The Tiger Claw

  Sparks struck up inside Noor’s head as she shook it no.

  “It’s a loan. Take enough for the doctor and so you won’t have to ask me again for at least a week. Then, if you are still here, still in need, I will arrange more. D’accord?”

  Still Noor hesitated, then said, “A loan. And I will pay you back as soon as I can.”

  Madame Aigrain counted out five thousand real francs, wadded them up and held them out to Noor. She replaced the rest in the humidor and put it back on the mantelpiece, evidently quite confident of Noor’s honesty.

  In the cupboard room, the forest-green skirt she’d given Madame Aigrain’s daughter to copy for Monique lay neatly folded on the bed. Noor changed from her slacks, shook out her damp hair and lay down.

  Madame Aigrain dipped a lace-trimmed handkerchief in eau de cologne and placed it on Noor’s burning forehead. Then she bustled about the apartment squeezing the netted balls of atomizers till heavy, soft, sharp, bright, resinous and animal scents dissolved and combined. In a lavender Sunday dress, black shawl and black fishnet gloves, she took her cane and left for church.

  Noor closed her eyes, but every nerve was on edge. With each breath she smelled the cologne of Gilbert’s betrayal. Now he had many reasons to pursue her.

  She saw the pilot throwing up his hands, believing her hysterical. Once again the plane rushed past and roared away. Then the flares, the fighters, the silence. She could imagine what must have happened: three men cremated alive.

  If only she could have warned the Dutchmen or the pilot. Luck or Allah’s farishtas had now saved her from Gilbert and the Gestapo three times. How many more times would be too many?

  Waking sleep. What day was it?

  July Fourth, a day so important to Mother. The one day Dadijaan was civil to Mother, conceded her approval of any country that fought for and won independence from the British, even a Western power. Sunday morning: Dadijaan would be standing at Speaker’s Corner, silk sari paloo billowing about her, giving her weekly speech in Urdu about the starving in India to passing churchgoers. Mother, believer in everyone’s right to free speech, would be her only, long-suffering, uncomprehending audience, and the two would garden their allotment in Hyde Park afterwards.

  Mother required everyone to be home for dinner on the Fourth and, being from Boston, would tell the story of the Tea Party. The first time the story was translated for her, Dadijaan had winced at the waste of that much fine tea, even to protest British taxes. “You know how long it takes to pick and dry one shipload of tea?” she said. “And why did they dress up as Indians? Everything, every time, blame it on Indians!” But pressed by Noor and Zaib on July Fourths since, Dadijaan would launch her own tale of how the Mahatma passed through Baroda on his Salt March in 1930. Dadijaan had joined his procession, walking for days, also to protest taxes, those on salt—but never destroying any salt, never wasting a single grain. After dinner the family would come together around the phonograph, listening to recordings of Abbajaan.

  And if things had been different last night, Noor would have been with them, playing the veena.

  She rose and lurched from her little room. Perfume hung in vaporous puffs in Madame Aigrain’s sitting room. In the dining room the fragrance of roses mixed with lemon. Lalique bottles released a musky patchouli that combined with a scent reminiscent of raspberry.

  Each hybrid fragrance begged for an open window, a single breath of air.

  I never felt such nausea since mon petit problème.

  Siamese eyes of unblinking blue reflected her own. A little motor purred as she lifted the cat from the windowsill. All Madame’s windows were locked, hermetically sealed with blackout tape; Madame’s fear of draughts ran deeper than her fear of bombs.

  Noor stopped struggling with the windows to cough into her handkerchief. A spot of red in the palm of her hand—she was spitting up blood!

  She could not stay in the airless rooms a moment longer. Not an instant longer. All she needed was a prescription for some medicine to cure influenza quickly. But how? She couldn’t approach a doctor at an office or a hospital. Madame Aigrain had gone to church and then Flavien’s pawnshop; it would be hours before she returned.

  At this moment she didn’t care if she was seen by one, two or fifty Germans.

  Get some air.

  Noor picked her handbag off the bed and slipped down the stairs, past the concierge’s empty loge. A moment later she was out on the sunny street, gulping lungfuls of fresh air, and coughing again and again.

