The Tiger Claw Read online

  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.

  And just why was he so anxious for Noor to take any position Boddington offered? Admit it now: was it that Boddington’s very hush-hush job brought in a few pounds more than a telegraphist’s pay, more than any nurse or secretary in London earned, and those few pounds more would help him support Mother, Dadijaan and their young sister Zaib? No, no, that wasn’t all. Admit the real reason: he meant to spare Noor the remotest chance she might be ordered to clean bedpans, swab blood, tend strange men. War be damned, at the time, he couldn’t stomach the idea that if Noor became a nurse on active duty, she, his sister, his unmarried sister, would touch, hold, bathe men’s naked bodies—unrelated men.

  He could imagine Noor, gentle Noor, as a wireless operator for the Nursing Yeomanry, as Mother, Dadijaan and Zaib believed, but not as a secret agent. He couldn’t imagine his sister flying the Channel to France tucked in the gunner’s end of a Lysander.

  Because Kabir still thought in French, preferring the solid logic of its verbs to the exception-dense mutt-quality of English, he could have asked to be assigned to the no-less-dangerous path of the Lysanders carrying guns, ammunition and operatives like Noor into France; bilingual pilots were in high demand. But like some other RAF men, he thought the Lizzies a mere bus service and remained with Bomber Command. When his bombardier released the four-thousand-pound cookies that stung the distant surface, none of them knew if the bombs had found their targets. Wind and speed affected their downward trajectory, and Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and his officers at Bomber Command had to wait for aerial reconnaissance photos taken in daylight, and coded dispatches from wireless operators like Noor, to determine the extent of enemy damage. Noor had sent such damage reports, reports on enemy strength, troop and supply movement, arsenals, artillery the Allies would encounter across northern France and beyond.

  Brother and sister are tethered at the ankle, always running together in a three-legged race, striving to match one another’s stride, leaning on one another even as they pull away. Younger by two years, he’d leaned on Noor from the time he was ten and his father, Abbajaan, went “home” to India and never returned. All of them—Mother, Dadijaan and Zaib—had relied on her; so he was, well, affronted that she hadn’t leaned in similar fashion on him.

  He was in charge of the family, and had been in charge since they all arrived in London. She should have consulted him when someone from Boddington’s hush-hush organization interviewed her! Instead, she just upped and volunteered to go overseas. In fact, she told no one she was being sent back to Paris. Until the fateful War Office letter, the entire family believed Noor was stationed in North Africa.

  Noor could have, should have, confided in him if no one else. Forget the damn secrecy. Not a single letter from her since she left for France. Not one letter to Mother, Dadijaan, Zaib or himself in two years.

  As dusk faded to darkness, the engine sputtered. Kabir slowed to a stop, dropped his foot to the verge of the road and dismounted. Coming around the bike, he stayed on tar to avoid land mines. He hoisted a jerrican clear of the sidecar with greater force than was warranted by its weight and used a rubber hose and metal funnel to pour the last few pints into the tank. He doffed his goggles and helmet, took a welcome gulp from a canteen, and swept the back of his hand across his moustache and stubbled chin. Then, chilled by some vague premonition, he reached into the sidecar for his RAF jacket.

  Distant bells, rusted from five years of silence, sounded wavering tones against the evening air. They announced food and a place to rest nearby, raking Kabir in like a marker drawn across a map to a plotter’s magnet.

  He was loath to stop, but stop he must. Besides being low on petrol, he was stiff and sore from long hours of riding, and needed information—if nothing else, confirmation that he might somewhere in Munich find a card or file with Noor’s name on it.

  He guided himself by the tall steeple needling the sky, through the town’s brick-lined streets to the central square. Everywhere, the dispossessed shuffled and limped, helping the wounded or carrying their meagre belongings.

  He stopped two Frenchmen in faded stripes and showed them his most recent photograph of Noor. They stared at her serious face, arrested by her direct gaze. Vibrant eyes, Kabir told them, black and fiery, just as in the photo. Her hair—long, wavy, jet black. He demonstrated her height at the level of his chin, no more than five foot three. Petite, he said, very petite; from a distance you could mistake her for a child. Perhaps they knew her by her Western name, Nora Baker? or her code names, Anne-Marie Régnier, or “Madeleine”?

  “Non. Désolé,” they said. The Frenchmen had been held in a POW camp, not a concentration camp. They questioned Kabir in return about their loved ones. Kabir listened carefully, compassionately, but sadly shook his head as he had so many times before.

