The Tiger Claw Read online

  Instead, Noor applauded Babette’s efforts and began to read the slogans presented after the portrait of Hitler on the frontispiece of her schoolbook. One in particular caught her eye: “Common interest before self-interest.” Under it the Victory rune mark of the SS, presumably capable of defining “common interest” for its colonized people.

  Then Babette was back, with her sketchbook turned to a page with a large check mark and no comment at all. It showed a bearded man with squinty eyes, thick lips, horns jutting from his curly black hair and a beakish nose.

  “That’s a Jew,” said the nine-year-old. “They have flat feet, they walk differently.”

  “Mais non, Babette. You don’t believe that? Surely you don’t?”

  “Anne-Marie, you have to go now,” said Renée. “Babette, vas-y! Time for school.”

  Babette turned Noor’s wrist to look at her watch, then nestled into Noor’s embrace. “À bientôt, Anne-Marie!”

  Renée tucked Noor’s oilskin coat in the closet by the front door and showed her the flowerpot where a spare key to the apartment lay in case Noor needed to stay in Paris again, a gesture that compensated for her sharp remarks on Noor’s arrival.

  Still, Noor was glad to be out of Renée’s home, walking past beds of cabbage and carrots to the gate, breathing fresh morning air.

  Following instructions, Noor avoided the obelisk at the métro entrance in the Place d’Auteuil. She passed signs in shop windows: Pas de sucre. Pas de lait. Pas de beurre. The Seizième Arrondissement was not as busy at this hour as she remembered.

  Loud, angry voices.

  She rounded a corner and came upon a crowd of women standing in a ragged queue outside a boulangerie waiting as the baker rolled open his canvas awning. A few doors away a shop bore a sign, Entreprise Juive, in red. The colour signified the shop was now under Aryan ownership. Black, gouged holes said it had probably been plundered, its contents sold.

  Where are its Jewish proprietors now?

  Three dark maidens lifted the heavy dome of the Richard Wallace drinking fountain above their heads—much like poor women in India labouring on construction sites, except that these were not women of flesh and blood.

  On the rue La Fontaine she passed an art nouveau house with a medieval turret and cast-iron balconies, then a park before a neo-Gothic chapel.

  Trying to take a circuitous route to her destination, as prescribed by her instructors at Wanborough, was boring, and she had blisters from all her walking the previous day. She headed directly to the avenue Mozart and the métro at the end of the rue Jasmin. She took the métro as far west out of the city as it extended, to the Porte Maillot. Following instructions again, she went to the Objets Trouvés and asked the man at the counter for a bicycle that was lost, and might now be found, giving the licence plate number specified by Émile.

  The bicycle was wheeled out to her, along with a loudly delivered homily on the presence of thieves who would not hesitate to steal so fine a bicycle if mademoiselle wasn’t more careful next time. Noor hoisted her bag off her shoulder into the front basket and rode away into the summer warmth of the country.

  Sunlight strengthened as Noor pedalled down the black ribbon of road past fields of rapeseed and wheat. Her hair lifted like a warm cape against her shoulders till she stopped, took a rubber band from her handbag, tied it into a ponytail and pedalled on.

  How unthinkable that this beautiful land could be invaded. How could Paris have fallen before Hitler? But it had, and the fall divided all of Noor and Armand’s yesterdays from today.

  When Armand came home on leave from the Maginot line early in the spring of 1940, he asked again, had Uncle Tajuddin agreed to their marriage?

  “No,” Noor said, “but he will, or Kabir will.”

  “Noor,” he said, “we’ve known each other almost nine years—nine years of loving, meeting, parting and hoping in secret. How long can we wait?”

  “I know, chéri. But my family is everything I know. How can I live and never see them again?”

  Blue eyes looked into hers. “I don’t choose for you,” he said.

  “Could you leave Madame Lydia and never see her again?”

  “Noor, each of us has the right to live without fear. Your uncle, your mother, your brother—they hold you hostage but call it love. We could marry in Switzerland, in England or anywhere outside France, if you gave yourself permission.”

