Noor’s whole body thought of food, escape, food, escape.
The prison guard began to slap segments of the deck upon one another.
Breathe. Al-lah, Al-lah.
The train jolted, nudging the cards out of his hands. They slipped, shot in all directions.
The guard let out a roar. He would take his eyes off her—she would run with the others. But his eyes didn’t leave her for a second as the soldiers began picking up the cards.
If she was dreaming like Alice, the cards should now fulfill their purpose: the falling house of cards should be the signal that called her to wake.
A sudden rush of hope; she pinched herself.
It hurt.
This is happening.
Ten minutes had passed, maybe fifteen. A smell, no, a stench unlike any other.
Sunlight poured through the carriage door. Hollow pulse of bloodhounds barking a few yards from the train. The soldiers rose.
“Rauss!” They motioned her with the others following to the door.
Before Noor, letters wrought above an iron-barred gate inset beneath an archway spelled ArbeitMachtFrei. Perhaps the name of this place? The prison guard pulled her from the carriage, sending her sprawling to skin-searing gravel. He leaned over, unlocked her handcuffs where she lay. The soldiers were shoving the others out of the carriage, too.
On one elbow, to her knees, to her feet. Hands dropping to her sides, swinging free.
Awash in gratitude—abject gratitude.
No reason to feel gratitude. Why feel any gratitude at all?
The guard’s thumb and middle finger met upon her humerus. Pincer hand clamped about her arm, he tugged, dragging her, with Yolande and the others following.
Noor stumbled on swollen ankles, past a sign, Jorhaus. A gloved hand pushed. The barred gate halved. Agitated shouts of guards, a baying and barking as of wolves.
A room in the gatehouse. Guns all around. A woman guard inside. Folded towel thrust at her, then at Yolande and the other two. Not a towel, a uniform. The woman guard miming they must change. Watching, just doing her job.
Faded blue stripes and a single patch pocket.
No Schiaparelli gown, this.
Behind Yolande now. Being led away, not to the rows of hulking grey wooden barracks stretching away as far as she could see in the diffused light, but past a huge open space. Moving in the sights of guns from the watchtowers, she shuffled with the others past a whitewashed, horseshoe-shaped building.
Before Noor and the ragged little troop of women stood a long white barrack with barred windows.
“They’re calling this the Bunker,” came Yolande’s whisper, translating the rapid German passing between the camp soldiers and the guard from Pforzheim. “For political prisoners only.”
CHAPTER 41
Dachau, Germany
September 12, 1944
ON HER SIDE in her new cell, wondering if her blood was still flowing. Her teeth had chattered all night as if possessed by djinns and the six-rung radiator against the wall wasn’t turned on. Breeze stirred a fine black dust, blew it through the barred window. Noor’s eyes were smarting.
Dawn now, and a click at the door. A scarecrow with hollow eyes set deep in his stubbled face slipped in, a finger to his lips. He placed a battered suitcase on her cot and thumbed it open quickly, a pulse throbbing at his temple. Two planks of wood hinged out and a tiny crucifix and candles appeared. A portable altar—no need to explain at what danger to himself.
The priest’s unexpected kindness penetrated her more deeply than any pain from her chains, bruises, hunger, shouts endured. She kneeled, ready to pray, trying to understand his textbook French through his German accent.
Was she Catholic or Lutheran? He wanted to know.
“I follow Sufism,” she said. “I’m a Sufi Muslim.”
He frowned, baffled. Then his brow cleared.
“Gypsy?”
She shook her head.
“You have been given this chance, mademoiselle. Repent of paganism and accept Jesus Christ as the true messiah, forsaking all others, and you shall be saved.”
What should she say to the scarecrow figure before her? She didn’t want to hurt this large-spirited, sincere man who had risked his life to bring her his sacrament. But she could not accept his gift. His Christianity came at the price of rejecting all other faiths, but to deny the Prophet or any one of the prophets before him was to deny them all.
Could Hazrat Issa have wanted to save some and not all of humanity?