  At a dry stone fountain before the church a peasant woman sat alone nursing a baby, a small basket beside her. Past her, thin, rough-looking men clustered around a small fire, cooking. Through the broken light from the remains of stained glass set in Gothic arches, Kabir saw a file of the forlorn t
hronging the centre aisle inside the church.

  Dismounting, he wheeled the motorcycle to an alley around the back. He switched off the headlamp and began searching for a place to secure his bike.

  Light glowed from an open door. A stable. A stable crowded with hollow-faced men and women, spreading jackets and saddle blankets on the straw in the stalls for the night. Polish or Russian flowed between them—he couldn’t tell. A few stared in hostile silence, some in frank curiosity. He moved on.

  Ten paces past the stable stood a weatherbeaten garage. Kabir pulled a torch from his pocket and wrenched the door open. Flicked the torch on.

  Someone gasped, and a ghost hand shot into view, palm raised, fingers splayed as if to halt him. The torch beam jerked in an arc. Another hand rose before him, then another. Kabir lowered the beam: half a dozen frightened faces below the forest of surrendering arms. German soldiers moving homewards, hoping to surrender to the British or Americans.

  “Restez tranquilles,” he reassured them, and backed away from their visible relief. They were boys. Or maybe they just looked like boys to him. This damn war had aged him far beyond his twenty-nine years. If he spoke German, Kabir could have explained they had nothing to fear—that the Russian army was nowhere near this tiny town, that British, French and American troops had thousands of German POWs now and were no longer interested in surrenders, except of Nazis and other war criminals.

  Did those boys realize that their suffering was the outcome of arrogance? that the battles of Paris and London, the bombing of Coventry and Dunkirk, made this necessary?

  Necessary. How much retaliation had really been necessary?

  In the alley, he switched on the headlamp again. Shadows loomed and shrivelled against the church walls—tattered scavengers sifting through rubbish. The beam illuminated an iron hitching ring embedded in the church wall. Kabir mounted, started the bike and guided it up to the wall in low gear. He took a fastening cable from the sidecar, looped one end around the frame, the other into the ring of the post, then snapped a Masterlock through both ends. The empty jerricans couldn’t be secured, but were hidden beneath the black button-down cover.

  Why had it been his hands that guided a plane to where it could drop its payload on the most people? Women, like that one looking at him with deadened eyes. Children, like the street urchin looking like a starving beggar-child from India.

  Kabir entered the church through a side door, fighting the urge to pull his collar to his nose against the reek of flea-infested, unwashed humanity. In Paris bistros before the war he’d played lighthearted games with friends, identifying the origins of tourists fed on buttered scones, kielbasa, sauerkraut or paprikashed goulash from their sweat—so different from people raised on wheat and brie. But here the pores of each man, woman and child excreted a common animal odour of rot, dirt, disease, feces and fear, indistinguishable in origin.

  So many years since he was in a church or mosque, he’d almost forgotten the silence such places inspire. A U.S. Army chaplain stood near the altar with Red Cross workers dispensing hot soup in place of the sacrament, ladling it from a great cauldron to outstretched metal bowls. What of the German parish priest? Probably interned long ago in some Nazi camp.

  Every inch of the church was covered by ragged travellers of all ages, kneeling, sitting, lying anywhere, everywhere, in pews, on the stone floor. Some sat, some lay pillowing their heads on rotten shoes, many coughing and spitting. Children wailed or played. Money-changers operated in the shadows, turning Reichsmarks and American military scrip to dollars and pounds. Money passed from hand to grasping hand.

  As he had in other villages, Kabir queued with the rest, hoping the steaming cauldron was full enough to contain a share for him. Hushed voices rose and fell in a dozen languages and dialects around him:

  “How far is the border from here?”

  “Which border? Of this zone or of France? Maps change every day.”

  “Please, is there an orphanage? This child is lost.”

  “Did you hear Herr Truman came to Berlin, now the canals are clean? Ja, the Russkies made the Nazis haul out the dead first.”

  “Pétain will be tried next. Oh, let the Maréchal reveal his ‘double game’ now. Perhaps he’ll be found dead, like Hitler and his whore.”

  “Hitler dead? Not so—I hear he gave a speech on the radio.”

  “My village is in Poland. Is there any Poland now?”

  Someone clutched at his arm. “I have sister—she is pretty little virgin, she love officers,” said rotten teeth and a cunning smile.

  Kabir shook the ghoul away in horror. His gaze flitted from face to face.

  Noor, dear sister—where are you?

  Kabir reached the front of the queue. The American chaplain sloshed lukewarm liquid into his bowl.

  “Better than water soup,” rasped a shaven-headed scarecrow. His toothless grin made him look ancient.

