The Black Madonna (4 page)

There was a thin, faintly antiseptic smell in the still, clammy air, an indication that the minions had done their job well, washing down and swilling away into the grating in the corner every last trace of the blood and urine. The man in the long robes wrinkled his nose slightly. At least some things got done properly.

He was angry, although you would not have known it. He made a point of repressing outward signs of emotion, except when they were needed for particular effect. They were to be used sparingly, to be appreciated all the more because of the rarity of their appearance. He refused to express emotion when he was on his own. Just as he refused to tolerate weakness, incompetence or treachery in others.

But then tolerance was not something those who knew him well would ever have accused him of. There were many, many, willing to lay down their lives for him, many more who regarded him as a holy man. That was not a claim he made for himself. He considered himself devout, in his own way, but more than anything else he was a pragmatist, a believer in the power of the possible: that anything was possible, if you wanted it badly enough. And would let nothing stand in your way.

He had never let anything stand in his way. Not since he had been a child in the dust of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, growing up to loath the man who had murdered his parents, and rejoicing when the hated dictator went to the gallows. But he had also quickly come to despise those who had deposed Saddam, then ground the ruins of his country to dust to satisfy their oil lust and impose their so-called democracy.

He had grown up in Samarra, the city of the two shrines of the tenth and eleventh imams, second city in the province of Salah ad-Din. The name was that of the great twelfth-century warrior who
had expelled the crusaders from Palestine but it also meant ‘
rightness
of religion’. The heathen Saddam had tried to usurp that name for himself. How much more fitting that instead he had inherited it amongst his followers, a name that he hoped would one day yet again echo in history.

All things were achieved only by God’s blessing, but also by the will of man, doing His work. That was what would be remembered in history. Yet sometimes artefacts from history could also make an impact on the present: artefacts such as the one that lay on the table in front of him in the place of the box of bloodstained surgical instruments.

The man they called Saladin sneered at the supposedly sacred image in front of him. He was familiar with the dolls and baubles of the idolatrous but still could not suppress an instinctive
revulsion
in their presence. He paced slowly around it, examining the quality of the workmanship, which was competent if unremarkable; this was not an object whose value relied on its artistic merits. Nor was it made of valuable material, or richly adorned. It was precious for what people believed it to be, it was an idol pure and simple. A fetish. A work of the devil.

There was no God but God – even the Christians claimed to believe this, they were like the Jews had once been, people of the Book, children of Ibrahim. Yet they had committed the ultimate blasphemy, the one which Mohammed himself (peace be upon him) had foreseen. He had forbidden the creation of any image or likeness of himself, whereas they had confused a prophet with the deity, and made images of his martyrdom to worship. Images of their man/god hanging on a cross, rightful worship of the one God surrounded by pagan rituals. And then this most absurd of fantasies, to take Miriam, mother of their minor prophet, exalt her to the status of ‘Mother of God’, to make images of her and worship her too. And these – these idolatrous crusaders – dared to claim the high moral ground for themselves and deride the children of Islam as infidel barbarians.

He reached out his hand, reluctantly, and ran it across the figure on the table. It was a simple piece of wood that had once been
coloured
. There were little more than traces of the original pigment still adhering to the surface: a hint of palest blue here, presumably to indicate robes of some sort, white here – a trim perhaps, it was hard to be sure.

And black of course. On the face and hands. Black. That was the worst of it. For if half of what the man who had betrayed his faith and his fathers had said was true – before he died like the swine he had become – then this thing was not just a fetish of foolish unbelievers, an obscene idol that merited little more than disgust or destruction; it represented something far worse. A blasphemy beyond belief.
Evidence
of a crime against God Himself.

For all his attempts to control it, the emotion he felt now was real: a deep rolling anger that gnawed at his innards, an anger that was fused with a hatred that was both visceral and intellectual, and focused, clearly and coldly, on the object in the centre of the table.

He turned on his heel and went over to the metal locker in the corner, took a key from his pocket and opened it. Having found the implement he required, he closed the door again and turned to the table. Briefly he fingered the figure on the table, rubbing his finger and thumb roughly over what appeared to be the face, as if he might rub off some of the vestigial traces of pigment.

Then, with a sudden violence, his face contorted into an
expression
of pure and holy hatred, he lifted high above his head a meat cleaver and buried it with a resounding, wood-splitting crash into the face of the Virgin Mary.

It should have been a day like any other in the sleepy little Bavarian town of Altötting: a day full of clerical routine, quiet mediation and the contemplation of miracles.

As she walked across the expanse of neatly mown green lawns between the great churches towards the tiny chapel in their middle, Sister Galina paused for a while, as was her habit on warm days, in the shade of the ancient grove of linden trees, and felt at peace with the world. Her place in the hierarchy of Mother Church was lowly, but the job was special. Her place of work was the oldest Christian building in Germany and one of the country’s most sacred shrines.

