Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  I had by that time read the account in The New York Times of the Abune’s misadventures the day before in New York City. It seems that he attended a dinner meeting at a restaurant with some church dignitaries and as they came and went, protesters threw eggs and rocks, and windows were broken. That gave chilling credibility to the threatening phone calls, but it also suggested to me what I later learned to be true, that the Abune was not interested in a low profile and discretion. On the contrary, he seemed eager to confront the protesters and receive their abuse. “My office,” he would later say in The Washington Post, “is not to run away. It is to listen, to be insulted. . . .” I called the Abune’s Princeton thesis advisor, my friend Kathleen McVey, and asked her what kind of person he was; would he be reasonable? Her answer was academically round-about, but my interpretation was, no, or at least probably not. So I scrapped the idea of the party at my house.

  On Wednesday, mid-morning, Black Entertainment Television was setting up their cameras for the press preview just outside the temporary exhibition space. I was in the parlor of the Walters house, all by myself, awaiting the Abune and his entourage, who were flying into Baltimore-Washington International Airport from LaGuardia. Howard White had rented a van to pick them up. I had no idea what to expect, but although I was not optimistic, I could not then have imagined how bad things would get, and how quickly.

  I can still see them getting out of the van, slowly: six bearded men all in black with bulbous black hats of wrapped fabric shaped like large, squat balls. They were followed by a single bearded man all in white with a fabric hat shaped like an inverted cone. And finally, there was a man in a cheap reddish-brown business suit. His Beatitude, of course, was the one in white and the man in the suit I was led to believe was his brother and his spokesman. Howard White was the last to leave the van and when he did, it was obvious that those half-dozen manuscripts I expected to see were in fact just one manuscript. It was large and carried by one of the Archbishops. It had no box or wrapping of any sort, but it did have a man’s belt tightly buckled around it. He carried it by that belt tab.

  They all came into the parlor and we sat there together in a circle, in silence. I offered coffee and tea and asked about the other manuscripts, the ones we had built exhibition cases for and that were now open and awaiting their content. No reply was the reply, which was typical of our non-exchanges going forward. I explained to the “brother-spokesman” that the press preview was about to begin, but that I first wanted to give His Beatitude and Your Eminences (the six in black) a brief tour of the exhibition. So we processed, single file and very slowly and solemnly with the Abune at the back, through the Walters house, then though the metal security door that leads directly into the third floor of the Walters palazzo. And finally, we went down the freight elevator to the first level of that building to the temporary exhibition space lobby where chairs and cameras were set up for the press preview.

  As we walked toward the exhibition’s entrance, the Archbishop carrying the large manuscript with a man’s belt asked me when the opening was, and I said Saturday. He responded, “Good, because we’re leaving to return to Ethiopia early next week.” In that instant I realized two scary things. First, he assumed that the African Zion “exhibition” was a one-day affair and that one day was Saturday. This meant that he was taking that big manuscript back to Ethiopia next week.

  And second—and this really frightened me—I thought that the Abune might “call in” the entire show after that one-day opening. I thought that we had a fundamentally different idea of what an exhibition was about, and that His Beatitude had the power and perhaps the intention to end the show after only one day. I was immediately so angry that I told that Archbishop with the one big book that if he was going to take it away the next week there was no sense in putting it in the case and showing it at all. He should just take it away right then, and I didn’t even want to look at it. And then, I wondered how this would look in the newspapers. What would the headline be?

  Numb is the right word. I was numb. The tour of the show was very brief. The Abune had no reaction to his Chester Higgins photo at the beginning and seemed not to notice the room divider closing off the last third of the exhibition space. We did though have a brief exchange in front of a 15th-century icon when I made the mistake of describing it as having been influenced by early Italian panel painting. His Beatitude used the word “autochthonous,” which I had never heard anyone else use before, and in using that word he was insistent that Ethiopian icons were 100 percent indigenously Ethiopian and that there was not any outside influence.

