The Tiger Claw

  But he couldn’t. How many sorties had he and his crew flown in formation over concentration camps, using their brilliantly lit perimeters as landmarks, never thinking, never thinking … War required that, required the suspension of independent thought. He’d done it as well as any other skipper. Bomber Harris didn’t think bombing rail tracks into the camps was a priority, so Kabir and his crew hadn’t thought so either. Much as Churchill might solemnly aver today, the war now christened the Second World War wasn’t undertaken for humanitarian reasons, but for survival. And for the import of tea, cotton, silk, jute, sugar and all the other luxuries Empire made possible. Revenge, too. Bombing of German civilians as revenge for Dunkirk, London, Coventry—never forget revenge.

  He couldn’t be accusing, facing Rivkin today: You didn’t leave her alone as you agreed. I heard she wrote to you. But not to me. Now she is missing, may have been tortured, may have died for your sake. It would sound as if he’d given up, leaped to a premature conclusion that Noor was dead.

  Rain twisted and pressed against the windows.

  “Have you heard from Noor since your return?”

  “No.”

  No, when Kabir wanted to hear yes. Yet he was glad. Glad Noor hadn’t called Rivkin, hadn’t written to him. If she was alive, she’d reach Kabir, yes, she would.

  “Do you have any news?” asked Armand.

  “No.”

  Maybe she wasn’t dead, but she haunted him in his dreams. Last night she came dressed in slacks with a breastplate, like Jeanne d’Arc. He couldn’t say this to Rivkin either. Any comparison to Jeanne d’Arc of the voices and braggadocio would ring overly facile. Heroines from before the war didn’t seem to apply as models, cinema actresses played heroines who were nothing like Noor, and he couldn’t recall hearing of any Muslim woman quite like Noor. Anyway, why should Rivkin feel moved by Jeanne d’Arc? Today, Jeanne d’Arc symbolized a France that had rejected him and his community. Rivkin’s eyes said he and his kin had now prepaid for all assistance received or to be received from France.

  He should tell Rivkin what Vogel said, that Noor had written to “A.” Should, but the words wouldn’t come. Rivkin might ask if Noor had also written to Kabir. Then he’d have to say no, not one letter since she was sent to France.

  Insh’allah, Noor would return, and if it was important, she’d tell Rivkin herself.

  He took a sip of coffee.

  He should express an interest in the camps. But living, life itself, in the kind of death camps shown in newspaper photographs was past his Imaginot line; he couldn’t formulate a question.

  “How … how were you saved?” His voice sounded unduly loud despite the clatter of spoons and plates behind them.

  No answer for a long time. Kabir sensed Rivkin’s mental scan of millions of words in French, English, Russian, Yiddish … sensed the successive failure of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs.

  “There were no reasons with the Germans,” said Rivkin. “At Auschwitz, we called those who smoked their last cigarettes and became ready to die Mussulmans—a misnomer, of course. No one wants to die when he has something left to live for. Even hatred gives one a reason to live, not to die.”

  Another silence.

  “I’ll tell you someday. Not now.”

  The man across the table was harder, more obstinate—and, yes, stronger—for having been rejected in so many ways by countries and communities. Kabir too felt harder, harsher, older. But Rivkin had been tested to the limits of human endurance, a test that must have allowed him a glimpse of his true self. Kabir envied Rivkin that glimpse, but he was very grateful—alhamdulillah—that he had not experienced the same.

  What if the true self is not as beautiful as the Sufis believe? What if it is shamefully amoral? Rumi said the soul is here for its own joy, but what if the outcast and the outcaste souls are here only for their own survival?

  “Your hand?”

  Rivkin dug it deeper into his coat pocket. “It’s ruined. I cannot play again.”

  A statement of fact.

  “And your mother?”

  “You remember, do you not, that my mother was a washerwoman?”

  The emphasis was unmistakable, linking “washerwoman” to Uncle’s objections to marriage between Rivkin and Noor. Kabir’s turn to maintain silence; words would only wound further.