  Five thousand francs in her handbag and Madame Aigrain’s words echoing in her mind: “… someone who will not ask questions, who will not mind a little deviation around the law.”

  One step forward. She knew immediately where she needed to go. Knew to whom she might go again.

  CHAPTER 26

  Paris, France

  Sunday, July 4, 1943

  LEAFY BRANCHES OBSCURED the curlicued iron gates of shabby houses lining the rue de Jolivet. The tiny brass nameplate still read Dunet. Feverish and wool-headed, Noor took the stone-flagged path and knocked at the arched wooden door she remembered only too well.

  What had possessed her to return, like a criminal to the scene of a crime? She was making an exception to SOE rules, but Montparnasse was a long distance from Suresnes and other areas where she might be recognized.

  Some events in one’s life stay forever.

  And she had a problem again, a problem that needed a practical though illegal solution.

  The woman framed in the doorway had faded a little in nine years. The mane of coarse hair falling to her elbows was greyer and sparser, but her face was the same, harsh with disappointments. Madame Dunet was a sage-femme, a midwife. Once a nurse at the American Hospital, she was competent as a physician.

  Noor gave her name as Anne-Marie Régnier, and beyond noting that Mademoiselle Régnier was sans rendezvous—without appointment—no flicker of recognition came to the midwife’s eyes.

  “Sunday is a busy day,” said Madame Dunet.

  She was with a patient; Noor would have to wait.

  A few copies of Pariser Zeitung in the dreary waiting room; Noor hadn’t known Madame Dunet spoke German. Four-year-old copies of the Herald Tribune and Vogue. No picture of Pétain on the wall. That only meant Madame Dunet was not a Pétainist; it didn’t mean she was a Gaullist or would sympathize with Allied secret agents.

  Madame Dunet ushered a pale, middle-aged woman to the door and returned.

  “Don’t ask me for a medical certificate for someone in a camp—I can’t give it to you. And if you’re Jewish, you can go to the Hôpital Rothschild. When was your last period?”

  Madame Dunet showed Noor into her kitchen.

  The same table at its centre.

  “Tiens, now I remember you, girl! You asked if I could make the bleeding start again. You came with your sister—she wanted to be a doctor, oui? I remember her, because I too once wanted to be a doctor …” Madame threw back her hair and gave a rueful laugh. “And because you wore a long dress—a ball gown, maybe? Indian.”

  That summer evening in 1934, Noor had worn a sari. Not because going to Madame Dunet’s was any celebration, but because Uncle Tajuddin, as soon as he discovered Noor’s love for Armand, decreed both his nieces must wear only saris and ghaghras. He didn’t order complete burqa as he didn’t want them mistaken for Arab girls, but a few months of Indian traditional garb, he said, would repel the desires of men like Armand.

  “Maybe to hide it?” Madame Dunet demonstrated with her hands clasped low around an imaginary belly.

  No, Noor’s stomach had been flat as ever that day. Although, if Uncle had kept her in her room much longer, she might have begun to show.

  “You are still in France, girl?”

  So Madame Dunet had no idea she had left France, ever been in London. Convenient; no explanations necessary.

  Noor gave a heavy-lidded nod. “Oui, madame.”

  “Have you come on behalf of your s
ister this time? Maybe a friend? Ah, the German soldiers are handsome, non? Eh bien, ma fille—vous avez encore un petit problème? Are you in trouble again?”

  In trouble. A fist clenched about Noor’s womb again at the words.

  “Non, non,” she assured the midwife. “I came to you because I knew you would be discreet. It’s dangerous to be a foreigner in Paris these days. You were always more concerned about helping your friends than with the law.” She sneezed.

  Madame Dunet inclined her grey head with a knowing wink. “Mais, bien sûr, girl. I am discreet—you remember.”

  As if she could ever forget.

  A fabric screen stood at one end of the kitchen, a screen like the one that separated praying women from men at La Mosquée. Madame Dunet motioned Noor behind it and pushed a garlic-smelling apron after her.

  “Can a medical certificate help someone escape a camp?” Noor asked. Every button seemed to have grown larger than its hole.

