of pine. Detour
upon detour drove him south to Freiburg im Breisgau, a city he knew only as a target objective last November, now almost conjured out of existence by Allied bombs—his bombs. As he drove through its high canyons of scorched rubble, the sight of a tiny, ragged girl foraging alone with a wooden bucket amid a mass of crushed possessions and twisted steel brought the Al-Fatiha surah to his lips:

Now, as he sped past these patches of green and gold, it was difficult to believe he had just seen Alsatian hamlets like Gérardmer flattened to the level of its glacial lake by the retreating German army, seen the abandoned barracks, the gallows and gas chambers of Natzweiler-Struthof camp near Strasbourg, or the stone skeletons and smoky ghosts of Freiburg. The putrid stench of death at Natzweiler, mingled with the bomb-smoke and rain of Freiburg, lingered in his nostrils, saturated his lungs, an all-pervasive odour that the scent of lavender blooming by the roadside could not erase.

This was his first time on the ground through Germany. In his childhood, his father’s savings were reserved for passages “home” to India, not European excursions. And since 1933, Germany, though literate beyond Indian nationalists’ wildest dreams of progress, had become the sick core of Europe whence refugees flowed into France. Hitlerland was the omnivorous devourer of the hapless, the racially impure, the non-Gentile, the circumcised. But these beautiful forests, hills and fields of Germany seemed unblemished by German actions.

The motorcycle rattled past a sign—
Stuttgart: 120 km
—and approached an improvised checkpoint beside a maze of oil drums.
A young American military policeman sauntered up, obviously expecting a courier on the motorbike. Noting Kabir’s rank, he snapped to. “Can I help you, sir?”

Kabir returned his salute and held out his pass and ID booklet. The MP studied the pass and looked uncertain. A lieutenant approached; they exchanged salutes.

Kabir raised his goggles, unbuckled his helmet, peeled off his gloves, while the lieutenant took the documents and read the pass aloud.

“‘This is to certify that the bearer, Flight Lieutenant Kabiruddin Khan of the Royal Air Force, is proceeding through Germany to locate his sister who was held in a German camp.’” He paused, glanced up at Kabir.

Kabir was intent on the road beyond the barrier, fist clenched about his gloves.

“‘It is requested that British, French, American and Russian military and civilian authorities assist Flight Lieutenant Khan in his task, and make such housing and mess facilities available, as well as radio, press and all other means which can help him locate his sister. A further request is made to permit his sister to cross the border with him on his return to his home in France.’” He again examined the signature and date on the pass for what seemed like an eon. “Which camp are you headed for, sir?”

“I don’t quite know. All I know is that my sister was deported to Germany.”

The lieutenant’s opinion of Kabir’s chance of success was expressed with a sigh, but Kabir was long past listening to the opinions of uniformed officials. He knew the odds were slim. Folded in his pocket he carried a list of the known concentration camps between the Alsace region and Berlin. And this list, without any German prisons, was three pages long. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross and
UNRRA
, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, had reminded him every day for weeks in Paris: one in ten people survived a camp. Searching for one woman among the millions displaced might
be futile. But this was not just any woman. This was his sister, Noor.

Immediately after Germany surrendered, Kabir had obtained permission to return to Paris, where he waited for the transports bringing deportees and prisoners of war home to Paris. For weeks, in deepening amazement and horror, he met trains arriving at the Gare de l’Est each morning with hundreds upon hundreds of hollow-chested, shaven-headed returnees. Every day, at
UNRRA
headquarters, at welcome centres for returned deportees and at the Hôtel Lutétia, he examined and re-examined the cards and notes tacked to bulletin boards covering every wall, coming to realize with ever-mounting dread that while he was looking for one woman, many were searching for entire families. A lucky break had come a week before when he recognized an
UNRRA
worker. A former theosophist, she’d studied Sufism first at his father’s feet, then at Uncle Tajuddin’s, in the now-haloed years before the war, learning about the oneness of Allah and all other names for God. Straight away, he wheedled a list of German camps now under Allied control right out of her lacquered fingertips, requisitioned a motorcycle from an
RAF
base, obtained three weeks’ leave and a high-level pass, and came searching.

“Try Munich,” said the lieutenant, handing Kabir’s papers back with heavy finality. “There’s a collection centre there, run by
UNRRA
.”

“Thank you.” Gloves back on his hands, Kabir adjusted his helmet and goggles and gunned the engine.

“Good luck, sir.” The young MP waved Kabir through with a salute of triumphant camaraderie.

