The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were mostly Huguenot Protestants, expelled from Louis XIV’s fervently Catholic France. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it filled up with eastern European Jews, fleeing the pogroms. And from the early twentieth century onwards Bengali seamen off tea clippers from Calcutta began to settle here. Gradually the community grew until just after the Second World War they opened Britain’s first “Indian” restaurants. It has been a magnet for others ever since so that now the dominant community is Muslim. The Brick Lane area is now home to the biggest community of Bangladeshi Muslims outside Southeast Asia. The locals call it Bangla Town. You see that building on the corner, the one with the sundial protruding from high up on the wall?’

  Nazreem looked in the direction he was pointing and saw a big, old-looking building of stone and brick with what looked like Arabic on a board that was just too far for her to read. ‘Yes?’

  ‘The whole history of this part of the East End is summed up by that building. When it was built in 1743 it was a Huguenot church; by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a prominent synagogue. It’s now a mosque. There are shops around here that started life as French butchers, became kosher and are now halal. I like it. It’s the sort of place that makes you understand why history matters.’

  Priji’s was in the middle of a line of similar-looking restaurants, but first Marcus took Nazreem into a newsagent opposite that also advertised itself as an off-licence and bought two bottles of cold Cobra lager from the cooler. ‘A lot of the restaurants around her don’t sell alcohol to avoid offending their Muslim customers but they don’t mind if you bring your own,’ he explained. ‘Drink?’

  Nazreem nodded with just a hint of a self-conscious smile: ‘I’d love a little white wine. Hamas have banned all alcohol in Gaza.’ Marcus chose a half bottle of Petit Chablis and said, ‘This do?’ She nodded again, blushing like a guilty schoolgirl.

  When they entered Priji’s, Ali himself was sitting by the kitchen door and immediately came over to greet them. He was a plump cheerful man with an accent that mixed broad East End cockney with just a hint of the subcontinent: ‘’Ow are you, Professor Fry,’ – he always overstated Marcus’s academic status and missed the nuance in his surname – ‘and ’ow’s your luvvly lady friend? Table in the window, or perhaps the corner, a bit more private?’

  ‘The corner would be fine, Ali,’ said Marcus, and let them be shepherded to a small table near the rear of the restaurant. A waiter brought menus and took the wine and beer away to open the bottles.

  Marcus ordered starters, the famous chicken tikka masala as well as a couple of more authentically Bengali dishes including balti lamb, shorisha king prawns in chilli and mustard sauce and a garlicky lentil tarka dall. He was hungry. The service was quick and attentive. He sipped at the cold beer, while Nazreem sipped her white wine with her eyes closed. He waited for her to begin the conversation, but the starters arrived almost immediately. Nazreem picked up a pappadum, dribbled some mint yoghurt on it, raised it to her lips and then put it down again without eating.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Marcus said at last.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘What’s going on … in your mind. Is it what happened in Gaza. This find of yours, the theft. I just wondered if you wanted to talk about it.’

  She looked up at him and gave him a thin resigned smile.

  ‘Of course. More than anything else.’ But she didn’t.

  ‘In the paper,’ prompted Marcus. ‘They hinted that this find … was something rather special. Particularly for Christians.’

  She gave him the same thin-lipped smile of resignation, accompanied by a slight shrug of the shoulders.

  ‘Who knows? Who knows what to believe?’

  ‘How did it happen?’ Marcus tried, then sensing from her frown that he had trodden on sensitive territory he retracked, ‘the find, I mean? The paper seemed to imply that the context dated it to the first century.’

  Nazreem took a long sip of her wine and leaned forward. ‘That much is indisputable,’ she said. All of a sudden, as if the memory itself had reinvigorated her, she began talking quietly, briskly as if reliving the moment itself:

  ‘It was just to the north of Gaza City itself, a place the Israelis call Tel a-Shakef, a sensitive location. Not so long ago it was an Israeli army base before they pulled out of Gaza. About three weeks ago bulldozers went in, to clear away rubble. The road leads towards Erez, the crossing point. They were pushing back the drifting sand when they came across old stones, paving, very obviously ancient not modern.’

  Marcus was struck by how her mood had changed. Archaeology was her life blood.

