He sounded intrigued. She wouldn’t deny it; what did it matter who or what he thought she was if it meant she could rejoin the fray?
“What else?” She tweaked her hat brim. Reflected in the window overlooking the busy alley, the hat resembled a cockeyed lamp-shade—not quite the right effect. She tried a Mona Lisa smile.
“That your mother is American—I only had to find out if you are a Yid.”
“Does that matter? Why should that matter?”
He seemed to hesitate. “Anne-Marie, it matters little to me, but it would be very dangerous for you if it were true, you know?”
He leaned across the table and grasped her elbows. She pulled away.
“You should be in a palace.” He made a U-shaped gesture across his chest. “With strings of jewels. And elephants. You should be in a scented harem, wearing the … the pantaloons. I see another Mata Hari—the spy who dances the dance of the veils.”
Noor gave a soft laugh.
Viennot looked wounded. “Tell me, why did you not join the Free French under de Gaulle—why the English?”
“I am a British subject.”
“Bon! Some British subjects are better than others. Your Colonel Buckmaster prefers his agents to operate only with each other and keep away from de Gaulle’s.”
“Oui, Professor Balachowsky explained this to me.”
“He and Hoogstraten are probably executed by now—they would be no use to the Nazis.”
This brought Noor back from her momentary flight of playacting. Exciting intrigue. Harmless banter. But the stakes—one’s life. Émile had said, “You have to deny reality to be brave.” And right now she was pretending to be brave.
Viennot carried on. “Messieurs Churchill and Roosevelt have not yet made up their minds who should run France after the war, and believe they should decide. That’s their idea of democracy, tu sais? They too, no less than the Nazis, have a New World Order in mind for Europe. But me, I work for the Free French and seldom for London. Now, if the Londoners are compromised, I will work only with the Free French—but we have to have money, even if it’s from London. So, if you work with me, you will have to co-operate with Gaullists. But it’s good information. Accurate, because a German talks freely to my little women, and what he doesn’t tell them, he tells Viennot for money …”
So this was the kind of man she was dealing with. She stopped the question that was about to claw its way out of her. She had been about to ask if Viennot had contacts who might find Armand.
Don’t ask Viennot, Viennot who doesn’t like “Yids.” He will have conditions. Or he won’t let you transmit. There must be other ways.
“D’accord,” said Viennot. “If you are agreed …” He froze in mid-sentence.
Two black kepis had stopped outside Madame Millet’s pâtisserie. They were talking with the tout across the lane. Now the milice gendarmes paced back and forth, carbines slung over their shoulders. A couple came out of the restaurant and one of the gendarmes gestured—the lane was closed off.
The poodle raised its head. Madame Millet went to the screen door to look.
Noor jumped up and got around the tables to the windows. The alley was emptying. She glanced back at Viennot. He now had his wallet out. He pulled out a fifty-franc note, placed it on the table, stood up. Far too much for their light repast, it lay suggestively across the path of any milicien.
“What is happening?” The little girl ran to the window and asked the question for all of them.
“A shanghaillage,” said the gentleman. The poodle quivered on his lap.
Madame Millet and Viennot exchanged glances.
“What is shanghaillage?” asked the little girl.
“A roundup of men for work in Germany.”
“But there aren’t enough young men outside,” said the mother.
Viennot was the only man present who fell within the ages specified by Premier Laval.
“We must leave, Monsieur Viennot,” urged Noor. She tensed to run behind Madame Millet’s counter, out of the back door.
But Viennot shook his head. “No, look!”
A Hasidic Jew emerged into the lane, arms raised in surrender, squinting as if the sun scathed his eyes. The miliciens surrounded him, shouting “Dépêche-toi!” and “Allez-y! Vite!”
A torrent of blood rushed like a train through Noor’s head. The poodle began to bark, its coiled leash unravelling.
Behind the black-garbed man came two women and three children, arms raised, heads lowered, blinking. A blue prison van reversed into the narrow lane. Its back doors swung open.
