The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  But Frey went too far, in Delahaye’s mind, when he drew another parallel that he claimed lingered in many Muslim minds. He pointed out that the Spanish history of the ‘Reconquista’ – the reconquest of ‘their’ country and expulsion of the ‘Moors’ – was in Arab eyes the theft by barbarians of El-Andalus, the country they founded in the ruins of the Visigoth empire. Delahaye’s head was spinning – he knew nothing about Visigoths and ancient Spanish history, but he knew this was not something that would go down well in Madrid in the wake of the 2004 Al Qaeda bombings that had killed 191 people and wounded 1,800 in the Spanish capital.

  Might was usually right, Frey pointed out pithily, and control of the present equalled control of the past. The history most people learned in schools was not something that could be used to win an argument but more often a lie taught by those who had already won it. Delahaye breathed in, long and hard. Right now he could see why any number of people might think the world would be a better place if the likes of Dr Marcus Frey were removed from it.

  He scrolled rapidly through the PDF file in which the book was displayed on his screen until he got to the author’s ‘acknowledgments’ at the end, the list of people who had helped with his research. You never knew what links you might find. Immediately one name sprang out at him: Nazreem Hashrawi, described by Frey as ‘providing invaluable research and insight into the Palestinian perspective’. The name set off a bell, a connection to something recent. On an impulse he opened a straightforward web browser and plugged the name into Google’s image search. Within seconds he had the link he was looking for: there on the screen, resized in its original context on a news page from The Times, was the photograph of a young woman who, even with the headscarf pulled over her dark tresses, was unquestionably the same as the one captured by the surveillance cameras with Frey. Except she was not in London, she was in the Gaza Strip. Only days ago.

  He linked through to the news story and shook his head. Whatever connection there might be between some missing religious artefact and this dangerous dabbling Oxford academic stirring up a hornet’s nest of Islamic extremists in the East End of London he had no idea, but this woman was clearly his collaborator. Delahaye had questions he wanted answering. Fast. And Dr Frey was going to answer them. Sooner rather than later.

  Within forty-five minutes details and pictures of both Marcus Frey and Nazreem Hashrawi were flashed to every police station in the capital – and every force in the country – with the clear instruction that the pair were wanted for questioning by the security services: detain with discretion, was the recommendation. The pair were not in themselves suspects and were not considered dangerous. Under no circumstances was force to be used. Unless absolutely necessary.

  It was some two hours, however, before there was any sort of response. It came, once again, not from any human observation but from the ‘isolate and identify’ subroutine running on the Argus system. The identification was quite clear and confirmed from multiple cameras, all situated within the terminal building and departures lounge at Stansted Airport.

  Part Two

  … MATER DEI, ORA PRO NOBIS …

  … Mother of God, pray for us …

  19

  Despite its ancient status as a place of pilgrimage the little Bavarian town of Altötting has remained curiously aloof from the automobile-centred infrastructure of modern Germany, in a rural backwater an hour and a half’s drive east of Munich across the flat and relatively featureless floodplain of the River Inn.

  ‘How come,’ asked Marcus as he tried and failed to overtake yet another tractor on a blind bend in a two-lane road, ‘that this place is about the only town in Germany that isn’t on an autobahn?’

  Nazreem made an attempt to smile, glanced at the map as if to make sure they were indeed going in the right direction, then turned back to gazing out at the flat, farmhouse-studded German countryside. They flashed by another of the little onion-domed churches which could almost have been Russian but it appeared were also a feature of old Bavarian architecture. Marcus considered mentioning the fact but thought better of it.

  He had all but given up on trying small talk to break the apparently impenetrable outer crust that Nazreem had somehow thrown up around her. Their conversations were perfunctory, her attitude to him friendly, but, in some intangible way, cold. She shrank visibly from physical contact, even though he had made no attempt to reestablish any kind of intimacy.

  It pained him, but at the same time he was more than aware that he had no real understanding of what pain he might once have caused her. At the time of their break-up it had seemed – to him – that they were both simply yielding to matters beyond their control: the different worlds they came from, the pull of their careers. And yet there had not been a moment in the years since when he had ever been one hundred per cent certain that he had made the right decision. ‘What did it profit a man,’ he had on maudlin occasions over a pint too many in the King’s Arms in Oxford parodied the biblical saying, ‘if he gained the whole world, but lost the woman who mattered more than anything else in it?’

  Maybe he had made a mistake – maybe they both had – but it was not something that could be fixed at the flick of a switch, if it could be fixed at all. He had to make it clear to Nazreem that, no matter how precious or painful the past might be for either of them, the present did not have to depend on it. More than anything right now, he realised almost with a shock, he wanted her to think of him as a friend. A friend she could rely on.

