The Black Madonna (11 page)

She looked back at him, apprehensively, then, out of instinct
covering
her head with the scarf she had until then worn loosely around her neck, walked into the sacrosanct darkness. And Marcus
realised
, all of a sudden, that in more ways than one she was crossing a threshold.

Inside it was dark. The antechapel was windowless and the walls and ceiling were painted black, or perhaps had just been blackened over the centuries by the rows of thin, smoking devotional candles that provided the only illumination. There were more paintings like those outside the building, but older: dark, sombre antique
depictions
of miraculous deliverance.

Several people knelt at prayer in a row of little pews, one of them a nun in a black habit, another a monk in a brown cassock. Beyond the pews a small door led into the sanctum sanctorum, the original ancient octagonal chapel around which everything else had been constructed.

On the other side of it a few people stood with their heads bowed, silent or mumbling prayers under their breath as they fingered rosary beads.

‘Go on in,’ Marcus whispered in Nazreem’s ear. ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to do anything. We Christians are more tolerant than our reputation.’

But she shook her head and waited for him to lead the way.

For a moment Marcus hesitated. He was at a loss to know what was going through her mind, a secular Muslim suddenly confronted by an exhibition of Roman Catholicism at its most extravagant. He wondered if she had any idea until now how much impact her find beneath the sands of Gaza might have had on these people. She had made what might have been the discovery of a lifetime, then lost it before its true potential had even been evaluated. Like a child
promised
the best present on earth only to unwrap the parcel on
Christmas
morning to find an empty box.

He knew Nazreem had never been devout, but religion was part of the tissue of her society, as it was here, in this shrine to the
religion
of the French mother she had never known. Christianity and Islam had been enemies, but were also intertwined, as they both
were with Judaism, the three ‘peoples of the book’. Who had spent centuries tearing each other apart.

Had she really gazed upon the face of the woman hundreds of millions of people believed to have been the vessel chosen by the Creator to carry His incarnation in human flesh? Had she seen – and touched – the very first image of which all others, all these
porcelain
and plastic Madonnas were just phoney imitations conjured up by imperfect imaginations? Was that what some jealous madman had snatched away from her?

Or had she simply held in her hands an early example of the
blasphemous
idolatry which her own religion preached had corrupted the word of God as told to Abraham, Allah to Ibrahim? The
intensity
he read in her face was surely that of a woman who had for so long regarded religion as little more than a badge of ethnicity
suddenly
struck by a desire to seek the truth.

They entered the chamber together. Immediately Marcus was assaulted by the warmth, not just physical, from the proximity of other people and the vast number of candles but the suffusing aura of their radiant reflection in the riot of richly worked gold and silver that adorned every facet of the tiny octagonal space. Precious
trinkets
of noble metals encrusted with gemstones hung on every wall.

In front of them, almost overwhelming in its ostentation, stood the candle-decked altar itself set into an arched alcove formed
completely
of beaten gold, with inlaid silverwork, on either side of which an almost life-size figure cast in solid silver knelt, one of an old man with a beard in a cassock whom he assumed was Saint Konrad; the other an eighteenth-century nobleman in gaiters with a perruque. Above and around the altar in the form of a giant horseshoe were caskets of silver set in golden niches and shaped like human hearts.

And then, set back in an alcove of its own, recessed above the altar, all but rendered invisible by the opulent splendour of its
surroundings
and even more so by the extraordinary cloth-of-gold robe encrusted with pearls and diamonds and dwarfed by a giant bejewelled golden crown out of all proportion to the tiny head of the figure itself, was the black Madonna of Altötting: a small statue, barely sixty centimetres high, of a woman holding a child.

Involuntarily Nazreem caught her breath and held it, as her brain tried to strip away the layers of extravagant adornment in an attempt to visualise the simple dark statue they all but concealed.
For a moment – just a moment – she could hardly believe her eyes. And then she closed her eyes, opened them and looked again with a different perspective.

‘It is so like, so very like,’ she muttered under her breath so that Marcus could barely hear. ‘And yet at the same time, so very different.

It was cold. A cold night in a hot country. But he was used to that. The extremes did not bother him. He had forsaken the soft life deliberately, to live closer to nature, to God. In the mountains and the desert the spirit of God was closer to hand, you could feel His breath in the night air and the warmth of His love in the burning sands. No one had ever said God’s love was easy to live with. Any easier than doing His will.

