The Black Madonna (12 page)

The caretaker in the sacristy was right. With dusk falling it took three presses on the old brass button in the wall which rang a bell somewhere deep inside St Joseph’s before the door was answered. And even then it was edged open only a crack by a hatchet-faced old woman dressed in a plain grey shirt and skirt who looked more like a Fury than a Sister of Mercy and told them with a scowl that the Institute was ‘
geschlossen
’. Closed.

Marcus responded with his most deferential, polite German to say they had come all the way from England to spend just a few minutes talking to Sister Galina. The result was a firm attempt by the hatchet-faced old woman to close the door in their faces, eliciting a sharp cry of pain from Nazreem. Marcus looked down and realised she had her foot in it.

‘The police have specifically requested that she give no interviews,’ the woman at the door said, still talking to Marcus in German but now glancing at Nazreem and her foot still wedged in the doorway with a strange mixture of annoyance and curiosity.

Nazreem reached out towards the woman with both hands and said suddenly: ‘In the name of the blessed virgin Maryam, mother of Isa, please do not turn us away!’ Marcus was taken aback. He was not sure that referring to Mary in the Muslim tradition as the chaste mother of a minor prophet would hold much sway with a Roman Catholic nun. But the effect of her words on him was as nothing compared to that it had on the woman in the doorway. She stood stock still, eyes fixed on Nazreem, the door opened almost wide enough for Marcus to force his way in if he had thought that would do any good. The old woman fixed her eyes long and hard on Nazreem before asking, in a thickly accented English:

‘Where are you from, my child?’

‘From … the Holy Land,’ and then, seeing the old woman squint at her as if trying to squeeze more information through her eyes, ‘from Palestine, the ancient city of Gaza.’

The old woman closed her dark wrinkled lids for a moment, bowed her head and crossed herself, then stepped back to allow them into a hallway dominated by a floor to ceiling oil painting of the Virgin ascending into Heaven, a figure swathed in blue robes, hands outstretched rising through the opening clouds.

‘Please be so good as to wait a few minutes,’ she said, again to Nazreem, again in the same accented English. By Marcus’s
reckoning
it was fully five minutes before she returned, head bowed, and said that if they would kindly follow her, Sister Galina would see them. Nazreem gave Marcus a nervous smile and followed the elderly woman up a dark stairwell with another picture of the Virgin ascending on the landing to a corridor with a series of doors on either side. She knocked on the second on the left, opened the door and ushered them in.

The room itself was also dark, with only the watery dregs of
daylight
penetrating through net curtains over a window opposite. On the wall Marcus could make out yet another picture of the Virgin, yet again shown ascending into heaven this time as if through a thunderstorm. It took a few seconds before his eyes adjusted to the dimness sufficiently for him to make out the little figure seated in an armchair in the farthest corner.

She was not at all what Marcus had been expecting. It was only now he had subconsciously imagined her as a frail, elderly woman in a nun’s habit. Instead, the woman who stood up and introduced herself as Sister Galina was a short, somewhat portly woman,
possibly
in her early forties, with mousey hair cut in a loose bob and wearing a grey skirt and cardigan, rather similar to the apparel of the older woman who had opened the door to them. She reminded him disconcertingly of a biology teacher who had taught him in his first year at senior school back in Cape Town. She rose to meet them and held out her hand. ‘Welcome to Altötting,’ she said in English in a voice that was mellifluous, deep and with a light, pleasant, almost Mediterranean lilt.

‘I’m sorry,’ Marcus said. ‘I … we thought you were a nun, a sister in holy orders.’

The gentle tone evaporated: ‘And what makes you think that is not the case,’ she said staring at him sternly, exaggerating the feeling that he was talking to a stern schoolmistress.

‘It’s just … you don’t wear religious dress, and your organisation
has an English name, but I’ve never heard of it in England.’

The dowdy little woman reseated herself in the armchair and tutted: ‘Our order does not have an English name; it is German. It merely refers to England, the country that banished our founder from its shores. Our order began as an order of exile. Mary Ward was an English Catholic girl who fled from the Protestants taking over her country in the early seventeenth century and established a house for her co-religionists in northern France.

‘We do not wear religious dress because there were times in our history when we were forced to conceal our faith. Even today there are those who think devotion to the Mother of God a blasphemy rather than a sacred duty, that only the male aspect of divinity is worthy of worship. There have always been men who believed
communities
of women should be closeted away behind locked doors. Sometimes they have called it a convent, sometimes a harem. And there have even been some,’ it was said with an unexpected twinkle in her eye, ‘who confused the two. It was an elector of Bavaria who eventually became our order’s protector. That is why, although today we have branches in many countries, we still consider here,
southern
Germany, to be our spiritual home.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Marcus, ‘I stand corrected. It’s very good of you to see us.’