The sweet-faced old gentleman quieted his dog. “Probably criminals,” he assured everyone with Panglossian equanimity. “Terrorists.”
The mother nodded. “Black marketeers.”
The little girl crept onto her mother’s lap and sat very still.
“Strange—usually they come at night. Those Jews must have been in hiding,” said the gentleman.
Viennot had returned to his seat.
A groan escaped Noor; she looked around wildly. The future was the past: she was running after buses again, green buses from Drancy, grey birds flying, she was running, searching, crying, the same pain in her side, that pain that arced out, reaching all the way to her womb.
“No, oh no,” she said in a voice that wasn’t her own. “No more!”
She reached for the doorknob, but Madame Millet stepped before it, loaf-like arms crossed upon her apron. Her pâtisserie, said her expression, didn’t need attention from gendarmes.
Noor stopped, remembering where she was, her role, whom she was with, why she was here. She backed away. She joined the others, watching in an anxious daze.
When the milice began to prod the Hasidim into the blue van, Madame pointedly drew all the curtains.
“Where are they taking them, Maman?” The little girl’s question rose plaintively around them.
The little group returned to their tables. It was very quiet.
Soon the poodle rested its head on its paws again. The gentleman removed his polka-dotted bow tie to loudly demonstrate mysterious techniques of knotting it. But the little girl was no longer enthralled, and began to cry.
“Tais-toi!” the mother hushed her. “Have they opened the street?” she asked Madame Millet.
Noor took off her hat and put it on the table. She stood looking down at Viennot for a long moment, then resumed her seat. Nothing could be said.
Eventually, Viennot fanned his fingers and met her accusing look. “It’s war that tells the truth, Madeleine. We’re all in tribes, no different from the Moroccan or Algerian in his souk. All of us, the Allies and the Axis, fighting for our fizzling utopias. But you care—care too much maybe?”
She looked away; let him not see her eyes had filled. “I’m a member of every tribe. At least, many tribes.”
“Ah,” said Viennot, taking a long drag on a newly lit cigarette. “I had that feeling once, the first time I fell in love. I loved everyone in the world—but you can’t do that. It’s very dangerous thinking. One must know very definitely to which tribe one belongs. That’s why I don’t do it any more—fall in love, I mean. Desire, yes—love, no!”
“And those people had the misfortune to belong to the wrong tribe? It’s not something we choose!”
Viennot ignored her outburst and continued low-voiced and deliberate. “Madeleine, you wish to have your talents used, I can use you. In fact, I admit I need you. But I have rules. Listen carefully.” His speech slowed as if he wanted her to memorize. “If you show any interest in Yids as you just did, you will attract the attention of the Gestapo to you, to Phono, Odile—any of us left in the network. Can you understand that? I will not work with you for one instant if you even try to inquire what happens to them, you understand? If you do—that’s it! Finis! This is no place for tourism, Madeleine, nor a place to become a heroine or a saint. Do you understand?”
“Je comprends.” Yes, she did understand. Only too well.
> “Now—what are your scheduled transmission times?”
“Wednesdays between 17:00 and 17:30 hours.”
“Odile will courier you messages, or you will find them at Flavien’s.”
When Madame Millet drew the curtains back, the gendarmes and the Hasidim and the blue van were gone. A man with a broom bent over a dustpan. The lane had opened, and the tout was stopping passersby again. The little girl waved to her temporary friend before her mother pulled her away. The gentleman put on his hat, tucked Voltaire under one arm, the poodle under the other, and nodded “à tout à l’heure“ to all.
A bell pinged as two German soldiers entered, their presence curtailing further conversation. As Noor left the pâtisserie, she heard Viennot order another crème caramel.
CHAPTER 30
Pforzheim, Germany
July 1944
NOTHING IN MY CIRCUMSTANCES has altered since the Allies landed but my capacity for acceptance, my perception of my own adaptability. I am as Sleeping Beauty waiting for her prince; all of us are waiting. Rumi could have been speaking to the Allies across the centuries: “Open the gates of the prison with the keys that spell Joy.”
