The Black Madonna (8 page)

‘Wait a minute,’ said Marcus, trying to calm her down and at the same time taking in the implication. ‘You think this really could be a picture of the Virgin Mary done from life?’ He found it hard to keep the incredulity out of his voice. Most Madonna figures were mediaeval, although he vaguely thought he had heard of one or two dating from the dark ages.

The waiter appeared to clear the pickles and bring the main courses. He looked disappointedly at Nazreem’s half-nibbled
pappadum
but set out a tempting array of dishes on the plate warmers in front of them. Marcus helped himself though he could not help being annoyed that the arrival of the food had disrupted Nazreem’s chain of thought. She had sunk back into herself, taken just a small portion of chicken and rice and was pushing it around on her plate. Then, just as he was trying to think of a way to bring her out of it again, she leaned forward and looked him straight in the eyes, asking in a quiet voice:

‘Marcus, would you call yourself a religious person?’

He was taken aback. Religion was a topic they had never
discussed
, not on a personal level at least, only insofar as the subject permeated the politics of the Middle East, as a denominator of race and politics rather than a matter of conscience.

‘No. Not really.’

‘But you are Christian.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘I suppose so, culturally at least.’

‘And a Roman Catholic?’

‘No, not at all, more a sort of lapsed Calvinist, really.’

‘That is a schism, a sect, like the Shi’ites? You must forgive me, I am not very aware of these things. It is why I need advice. That means Protestant?’

‘Yes, absolutely. Sort of the original Protestants, you might say: after John Calvin. In my case, it’s a South African thing. A lot of the Boer settlers who went out there were Dutch Calvinists. Bigoted bastards, most of them.’

‘These are your own people you are talking about.’

He gave a little laugh: ‘In a way. Ancestors maybe, but things change – we evolve, you know, even white men. That’s what I write about. Remember?’

‘I’m sorry, I know. It’s just that, out there – at home – things are different. It is not so easy sometimes, to criticise your own people, even when they do terrible things.’

She looked around her, but no one was paying them any
attention
. Marcus picked up her meaning. Britain’s Muslim
community
had been shocked and damaged by the discovery that the four young men who had carried out the July 2005 suicide bombings that killed fifty-two Londoners were from second-generation immigrant families. But Nazreem knew only too well what it was like to have people you knew to be serious, kind, sensible human beings turn themselves into suicide bombers on the promise of martyrdom.

‘Do Protestants believe in the Virgin Mary? The way the
Catholics
do, who call her the Mother of God?’

Marcus took a forkful of curry and a swig of cold lager to chase the heat: ‘No,’ he said. ‘That is, I mean, yes, sort of. We – they – believe she existed all right and was the mother of Jesus.’

‘But for you Jesus was not just a prophet, as the Muslims believe, he was also a god, I thought.’

‘Well, yes, the son of God, anyway, although it’s sort of supposed to be the same thing. Somehow.’

Nazreem looked at him questioningly:

‘So Mary is the wife of God? Or the mother?’

Marcus took another sip of cold Cobra. He hadn’t been
expecting
a theological debate: ‘It’s not quite like that. Well, I suppose it is and it isn’t. It’s all to do with the Holy Trinity, the three-in-one. God the Father and God the Son are the same. Only different. And then there’s the Holy Ghost.’

‘A ghost? Like a dead person?’

‘No, quite the contrary, or sort of. It’s also called the Holy Spirit, the third part of the Trinity.’

‘But not the mother? Or the wife, or whatever?’

‘Eh, no. I mean, it’s complicated. Didn’t you learn any of this at school, or from your mother at least?’

‘No. The only thing we are taught about other religions in Muslim schools is that they are wrong. My mother, you must remember, died when I was very young. I was brought up by my father’s family. In deference to her wishes, they gave me an education, but it was an Arab education: I know about Jesus – we call him Isa – who was a prophet, and his martyrdom. And the legend of his virgin birth, but not these Christian things: about who is related to whom. It all sounds like … do you say “incest”?’

Marcus spluttered into his beer: ‘No. I don’t and I don’t advise you to either, but I know what you mean. Look, I’m not the person to explain any of this to you. You need a theologian: a Catholic one. Has this got something to do with the theft from the museum, the picture of the Madonna? Do you seriously think it might have been the original?’

‘You mean there is an original?’

Marcus shrugged: ‘There is a legend that the earliest image of the Virgin Mary, the first icon if you like, was painted by one of the apostles, St Luke, on her kitchen table?’

‘This is true?’

‘I doubt it, but that’s the legend. There are pictures of him
painting
her, from the Middle Ages. There’s a particularly famous one by some Dutch artist or other. In a gallery in Munich, I think. Anyway that’s why St Luke is the patron saint of artists.’