  ‘They stopped work immediately – it does not take much to make them stop work,’ she added with a pertinent look. ‘The foreman sent someone to the museum, to ask for advice. In the past, during the occupation, the Israeli archaeologists would have been all over it. We were lucky. If you can describe anything that happens in Gaza as luck.

  ‘I went with some workers, a few volunteers. It did not take much to discover we had found an old Christian church, a very old church.’

  ‘Not from the first century?’ Marcus looked puzzled. The early Christians had met in private homes. Under the Roman persecution they had gathered in caves and cellars. Purpose-built churches didn’t start to appear in any number until the Romans did a U-turn when the Emperor Constantine made it the state religion in the fourth century.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Nazreem said dismissively. ‘The uppermost ruins included a beautiful mosaic floor – the sand dunes had protected it – that inscriptions made clear dated from the reign of the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. They were all in Greek of course; that was effectively the official language of the eastern Roman Empire by that date. It appeared the church was dedicated to St Julian.’

  Marcus made a face: ‘I’m afraid I’m not very good on my saints.’

  Nazreem shrugged. ‘Obviously, nor am I, but my Egyptian colleague, a Coptic Christian, reckoned it had to be St Julian of Anazarbus, a Roman citizen of senatorial rank who was born in what is now Turkey and put to death around the end of the third century during the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian. Sealed in a sack of vipers and thrown into the sea.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘But that church was built on top of one that was even older, and others beneath that. It had obviously been a holy place for many centuries.’

  Marcus was impressed: ‘The Coptic Christian church was allegedly founded by the apostle Mark shortly after the crucifixion. But I’m surprised you kept digging after making a find like that.’

  Nazreem shrugged and sighed, ‘It was an accident. You know sometimes how our workmen are. One of them was trying to move the bulldozer out of the way, when the ground beneath it suddenly dropped. The weight had obviously collapsed some subterranean chamber, possibly part of a crypt.’

  Marcus winced. It was exactly the sort of thing archaeologists dreaded: their own interventions spoiling the evidence. Nazreem closed her eyes an instant in tacit acknowledgement of his understanding.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘part of the layer below was still a void, although we still haven’t quite worked out its relationship to the church above. Initially we thought we’d hit a treasure trove – there were large numbers of coins.’ She almost laughed: ‘My biggest fear was that the workers would start to pocket them, when their main importance was to help the dating.’

  ‘And they did?’

  She nodded: ‘Almost all from the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.’

  ‘Suggesting the early part of the first century.’

  She nodded. ‘That was when we found the casket. I had to fight to stop the workmen dragging it out. I suppose they thought it had more treasure inside. That’s when we noticed the inscription: not in Greek, but in Latin. Older therefore. Just two words: Regina Coeli.’

  Marcus whistled under his breath: ‘The Queen o
f Heaven.’

  ‘We took it out carefully. You can imagine, didn’t even open it on the spot. Some of the workers got restless, thought we were making off with treasure. I had to point out the writing, that it was a religious artefact, a Christian thing. I don’t know if they believed me. It was only when we got back to the museum that we opened the casket.’

  ‘And found …? Come on … don’t keep me in suspense.’

  ‘An image, a graven image. Female. The workmen sneered at it.’ Marcus wasn’t surprised: Islam forbade any depiction of human beings or animals, let alone the divine or semi-divine. Idolatry was a cardinal sin. ‘The location would suggest that it could be a Madonna and the date would make it the earliest known. But obviously we wanted to date it definitely before revealing it to the world.’

  ‘But you didn’t get the chance. Somebody leaked.’

  She shrugged, a bitter, half-hearted little shrug.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  Marcus looked at her quizzically. All of a sudden there was that glazed hardness again in her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’m missing something, but it’s not obvious to me.’

  ‘Mossad.’

  ‘Mossad?’

  ‘The Israeli secret service,’ she spat out the words.

  ‘I know who Mossad are, I just don’t see why …’

  ‘Why? Because they want it for themselves, that’s why! Because they will claim it was theirs all along, like everything else. Like the grains of sand on the beach, the air that we breathe, because they will leave us nothing of value, and if possible nothing at all, least of all our history, our decency or our self-respect! Do you think they want Gaza to become a shrine?’

  ‘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.’