‘On the contrary,’ she replied dismissing Marcus and turning towards Nazreem with a gaze filled with a suddenly childlike mixture of awe, envy, hope and longing. ‘It is a miracle that you have come to us. You who were chosen.’

‘Chosen?’ said Nazreem self-consciously.

The little woman smiled as if nothing could be more evident. ‘Of course. We are not so cloistered here that we do not read the
newspapers
, or watch the television. Sister Ursula is surely right in
thinking
you are the one who discovered the likeness of Our Lady? And these things do not happen by accident, you know. For this you were surely chosen. Tell me my child, is it true you have looked on the true image of the Mother of God?’

‘Yes, that is, no. I don’t know,’ said Nazreem awkwardly,
wrong-footed
at the awestruck tone of the little nun’s interrogation. ‘I have seen the image we found underneath a church in Gaza.’

‘An image that dated from the time of the Christian gospels?’

Nazreem bowed her head and shook it. ‘There was no opportunity
to carry out a definitive dating, but because of the location it seems almost certain that it dates back to at least the second century AD, and probably earlier …’

The nun looked at her sternly. ‘But you have doubts?’ she said. And then, ‘I am sorry. Of course you have. You are a Muslim, that is correct? You do not believe in “graven images”.’

‘Yes. But I am a scholar first.’

‘And this is why you have come here? Now?’

‘Yes … no,’ said Nazreem. ‘I believe there is a link, between the theft of the image we found in Gaza and the …’ she struggled for suitable words, ‘what happened here. The package that was
delivered
to the chapel.’

The nun let her head drop suddenly, and Marcus feared they had sent her back into some state of shock from which she had only just recovered.

‘Go on,’ she said quietly.

‘It was just a feeling, no, more than a feeling, an instinct, when we saw the report in an English paper. About the heart. So horrible, and yet now, here, in this place, the chapel, you keep hearts, hearts of dead people, like sacred relics.’

The nun was nodding, silently, her eyes uplifted now, studying the mass of contradictions playing itself out on Nazreem’s face.

‘There is a difference,’ she said at last. ‘A difference between a heart given freely, of love, after death, and a heart ripped from a living body. And not the heart alone.’

Nazreem recoiled automatically at the image conjured up by the nun’s uncompromising language.

‘What do you mean, not only the heart?’

The nun’s face contorted as if even the memory was excruciating.

‘We are nuns,’ she said. ‘We have taken vows of chastity. That does not say we do not know the bodies of men.’

Marcus’s eyes opened wide and then he involuntarily retched as he realised the implication of the nun’s statement. He glanced at Nazreem to see if she realised what was being said, but saw only a look of almost Mona Lisa-like inscrutability on her face, eyes open wide, with almost the ghostly trace of a smile about her lips. Although he was sure he was imagining that.

Otap Cevik looked up at the heavy cloud formations coming in from the west. It was going to rain, a heavy summer rain, the sort his father said they used to dream of in the parched summer of the Anatolian uplands. Otap didn’t know about that. He had never been there. He had grown up in the Saarland, but he had never felt at home there and did so even less down here in Bavaria. His religion forbade him beer and down here local life seemed to revolve around it. Beer and coffee and cakes.

All around Altötting’s great pilgrimage square, the little tourist shops that nestled at the feet of the great ecclesiastical monoliths were bringing their outdoor displays inside, pulling down shutters and closing the doors as the approaching thunderstorm brought an early dusk.

In the Wiener Kaffeehaus cake shop on the corner a large woman with a candyfloss hairdo was shovelling a final wedge of cream torte into her mouth when she spotted the swarthy-skinned man
polishing
his motorbike outside staring at her. She scowled and turned away. Otap spat on the ground to show his disdain, then put away the polishing cloth

He had no time for the fat bourgeoisie with their BMWs, their ridiculous religion and their grinning pagan pope. He had never been particularly devout as a child but as he had grown into an increasingly estranged adulthood, he had realised that Islam was a badge of his ethnicity, and he wore it with pride. All the more so now that he at last had been called to be of service.