  It was true, Armand said, that Europe was regressing to chaos, but not as far back as some Neanderthal era in which men dragged away the women they wanted by the hair, or sweated the labours of Hercules to win the damsel of their desires. Nor was he a Svengali, as Uncle and Kabir seemed to think, casting Noor in the role of his feeble-minded dupe. They were, Armand said, civilized people in a civilized country with progressive ideas and relations that surely could be reconciled. But at the time, the stakes were higher for Noor than for Armand. Armand would gain a wife; Noor would lose a family.

  “Someday,” said Armand, “you’ll choose whose life you’ll live—the life your family planned for you or one of your own.”

  Hoping those two lives could be one, Noor ventured to ask Kabir to meet Armand. But Kabir …

  Armand came into my life to free me from fear, to teach me laughter, generosity and kindness. Through his actions he taught me the principles: my life is my own, my soul and my body my own. But claiming my own life or body was just a lovely idea when Uncle Tajuddin was arranging to marry me off in India.

  A firebud of hope bloomed within her.

  What was impossible then might be possible now.

  The only animals grazing today were sparse and scrawny. The fields she remembered—for instance, on that day Abbajaan took the whole family to Versailles in the Amilcar for a picnic—were full of dappled, cud-grinding cows, puffy black-eared sheep and powerful percherons.

  At Versailles, Abbajaan had walked past foaming fountains, left Mother preening in its sumptuous Hall of Mirrors and the guide extolling the Sun King for spending sixty million livres to build that temple to himself. He didn’t show his children the secret door where Marie Antoinette escaped from the revolutionary mob, or the diary entry where, on the day of the storming of the Bastille, Louis XVI wrote “nothing happened,” but stood in the marble courtyard to show his children where the king greeted his subjects from a balcony. There Abbajaan explained the concept of darshan, how the sight of an enlightened being or the king, assuming him to be enlightened as the maharaj of Baroda, brings the one who sees—in the Sanskrit term, the dixit—a blessing.

  Noor and Kabir dutifully tried to imagine a blessing from the chicken-legged Sun King.

  “Try,” Abbajaan continued, “to become people who see beyond what your eyes tell you. Use all your senses, and your ajna, your third eye. See the invisible—Al-ghayab.”

  Kabir and Zaib had played hopscotch in the courtyard as he spoke, but Noor was old enough to understand.

  A wind-breaking row of poplars provided a cool patch of shade, then she was out in the open again. She took deep lungfuls of air with each wheel-whirring movement, but even so, her hands were soon sliding on the handlebars.

  Boys walked the footpaths between hedgerows, carried rakes and hoes far too large for them. A man bending over a shrub straightened as she passed, the curve never leaving his back.

  Where were the young men? In England, she, Mother, Dadijaan and Zaib had slept many a night in Mother’s basement kitchen armed with pumps, buckets and Dadijaan’s good luck amulets, and often said namaaz over the boom and smash of falling bombs and debris; but the sight of strong young men like Kabir in the streets, in small towns, almost all in uniform, was comforting. In Paris, and here, young Frenchmen had been spirited away—some, like Armand, to camps in France, some, like Renée’s husband, to Germany.

  She cycled past a couple of well-dressed women incongruously carrying panier baskets. City women; their expressions said they would rather be elsewhere. They must be on their way to pick their own fruits
and vegetables. A snub-nosed truck with a crooked tail caught her eye—a gazogène tractor. A few fields away, a shapeless woman in kerchief and clogs whacked an emaciated horse straining in the traces of a plough. Both looked as if they were weathering the nineteenth, rather than the twentieth, century.

  Sweat prickled at Noor’s eyebrows, her eyes itched as if gnawed by the wind. Her thighs, strong as she was, were stiffening against her will, her calves threatening to knot into a cramp.

  She dismounted, wheeled the bicycle to stretch her legs for a while till she came to an incline, then pumped up the low hill, riding the balls of her feet, crested the top and sat down, jarring on the husk-shaped seat, bruising her inner thigh once more.

  Twenty kilometres had spun away behind Noor.

  Only five to go.

  Pforzheim, Germany

  December 1943

  Pedalling to Grignon, I had none of the hesitation that rises from knowledge; I had yet to come upon the peaks and troughs of circumstance. Yes, I had been told but did not comprehend how the war had made France a place where the ordinary and the dangerous could not be differentiated, like a desert where you cannot tell snake from rock, rock from cactus.