  “The Germans found out my mother was born in Moscow and they wrote ‘Russian spy’ in her file. At Drancy she was transferred to the laundry to wash typhus-infected clothing, and I thought she had been deported or was dead. Washing clothes saved her from Auschwitz—she was quarantined and could not be sent away. She never contracted typhus, either … she boiled her own clothes every night. But then …”

  Eyes that had seen too much met Kabir’s.

  “She died last week.”

  What to say? Rivkin’s suffering, his mother’s suffering, Jewish suffering, set a new standard by which the suffering of all people would be measured. Every colonial not called upon by his occupier to report for annihilation with one suitcase could now be told his suffering was not commensurate.

  “I’m sorry.” He was sorry, and he was not responsible. Not for this part of Rivkin’s suffering.

  Silence lengthened, weighted with unspoken memories.

  The crème brûlée arrived and for no reason reminded him that Rivkin had once attended Uncle Tajuddin’s lectures. That he’d been a seeker, a self-styled agnostic.

  “Perhaps it may help you to meditate? Look for the hand of Allah—God—in all things?” The kind of suggestion Abbajaan would have made.

  “God!” Rivkin’s laugh was like the rubbing of dry bones.

  A godless man. Kabir was curiously unsurprised, as if he’d known the moment he sat down. He’d never talked with a godless man, really.

  “Were … are you a Communist, then?”

  A trace of a smile crossed Rivkin’s face. “That’s the American in you, always worried about Communists. No, I may be an atheist, but I’m no Communist. I sympathize with Communists—how could I not?—my father was a worker at Renault. But I rethought Communism in the camps. I rethought so many things.”

  Kabir had an urge to agree in some way—a minor point would do.

  “It’s classless, much like Islam,” he said.

  “Classless? From Auschwitz, the Russians sent me to two camps. And even there I found that even when everyone is dressed the same, fed the same, made equal by suffering, there is no such thing as a classless society. Stalin doesn’t want a classless society—he wants a society of workers. Wants to banish complexity, just like the Nazis. And where there’s no complexity, there can be no art—only propaganda.”

  Maybe Rivkin was right. Abbajaan had banned Indian music from his life rather than simplify it for his Western followers. Later, Uncle had banned complexity, killing any hereditary urge Kabir had to compose music.

  “So, I think it may be difficult to truly love an art—any art—and also be a Communist. Or a Fascist. But”—Rivkin’s voice acquired an edge—“Communist or not, a rational human being can realize God is but a human creation, a myth constructed to control and comfort the poor, the powerless and the dispossessed of the world. So—I have no faith at all.”

  “I see,” Kabir said.

  But he didn’t. This would really hurt Noor; in fact, it might be the one thing that could finally sever her from the clutches of this Jew. But why, Allah, why was she who had so much faith the one still missing, feared dead—while ever-doubting Kabir, and Rivkin, agnostic turned atheist, were alive and here today?

  “When did you … I mean, why did you lose faith?”

  He asked for comparison with himself, though losing faith in Yahweh and losing faith in Allah might be two quite different things.

  Rivkin’s face gave Kabir nothing, for a while. Then he said, “I used to believe in that force that sent me music. But now … I hear no music. Another loss, beginning with that first loss—Noor’s loss, our loss.”

  Elev
en years ago—the child.

  If only he could explain to Rivkin: A much younger Kabir had felt besieged, excluded from full participation in France. He had attempted to conserve his religious community.

  Rivkin’s spoon scraped the small dish.

  It wasn’t that you were a Jew. I was raised to respect your religion—we are all People of the Book. It was that my eldest nephew could have been Jewish, not Muslim, and Afzal Manzil might be inherited someday by Jews.

  But those words, those unsaid words, were a half-truth at best. Kabir offered Rivkin another cigarette, struck a match for his own. Held it out to Rivkin, but the cigarette was already in Rivkin’s pocket.

  A carafe of house wine he didn’t remember ordering appeared.

  “Will you be at the Lutétia for long? It looks crowded with returnees.”

  “As long as I can.”

  “It is difficult to find an apartment in Paris. Soldiers everywhere …”

  “Very few wish to rent to Jewish deportees,” said Rivkin.