Today the guard gave me so many white tickets to thread on strings, I barely have time to write before my light is extinguished. The tickets have tiny holes through which I thread cotton, then make a knot. She supplies a single measured thread with the ball of twine, and I have to bite each thread to that length. Finished, they look like price tags for hats and clothes. Though I’ve always disliked sewing, sometimes I look forward to this useless work—it keeps my hands busy and dulls fear, regret, loss, yearning, self-pity and anger, and the stench of the toilet in the corner.
Forty tickets an hour—that’s how many I can thread if I cut all the strings first and thread the tickets after. If I cut a single string and thread its ticket, I thread only thirty an hour. So I cut each string and thread its ticket, using inefficiency as my protest device. But today the guard’s eye was at my peephole at least five times, and I got no soup at midday till I had threaded enough to satisfy her. So I tried to concentrate on threading, threading tickets all afternoon.
This is how I felt once I made contact with Viennot and began to work in earnest. The first static and whistles as I turned the dial were as the greetings of slow-turning planets, a cosmic noise of jangled intentions, but after a few days my concentration returned, skill and speed improved. I was back to that incredible feeling of lightness as thought projected from my tapping finger to ether, and I became Madeleine. Night after night, my finger on the key, translating French to English, then to Morse dot-dash-dash-dot, and I could not know if the information meant anything to the receiving women in London, Miss Atkins, Major Boddington or Colonel Buckmaster. After transmitting, I came back to being Noor, Noor who must, as Anne-Marie, live with the consequences of her communications. Once Josianne and I had finished decrypting and deciphering, we had messages and instructions to courier all over Paris.
I made contact with Odile again. Since her father’s arrest she had become a little quieter, but had not lost her confidence.
Sometimes I thought all I was doing was waiting, waiting for messages, waiting for appointments in unfamiliar cafés with strange men and women from every occupation, every origin—people I might never have met in quiet Suresnes, or even in Paris, but for the war.
I felt connected to all my countries in this work—England and India, America, Russia and France. For once I was part of them all, necessary to the survival of nations, a finger-tapping sender connected to Colonel Buckmaster’s women radio receivers, and because I was working with people who needed my skills, no one would call me foreigner any more. But every minute I lived with the thought that my love had become foreign in his own country … the one we had called “our” country.
For both belonging and non-belonging, there’s no place like a war.
I disobeyed Viennot’s rules, of course—adding one more disobedience to my stream of disobediences—and renewed my lease at Madame Gagné’s boarding house in Drancy. Gabrielle, bartering more than tobacco ration coupons now at the Café Vidrequin, served me larger portions of food than she should have and took larger portions of drink than she should have. Her eyes were always puffy.
We never—I never—saw Monsieur Durand’s sad eyes again, though I went to Drancy every week and transmitted from there. Poor Claude continued to call me at Madame Aigrain’s, but now he called to say he had no news, just to have an excuse to call.
There were more transports, each of a thousand people. Each of a thousand Jews and resistants, some that left from Drancy station, some from Bobigny.
Once, only once, I was even angry at Armand. Why had he allowed himself to be captured? Why did he not resist more? And once he was at Drancy, why did he not try to escape? If he found his name on the list of deportees, could he not pretend to be sick, or fight legally not to go? But then Gabrielle explained what Monsieur le Missionnaire had told her, that the German quota of a thousand per transport meant if Armand found an acceptable excuse not to go, he would be condemning some other Jewish man to be transported in his stead.
The world is a barbaric place at present, ma petite—wait a while to enter it.
Gabrielle was there to comfort me if I ever saw your father, but I never did, though I stood by the gates and watched each convoy leave:
July 31
September 2
October 7
I watched unblinkingly. I watched to remember. I watched as if through the crocheted eyepiece of a shuttlecock burqa. Then back to work, after angry tears.