My soul is part of Allah; I don’t want or need to be saved.
Could she explain that, in rejecting conversion, she meant no disrespect, no personal affront, merely a choice freely exercised? She was Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu if she was a Sufi. But she was so tired, so tired—where could she begin to explain?
Why was it necessary to explain what should be so obvious?
And there was no time for explanations. Every second the portable altar remained open on the valise was one of terrible danger for him, for herself. All she could do was whisper, “Non. Merci, mais non—I can’t say the reasons now. Perhaps some other time, when we meet again.”
His expectation for her was in his elegiac eyes. She would not believe it.
I have claimed but never yet lived my life as my own. How can it be time to die? What have I learned of existence that qualifies me to knock on the door of non-existence?
“Give me your blessing instead, mon père.”
Giving might make him feel worthy of his jealously guarded, exclusive God.
His palm scraped her forehead. “Bless you, my child.”
Alone again but for the cold metallic odour inhabiting her cell, she pressed her palms to burning eyes. Had she imagined him? Sincere priest with the face of Azrael.
Imagined or not, when one has seen the Archangel of Death, the appointed hour has come. There is no time left to repent or change anything.
Blood slid through vein and artery, distributing the acid pain of bruise through tissue, to the bone. Heart rate, temperature, movement—thought—slowing.
A bowl of cold soup helped for a while, then she had to lie down.
I might as well be in India, starving, beaten or imprisoned without trial. Or confined to my room in Afzal Manzil, confined at the avenue Foch or confined at Pforzheim. Someone always regulates my surroundings, affecting the air I breathe. Other people’s decisions have governed each moment of my life, limiting each choice by past decisions, decisions made by others before they ever met me.
Maybe I suffer from the illusion that I ever had choices. Perhaps my expectations of my family, my leaders and myself were too high.
If I surrender to these thoughts, does it mean I give in?
I have no tears left to cry, so I dream: On foot through a low fog, and I am following someone, gasping, panting. I’m in a field clotted with red poppies, dark hearts at their core, and I, running from light-swallowing darkness, wade in knee-deep. Bare knees feel the brush of petals, my shoes crush flowers. If I cross the field, I’ll be safe, but there’ll be no coming back to find out what lives in the darkness and why it chases me. I look over my shoulder—dark shapes following me again, running through dense trees, the skull and crossbones branded on each man’s cap.
I am with child again. Large and unwieldy with your weight, ma petite. But the fingers that hold my own are strong, the voice deep and urgent, the eyes blue. It is Armand.
“It is time,” he says. “I am with you.”
I look down; my lap is soaked with life water. Desperately, I search for cover, but the pain in my enlarged womb is too great. I drop to my haunches behind the trunk of a felled tree. There, in Armand’s arms, what should take hours happens in a flash in dream time. And this time I am ready. I experience it fully, genuinely and without fear—experience with my husband the sacred moment of your birth. This one moment is my own, a moment of my life no one may pre-define or permit. From it I become a mother. Fr
om it I know my own mother and my grandmothers, leaving the Noor who could not be Noor and mother together.
Afterwards, your father and I hold you and you give your first cry. But oh, ma petite, this is no cry, for I hear you laugh, a clear, spontaneous laugh.
A laugh!
And though I know I dream, some part of me learns what you came to teach me: that Allah, God or principle that created you, can also, if we wish, restore this war-weary planet.
“Rauss!”
A key clattering in the cell door. An SS guard prodding her awake.
I am just being moved to another cell, perhaps this is when they feed prisoners here …
In the narrow hall, three other cells opened. Yolande’s familiar face, her lifted eyebrow. Noor answered with a weak smile, as if they were out in the Surrey woods again. The guard motioned her and the others down the length of the Bunker, out into the dawn. Pebbles speared her shoes, her legs were stiff as wood. But the guards were behind, so she stumbled forward. Around the side of the building, back towards the gatehouse.
To her right, between the Bunker and the rows of barracks, stood a legion of wretches in faded grey camp uniforms. A loudspeaker barked names and orders at intervals.