  If Noor had married Rivkin in 1940, she too might be searching for an apartment now. Some moral consolation. He should invite Rivkin to stay at Afzal Manzil, just for a while. But he’d have to explain to Mother and Zaib, explain reversing his own adamant decision. Thank heavens Dadijaan and her Urdu orations had returned to India—he wouldn’t have to explain who Rivkin was. Anyway, he wasn’t going to weaken and invite Rivkin now; Rivkin wouldn’t accept.

  Rivkin was looking at him, through him. “Will you return to India?”

  “India?” All the urgings of Dadijaan, the English and the Anglo-Indian press hadn’t persuaded Mr. Churchill to request grain shipments for his brown subjects from Mr. Roosevelt till three and a half million Indian civilians had swelled the population of the dead. And two and a half million Indians had returned to their villages by now, taken off their British Indian Army uniforms and probably joined the ranks of independence agitators. “Return to India?” Kabir said.

  “Home. To live there,” said Rivkin. “You once told me how very Indian your family was, how important your traditions are to you.”

  Indeed, he had said many such things to Rivkin in 1940. But today …

  “I’m a European Muslim,” said Kabir. “I am home.”

  He might visit India again now the Suez had reopened, but the thought of living there had never entered his mind. He wouldn’t know how.

  “I will return to Afzal Manzil,” he said. “Take up my father’s mantle. Teach.”

  The irony. Inheritance, that fossil remains of feudalism in capitalism. What opportunity was left, now the war was over, would come from aligning his fortunes with the memory of Abbajaan and trading on a few slender, half-remembered associations with that starving subcontinent still locked in struggle against its occupier, a place he had visited but once for two years as a boy.

  Life—Allah, kismet, what you will—required Kabiruddin Khan to become Pir Kabir, an expert on all things Indian. Oriental Thought, Sufism in particular. Mould and wrap ancient wisdom for consumption by the West.

  Other people’s half-baked mystical experiences would haunt him all the days of his life, and every day he would have to find French and English words to spark his inherited disciples’ souls. Try, like his father before him, to dilute the fear of death that haunted them, haunted him too. Becoming Pir Kabir would never offer the ecstatic rush that came from wavering on the cusp of death, but it was a profession, like any other. He would wait for Judgement Day to begin the real atonement.

  “Will you go to Palestine?” he asked, to deflect thoughts of his own future.

  “Palestine? I hear it is beautiful. And being with other Jews for the first time, all together like that, no longer being in the minority—it’s a powerful thing.”

  Rivkin stroked his chin. His beard was returning, Kabir noticed. Completely white.

  “But how Jewish will I need to be for acceptance in Israel? If it ever comes about, the Zionists will make Israel a Jewish theocracy even if they call it democratic. Then how long before people with fantasies of God-given rights to land begin ‘resettling’ Muslims and Christians? They too will exclude those they need to hate to survive. Noor and I—”

  Kabir stiffened, but Rivkin didn’t pause.

  “—if she returns and chooses to go, then maybe. But without Noor, with only French, Russian, English and a smattering of prison German and Yiddish—no. I’d only exchange the watchtowers and barbed wire of Auschwitz for the watchtowers and barbed wire of the kibbutz. And now, with the bomb—I don’t want Gentiles to have us all in one place.”

  “I’m sure you won’t find peace by going to the Middle East,” said Kabir. “Muslims in Palestine won’t accept becoming refugees in their own land. If they are pushed out by the British and the Jews, they’ll run into the open arms of the fascists. Hitler may be defeated, but his Nazis are not gone, nor is their ill-gotten wealth.” He extinguished his cigarette and poured himself a glass of wine. “How Muslim would a Palestinian Muslim have to be then? The first casualty would be Sufism, we who preach a Universal God, write odes to wine, sing and dance in devotion.”

  But how could Rivkin remain where he was unwanted?

  “If not Israel, will you go to Russia? I read in the Herald that Stalin is offering amnesty to all who left during the Revolution.”

  Rivkin gave a mordant laugh. “Yes, poor powerless France would agree to a second deportation for me, to Russia.” Unvarnished pain and reproach had thickened Rivkin’s voice. “But I am a born French citizen. So, now that they cannot send my mother back to Moscow, I will fight to stay here.”

