The Tiger Claw (29 page)

I said, “I do not hate Germans, but I fear becoming like them.”

“
All Germans,” he said in a calmer voice, “are not like Kommandant Kieffer—many are cultured—enlightened.”

“
Enlightened! Enlightened people wouldn’t follow a madman.”

Allah, what made me say that?

Vogel took a deliberate step forward. I braced for his fist
.

“
The Führer is no madman!” Rage reverberated in his voice. “He’s brilliant. Brilliant!” And his ice-stiff gloves lashed across my face. “A cultured man. A lover of Wagner, Fauré, Gluck, Schumann and Bach.”

The composers Vogel loves, the same Armand loved. Love of music doesn’t ensure enlightenment or tolerance
.

Hot blood oozed from my cut lip. I swayed like a reed. The walls closed in
.

He persisted. “What do you gain by silence, so many weeks of silence?”

But why, ma petite, why could I not be silent now? My life depends on it. I am tired of silence, tired of listening to men like Vogel. Still, I wrapped myself in it again
.

He offered to remove my chains. “I could take you to Munich. I would give you a hot bath, a soft bed, a candlelight dinner. The Residenz Theatre is performing As You Like It.” Like a guardian serpent, he’d protect me, interpret my rebellious “exotic nature” to his Kommandant, if I just …

The sentence trailed away, but I could complete it: if I propitiated him daily, kneeling before him in adoration, offering my subordination, asking to be interpreted by him alone
.

If I, of my own volition, called him Ernst
.

I don’t pretend to comprehend the home or society that grew a man like Vogel. All I can tell you is that his kind have been rewarded daily, have multiplied across Germany, Austria and even France, in a grotesque farce beyond any imagined by Molière
.

I pressed a finger to my bleeding lip and looked away. I had no trouble fetching tears. It had the desired effect: my captor turned to penitent
.

“
Forgive me, Princess. I am greatly distressed. My wife and children—indeed all of Munich—are being bombed by the
RAF
by night, the Americans by day. Now I must get back to Paris.”

He put the pages I gave him in his breast pocket without counting them, without verifying them against my guard’s count. He put on his gloves and coat. He shouted and she came running, braids shining gold above her SS epaulets
.

“
Wie, bitte?”

“
Place this prisoner in solitary confinement,” he said, then uttered the dreaded words, “Pas de privilège.”

The door slammed behind him. The SS woman has gone to prepare my punishment cell and I have pulled these papers from the mattress to write
.

At this juncture where past and present meet, eternal child outside time, you are Hope. Without you, reason might desert me in the unknown geometry of the dark, where there is nothing to witness, nothing to comfort, but remembered images. Reason might give way to the terror Vogel wanted me to feel when he told me my file was marked “Nacht und Nebel.” By his will I can disappear into
the “night and fog” with no trace. Without you, terror would brand my mind, incarcerating it along with my body. Perhaps my story will remain for you—a mother’s myths from which all others come
.

I look at the wall. Blank wall with scratches
.

I take up my pen and scratch five small words with no apologies to Descartes. Five small words that join the scratches of other women on these walls: “I resist, therefore I am.”

Then the date, as close as I can speculate and calculate: January 12, 1944. Only days since my thirtieth birthday
.

I sign it and this page with my true name, Noor
.

Now I wait to be taken down to the dungeon
.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 17

En route to Drancy, France
Monday, June
21, 1943

R
USTED GIRDERS
, smoking chimneys and cavernous warehouses replaced the cream and grey buildings of Paris rushing past Noor’s carriage window. Beneath nearly closed eyelids she studied her early morning travel companions: the worried-looking woman who’d asked if this was “the potato or the bean train;” the two younger women who’d responded in unison “the bean train;” the old man at her left with his empty macramé bag—probably on his way to forage for food; the German soldier about Noor’s own age who gave up his seat for the old lady in mended espadrilles; the white-lipped little boy on her right who hadn’t taken his eyes off the soldier since the journey began.

And if the little boy’s mother didn’t stop staring at Noor’s bag, the soldier might notice. Was it too large, too expensive-looking? Perhaps too full?

Carry an empty basket next time
.

This time, when the train stopped at Le Bourget–Drancy station, Noor knew her way to the centre-ville. But she had no plan. Gauzy blue skies veiled inspiration; she was a cavity of indecision. Inspiration, Abbajaan said, comes to those who prepare themselves. But how to prepare herself?

Get information. Use the tradecraft of secret agents
.

Watchtowers of the internment camp loomed ahead.

Don’t attract attention. Take the back streets
.

But there was the
tabac
door, held invitingly open to cool the little shop. She stopped and asked the owner for Claude to take her to the boarding house again.

“Mademoiselle, a customer who returns is impossible to refuse.” He went to the back and shouted for Claude. “It’s the mademoiselle you said had such pretty eyes.”

Claude’s face popped around the door, flushed pink to the roots of his brown, curly hair. Noor gave him a bewitching smile, accelerating his tint to scarlet.

She hopped sidesaddle on Claude’s luggage carrier, bag on her lap, and steadied herself with one hand about his waist. Claude began pedalling down the avenue.

Even his neck had turned beet red.

Don’t laugh
.

“How is your Tante Lucille?” asked Claude.

“Oh, the same, thank you. Kind when she has good days, unkind when she is in pain.”