God’s warrior had for so long lived by proxy, pulled strings and operated the puppets in a pantomime he wrote but never watched. The metaphor was blasphemous, Like all metaphor. But it was apt. We all fall short of perfection. Particularly the incompetents on whom he was forced to rely. Now the time was at hand when he would have to soil his own hands. Soil them in order to cleanse them, to cleanse the world of blasphemy.

The cruel irony, the test sent by Allah, was that it was at moments like these when his faith itself was most challenged. Those he had considered loyal servants turned out to be slaves to lucre, men he had thought ready and willing to be martyrs had proved unworthy of the supreme sacrifice. Worse: they were prepared to betray the sacred call of their religion for something so petty as earthly
survival
. God’s chosen warrior was of different material. When the time came for him, he would be ready. But first he had to complete the work he had been put on earth to carry out; it was his duty to send others to their Maker, while delaying that glorious day for himself.

The thought of the man whose tortured screams had so recently sounded in his ears tormented his soul. Not the man’s death nor the manner of it. That had been fitting: a suitable punishment for a coward, traitor and apostate. But the wretch had betrayed both his spiritual master and his religion. A man thought to be a loyal soldier of Islam, who had provided materiel for the martyrs of Madrid and London, had turned out to be a venal turncoat. Worse: he had turned his back on the true God for the sake of an infernal creed.

Strapping explosives to his blood-soaked corpse, putting him behind the wheel with a brick on the accelerator and pointing him at the Zionist butchers, had been a fate too good even for the carrion he had become. He had served in death better than in life. His severed body parts would have conveyed the most direct of messages to the abominable incarnation of idolatry.

And perhaps the vengeance he had wrought would perform a miracle on the heart of a lapsed daughter of Allah: that the
punishment
of the wicked would convince her that the ways of her fathers were the ways of righteousness, and Western learning the province of false gods. Perhaps she would see the foolishness of her ways. He did not really believe it, but he nurtured the hope. To take the life of a fellow Muslim was an evil, even when necessary.

He hoped with all his heart, therefore, that he would be relieved of the burden of beheading Nazreem Hashrawi.

Outside, in the bright afternoon sunlight which seemed such an antithesis to the darkness of the shrine, Nazreem stood blinking and dazed. In the end he had almost to drag her away from
contemplation
of the little wooden figure, so little of which was actually visible beneath the gilded ornamentation that smothered the thing.

Eventually she lifted her head to him and said: ‘There is so much I don’t understand. What are all the things around the altar, the things that looked like urns. In the shapes of hearts.’

‘Ah, yes, those,’ Marcus had replied, nodding in affirmation. ‘That’s what they are. Just what they look like. Urns. For hearts.’

‘Human hearts?’

‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s an old practice in certain parts of the Catholic world. Something to do with getting as close as possible to the sacred in death.’

In the distance dark clouds grumbled on the horizon; it looked like a summer storm was moving in from the Alps. For the first time since they had arrived in Germany, Marcus felt a bit of a chill. He pulled up the collar of his jacket.

‘Austria’s Habsburg emperors used to have most of their internal organs removed and placed in urns around their sarcophagi. When Zita, widow of the last emperor, died, she was buried in the family vault in Vienna but they took out her heart and placed it alongside that of her husband in a Benedictine monastery in Switzerland. I think that one had a “black Madonna” too, come to think of it.’

Nazreem was staring at him with an expression somewhere between mystification and disbelief. ‘They were still doing this, here in Europe, just a few hundred years ago?’

‘A bit more recently than that. Zita only died in 1989, if I
remember
rightly.’

Nazreem stared at him as if she thought he might be joking.

‘I know. You find it bizarre,’ said Marcus. ‘So do I.’

She shook her head: ‘It’s not that, it’s just … it’s uncanny … do you think … that there’s a connection?’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. It seems a bit unlikely that whoever cut out some Islamic extremist’s heart would have sent it here as a gift to the Virgin Mary.’

‘For a Muslim it would be a terrible punishment. But then, maybe it was intended to be a terrible punishment.’

Marcus gave her a puzzled look. She was losing him again.

‘I wouldn’t have thought people in the Arab world would have known about things like this.’