  And when he bent over to have a closer look at the icon I was talking about, I noticed a deep dent in the top of his head. And I recalled that before he became Ethiopia’s Abune he had been imprisoned by the Communist regime for seven years and tortured. So yes, we were at Princeton together, and yes, we both understood what autochthonous meant, but beyond that, Gary Vikan and the Abune Paulos could not have been more completely different. The press preview came and went with the Abune in his remarks making it a point to restate the truism that Ethiopian icons and manuscripts are like no others in Christendom—that they were the unique creation of the Ethiopian Orthodox people.

  And now the time had come for the heart-to-heart, and by that I mean the difficult conversation about the necessity that the Abune stay away from the Walters on Saturday evening. I had my friend from the Baltimore City Police at my side, and I thought it best that I make my case to the man in the suit, the one I understood to be the Abune’s brother. I pointed to the glass entry doors just to my left, referenced the 2,000 or so visitors who would be crowding through those doors on Saturday, and told him about the threats to His Beatitude’s life that we had received over the phone. I suggested that for their safety, the Abune and his group would be wise to stay away on Saturday.

  Well, this did not go over at all well, and in fact, the brother’s reaction was so swift and unequivocal and so angry that I suspected that mine was not the first of the Abune’s recent disinvites. What I was told then, for the first of many times and with only slightly variant wording, was that for me to withdraw my invitation to His Beatitude to the opening of African Zion would be a profound insult not only to His Beatitude but to the whole Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which numbered nearly 40 million people. I had never bargained for this.

  AFTER THE PRESS EVENT, THEY all piled into a van and were off to Washington, DC, for an audience with the Dean of the National Cathedral and a different set of protesters with a different set of eggs and rocks. I then had a great idea: there would be two openings on Saturday, one private, with just VIPs, for His Beatitude and his entourage in black, and the other would be the regular members preview, sans Abune Paulos and friends. A perfect solution, I thought, and I called brother, via the Embassy of Ethiopia, to let him know that we had moved beyond the disinvite to a happy, special place, and while I’m not sure I heard him say yes, I certainly did not hear the word no. I took that to mean we were on for Saturday, in the parlor of the Walters house, with our Mayor Kurt Schmoke and Congressman Kweisi Mfume, both African Americans, and the latter the honorary chairman of the exhibition committee. We were to converge at 4:00 p.m. with some fancy hors d’oeuvres, some appropriate celebratory remarks, and a private tour for the group which, all in, probably numbered no more than a dozen people. This meant that by 6:00 p.m. the bearded prelates would be gone.

  Well, perhaps the brother did say no and I just didn’t hear him. In any event, 4:30 p.m. Saturday came and went, and it was now 5:00 p.m., and a few in the VIP group had to leave for other engagements. I had no way of reaching the brother, who, I had to assume, was on his way in the van with his sacred, bearded cargo. I wondered if they were lost. Maybe one of the protesters had injured the Abune, or worse. Then the phone rang and it was the brother, asking for Vikan. It seems that the group was still at the ambassador’s residence in DC. It was after 5:00 p.m., and they hadn’t even left yet! A little mental math put
them at my doorstep at 6:30 or so, a half hour before the members’ preview was to begin. I decided that I would give those patient VIPs in the parlor a quickie tour of the show and get them out the door. The Abune and his friends would arrive around 6:30, and I’d give them a super-quickie tour and get them out the door before 7:00 p.m.

  What was going on outside, and had been going on since the early afternoon, was a crowd of protesters. There were lots of them, and it seemed to me that they all had grocery bags that sagged, as if perhaps filled with big rocks or eggs. If you could see the Walters’ city block from above, looking south, you would see that the main entrance is at the south center of the block on Centre Street, at 12 o’clock. The entrance to the palazzo is at 9 o’clock, and the entrance to the Walters house, #5 West Mount Vernon Place, is at 6 o’clock. The protesters were at all three entrances, and I have no idea how they knew that the Abune came and went through the Walters house, but they did.