  I thought of the sketches and slogans Babette showed me. If you were her age in France then, you too might have written such praiseful essays to a worshipper of Death, would have been asked to draw your internal demons and call them Jews.

  But I put aside those thoughts. That day I was glad to be in France, nearer to Armand.

  My captor Vogel wants me to write stories for his children. But every story I’ve written since 1934 has been for you, ma petite. In 1938, I translated Buddhist stories you’ll read someday. My book is called Twenty Jataka Tales. I wrote my own stories for you, too, and they were published in the newspaper Le Figaro.

  Nineteen thirty-eight. Dadijaan had just arrived to stay with us when news of Kristallnacht rippled through Paris. A Jewish man traced the German deporter of his parents to Paris, and shot him. In retaliation Hitler ordered “spontaneous” demonstrations against Jews everywhere. In panic for Armand’s family, I telephoned him again. Although four years had passed since our last meeting, it was as if we had parted the day before. I asked if he knew people, or was related to people, who were affected.

  “Of course I do,” he said.

  Once a week, after his piano students or practice, Armand had begun volunteering at the Alliance Française on the boulevard Raspail. He taught French to refugees and immigrants from Russia and Germany, mostly Jewish, and many whose only crime was to disagree with the Nazis. Stories poured in from his students after Kristallnacht, and though your father is an explorer, open to all faiths, not only Judaism, he was incensed. “Two hundred synagogues, Noor! A licence to loot and destroy ten thousand shops! Five million marks’ worth of shattered glass, and Hitler wants the Jews to compensate for damages, demanding a billion marks!”

  In the piano room at Mademoiselle Nadia Boulanger’s, we turned to music for comfort. Music cannot tell if its performer be Muslim, Jew or Christian; French, German, English or Indian. All afternoon we played duets, improvising snatches of jazz, my knee touching his as we reached for the pedals. Afterwards we stopped at a Boulant restaurant on the boulevard St-Michel and ordered one crêpe for two. Then upstairs to your father’s apartment—bodies thirsting, clinging, desperate to love—but we were more careful this time.

  With Armand, I was unconscious of being woman, unconscious of him as man. With him I could act, and he had liberty to feel. I loved him for what he confided to me, the glimpse of his forbidden inner core, for the things I could say only to him when he shared my body and was enclosed by me. In those moments there was nothing impermeable between us, no trivial differences to separate us.

  His weight shifted above me and he said, “I am outside and inside you at the same time.” Then he kissed me, said how much he loved me. I must remember this.

  Joy and pain came together without distinction, joy in our interpenetration so that active became passive, pain that I could not bridge the barrier of his skin to know how he felt—one day you’ll find such pain is part of desire, ma petite.

  “How does it feel,” I wondered aloud, “to be a man?”

  You see, I could ask him such things.

  He gave a surprised laugh. I waited as his thoughts formed to the precision of words. “I was never anything other than a man—how can I answer?”

  “But you must have thought about it.” My fingers slid over his short beard, chest, then down, committing his shape to tactile memory.

  “I’ve never thought about it,” he said, as if realizing. “I’m a man—that’s all.” His thumb moved at the wedge of my clavicle, massaging my back, returned to my throat. His fingertips followed my gold chain to my breasts, traced the gold frame of my tiger claw.

  “It’s cut from the carcass of a great beast slain by my ancestor, Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore,” I told him. “A tigress, perhaps. Maybe she was hunting or in defence of her cubs. I often wonder about the women who wore it before me for luck and courage. Armand, haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to be a woman? Today or perhaps in another time?”

  “Never, chérie.”

  “Or another man?” I ventured.

  He considered this, delving into childhood, adolescence, coming closer to now. “I have often wondered how my father felt when he arrived from Moscow after the famine.”

  Your grandfather came to Paris in 1892 because every university in Moscow had filled its 3 percent quota for Jews. He dreamed of being an engineer—but except for the Great War, laboured the rest of his life on the line at Renault.

  “Did you ever ask him?” I said.

  “No, and now that he’s gone I can’t.”

  Your father and I were both fatherless, you see.

  Armand rolled away, cupped his hand over a match, lit an Anoushka. That smell always reminds me of him.

  “My mother still has all his military decorations,” he said.