The work consumed me the way these tickets help to eat away time. All through August and September, Viennot attempted to meet me at his apartment, always mentioning that his wife was absent on vacation. He said he could fix my transmitter if it ever broke—and once upon a time I would have pretended to be very stupid, pretended I didn’t understand his advances, or that he was waiting for complete impoverishment to steer me down the road to selling my body. Instead, one day I explained that all I wanted from him was information. Information about the war as it was, not as I or Monsieur Churchill wanted it to be. And that if he expected to continue being paid by London, he should keep his suggestions to himself.
To my surprise Viennot took rejection well, merely saying, “You know I had to try,” as if a point of masculine honour had been at stake.
In England, I was trained to be a conduit, only a conduit. Told to ignore the content of messages—details about the movement of supplies, trucks, trains carrying tanks, troops, troop morale. But Archambault had taught me to grasp the significance of a message before sending. So I became familiar with the code names of Viennot’s sources, and their motives. Germans were paid well, and some of the French will live like colons once the Allies liberate Paris. I sent signals for entire power plants and engine factories to blow up. My messages caused patrols and sentries to be blown to bits, horses to stampede, mail to burn in acid, food and forage to be poisoned, time bombs to detonate in cars and trains, stocks of petrol to burn. And it was not that I hated, but that I had no alternative. And I wanted German destruction in proportion to the cavity that yawned within me.
I felt then as today that I will prove to them, to myself: ours is a love their bombs can’t shatter, that bullets can’t kill, even if they have deported my beloved.
I wonder if it made any difference that I, Noor, was hiding in Paris and from my purdah behind a radio was telling the Allies where to bomb, when to hit, provided damage assessments and reports of roundups.
But it was not only me—Josianne was at my side, decoding. Odile was my courier, thinking up a million excuses any time she was stopped after curfew. One night she had gone out to call her German soldier from a phone box because her mother wouldn’t let her call from home. Another night she was going to her sister who was having a baby and the doctor had no gas for his car. And my surrogate mothers Madame Aigrain and Madame Prénat supported,
sheltered and fed us. The power and anger of our zenana steamed like an engine to its goal.
Every day, I dispossessed myself of self to find some characteristic, any small thing, in common with my assigned personas, Anne-Marie and Madeleine. Translating to English, encoding, transmitting, receiving, decoding, translating to French again—for all of us it was theatre without the drama or applause. This dance of pseudonyms carried me through to autumn.
In a few months, when the Allies release me and things are better, ma petite, I will work for Radio France. I’ll tell you stories on the air, using my own clear voice in place of code. Armand always said I have a beautiful voice, untrained but beautiful. I’ll take singing lessons, we’ll write a children’s newspaper together—we’ll call it Bel ge.
Silence in my unaired cell now. In the distance a woman screams, “If there is a God, hear me!” Another responds with the Lord’s Prayer. The Latin words return us to our atavistic urge to believe, believe the crucial moment will come.
I hear the guard tramping towards my cell.
Allah hafiz for now, ma petite.
CHAPTER 31
Paris, France
Tuesday, October 12, 1943
THE QUEUE OUTSIDE LA PAGODE, the cinema designed like a Japanese pagoda on the rue de Babylone, was short. A matinee show—and who had money for cinemas these days? Or maybe the interest of Parisians had run its course, but the Germans still considered The Life of Mozart required viewing. The film did have a foreign following; a few callow-faced soldiers stood before Noor in the queue talking loudly in German. An accordionist serenaded French and Germans alike with “Sous les ponts de Paris.” A few voices joined the chorus, but only one bought the sheet music when the song ended.
Noor’s coat, tailor-made green jacket and skirt were the same she’d worn for her landing in France, a reminder that her three-week assignment had now stretched to seventeen. What must Mother think had happened to her—no more letters since the ones she’d sent to Kabir and Zaib in mid-June. And Gilbert probably hadn’t delivered those.