  I went outside to mingle. And why not? No one knew who I was or what I looked like. I started to ask some questions and before I knew it someone asked me if I knew who “Vikan” was. I didn’t respond. But he had a message for me to convey to this Vikan guy, and it was that “Abdul” somebody was looking for him. I didn’t think that sounded like a good thing.

  It was almost 6:30. Two Baltimore televisions stations had shown up and klieg lights were all over the place. Traffic had been stopped on Centre Street, and there appeared to be more than one thousand Walters members milling around in the street with a smattering of the protesters with grocery bags among them, and plenty of police.

  There was one fortunate thing: the klieg lights and TV stations attracted most of the protesters to the museum’s entrance at the south side of the Walters block. So when the Abune’s van finally arrived at 6:30 and pulled up at #5 West Mount Vernon Place, most of the protesters were elsewhere. This meant that the Baltimore City Police stationed there were able to keep a small group of protesters waving signs and holding sagging grocery bags at bay (with Mace and night sticks at the ready) as the sacred procession slowly went by. And there I was, taking pictures.

  I had a quick conference with the brother. I told him we would have a tour, a really short one, and then it would be time to get back in the van since this was not a safe situation. Again, I don’t recall much of a response, but then, that was the way we communicated. We replicated the procession through the museum of the previous Wednesday and, at the precise spot just outside the exhibition where the Archbishop with the book told me he was soon to take that book away, we paused. The Abune was at my side. Kate Sellers, the Acting Director, was standing and listening, and the Director-to-be, Michael Mezzatesta, was standing and (I thought) not listening. (I have no memory of him at any other juncture that evening.) And for some reason, I guess because things were heating up during the week and he couldn’t be there himself, Bob Bergman had sent his brother Edward in his place, all the way from New Jersey. Ed was energized and standing at the ready.

  What happened next I could not have scripted in the most bizarre moments of my distorted thinking. The Abune’s brother turned to me to ask if I had a quarter. Did I have a quarter? What was this about? Well, I did, and I gave it to him. And tout de suite, he disappeared down the hall, and then reappeared. He had a message for me. He told me I had a call. This meant that he had placed a call for me on the pay phone next to the entrance to the palazzo. He said, “It’s the ambassador.” “Great!” I responded.

  So there I was, sitting in the darkened cloakroom at the palazzo entrance on one of those tall cylindrical ashtrays, maybe three feet high. I will never forget what I heard. “Is this Gary Vikan? This is Ethiopian Ambassador so and so; I have called to tell you that I consider this an international incident, for which I hold you personally responsible.”

  Well, I now assumed I had reached the bottom. It can’t go any lower or get any worse. An “international incident”? I suppose the whole idea went back to the “insult” to His Beatitude, to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and now, to the entire nation of Ethiopia, committed by me in withdrawing my invitation to participate in Saturday evening’s members preview.

  The crowd, the lights, the TV cameras, and the protesters were all visible, some thirty feet away, through the double set of glass doors of the museum’s main entrance. Luckily, there was a tall iron gate, still locked, that separated those glass doors from the sidewalk and the crowd. We inside could see them, and anyone out there who tried could see our little troupe inside: two versions of the director, me, the PR guy, our head of security, Bob Bergman’s brother, six bearded prelates in black and one in white, the guy in the reddish-brown suit, and finally, a Baltimore City cop. That’s what I remember.

  All congeniality was now gone. I said to them that I would give the tour and that then they must go. The Abune replied that he had already seen the exhibition, so no tour was necessary. But he was not going to leave—he was not going to be insulted. I hadn’t yet shown the brother the auditorium and its entrance was just to the side of the entrance to the exhibition. I thought it was worth a try. There we were, inside the door of the very large Walters auditorium, looking down toward the stage. “See that stage,” I said to the brother. “To get there to give his remarks, His Beatitude will have to walk down that aisle, past at least four hundred in the crowd, and we have no way of controlling who those people will be. Any among them could leap up and attack the Abune.” At this point the brother topped the behavior of the ambassador. He said: “I would rather have the Abune’s blood on this carpet than have him insulted.” Blood! This whole miserable misadventure in hyper-religiosity began four months earlier with vomited blood, and now we’re talking about martyr’s blood, not in the hinterlands of Ethiopia but right here in the Walters auditorium.