A short distance further, four men and two women carrying bundles and suitcases were climbing slowly into a Red Cross lorry parked along the road, facing Kabir. These anonymous survivors of the terror, weak from their time in the camps, still wearing their sacklike prison attire, were the liberated—“displaced persons,” or DPs—on their way to somewhere they once called or could now call home.

Kabir slowed, scanning their faces as they passed, searching for one familiar face, one woman’s face. Sympathy blended with revulsion. Noor—petite, gentle Noor—might be in such abject condition at that very moment. As they trudged past, a sob of desperation surfaced in him. He pushed it away. Insh’allah, Noor was alive. He began another
du’a
to add to all the others he’d uttered during the last few months, calling on Allah’s mercy for her.

Speeding to high gear again on the rutted road, a dust cloud lifting in his wake, he tried to recapture the bravado that had filled him like poppy-fume when he volunteered for the
RAF
, returned from flight school in Canada and began to fly bombers. Back then, in England, he was a refugee after the fall of France, and his British Indian citizenship gave him what he wanted most—the chance to fly. The destructive actions he justified multiplied daily as his tenets and personal code of conduct were suspended, superseded by the obligations of war.

Flying over Germany once in daylight last winter, the spiky pines bristling from snow-covered slopes were like the bayonets of Great War soldiers buried alive in the trenches of Verdun. From twenty thousand feet the world had looked flat but for mountains, giving no indication of the 23.5-degree tilt affecting the experiences of each person below, or the ferocity of emotions that curdled all co-operation and compromise. And nothing below had presented the jigsaw of warring countries, delineated any boundaries or coloured parts of the soil Occupied. The surface flowed instead from grassy field to knoll, ridge, escarpment, cliff, sea.

But now, what had looked like green explosions erupting in sudden abundance beneath his wings had expanded to three dimensions—dense foliage flashing past his careening motorcycle.

Kabir acknowledged his motives, acknowledged that he would have, and had, killed for the joy of flying ever more wonderful machines, almost as complex as birds. How he loved that swift, fragile Mosquito whose engines and high-octane fuel propelled
him across the Channel and back, through searchlights and puffs of ack-ack, almost as fast as the rotation of the giant planet beneath. Flying, he felt ever closer to the infinite Allah, ever conscious of the hidden Orient hemisphere, regretting only that he could never gain enough altitude to see it. Later in the war he had thought of himself as a birdman carrying seed, and the scattered markings on the fuselage of his Lancaster the coefficient of Indian bravery. High in his metal bubble, the lure of gravity had been his most pressing problem, gravity operating even in the aquamarine depths below, saving fish from sloshing away into space. The probability of Messerschmitts sharpened each reaction, increased his impetus to prove his role in the drama of Europe’s war.

It came to him now, as he saw these displaced people, that after each night’s sortie, while he could—
allhamdullilah!
—retreat to safety across that tiny moat heaving as if with uneasy dreams between the crone face of England and the sea-encrusted Continent, he’d been far above the sight and smell of blood, the effect of his work, that he’d been spared a single scream of the dying. While he feared only the blaze of sudden fall and a living cremation, or capture, the lives of the landbound had been a string of long moments of dread and privation.

And yet. Some intangible element within him and the survivors was indestructible; it had demanded of all of them that they survive these terrible years.

If Noor hadn’t survived, he would never forgive himself. If she was wounded or worse because of his bombs—Damn it, why had he bragged about Noor to Boddington? It was Kabir who introduced Noor to Nick Boddington—a journalist, so he’d thought—whom he met perusing
The New York Times
in the circular reading room at the British Museum Library. How anxious he’d been then to prove his loyalty to Britain, how anxious for Noor to prove hers too. It was 1942—must have been June, for it was shortly after Premier Laval said “I desire Germany’s victory” and broadcast his latest madness, a program to exchange six French workers for each French POW held in Germany. One of Noor’s stories for children
was to be broadcast over the BBC, and he’d mentioned it to Boddington over a pint at the Café de Paris in Trafalgar Square. Surrounded by a babble of languages, including the halting, lilting English of refugees from all over Europe ordering themselves into old hierarchies, he’d enumerated Noor’s accomplishments: multilingual, children’s writer, pianist, qualified nurse, wireless telegraphist. Impressed, Boddington wondered out loud if his sister might be amenable to doing a little “liaison work” for King and Country—“very hush-hush and all that, could bring in a bit more pocket money, if you get my drift.” And Kabir said, “Yes, of course, but of course,” and gave friendly Nick Mother’s address where Noor could be reached.