  “Sometimes. Britishers and Americans in Vittel and Besançon camps have successfully used them, but it only gets POWs and Jews into more trouble.” Madame Dunet continued talking. “Bombs and air raids—I barely slept last night. The Allies should invade, have their battles and let us all go back to normal. The cosmopolitans who used to come here when their daughters were in trouble have deserted Paris. But you are still here, girl …”

  Madame Dunet’s kitchen table was cold beneath her thighs, the way it was on a night nine years before. The midwife made Noor breathe deeply, tapped her breastbone with two fingers, listened to her lungs, her cough, nodded when she said she was spitting up blood.

  “Influenza,” she confirmed. “Maybe pneumonia.”

  “My father died of influenza,” Noor blurted.

  “He was a guru from India, yes? Your sister told me. Medicine is so backward in India—he probably had astrologers for doctors. Susceptibility runs in the blood.”

  When Abbajaan caught influenza in 1926, it was an equal scourge in France, one that couldn’t be healed simply by faith healers. But the midwife was unlikely to comprehend any similarity between Indian astrologers and the guérisseurs.

  Madame Dunet gave Noor a dose of belladonna and a vial of smuggled American Prontosil to be taken morning and evening. She directed Noor to gargle with bicarbonate of soda and drink an infusion of linden flowers.

  “I gave you tisane of linden after your operation. It was effective, non?”

  “Oui, madame,” said Noor, though nothing Madame Dunet had given her nine years ago had helped mitigate the shame draining her heart, weakening every limb.

  What was torn from me that day was only flesh, less than love. No child asks to be born or to die; ours was no exception.

  Madame Dunet was speaking again, lecturing. She should listen politely.

  “ … Mid-wives who help women deliver fine offspring understand the science of heredity. The arranged marriages of our ancestors produced a strong French race. But nowadays people do not acknowledge the value of blood.”

  Heredity was the highest value of the Germans and Vichy. How could Madame Dunet still feel it was unavowed in the public mind?

  “Madame Dunet, I thought you were a romantic,” said Noor with an effort.

  “Romance? Romance led us to defeat by the Germans. Romance led to decadence, softness. We French alone among all of European colonists committed miscegenation with our colonials, tainted our blood with the black man’s and the Arab. Nothing like this would be possible in America, girl. When your mother married an Indian guru, in all of Europe the only country that would countenance their household was France.”

  Her tone held shame rather than pride. Noor had never told Madame Dunet anything about Mother or her antecedents, nor had Madame Dunet and Mother ever met. Had Zaib told her? Before, afterwards, while waiting?

  Anyway, it wasn’t true, for there were many other countries to which Abbajaan and Mother could have gone, but they didn’t. Where to begin correcting Madame?

  Yet Madame Dunet didn’t appear a Pétainist, or a collaborator. Maybe she was simply someone categorical, accustomed to her categories.

  She had come to Madame Dunet to be treated for influenza, not to be reminded of that painful day in 1934. It was highly indiscreet to mention a “stomach operation,” a crime for which mid-wives could be sent to the guillotine; Madame Dunet could still be arrested. The Vichy slogan Travail, famille, patrie glorifying work, family and country meant her operations were less acceptable than ever before.

  “So when your mother came to see me, it was clear I had to help you.”

  Noor had never told Mother about her “situation.” Surely there was some mistake.

  “Mother came to you? Met you—here? Non, non. You mistake me for someone else, Madame.”

  Mother, if she had known, would have begged Uncle’s permission for Noor and Armand to marry. And Noor didn’t want Mother begging Uncle for anything on her behalf.

  “My sister made all the arrangements.”

  Madame Dunet threw back her grey mane and laughed. “Your mother. A shrewd lady. Oh, she knew you’d never come if you knew she wanted you to do it, so she said she would give your sister the money. She said you’d never ask where it came from.”

  Oh, Zaib! Though sworn to secrecy, Zaib had told Mother. Anger swept Noor. Anger at a previous version of herself—such ignorance!—such stupidity!

  Madame Dunet was right, never once had Noor asked Zaib to explain how she collected the five thousand francs. And Mother, who always held the family purse strings, knew her eldest well. Knew Noor loathed discussing money, how she trusted Allah would bring it forth when necessary, never asked where money came from nor cared much where it went. How could she have been so juvenile, so very naive?