  But he wasn’t done with me yet. Brother then moved on to the “apology.” I must now apologize for insulting the Abune. Not only that, it had to be before television cameras. And what would that get me in terms of his departure from the Walters? Nothing, it seemed. So for the second time that week I got really angry. I refused to apologize, since I had nothing to apologize for.

  But I thought of a tactic that might just be my salvation. Howard White could say some nice apologetic-like things. And as for the TV camera, I sent the head of security to get our new camcorder, big and bulky and official looking. He was the “TV cameraman” and Howard White was the apologizing spokesman for the Walters and, I suppose, for all America. We quickly brought out a podium and some chairs for the “audience,” which consisted of the prelates, Ed Bergman, our two versions of Walters Director, and a few others. The brother protested as, this time, did the Abune himself, saying: “This is not a real TV camera and that is not a real TV reporter.” But we barreled ahead with our little charade. A vague, micro-apology was made, to which we received no reaction. But then, that was typical.

  By this time it was 7:00 p.m. and the crowd was pressing toward the iron gates, expecting them to be swung open and the festivities to begin. I had no indication that my Ethiopian guests would ever leave. In fact, I was pretty sure that he and all of them were enjoying the metaphorical martyrdom of the “insult” to which I had subjected them. And they had this huge audience and real TV cameras just a few yards away. I was standing next to the Baltimore City cop, just inside the glass doors. He was fully aware that we had reached the climax of this crazy event. I can still see his face, and see his hand now resting on that wooden nightstick of his on his belt.

  He had a question that startled me: “Do you want me to take him out?” Wow! The “out” part I took two ways. The second was that he’d escort him “out of the building,” but the first was the critical “out.” I took that to mean that he, the cop, would act with some force, and that he might just have to bop the Abune on his already-dented head to give him some attitude adjustment. (I had gone far enough along these lines in my thinking to wonder how that would mesh or not with his inverted-cone fabric hat.) Well, that’s
brilliant, I thought. A white Baltimore cop roughing up an Ethiopian Patriarch dressed all in white in full view of hundreds of people and the cameras of two Baltimore television stations. The ambassador, the State Department, the press, the headline (“International Incident at the Walters”) together would spell the end of Gary Vikan’s museum career.

  It was time to cut bait. I sent Howard White to find some poster board and a magic maker. This seemed to take forever. And I quietly told my friend the cop that for now, I was going to do nothing—absolutely nothing—and that in two hours, at 9:00 p.m., we would revisit our options. I also told him and the rest of the Walters crew that under no circumstances were they to tell our Ethiopian guests where the bathrooms were. (There were none on that floor, which was good.) As for the poster board and the magic marker, I told Howard White that the members preview was now officially canceled and he should write something to that effect on the poster board and wedge it between the bars of the iron gate. He did, and it read: “CANCELED. Dear Members Please Go Home.” This seemed odd to me—that he instructed our members to “go home.”

  Once that sign was in place our world suddenly changed. The Abune and his group stood up in unison and walked the fifteen feet over to the freight elevator, pressed the up button, and all got in. It seemed like magic. I thought I was all but free. But suddenly my claustrophobia kicked in, and where did everyone go? These eight Ethiopians had finally decided to leave, but I could not force myself to get in that elevator with them. Then Ed, Bob Bergman’s brother, suddenly appeared and manned the elevator, the door closed, and I raced up the steps. They processed slowly though the building, retracing their path from forty-five minutes earlier. I got ahead of them, and by the best of luck, all the action on the Centre Street side of building meant that there were no protesters or cameras or cops on this side of the building. Miracle of miracles.