The Tiger Claw (54 page)

Even with these precautions, Gilbert might still find me. Might still turn me in. But I could pretend to be brave; how can anyone tell the difference?

Madame Aigrain’s home was just a cachette, not a true maison cachée—a real safe house from where I could transmit. I could transmit from the new safe house Major Boddington had rented
,
but I couldn’t sleep there. I could transmit from Madame Gagné’s boarding house in Drancy and sleep there; only Émile knew that location
.

I’d have a better chance of evading Gilbert and the Gestapo if I transmitted from the boulevard Richard Wallace and Drancy but turned nomad, sleeping at a different location every night. I needed one more safe house not far from Madame Aigrain’s, somewhere I could receive, code and decode in safety, and sleep at night
.

I had said to Major Boddington: “I need to work with people I can trust.” If he could not recommend any beyond Gilbert, I would have to find my own friends. I would step off the stage and write my own script, find fellow actors, direct our own play
.

No matter what Miss Atkins had told me in London, no matter what the
SOE
handbook said, I could see only one choice: to find people I could trust, I must break cover
.

I would return to Suresnes and contact someone with whom I shared my earliest memories—Josianne
.

With Josianne, I never had to explain origins or allegiances. Josianne understood the premises of Sufism though she was Catholic. She had learned of Islam, having travelled in Algeria as a child. She understood and respected that I tried never to disappoint my family. She never thought of us as “different” and “exotic;” we were a part of her childhood. Though she had never travelled to India, and probably never will now, she took epicurean delight in Dadijaan’s sweet daals and kachoris. A beneficiary of colonization—but then, so were most of the French bourgeoisie—at least Josianne always acknowledged it
.

I felt sure of Josianne’s sentiments, but Josianne could have married and moved away in three years. If she still lived with her mother, Madame Prénat, in Suresnes, I would need to gauge where Madame’s political sensibilities might lie. I knew Madame almost as many years as my mother—but that, I now felt, meant little. A friendship from another time, an era of plenty, with no war, no real dangers to test Madame’s principles. But she was proud. She wouldn’t have become resigned to the Occupation. She wouldn’t be
afraid to offer her home. But what if she had placed her trust in Pétain and truly believed his surrender had averted France’s complete destruction? Then I wouldn’t ask for shelter. I’d say I was back to check on Afzal Manzil, and in private, ask Josianne to help me find another safe house
.

With this plan, I would return—return to where I began
.

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 28

Suresnes, France
Monday, July 19, 1943

N
OOR ALIGHTED
at the Val d’Or trolley stop at a little past ten in the morning. Fear currents flowed from the nape of her neck and branched across taut shoulders, down to the hand gripping the suitcase transmitter and the other looped through the handle of her handbag. Her sunglasses were slipping; she adjusted them.

See and do not be seen
.

She wore Monique’s slacks again, because she had never worn slacks all her years in Suresnes. And a chignon; she’d rarely worn one while living at Afzal Manzil.

She could have walked directly up the rue de la Tuilerie to the green gates at the top of the hill, but in case Gilbert or anyone else was following her, she detoured through the coil and branch of Suresnes streets.

Read the landscape, read every lane
.

Everything familiar must be seen with a sceptical eye. Poplar leaves jangled
SOE
handbook warnings at every corner: someone would recognize her, someone would notice she had returned. She paced streets that ran at forgotten purposes, and intersected seemingly at random, trying to understand herself as foreign even to this, the peripheral town she once called home. Foreigner. Foreign-born. She could be deported to a camp in a minute.

She turned towards the central square.

The mairie should have had swastika banners draped over its façade as at Grignon—but all that remained of the stately old building was a gaunt, skeletal outline.

Past a hedgerow at the corner of the square, helmeted heads and shoulders glided with not a single bob above some imaginary plane—German soldiers marching past.

She doubled back and forth through the little town. Bombs, German or Allied, had damaged the locks on the Seine, but the Pont de Suresnes, rebuilt after the 1870 war, was intact. Little girls wearing bows in their braids swung bare legs from windowsills of shell-pocked apartment ruins. The Coty
parfumerie
was busier, sleeker. Employees came and went from the Radiotechnique buildings. Little boys got their knickers wet in the stone fountain at La Place du Marché, as mothers and grandmothers scolded.

Surprising that Émile Zola’s bust still stood before the municipal library; he should be alive today to defend more falsely accused Jews. Avoid the library—many an hour spent there, with Armand. Avoid the shops too.

In the
buvette
on the rue de la Huchette, a few German soldiers were gathered around a radio, but only a few—some messages she sent mentioned entire divisions being sent to fight Russia now.

At the Café Val d’Or, where she had so often met Armand in secret, waiters were wiping tables and polishing wineglasses, readying for lunch. Scarlet tablecloths ballooned and flowed from deft hands, as if to enrage bulls. Outside the
tabac
, men discussed the odds on favourites at Longchamp. Not one gave her a second look as she passed—but why should they? They weren’t looking for her. Everyone was engrossed in their own affairs.

Afzal Manzil
was still carved into the marble slab beside the green gates of her family home. Was this really where a little girl, then a young woman, called Noor had lived?

The rue de la Tuilerie was now Neu Rosenstrasse. In place of the hastily painted
British Property
sign, nailed to the green gates in 1940, was a black-and-white sign saying something in German.