‘Strange. Sometimes I think Christianity is very strange.’

‘Yes, well, some parts of it seem pretty strange to me too at times. But like they say, it takes all sorts.’

Nazreem gave him a look that implied she wasn’t sure about that: ‘Tell me, in this painting, what colour is she?’

‘What colour? Mary, you mean? White of course. She probably looked exactly like a fifteenth-century Dutchwoman, most likely one of the artist’s mistresses.’

‘Not black?’

‘No,’ Marcus almost laughed. Marcus thought of the Afrikaner
women of his childhood who wore big hats to protect their pale skins from the sun that even after four generations their genes had not adapted to accommodate. Dutch-descended women who would have been horrified that anyone might think they had even a drop of Negroid blood in their veins. And then something occurred to him:

‘There is a famous black Mary in a church in Soweto, though, painted in the 1970s.’

Nazreem waved the comment away: ‘But this is not something ancient, more a modern statement, I think, political correctness?’

Marcus visualised the fine mural on the church wall, and its poignant expression of universal humanity and suffering, seemingly timeless but also so obviously a product of its time and place, the features of the mother and child so obviously African.

‘I suppose so,’ he said.

‘But there are other black Madonnas, aren’t there? Real ones.’

‘Well, you could say …’ he was about to question what she meant by ‘real’ in the context of religious iconography, but Nazreem was not listening.

‘Old ones, worshipped for hundreds of years.’

‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you?’

Nazreem nodded, her eyes big, dark and fiercely concentrated, with not a trace of a smile on her face. She was serious all right. More serious than he had ever seen her before.

‘Yes, yes there are. Quite a few of them in fact. In Poland, Spain, places like that.’

‘And people make pilgrimages to see them.’

‘Yes, I suppose they do. The late Pope John Paul II had a lot to do with it of course. He was very keen on the cult of Mary. And then there was the black Madonna of Czestochowa …’

‘Jemster … what?’

‘Czestochowa,’ he repeated, spelling it out. ‘It’s in Poland,
pronounced
“Chen-stok-ova”. Lech Walesa, the leader of the free trades union Solidarity back in the eighties used to wear a lapel pin with her image. He believed – and probably the pope did too – that the virgin, in that particular incarnation, would save them from
communism
in the end.’

‘And they think it worked?’

‘Well maybe it did. Or maybe just the fact that people believed it did the trick.’

‘Trick?’

‘Trick, miracle, whatever you want to call it. Sometimes believing in something helps make it happen.’

‘Sometimes. Maybe.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment, then took a forkful of chicken curry and washed it down with a swig of the wine, and said: ‘I need to see her.’

‘What? A painting of the Madonna? Why?’

‘One of the figures, one of the oldest ones, the very oldest. Why are they black, when the later pictures show her as white?’

Marcus was taken aback. ‘I don’t know. I think the reason most people accept is that they have spent centuries wreathed in holy smoke.’

Nazreem gave him a quizzical look as if to see if he was joking.

‘Candles. Incense and stuff. Spend a couple of centuries in an airless room with tallow burning all around you and you’d be pretty black too.’

Her eyes narrowed.

‘I’m not exactly white.’

Marcus sighed. The face across the table from him was an almost perfect golden café crème, the sort of complexion people not born with it might spend fortunes trying to achieve. The sort of face people looked at. The way the group of men who had just come in through the door were looking at her now. Except not like that at all.

And certainly not the way the waiter they were speaking to had begun to look at her as he made his way deliberately towards them, ignoring a diner at another table who tried to catch his attention. All of a sudden Marcus was aware that a second waiter had materialised just behind them and had put his hands on the back of Nazreem’s chair.

‘Are you all right?’ she said, catching the sudden switch in his attention. Then she became aware of the man standing behind her. ‘Is something wrong?’

Something was very wrong. The waiter was paying no attention to anyone but the men at the door, as if he was waiting for some sort of instruction. One of them, with a thin beard and dark sunglasses, was suddenly familiar. Marcus watched him put his hand inside his jacket; it didn’t look as if he was reaching for his wallet.

He grabbed Nazreem by the elbow and pulled her to her feet, shouting ‘Run!’ as he pushed her past the waiter at his elbow towards
the kitchen. The waiter thrust out an arm to stop her. Marcus pushed him hard on the shoulder sending him backward towards his
colleague
. The man behind him – and those behind him – lunged forward. Without thinking Marcus seized the cast-iron platter on the table, still hot but no longer sizzling, and hurled it with its cargo of steaming prawns in chilli and mustard into his face. The man howled and reeled backwards. Behind him there was pandemonium as his friends recoiled, tipping over tables, sending the other diners into screams of outrage that turned to terror at the sight of the gun in his hands.