Compared to the monumental religious buildings from the
fifteenth
, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries that surrounded it, the tiny Chapel of Grace that gave the vast square its name was almost comically out of scale. Architecturally it tended towards the absurd: the pointy roof sat on the little octagonal chapel like a witch’s hat and the external canopy that ran all the way round looked more in keeping with a bus shelter or some arcade in which bad artists hawked their works to tourists.

Close up that impression was reinforced: all the way around, fixed to the walls and even inside the canopy roof, were paintings. Almost without exception they were works of no value at all from an
artistic
point of view, but that was not the point. These paintings were not for sale; they were offerings. Each and every one of them, from the ancient, weathered, oil-painted wooden panels to the childish crayon drawings on A4 paper in a supermarket frame, was a
testimony
to the miraculous power of prayer and divine intervention. And that in itself was more than enough to make them special.

Sister Galina felt in the pockets of her habit among the rosary beads and her hand-carved crucifix, for the key to the little chapel,
and smiled as she opened the door. It was dark inside, for the tiny windows had mostly been blocked; the light of day was not
encouraged
to penetrate a place which held such ancient treasures.

The familiar smell of old incense and doused candles greeted her, rich, pungent and slightly acrid. The nave of the chapel, a later
eighteenth-century
addition, was, like the canopy outside, adorned with pictures donated by pilgrims. Beyond, behind a dark screen was the tiny octagonal chamber that was the oldest part of the church, first built for the baptism of heathen warlords in the first half of the eighth century, in the days when Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, was battling the
Saracens
in Spain and Christendom was on the verge of collapse.

The original font had long gone, of course. What made Altötting special, what attracted the tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over Germany, the rest of Europe, even the world, in planes, trains, buses, coaches, cars and even on foot, was the presence of the Mother of God. Or rather, Sister Galina corrected herself with a smile for she had almost erred on the side of heresy, Her miraculous image. The little seventy-centimetre crude wooden carving of the Holy Virgin had been brought to Altötting, nobody knew from where, some time in the early fourteenth century, but its cult dated from 1489 when a three-year-old child believed drowned had miraculously come back to life when brought before it. Since then the legend of miracles attributed to the statue had spread like a bush fire to make Altötting the German-speaking world’s prime pilgrimage site dedicated to the cult of Mary, visited annually by up to 300,000 believers. The
Altötting
cult had reached its climax not in the Middle Ages but on the 15th of August, Ascension Day, 2008, when Benedict XVI, the first German pope in nearly 1,000 years, and coincidentally a local lad by birth, returned to his homeland to bestow on Altötting a papal Golden Rose, one of the highest honours of the Catholic Church.

It was not Sister Galina’s job to attend to the Blessed Virgin; she was too lowly to be allowed the job of dusting around Her, let alone cladding Her in any of the vast wardrobe of silver, gold and
jewel-encrusted
robes accumulated over the centuries.

She bowed her head in the direction of the holy image before turning to open the door on the right which led into the sacristy. This was the mundane part of the chapel, a little room furnished in relatively modern style, that is with the dull functionality of the
late twentieth century. It contained a desk, two chairs, filing cabinets and, as Sister Galina demonstrated by clicking a switch, even had electric light. The only obvious ecclesiastical item in the room was a large silver chalice which stood on the desk next to several heavy, leather-clad books.

She sat down at the desk and opened the uppermost ledger at the bookmark she had placed within its pages yesterday. Then she opened the desk drawer and took out the expensive italic fountain pen kept specifically for the purpose of making entries in the ledger.

It was not exactly state-of-the-art, but even a nun younger than Sister Galina brought up on the cusp of the twenty-first century would still regret the day – possibly not far off, now that the order had its own website and email address – when even tasks such as this were computerised. It would not exactly be sacrilege but a break with the past, with centuries of tradition. Here above all else
tradition
mattered.

It was Sister Galina’s task, although she thought of it more as an honour, to record the letters, prayers and offerings sent by grateful recipients of divine mercy. She would note down, as her colleagues and predecessors had done for hundreds of years, the names of those offering their thanks to the Madonna, the city, town, district or even foreign land they came from, what their prayer to her had been and in what way it had been answered.

Some pilgrims whose prayers had been answered, often months or years afterwards – and sometimes with the intervention of modern medicine rather than by instantaneous intercession, but deemed their cure miraculous nonetheless – came back to leave offerings. There were crutches no longer needed piled by the door. Others, following an ancient, if somewhat grotesque, tradition, sent
replicas
of their formerly afflicted organs. The custom had begun with mediaeval princes, some of whom had donated near life-size silver images of themselves. The greatest among them had obtained
permission
for their hearts, after death, to be encased in elaborate gold or silver urns and entombed in niches in the wall around the sacred statue. No fewer than twenty-two members of the Wittelsbach clan, Bavaria’s ancient ruling family, had their hearts removed after death and enshrined in the Chapel of Grace, the most recent among them Antonia of Luxemburg, Crown Princess of Bavaria, who had died in 1954.