She should have expected this. Renaming was ever the colonizer’s way in India too; the Germans were simply extending the “favours” of colonization to Europe. But she hadn’t expected it, and it irked her that she hadn’t, and a “little thing like that,” as Londoners would call it, was suddenly meaningful, sinister, one more example of German inhumanity.

The Sufis say one’s true home is a place with a name but no precise address. How many times did you say that to yourself when you lived in this “house of peace” that became your House of Grief?

She must try to imagine the homesickness of the German bureaucrat who had renamed rue de la Tuilerie. Imagine a civil servant far from home who longed for his family living in, say, Berlin, Hamburg or Munich on a street called Rosenstrasse.

Too charitable. The German bureaucrat was probably now living in Paris, might even be billeted on Neu Rosenstrasse, in Afzal Manzil, occupying her old home with other Germans.

Circling back on Neu Rosenstrasse to the top of the hill, Noor stopped before a modest red-brick house sitting beside its enclosed garden, patches of ivy climbing the stone walls. The wall was a costly endeavour and a nuisance to maintain, but Josianne’s father built it because his father had built one and his grandfather before him. Behind it he kept his wife and children, before it and its buffer space of garden, the world. Josianne’s father, a colonist in Algiers, died a year after Abbajaan, and at the lycée teenage Noor offered Josianne the comfort of a Petite Beurre biscuit at break time, and listened as Josianne talked about her father’s liver disease.

With no elder brothers, only younger sisters and a brother who left at eighteen to run the family vineyards in Algeria, Josianne was the one friend approved by Uncle, the only one Noor was allowed to visit in her home. To Josianne, then, Noor confided all the restrictions placed upon her. And Josianne endeared herself to Mother, obtaining permission for Noor. Together they had cantered through the Bois, attended open-air concerts beneath the metal girders of the Eiffel and roamed the Louvre. Later, it was Josianne who noticed, well before Noor
herself was aware of it, that in the daily tide of Sorbonne students, Noor’s face glowed only for Armand.

Since her family’s flight from Afzal Manzil, the “next-door neighbours,” as Mother called them, had installed louvred windows and heavy curtains for blackout. Was anyone within?

Kneeling as if to adjust her shoe buckle, Noor glanced over her shoulder. No one on the street seemed interested in her. No one on the street resembled Gilbert. She straightened, unlatched the low gate in the wall. Beyond it, all the doors would be open; this was, after all, Suresnes, not Paris.

Josianne’s rusty bicycle with its painted wicker basket leaned against the wall. Noor let herself in. From an open window she spotted bony Madame Prénat, under a veiled hat in the back garden, supervising a gardener raking the prongs of a binette into soft earth. Noor wandered into the drawing room to wait.

Josianne’s oil paintings, still on every wall. The same three chairs in the drawing room: the armchair for Josianne’s departed father, Madame Prénat’s straight-backed chair and Josianne’s.

Josianne’s chair felt just right.

Josianne entered, carrying a porcelain bowl. Bobbed hair—three years ago it was long. A crisp pastel-blue linen dress, real stockings and platform shoes.

Josianne looked, and looked again. Then dropped the bowl with a great crash and let out a scream.

Noor jumped up and clapped her hand over Josianne’s mouth. But Madame Prénat came running, casting back her veil. She turned Camembert-pale and sank into a chair.

An electric rush of sheer gratitude and relief came over Noor as Josianne’s arms tightened around her. She came to tears, embracing Josianne and Madame Prénat in return. She was no longer alone.

A great mess of shattered porcelain and oatmeal had to be swept away and mopped up, the linen dress had to be spot cleaned and powdered. Twenty minutes later, all the exclamations hushed and questions began to flow.

Madame Prénat said she’d lost all respect for the Germans after their invincible General Rommel was routed at El Alamein. Their Thousand Year Reich wouldn’t last another year, she scoffed. “And you and others who escaped to the Riviera after the bombardments cannot imagine how humiliating life has been here.”

Emboldened by her words, Noor said, “We didn’t go to the Riviera, we escaped to England. Kabir and I joined the airforce. Now I’m with the Résistance Service des Renseignements.”

The Information Service. Madame Prénat’s face, all planes and angles above her lace collar, wore a look of amazement mixed with agitation as she took this in.

“That’s all you need to know.” Noor sounded determined, sure. Like a woman, not a girl, as she asked if Madame would take her in, give her a place to sleep, understanding the dangers involved? And a place to transmit?

“And no questions,” Noor added.

There was a weighty silence. Josianne’s hazel eyes gazed at Noor in wonder. Madame Prénat was hesitating. It was plain she really didn’t want to get involved; the Occupation had probably rearranged every person’s relationships as if they were anagrams.

Pretend to be brave; no one can tell the difference
.

“There have been many executions, Noor,” said Madame.

From Madame’s expression Noor could tell she still thought Noor the trembling young girl she used to know.

“At Mont Valérien,” added Josianne. “They began soon after the old town crier came on his bicycle, rapping his double-faced drum, with the Ortskommandantur’s instructions for Suresnes. Fusillades sound almost every morning now.”

“Mostly godless Communists,
je sais
,” said Madame Prénat. “But the guns! If we are caught helping you—”