  Kabir’s hunger pronounced the soup and slice of Wonderbread worthy of Maxim’s.

  He rinsed his bowl and spoon in a drum of scalding, soapy water, dipped it into another drum of boiling hot water and joined a queue for the slit trench at the back of the church. After a wash from a jug of hot water, he climbed to the second storey, spread his jacket as a prayer rug and did namaaz, hoping, as he had since his tenth birthday—the day Abbajaan transferred his mantle to his shoulders—that the prescribed motions would open the invisible connection to the Divine and leave in its wake the deep, abiding faith in the will of Allah that Abbajaan always had.

  But on this night, as on every night, nothing moved within him. When he had completed each motion and prayer, he was still alone.

  Someday your heart must awaken, he told himself sternly.

  Oh, for the luxury of faith! But since the German invasion in 1940, when the war truly began for France, for Kabir and his family, he’d been awkward with Allah, finding it impossible to believe the Most Merciful would will the Western world into this state of barbarism.

  Faith would rise because it must. The hiatus of war was over. Abbajaan’s followers would be among the displaced making their way home from concentration camps. They would return for Kabir’s blessing, his assurance, as Abbajaan would have given them, that Allah would recognize their sacrifices. He could not, like Edward VIII, say, “I hereby declare my irrevocable determination to renounce the Throne for myself and my descendants,” for he had no physical throne to renounce. The warrior in him balked at abdication, like the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, when so many needed Kabir as their organic link to the late Inayat Khan. Hazrat Inayat Khan. To tell them Abbajaan’s blood was no guarantor of continuing faith or understanding of Sufi thought would be cruel indeed after all their suffering. And Kabir and his family relied on the donations of the faithful to the Sainah Foundation—all of which meant that any such misgivings or crises of faith must, simply must, be quelled.

  Suddenly overcome with fatigue, he returned to ground level and found a length of stone slab on which to lie, rolled his jacket into a pillow and used his cap to shade his eyes from the too acute angles of the Gothic arches over his head.

  He dreamed Noor sat writing at a table suffused with light. Yes, that was Noor, not his sister Zaib or his girl Angela—black hair strayed about that oval face. She paused, nibbling the end of her pencil the way she often did. She looked far past him down the way he had come, and wrote again, as if writing his deeds in the Book of Judgement. He floated between her and the light, and now he could read over her shoulder. She wasn’t writing in Persian script. No, she wrote in English. And in the language that was not Abbajaan’s, not their heritage, she wrote cruel truths about Kabir. Guileless, she wrote Kabir had betrayed her, sent her alone into harm’s way.

  Kabir woke, heart in spasm as if a bugle called him to another freezing sortie over Europe. He sat up, quickly spitting to his left side, in case the Noor he’d dreamed of was the recorder of his deeds. If she was, there should be two of her—twin angels, the Kiraman Katib
een, pious writers writing diligently in the Book of Judgement. Couldn’t he even dream it right?

  How is a man to know these days which deeds will finally be recorded as good, which ones as evil?

  Light slivers of cobalt and scarlet filtered through shards of stained glass and stilled Kabir’s dreams the next morning. A shave, a cursory wash, a tin mug of coffee and three slices of unbuttered bread eased some of his stiffness. More refugees filed in, and the second storey came alive with crying babies and children as exhausted knots of people found places to rest. So Kabir gave up his space and jogged smartly up the bell tower’s hundred and six stone stairs for his Fajar prayers.

  At the top, a small iron balcony suspended him over the central avenue of the town like a mullah in a minaret about to call the faithful. In the distance, fields amber with wheat rippled beside the road he’d travelled the previous evening. To the west, undulating hills rose to meet the Black Forest. He faced towards Mecca, towards Munich, and did his remembrance of Allah, praying this day to find Noor or, insh’allah, some clue as to her whereabouts.

  Heartened with new resolve and urgency, he descended into the church again, thanked the chaplain for his stay and asked directions to the nearest U.S. motor pool for petrol. The chaplain drew a map locating it a few kilometres from the church and, yes, Munich might be a place to continue his inquiries about Noor.

  In the cool sunshine of the alley outside, refugee women were removing their shoes and socks to wash clothes under a water pump. Except for their dresses they looked like poor women he’d seen in India.

  He unbuttoned the canvas shroud covering the sidecar. Fumes were released from the remains of the petrol when he opened the jerricans. Not much left in them.

  He put on his gloves and goggles, strode smartly around the motorbike, unlocked and released the cable, swung his leg over the bike and kick-started it.