It did not concern him that the higher purpose of what he did was not explained to him. It sufficed to know that it was indeed a higher purpose. It was not demanding work. It was more like a game, a game that gave him an adrenalin rush while putting him in no real danger. He had not even been required to break the law, except perhaps in the avoidance of motorcycle license plate
regulations
; he kept a plate in his pannier in case he was stopped when ‘on
business’; that way he could say it had simply fallen off. At worst he risked a fine. And what was that to a soldier of the Kurdish nation in exile? A soldier, the imam had hinted to him, in the tradition of the greatest Kurd of them all: Saladin, the scourge of the crusaders, the man who had turned the infidels back into the sea and recaptured Al-Quds, the city the Jews who had stolen it again called
Jerusalem
. The imam had spoken of a new Saladin, but of that Otap knew nothing. The name itself was enough to inspire him. In the name Saladin he saw a thread that led him back to the roots his parents had abandoned when they came to this miserable country for the sake of mere money.

Pretending to be a messenger for a courier company had been the easiest thing imaginable – it was a job he used to do, back in
Neunkirchen
. Why the imam had wished to deliver a special package to a Christian nun in the vile little temple of idolatry the people around here regarded as a shrine – as if it were the tomb of a prophet – he had no idea. It was not his business to ask. In the same way he had no idea why he had been told since to stake out the site, to report any unusual visitors, either to the shrine or the building where the nuns lived. He took it in turns with another soldier, who also had a bike – it made it more convincing, they had been told – if they
occasionally
were seen together. Bikers did that.

In particular he was to watch for one woman, an attractive woman; he had a photograph, a picture that had been sent
electronically
to the imam but printed out from the computer on the best quality Kodak photographic paper. He carried it in the inside pocket of his leather motorcycle jacket, so that he could take it out regularly to refresh his memory. It might almost have been a photograph of his girlfriend. In fact, he had been in a bar just the previous night – drinking hot sweet coffee – when one of the pig-like locals sweating profusely and exuding sickly beer fumes had leaned over his
shoulder
and ogled her: ‘Who’s that then, Ahmed? Your girlfriend?’ They all said ‘Ahmed’ if they didn’t know his name, as if it was some sort of generic title for Muslims.

He had pushed the man away and put the picture back in his pocket. One of the others, who had been leaning on the bar also drinking heavily, had put an arm out and grabbed him, but the man he had pushed restrained the other, saying: ‘Leave it off, Dieter, bloke’s got a pretty bird, fair enough, he doesn’t want an old fart like me giving her
the eye. That right, Ahmed? No offence, mate,’ and he had raised his glass and given him a beery smile. ‘Girl from back home, eh?’

Otap had wanted to hit him, to smack him in the face, to smash his glass and jam it in his eye, for flaunting his drunken
camaraderie
, for patronising him, for calling him ‘Ahmed’ and thinking he was a recent immigrant when he was a born German, with a German passport, except that he knew deep down, that that was a lie. His parents had hoped that he would live the lie. His parents had been fools.

But he had been told not to draw attention to himself so instead he raised his coffee cup, gave a terse smile and paid his tab and left. On the way out, standing in the doorway before he headed off for the cheap labourers’ rooming house where he had booked in for the duration of his task, he took out the photograph again and looked at it from a new perspective. A girl from back home? Hardly. There was no way the woman in the picture was a Kurd – the cheekbones were wrong, for one thing – but up until then he had assumed that, despite her jet black hair and sallow complexion, she was a German, or at least a European, Italian maybe, or Greek. The possibility that she came from further East had not occurred to him, but he had to admit now that it was possible.

Now, all of a sudden, he was certain of it. He had never really expected that this woman would cross his path – the imam had said it was possible, but not likely – and yet at this moment he was almost sure she had done precisely that: climbed out of a Volkswagen Polo and walked straight past him, her eyes unseeing, focused on the
infidels’
temples, in the company of a man, this one almost certainly a German, he had thought until he heard them speak to one another, and recognised the language as English.

He looked again at the photograph, staring hard to memorise every detail of her bone structure, the colour of her eyes. He had been told that on no account was he to make a mistake. He had watched from a distance as she and the man had gone into the little chapel. He had timed them. They were in there for nearly half an hour, then had come out, spoken to someone and then walked straight across the square to the house of the nuns. That had been the decisive factor. Whoever this girl was, whatever the imam or his distant masters required of her, it had surely to do with the package he had delivered to the nun.

There was no doubt now in his mind what he had to do. He moved into the doorway of the Kaffeehaus which had now closed and turned out its interior lights, and pulled out his mobile phone. He would ask for his orders. And then he would obey them. It was what a good soldier did.