Their modern imitators were more often reduced to sending plastic models, almost invariably made in China: little hearts or arms or legs hung from the ancient timbers of the outside canopy like the carnage from some massacre of the puppets, until the
elements
faded the colour to a grimy pink as if drained of blood. Other grateful supplicants more prosaically sent cheques for the
maintenance
of the shrine and continuance of the brothers’ work. They were appreciated none the less.

Over the centuries the gifts showered upon Altötting’s shrine were such that a special treasury had been set up within the great fifteenth-century Foundation Church nearby to house the most valuable gifts of gold and silver. Only a very few of the most sacred or historically important remained in the inner sanctum with the Virgin Herself.

Sister Galina ran her eye with benign interest over the last few entries: ‘From Uschi Bernstein, Halle, thanks to the Holy Mother for restoring my husband to health following a heart attack’,
donation
: photograph of smiling pensioner in jogging suit. ‘From Gabi Urkamp, Regensburg, grateful thanks to the Queen of Heaven for recovery from breast cancer.’ ‘From Sylvie Schabowski, Munich, super thanks for getting me through my school exams.’ Sister Galina smiled; nothing was too insignificant for the attention of the Mother of God.

She was just wondering what today’s post would bring when there was a knock on the door, a loud knock, the sort that
suggested
a more businesslike attitude than the usual hushed reverence demonstrated by the faithful. ‘Enter,’ she said in a voice that she hoped was both firm and gentle. She was not expecting the
apparition
which confronted her. Rather than being opened gently, as was usual, the door was flung open rudely and Sister Galina found herself staring in shock at a faceless figure in black. She pushed back her chair and stood up. Sisters in holy orders were not used to unannounced visitations from leather-clad motorcycle messengers in visored helmets.

‘Delivery,’ said the muffled voice, as the figure produced a
weatherproof
silver bag and dumped it unceremoniously on the desk next to the leather-bound ledger, nudging the ornate chalice aside. A Protestant, Sister Galina decided.

‘Sign here.’

‘Which company are you from?’ asked Sister Galina, removing the top of her fountain pen for the first time that day and
fastidiously
inscribing her name on the grubby piece of paper proffered. ‘Not DHL or Fedex? I don’t recognise the uniform.’

‘Private,’ came the gruff reply from the already retreating back. The door closed behind him and within seconds the nun could hear the growl of a powerful motorbike starting up outside. Funny that she hadn’t heard it arriving. She also realised that the paper she had signed had been taken away without her receiving a copy. Sloppy. A sign of the times.

She opened the desk drawer again and took out a long silver paper knife with the familiar Altötting heraldic depiction of the Madonna and Child in yellow and red enamel on the handle. The blade, however, was not sharp enough to open the thick
weatherproof
bag. A pair of scissors did the trick.

Sister Galina cut carefully along one corner. There was something about this that made her uneasy. Call it superstition, or intuition; the Queen of Heaven moved in mysterious ways. There was no
indication
to whom the parcel had been addressed. Possibly that had been on the receipt so rudely thrust under her nose and taken away again; if so, she had not noticed. She assumed, since it had been brought directly to the sacristy of the Chapel of Grace, that it was intended as a gift to the Madonna, although normally items
dedicated
to the shrine were not received directly at the sacristy, unless pilgrims themselves left them.

She wondered if she was wise to open it, if it might not be better left to someone else, but then quickly decided that under the
circumstances
she had little choice. It was always possible there was a covering note of explanation inside.

There was not. Instead, inside the bag was another, black, made of some thick rubbery material, heat-sealed. Whatever was inside was small, irregularly shaped. It felt somehow distantly familiar as if it was something she ought to recognise, bizarrely out of context.

Carefully she took the scissors again and cut along one side of the rubber bag, near the seal mark. Almost immediately her senses were assailed by a strange, sweet-sour smell, like something that had been left in the fridge too long. She looked inside the rubber bag and saw that whatever it contained was further wrapped in a normal
transparent
plastic bag. Gingerly she extracted it by one corner, wishing
all of a sudden that the sacristy had a pair of the rubber gloves they used in the convent for washing-up.

The object in the plastic bag was fleshy, lobed, and she realised with an unmistakable creeping horror, bloody. But that horror was as nothing to that which exploded an instant later as she realised what she was holding in her hand. Immediately, convulsively, Sister Galina committed an act of wholly unintentional sacrilege: she threw up into the silver chalice.

Lying on the ancient ledgers of donations to the Mother of God, was a bleeding heart – not the idealised sacred image that glowed pink and perfect on images of Christ – but the authentic organ,
assymetrical
and caked in dried brown gore. Worse was what lay next to it, shrivelled, obscene and almost unidentifiable at first glance: the severed sexual organs of an adult human male.