  Rivkin was angry, not for his own suffering but for the suffering of those he loved. His mother, Noor. And, Kabir had read, he was one of only three thousand returnees; only three thousand of the three hundred thousand Jews in France before the war.

  Living proof, a surfeit of it.

  For a moment Kabir saw as Rivkin did: Gentile inhabitants of houses near the Jewish areas in nearby Montparnasse and in the rue des Rosiers should be drowning in the blood of thousands whose cries were ignored as the gendarmes kicked doors down, as buses and trains trundled away. The symphonic cries of the absent were notes played out of hearing range of listeners, though today’s newspapers were full of the trial of Xavier Vallat, the Vichy administrator responsible for their deportations. Rivkin was a walking accusation. Yes, it was necessary for the French that he remain.

  “Many are being brought to justice,” Kabir felt it necessary to assure him. “Laval has been executed, Pétain sentenced to life in prison.”

  All year long, since Robert Brasillach, editor of Je Suis Partout, was denied pardon and executed, the trials of artists and other intellectuals had drawn press and spectators. Following some obscure logic, the French were holding their writers, musicians, actors and artists more culpable under Article 75 for putting their skills in the service of Fascism than black marketeers or war profiteers, more culpable than themselves.

  “Yes, and France is découpaging its war years.”

  “I mentioned when I telephoned you at the Lutétia that I know who betrayed Noor,” said Kabir. “Renée Garry is her name.”

  A silence. Then Rivkin said, “How do you know?”

  “A woman named Monique Nadaud working in the Hôtel de Ville denounced her to the Allies after the liberation. There was evidence: she found a ledger where Madame Garry recorded receiving ten thousand francs for denouncing Noor.”

  Rivkin was staring out of the window at the rain. Was he listening?

  “Madame Garry is at Fresnes now, charged with treason. The committee chose four jurors—all women! I have still to accustom myself to the idea of women jurors. All members of wives-of-POW organizations. They will have to accustom themselves to the idea of a Muslim woman as a resistant, then convict a European woman for denouncing her …”

  A combustible anger burned inside him. He couldn’t say the rest: chances of Renée’s conviction were low.

 
“Will you attend her trial?” he asked Rivkin. Kabir planned to attend. Meditation and prayer might help him through it.

  “I don’t think so,” replied Rivkin. “Today, all forty million liberated Frenchmen say they were in the Resistance. But the facts persist: My mother and my Noor were here. They are not here now. Me, I long just once more to hold Noor—”

  He looked directly at Kabir. “What did you fear would result from my beliefs?” An inner energy seemed to drive each word.

  The past, that insurmountable wall. Kabir’s visit to Rivkin’s apartment in 1940, days before the fall of Paris. The weight in his pocket. “Leave my sister alone.” The packet of money that never changed hands.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Deep blue eyes that wouldn’t let him look away. Mirror eyes.

  The moment passed. Rivkin lit one of the cigarettes; smoke clouded Kabir’s vision.

  “What shall we do, then?” He discovered his voice was bleak with unshed tears.

  “Continue,” said Rivkin. “She still lives.”

  EPILOGUE

  Suresnes, France

  April 28, 1995

  IN THE GARDEN at Afzal Manzil, people were taking their seats beneath the quince tree before a stage enveloped in red, blue and white. The men hatless, the women clutching handkerchiefs. Amid the dark suits and coats in the rows of folding chairs, Pir Kabiruddin Khan’s kaftan of ochre velvet trimmed with gold stood out like a beacon.

  A faded golden head leaned towards Pir Kabir’s right ear.

  “It’s Armand Rivkin again,” said his wife Angela.

  A tall, stooped man in a dark hat and coat, silver showing at each temple, had entered the garden. He leaned on a brass-headed cane, kept one hand in his pocket.

  Kabir glanced at his watch—a little past five o’clock.

  Rivkin. Distracting him again.

  The Jew would be at least eighty-five by now. Thin as only the survivors living in their rest homes were, yet he had a stringy resilience about him.