How often had she watched such roll calls at Drancy, through binoculars. But at this lesser distance she could see faces, see how gaunt and emaciated were the travesties of shaven-headed men who leaned against one another; see that there were old men and a group of women. Some little boys. Girls. One looked barely four years old.
Wardens moved among them, pushing and shouting.
Noor hung back, stealing oblique glances. Did someone call “Armand Rivkin”? Could he be here, among these men? Names came in a never-ending stream.
Yolande whispered, translating the shouts, “Road-building commando … stone-breaking commando … Krupp commando …”
“Rauss!” Behind her. A sharp twinge at her kidney—the barrel of a gun.
She tried to meet the guard’s eyes, to make him truly see her, but he looked away.
Noor held her hand out to Yolande and gripped firmly. Slowly, past long grey barracks, more and more of them. Perhaps one of them was a women’s barrack intended for their billeting. Were any from her network here—Prosper? Archambault? Monsieur Hoogstraten? Professor Balachowsky? Viennot?
A two-wheeled horse cart with a man in its traces came down an alley between the barracks and halted at a guard’s challenge.
“The night’s dead—under the tarpaulin,” came Yolande’s whisper. “He’s taking them to the crematorium.”
From the watchtowers, gun barrels swept in a slow arc. Where were they being taken? The far wall of the compound was in sight now, razor wire billowing above it.
Again, that stench from yesterday.
Opposite the last barrack, a double gate opened in the compound wall. The smell grew stronger, the barking closer.
Her legs belonged to someone else.
Pretend to be brave; no one can tell the difference.
Smoke belched from a chimney poking through the trees. Now they were at its source, a low red-brick building, smaller than the barracks they had passed.
The guards prodded her and then Yolande, then the others, past it, down a path to a gravelled clearing. There, Noor saw a brick wall, a trench running before it.
Dark wet trench. Blood trench.
Yolande’s hand, cold in hers. Run! Run—where?
Dogs! Closer. They came into view. Two Dobermans straining and slavering, restrained by leather leashes. Two SS officers waiting, pistols drawn.
Noor’s eyes caromed to Yolande’s—nowhere to run.
Guards were pushing the others to their knees, one by one. No charges, no trial, no sentence? No blindfold offered? Nothing left to barter for treatment as a POW. No saviour in sight. She gripped Yolande’s hand in her left and met her eyes.
Together to the end.
Noor knelt in the fawn-coloured sunshine, the nape of her neck exposed to an SS officer’s Luger.
Allah, for which country do I die? Be with me now. Let me be true to you, now and always. Send my father to meet me in spirit, send my child to greet me.
Not in the back. Not to be shot in the back like prey run to ground. She must turn, turn and face her enemy, look him in the eye.
This is the moment, the crucial moment, in common with every being who has been or will come. The moment to which I was riding my body headlong against time. This is the trench; from here I go forward alone.
She heard the light coming, light behind her, light before, light above, light beneath.
Heat stiffened each muscle, every nerve. Before her, a light that excluded nothing, including her in its largeness, holding her in a munificent wholeness as skin turned to porous shield, let fire in.
Armand, I wait for you always. Allah! I evolve to spirit, withdraw from known to unknown.
Time splintered what glue held together fragments of Noor. She tasted hot breath leaving. A million other events could have happened at this moment. But there was only the sharp report that precluded all other events, the slow fall of a broken body to hard gravel. A confluence of betrayals no one could have foreseen.
Then the continued fight until her body knew action could no longer bring effect … that nothing could hurt … nothing hurts any more.
PART TEN
CHAPTER 42
Paris, France
December 1945
RELENTLESS RAIN drove Parisians underground to the métro, scoured monuments, washed away paint, dirt, tears, six war years. General de Gaulle was now President de Gaulle. Gas lamps hissed on smaller streets, electric lights had returned in several arrondissements. The better-off were buying marrons glacés and Christmas presents at Galeries Lafayette, trying to believe the years of war were over, that nothing was scarred, no walls bruised by ripped-away German posters, German signs. The barricades that had blemished streets during the Battle of Paris were gone, motor car taxis were back on the streets, ferrying Allied soldiers to the Louvre and the bordellos of Montparnasse. Some Frenchmen were heard muttering about an American occupation. Banners—Vive les Alliés, Merci pour la délivrance— were fraying.