Marcus pushed Nazreem through the swing door into the kitchen, into a scene of steam, burning gas rings and clattering pans. One of the cooks rushed forward to block their way. Marcus elbowed him in the face and pushed Nazreem past. Ali, the proprietor, was
standing
by a large saucepan with a ladle at his lips: ‘Professor? Wot the …?’

His words were broken off by the commotion building in the restaurant. ‘Trouble, mate. I’m sorry. Not our fault. The back door, where is it?’ Marcus thrust two twenty-pound notes into his hand. The chef clutching his nose stared at them a split second then at the man with the beard and gun forcing his way into the kitchen.

In a second Ali had taken the money out of Marcus’s hand, pushed over two twenty-kilo sacks of Basmati rice into the gunman’s path and flung a ladle of sauce at him. Dragging Nazreem behind him, Marcus dashed for the open rear door, pulling pots and pans off the shelves to litter the floor behind him. As they gasped the damp night air they heard the voice of one of the waiters: ‘Boss, no, they must not get away. The imam commands!’

Amid the bedlam Ali’s reply was wholly unmistakable: ‘Not in my fucking kitchen, he doesn’t.’

‘I can tell you one thing,’ said Marcus as they ran down the alleyway behind the curry house, ‘whoever that lot were, it wasn’t Mossad, not unless they’ve started taking orders from a different set of clergy.’

Nazreem said nothing. She was panting, out of breath and clearly in shock. The night was cold after the heat of the day and the
thunderstorm
that followed, and she was shivering. From behind them the noise of clanging kitchen implements and shouting voices grew louder. It would only be a matter of minutes at most before there were people on their tail.

The curry house kitchen emptied into a warren of old artisan’s yards, one darkened shed proclaimed itself a computer
graphics
workshop, another, lit from within, had adverts for Bollywood movies on the windows, another was semi-derelict with rusted meat hooks hanging from collapsing rafters. Outsize commercial wheelie bins overflowed with pungent kitchen waste and debris from
cardboard
packaging, most of it reduced to mush by the recent rainstorm. Marcus trod in something squishy and organic and tried to ignore it.

Angry shouts from the depths of the kitchen behind them were followed by an ear-splitting clatter and something that might or might not have been a gunshot. He grabbed Nazreem and pulled her after him, through the yard and out into the street, at right angles to Brick Lane, and then right again, away from the busy thoroughfare where more of the Beard’s best friends might be waiting in front of the restaurant.

The streets were darker here, no garish shop fronts or pestering restaurant touts to get in the way. The little brick houses, most of them 300 or more years old, allowed brief glimpses through partly shuttered windows of Georgian interiors, some original and
dilapidated
, others expensively restored. There was a pub a few doors away but the doors were shut and there was little noise coming out. Then the bright lights of Brick Lane again, but if they were to get back to the car they would have to cross it.

‘Wait,’ he told Nazreem. ‘I’ll go first. The restaurant’s farther up and they’ll be looking for a couple. If nobody comes at me, wait until I’ve turned the corner and follow me.’ With more than a little
apprehension
he strode out into the busy street, and crossed it without incident. A single man was an unpromising target for the curry touts; besides, most people’s attention was diverted by the
commotion
. As he slipped around the corner into Fournier Street, he halted in horror. Almost immediately Nazreem was at his side.

Marcus motioned her back against the wall and gestured with his head. She followed his gaze and saw the car, as mercilessly
illuminated
as an ageing model on a catwalk. Banks of floodlights had been turned on to light up the soaring tower of Christ Church picking out its glistening white stone like some giant ivory dagger against the night sky, but also making it totally impossible to get to the car without being noticed. Then his heart sank further when he realised it would do them little good even if they could. The Peugeot was listing unnaturally and thanks to the brilliant illumination he could clearly see the reason: both of the offside tyres had been slashed.

He cursed himself for a fool. Obviously if they had traced them to Brick Lane, they must have somehow followed them in the car. And made certain they would not get away in it.

In the distance a police siren sounded, coming closer. From around the corner in the bright lights of Brick Lane came screaming in Bengali, then the one word repeated in English: ‘Murder, Murder.’

Marcus pulled Nazreem towards him, out of the spill of light, instinctively flattening them into the high arched doorway of the building they were standing against, as if in the hope that it might open and offer them sanctuary. But the door was firmly locked. He looked up and realised where they were: outside the mosque that had once been a synagogue and before it a church. From the wall above his head an ancient sundial protruded, above it a two-word Latin inscription: ‘
Umbra sumus
’. We are shadows.

All of a sudden the spotlights were extinguished and the darkness swallowed them.