But Nazreem was shaking her head. ‘Today, no. It is blasphemy. But it was not always so in my part of the world. A long time ago …’ her voice trailed off. Then she looked up at him: ‘The ancient Egyptians would have understood. They would have understood very well indeed.’

Marcus blinked, taken aback for a second and then all of a sudden an image came flooding back in his mind, from the treasures of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. ‘Of course, the Canopic jars!’

Nazreem nodded: ‘For the vital organs of the pharaohs. There were four, with different heads, one human, one monkey, one jackal and one crocodile – one each for the stomach, the liver, the spleen and the intestines.’

‘But not the heart?’

‘Not the heart. Only later they took that out, and more often than not they fed it to the pharaoh’s cats. But then the Egyptians didn’t understand the function of the heart. Or the brain. They thought the consciousness was located in the stomach.’

Marcus gave a little laugh: ‘I have friends like that.’

But Nazreem wasn’t in the mood for jokes. She was silent. The clouds were growing closer. A pair of big black rooks landed beneath the linden trees and began pecking at the remains of a hot dog. Around the chapel the two women with wooden crosses on their backs continued their separate silent circumambulations.

Nazreem turned to Marcus and said: ‘We need to speak to the nun. The one who received the … the package.’

‘That may not be easy.’

‘We have to try. Go on, you speak German better than I do.’

Marcus shrugged. To the left of the chapel’s main entrance was
a door marked
Sakristie
. On a table next to it was a pile of leaflets with a picture of an old man with a beard and a halo. Marcus lifted one and glanced at it: it was the brief life story in English, German, French and Italian, of the ubiquitous Saint Konrad. According to the text Konrad of Parzham had been beatified in 1930 by Pope Pius XI and elevated to the sainthood only four years later. But as far as Marcus could tell his claim to sanctity was little more than having been the porter here at the shrine in Altötting. Just working here apparently could be a passport to heaven. He went over to the door and knocked on it. A man’s voice beckoned him in.

He opened the door to find a middle-aged man in a housecoat, presumably the successor to Saint Konrad, standing in the corner looking up at a small black and white screen that was a
closed-circuit
television link to the inside of the chapel. Marcus realised he had not noticed the camera.

‘
Kann ich Ihnen helfen
?’ the man asked. Can I help you?

Marcus summoned up his German, relieved to find it less rusty than he recalled from his South African schooldays, and told the man they were interested in speaking to one of the nuns. The man gave him a look as if he had already anticipated which one.

‘Not a reporter, are you?’ he asked.

Marcus shook his head, suddenly understanding that they were obviously not the first to try to speak to the woman.

‘Poor old Sister Galina’s had about enough, I can tell you. We’ve already had the police. The boys from Munich.’

Marcus nodded his head. ‘Yes, I’m sure. A terrible business.’

‘So I’m not wrong then,’ said the man, with the smug
self-assurance
of someone who had known it all along: ‘That’s what you want to talk about. The incident.’

Marcus decided there was no point in avoiding the truth,
especially
if it was so obvious. ‘Yes.’

The man shook his head. ‘Well. I won’t ask why but I doubt anyone will see you. You need to go over there,’ he gestured towards the corner of the square. ‘Down there, on the right,’ he said. ‘You can’t miss it. St Joseph’s, the little church. That’s where you’ll find the institute.’

‘Institute?’

‘Institut der Englischen Fräulein. That’s who you’re looking for if you want to speak to Sister Galina.’

‘The “English misses”,’ Marcus repeated queryingly.

‘That’s what they’re called. Over there in the corner. You’d best get a move on. Like as not they won’t answer the door after dark.’

The building turned out to be an eighteenth-century church in a side street leading onto the main square.

‘Who are these people then?’ asked Nazreem. ‘They are English? Do you know of them.’

Marcus gave her a blank look. ‘Quite frankly, I’ve never heard of them, but I told you, I’m no expert on the Catholic Church.’

‘But England is Protestant, no?’

‘Yes, mostly anyway.’

‘And they are Catholic.’

‘Yes.’

‘So?’

‘So at least there must be a fair chance they speak English.’

Compared to most of the other ecclesiastical architecture in Altötting, the church of St Joseph was relatively modest. A plaque on a door to one side, however, identified it indeed as the Institut der Englischen Fräulein.