  Madame Dunet’s hair splayed across her back as she hunched over the kitchen sink to wash her hands. The last time Noor saw her turn to that sink …

  “I—I had no other way,” stammered Noor. She was back in that time of terror and clandestine inquiry.

  She should not have come here today.

  Soapy water slithered like mucous between the midwife’s hands. “Nonsense, mademoiselle. I tell all my Medeas there are alternatives. I told your mother what else could be done.”

  That’s what Madame Dunet thought of Noor? No matter that it was her hands that performed the operation, Madame Dunet judged Noor a Medea. For Madame Dunet she was no longer Noor, with her own motives, constraints and love, but sorceress Medea. Armand was no longer Armand, who had affirmed her possession of her own body and stood by Noor whatever her decision, but a Jason abandoning his unborn child. But there had been no revenge or anger in Noor as in Medea, only sorrow.

  What alternatives did Madame Dunet mean?

  “She could have sent you to a convent. The nuns often raise ‘foundlings.’”

  Noor’s head bowed into her open hands. No one had offered her such an alternative. Certainly Madame Dunet had not, nor had Mother.

  “M-mother? She knew this?” Nine years ago Mother must have thought her not old enough, not intelligent enough, not worldly enough. Nine years ago Noor was not a person, just a problem.

  “Of course. I discussed it with Madame Khan.”

  Why would Mother have forgone such an alternative? Could she not have provided money for the nuns instead of money for Madame Dunet’s stomach operation?

  “And Monsieur Khan.”

  Noor looked up. Her tongue almost refused to obey. “With Uncle? You met my uncle?”

  “I don’t know any uncle, non, non.”

  Uncle would have shown Noor to the door immediately, had he known. Mercifully, Noor’s shame must have been kept from him.

  “You met my brother then?”

  “Oui, oui. A young man, very handsome. Your brother Monsieur Khan.”

  “And what did my brother say?” She hoped to hear that Kabir had argued with Mother, argued to allow Noor to marry Armand immediately.

  But Madame Dunet said, “Your brother
was adamant—he didn’t want any niece or nephew of his baptized.”

  Words like blows.

  “But our mother was raised a Christian!” She was reeling; how little had she known Kabir.

  “Oh, I was there when your brother reminded Madame Khan she was now a Muslim, even if his father had permitted her to go to church.”

  Permitted? A thunderclap in her heart as anger and sorrow came together. How could Kabir say that? Abbajaan always encouraged Mother—and everyone else—to go to any house of worship that inspired awe. If she couldn’t comprehend the motives of a person with whom she shared two parents, was it possible to understand any other being?

  We are all doomed to be exotic, each to one another.

  Madame Dunet wiped her hands and made a sucking sound against her teeth. Then, as if revealing the intricate arrangements of a great practical joke, she said, “Your mother and I understood one another. She understands blood too, you know? I told her, not one more Jew should be allowed to enter the world.”

  No anger any more; nausea washed through Noor. Mother was not present to be confronted with Madame’s revelation, Mother who always criticized Europeans and Indians for emphasizing bloodlines. Madame Dunet could not have stated such bigotry nine years ago as openly as today. As with Renée, Vichy had loosened the midwife’s tongue by sanctioning and blessing such statements. Her words were supplied by editorials in Je Suis Partout, maybe they had even altered the midwife’s memory of her own actions. She had arrived at a surreal defence of at least one of her operations, one of the few defences that would be acceptable to Vichy. How many more would she explain the same way?

  And Madame Dunet was implicating her in a vile hatred of Jews, a hatred she presumed Noor and Mother shared with her.

  Why did Madame Dunet need to tell Noor this, so many years later? Knowledge worming its way beneath Noor’s skin. Madame wanted her to acknowledge that if she had a half-Jewish child or had simply been married to a Jew, she could be deemed a Jew under current Vichy laws, laws more stringent and anti-Semitic than the Germans required. Wanted her to understand that the gates of Drancy and Compiègne and Pithiviers would stand waiting to devour her today had Madame not saved her.