Claude was approaching the turreted watchtower. Claude had passed the watchtower.

Just another part of the landscape.

“Does your aunt take medicines for the pain? Laudanum, perhaps?”

“She should, but who can find laudanum these days,” said Noor.

Past several lorries parked at the entrance gate like dogs sniffing for bones.

“Everything can be found, for a price.”

His tone was meaningful. A new avenue opened before Noor.

Allah! Sometimes all one has to do is be present and not give up.

Careful. A hunter who traps a tigress tricks her with a branch-covered pit
.

“Was that your papa?” she asked.

“No, he is not my papa. My papa is still in Germany.”

“In a camp like this?”

“
Mais, non!
Not like this! A Stalag, widening roads, building irrigation canals in Germany. Drancy is for Jews.”

How different were conditions for French soldiers who were now in POW internment camps and for Jews in internment camps? How should Claude know?

“And you are—how old?” He was tall but malnourished. Perhaps fifteen?

“Seventeen, mademoiselle.”

Seventeen—only a few short months from being called up for the Relève and sent to make weapons for the Germans. Unless he was fortunate enough to be employed in an essential industry in France.

“You look older, Monsieur Claude,” lied Noor.

His chest puffed at her compliment.

“Where is your mother?”

“Here, in Drancy,” he said. “I carry messages from the
tabac
when I’m not working at the automobile garage—I’m apprenticed to the mechanic there.”

Young Claude wasn’t black marketeering for a fat pocketbook but to survive. Still, he could be working for the Germans. He could be trying to trap her, trap her into divulging her own interests.

Keep your inquiries general
.

High walls passed the bicycle. And passed and passed. How very many people there must be like Noor, whose loved ones had disappeared into that camp.

Lorries, pedestrians, very empty shops on the other side. But perhaps she could find work close to Armand.

“There must be so many jobs that need to be done at the camp,” she said.

“I’ve asked,” said Claude. “But the prisoners are forced to do everything.”

“And what about deliveries? Couldn’t you help deliver food, clothing—letters?”

Claude grunted. “These days? Every camp gendarme who comes to our repair shop is trembling for his job. One of them told us a new director has been appointed. A German this time—SS.”

“Why? Don’t the Germans believe we can guard our own people?”

Sound casual! Sound indifferent!

Unwittingly she had used the first person plural
nous
. Using
nous
when her family’s inclusion in France was tenuous at best had always felt inappropriate. But it came naturally with her outrage at the treatment of people with whom she’d shared her childhood.

“Oh, we guard them well,” said Claude. “But we aren’t deporting the Jews to Germany fast enough. The gendarme said the new Kommandant has vowed to change that.”

“How long are prisoners kept here before their deportation to Germany?”

There—she’d asked it. A simple question, dropped easily into the conversation.

Claude shrugged. “It depends. Maybe a few weeks, a few months. The gendarme said the Kommandant was appointed because there have been no shipments from Drancy to Germany since March. The French director intended to, but they’d no coal allotment for prison transports. He said the new Kommandant was enraged that not a single convoy has left Drancy in three months.”

Allah! If no one was sent to Germany since March, there was a chance that her Armand and Madame Lydia were still at Drancy. Armand’s postcard was dated April. Hope brightened the sooty façades of passing houses and shops.

But hadn’t Monique said fifteen thousand Jews had been rounded up in one week? Where were the Germans housing them? Suddenly the long walls of Drancy appeared far too short, the whole camp shrank in her mind.

Hold fast to hope
.

“So, Monsieur Claude, tell me … what other things can be had for a price?” she murmured to Claude’s back.

“That depends, mademoiselle”—the whir of wheels punctuated his voice—“on what your aunt Lucille requires.”

“I will ask her,” said Noor. “You can call me Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie Régnier.”

The bicycle bumped along past the last watchtower and its machine-gun silhouette, and this time Noor looked back as it swung and became sure it wasn’t aiming at her. Wasn’t aiming at her at all. Claude turned at the chestnut tree waving its leaves against a warm, cloudless sky. When he stopped in the lane, Noor slipped off the carrier and opened her bag for a tip. He shook his head.

“Non, mademoiselle—I will take you again, for your pretty eyes. You can ask for me at the
tabac
or the garage on the other side of the camp. I deliver bread here in the mornings, too.”

“Merci, Claude,” said Noor warmly. “I will ask Tante Lucille what she needs.” With Dadijaan in mind she added for greater effect, “You know old ladies—today it is one thing, tomorrow another.”

Claude ran a few paces on his wood-soled shoes and vaulted onto his bike. He looked over his shoulder, beamed and waved when he caught her eye.

Inside, Noor greeted Madame Gagné.

“Oh, have you come, then? Too late—breakfast is over. You can have the last of the oatmeal.”

Late despite her best intentions; the meal would have been welcome. Still, she had learned something. Noor ate the weak oatmeal and climbed to her attic room, a little wiser, much more hopeful than before.

Flashes of light resolved into patterns:

… dot-dot-dash … dash-dot-dash … dash-dash-dot …

Inside Madame Gagné’s creaking house, Noor rose from the chair she had pulled to the window and raised her binoculars. Chestnut leaves, metallic in the moonlight, filtered a welcome breeze through the window. Mice or rats skittered beneath the floorboards.