The Tiger Claw by Shauna Singh Baldwin

held the door. Miss Atkins strode purposefully through. Noor followed close behind. On Clarges Street, Miss Atkins snapped a black umbrella open against a slow drizzle growing to shower. Noor did the same. Miss Atkins’s umbrella bobbed away down the street. Soon she and Noor were far apart.

CHAPTER 6
    Pforzheim, Germany
December
1943
    MISS ATKINS NAMED US ALL . Yolande was “Mariette” and I was Madeleine. But the nom de guerre I wanted was Madelon
.
    Madelon from an evening in 1934, when I was twenty. Uncle Tajuddin’s lecture to the Sufi disciples closed with the Universal Worship ceremony, and I slipped away with Armand to the Val d’Or café. When we were sure no one who knew me was near, we walked uphill, summoned by an old man’s plaintive song, “Quand Madelon vient nous servir à boire.” A poilu from the Great War sang of the girl Madelon who inspired warriors like him
.
    The poilu stood on his wooden leg at the foot of Mont Valérien, the cemetery where American soldiers lie. His accordion pleated and unpleated, breathing that melody into the summer evening. And before him on the ground he displayed his medals beside his cupped beret
.
    Armand tossed a few sous in the beret and his arm encircled my waist. In our special place, we lay down on his coat and the tall chestnuts swayed above. We talked till we found ourselves still speaking but without words. When I close my eyes in this dark hole, I do not feel my chains but feel his lips again, lips on mine, feel his hair between my fingers, dark hair scented with grass. The
accordion music vibrates in me, a song from that war that was to end all war, from the poilu’s days at Verdun
.
    We married, though no synagogue or mosque sanctified our nuptials. We married, though no one witnessed it but the stars over Paris. And for all that has happened as “the moving finger writes and having writ moves on,” I would not lure that finger back to cancel that one line
.
    Of course we should have waited, of course he should have pulled away sooner. Suffragettes have secrets I should have known, but I’d never listened to them, never asked, never read a single pamphlet. Uncle’s fears and restrictions had taught me to think of my body as a thing beneath my clothes, an evil thing to be tamed but never claimed. Armand explored it for me, with me. He played, read and described it to me as if reading a sacred scroll
.
    I never planned those long years of clandestine romance, and certainly not a secret marriage. I was travelling in two directions at once, and every magical hour with Armand became one hour stolen from my approved destiny as someone else’s wife. Every hour I spent with him became tinged with the melancholy of probable farewells, yet every hour we were together we became more essential to each other
.
    But from the vortex of contradictions that led to this resumption of the wooden-legged man’s war, from the eddying and rushing, from the headlong mix of suitable and unsuitable thoughts, there must have been a self-organizing moment in which thoughts cohered and glided to form a knot of flesh. Your body came into being in that instant, a particle of me became animate, waiting for you. Unensouled, and as yet without anger, defiance, sadness or fear. All that remained was for Allah to send you, light your life within me
.
    The girl I was then stood poised on the fulcrum of change. I follow that naive, idealistic girl as if watching another time, someone else’s life. When she comes into view, I write, hoping one word will form the next, hoping a moving pen can translate thought, memory, love, grief
.
    I sit enchained, prisoner of the present, looking back farther and farther, letting collage develop to story. Events are connected like prayer beads on a string—Subhan-allah … Subhan-allah … Subhan-allah
.

CHAPTER 7
    Tangmere, England
Tuesday, June
15, 1943
    N IGHT AIR PARTED before the nose of the Lysander, slipped around its wings. The shudder of the