  I must tell you about your grandmother Madame Lydia, Armand’s mother. She was born a Catholic, and sometimes went to mass. But she took the ritual bath and converted to Judaism, and joined your grandfather in France. When Armand was born in Paris, she learned to raise him as a Jew. Armand took me to meet her the very first Rosh Hashanah after we met, and she accepted me immediately. I was born in Moscow like her, she said. She told me about the first time she made challah, and showed me the slippers she wore to dance Raymonda under ballet master Petipa in Moscow. But all she could get, when after long waiting she received her permis de travail in France, were parts in Folies Bergères revues. Of course, she wouldn’t take them; she preferred to manage the laundry department at the Hôtel Lutétia. She always had visitors to stay, and as I got to know her, I found they were ever more distant “relatives”—and so many came with children that Armand had to rent a second apartment, a garçonnière, where he could keep regular hours, composing. Someday, ma petite, you will taste her special kasha, her poppy-seed cakes, her borscht and blinis.

  When he first heard of our love in early 1934, my uncle shouted that he had no objection whatsoever to Armand’s religion and, not being Christian, had no tradition of hatred against Jews; that he objected only to Armand’s mother’s work “as a washerwoman.” If that one fact were different, he said, he might have agreed to our marriage, if only to save my tarnished reputation. But since Armand could not change his mother or her past (nor wished to, being so proud of her), my uncle’s impossible condition was just another way of forbidding our marriage; a way he could continue talking to his students about Sufi Muslim traditions of love and tolerance and the Universal God of all faiths, and at the same time continue promising my hand in marriage to my cousin Allahuddin in Baroda, even as he knew I wept in my room.

  “And you—you plan to leave me and return to Moscow?” I asked Armand, pouting a little.

  “I’ll take you to visit Moscow one day, but if my family wanted t
o live as subjects of Moscow and remain Russian, wouldn’t my father have stayed there? Non, I don’t like the thought of Moscow controlling France. Those who care for the French people should govern it.”

  “I have a Russian passport somewhere,” I reminded him.

  “That will save time when we visit—you won’t have to apply for one!”

  We laughed together at bureaucracy then, never realizing how deep its tentacles could reach.

  I rose, wound a sheet around me and tipped the long mirror in the corner of the room upright. I let the sheet fall like a wing veiling me till he came close, put his arms around me from behind.

  “Which do you prefer,” I asked with the mirror before us, “me or your image of me?”

  “You,” he said, resting his hands on my shoulders and kissing the nape of my neck, understanding both the question and my need to ask it. It would be the question I asked my brother a year later, but though Kabir also answered “You,” his actions showed he preferred the sister in his looking glass.

  But Armand’s answer reassured me, and we returned to the stillwarm sheets and held one another as we talked.

  “Have you ever wanted to live as someone else for a while, just to see if you could do it? Transcend your self, my Abbajaan used to say …”

  But your father was, as the French say, bien dans sa peau—comfortable in his skin. More than I was, then.

  “No. I am human and a Jew,” he said. “Every day I hold fast to that belief.”

  Armand didn’t need to explain. Even before Kristallnacht, new German restrictions for Jews were broadcast every day, wherever Hitler ruled, restrictions Uncle and so many others in France didn’t notice.

  “Not in France,” I tried to reassure Armand. “Kristallnacht would never happen in France. France is different. Remember the Rights of Man, and Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, non?”

  “I hope you are right,” he said.

  But I was wrong, so very wrong, for it did happen in France. The things we thought could occur only in Germany happened. Tolerance vanished overnight the moment war was declared the next year, and like many French people who had read articles about the “Jewish Peril,” Uncle began to talk about Jewish conspiracies, even quoted the Qur’an. But I know my Qur’an—Abbajaan taught it to me very well. I didn’t need Uncle to quote it, nor was there such hatred in it as he said, for Jews or any others. The unbelievers it speaks of are those who, professing Islam or not, have never yet touched the spirit of Allah. And for each concession I made to intolerance in my home, appeasing and placating Uncle Tajuddin and his campaign to keep our family’s blood pure, the world conceded to and placated Hitler and his Nazi thugs. It wasn’t long before your father sat in the bunkers warding off the disease of purism that would soon invade France.