The restaurant on the rue de Sèvres near the Hôtel Lutétia once had the best tarte tatin, but the menu chalked on the blackboard offered Kabir no such delicacy today. He consulted his watch, ordered two café filtres and waited.
It was time, American pressmen in Paris were fond of saying, to “move on.”
But how could a man with no news of his sister “move on”? Every day, he lost a little more hope, hope he didn’t even know he had to lose. He had sought Noor across Europe as his obligation as a member of the Khan family. But he did miss her, too.
He missed the Noor he remembered, wanted her back exactly as he remembered her.
After questioning Vogel, he had gone to Dachau, but in all the tons of documents translated for trials, there was no mention of Noor, Nora Baker, Madeleine or Anne-Marie Régnier. She was a Night and Fog prisoner, one of an unknown number of the disappeared.
Pforzheim prison was still standing, though a mound of bones and little else remained of the town. The governor, when denazified and reinstated to his job, could only confirm she had been there from November 1943 to September 1944, and his prison ledgers said she was sent to Dachau. He led Kabir down the women’s block, now full of Nazi men, to an empty cell. There he pointed to the inscription, I resist, therefore I am. A date almost two years earlier, and her signature, so small, Noor.
The governor was delighted by his discovery and eager to please. He promised to contact Kabir if any further information ever came to light. But the discovery only raised more questions. What did Noor mean? What resistance could she effect despite imprisonment? Where was she now?
So many questions, how could a brother move on?
Even France couldn’t just move on. First, said Frenchmen, the épuration of “national sentiments.” Some said, “I resisted, why didn’
t you?” Others said, “I didn’t resist, therefore it was impossible to have resisted,” and discounted tales of resistance as wild exaggerations of Communists. What was resistance? Which acts were collaboration? Which acts of collaboration were simply necessary for survival? Old scores had been settled in the first few weeks of liberation when those deemed collaborators were brought to the rough and ready justice of the gun. Things had improved a little: now there were trials.
Kabir looked up as a tall, thin man with the unmistakable shuffle and sepulchral eyes of the returned deportee came through the door. A spectre reappearing, he looked around the room as if inquiring who had summoned him. The few diners in the restaurant fell to a silence in which discomfort was mixed with horrified compassion. Kabir rose to his feet.
No beard. But those blue eyes were unmistakable.
Kabir started forward, holding out his hand, then faltered when Armand Rivkin didn’t extend his. Rivkin’s hand, indeed his whole right arm, was bandaged. Awkwardly, Kabir closed the distance between himself and Rivkin with a half-embrace.
Bones knocked beneath the shoulders of Rivkin’s wet tweed. Kabir resumed his seat. Rivkin sat down.
A glass partition seemed to rise between him and the Jew. All they had in common was Noor—and loving the same woman, as sister or girlfriend, wasn’t grounds for friendship. Would Rivkin remember Kabir saying so in 1940?
Cigarettes were all Kabir had to offer. Rough fingers took one; it vanished into Rivkin’s pocket. Two steaming cups were placed on the table between them—coffee served with almost palpable triumph.
Rivkin shook his head.
What had Kabir been thinking of, ordering coffee? He had heard, then forgotten, that coffee was vitriol in a deportee’s stomach. Someone might be offering Noor coffee at this moment …
He ordered crème brûlée instead, and began.
It was less difficult than he’d expected, as if he had some obligation to tell Rivkin the scant details he had. Tie facts together. Perhaps draw conclusions, ask if Rivkin was worthy of this war, of Kabir’s sorties over Germany. The warrior in him and the part that was American was proud. We saved you, we liberated you, he wanted to claim.