  She had come to him. She needed help; he was able to provide it. Or thought he had been. And now it had all gone horribly wrong. A man had died. They – or Nazreem at least – were being pursued by men who would not stop at murder. And he hadn’t a clue why. All he knew was they were now in Germany, in a hire car heading for a place he had never heard of, for no other reason than it was home to an obscure religious relic and Nazreem was offering no explanation that went beyond an oblique and obstinate insistence that she was in search of answers to questions Marcus had not even begun to ask.

  She had not insisted he come with her, but made clear she would welcome his company. A brief spell in an Internet café on the Euston Road found them surprisingly cheap flights to Munich on a no-frills airline from London Stansted. They had booked two for the same day for less each way than it cost on the train from Oxford to London. Marcus thanked the fact that growing up in South Africa meant he never went anywhere without his passport. And Nazreem was never separated from the French passport which was her most precious possession.

  They had arrived in Munich in the middle of the afternoon and picked up a car, also booked in advance over the Internet. It occurred to Marcus that using his credit card opened an avenue for anyone trying to trace them. But it was Nazreem they were after, not him. He doubted if they even knew who he was.

  The car was a Volkswagen Polo and surprisingly nippy for its size. They had got around the city quickly on the autobahn from the airport, only to find that it ran out barely thirty kilometres from the Munich ring road in the direction of Altötting. The only major city in the same direction was Passau on the Austrian border, and that was scarcely a metropolis; it appeared that a continuation of the autobahn was in planning, but not on anybody’s priority list.

  For the most part, the landscape they traversed was rich agricultural land – borne witness by the infuriating number of tractors on the road – with red-roofed farmhouses and barns, and the occasional high-tech low-level factory thrown in. At one point thick forest closed in on them as if from nowhere, and then it opened out again. Two high, pointed spires in the distance finally indicated they were in sight of their destination. Just what they were going to do when they got there, however, was another matter.

  Like most Bavarian towns Altötting’s centre was largely pedestrianised. Cafés filled with middle-aged women with big hair and traditional dresses eating slabs of cream cake with frothing cups of coffee competed with bakeries, bookshops and traditional Gasthofs whe
re their menfolk supped half-litre glasses of Helles beer. A gang of noisy teenagers with nothing to do hung around on a street corner kicking skateboards about and making gauche sexual passes at one another. A couple of leather-clad bikers dawdled as if rapt in endless admiration of each other’s big machine. It could have been any small town in Germany. Marcus pulled the car into a space at the end of a one-way street and they got out to find the tall spires they had seen from a distance towering above them.

  It was easy to see the geographical, if not immediately the religious, basis for Altötting’s ancient rise to prominence. The heart of the town was a large plateau raised from the surrounding countryside, the sort of place that would have been a natural gathering place for centuries if not millennia. The streets leading up to and around the sides of the great square itself were lined with religious souvenir shops selling more kitsch than Marcus had seen since his first visit to the Arab bazaar in Bethlehem.

  Images of saints in plastic, porcelain and pewter jostled with wooden carvings that were almost life-size. One image, of a bald, bearded monk in a Franciscan habit who appeared to be called Saint Konrad, a local monk canonised in the 1930s, vied for prominence on postcards with another local boy who was altogether more familiar: a sharp-eyed smiling man with iron-grey hair and intelligent eyes. Altötting’s shopkeepers were keen to capitalise on the fact that Pope Benedict XVI had been born just down the road. It seemed the recent scandal over abuse in the Catholic Church had made little impact on the faithful of the Pope’s home district.

  Signs advertised the beginning of the Benediktweg, a tourist route around the sights of his boyhood, even Papstbier, the pope’s beer – ‘a heavenly brew’. Marcus found himself smiling despite his cynicism: what could be more natural in Bavaria, where the monks had been brewing for a millennium? He wondered if the pained look on Nazreem’s face reflected her inner contradiction about adhering to a religion which forbade alcohol while she enjoyed the occasional glass of wine. Then he realised it was that other great taboo of Islam – the making of graven images – which was rather more obviously in her face.

  Marcus felt obliged to apologise:

  ‘Kitsch, isn’t it? At least the Germans gave us a word for it.’

  Nazreem looked at him questioningly.

  ‘Bad taste, I mean. All this plastic.’

  Nazreem shook her head, but not in disagreement. In the window in front of her a flock of cherubic angels with prayer books – for all the world like little gods of love who’d mislaid their bows and arrows, gone on the Atkins diet and taken up reading – dangled on strings above a football crowd of plastic Konrads. But it was not this grotesque scenario that had captured her attention. It was a large porcelain statue obviously supposed to represent the Holy Virgin. To Marcus it seemed a conventional enough image, a Madonna in a sky-blue robe with a complexion like ivory and a gentler rosy blush to her cheeks.

  ‘It’s just that …’ Nazreem said, hesitantly, ‘no woman from Palestine could ever have looked like that.’

  Marcus smiled: ‘No, I suppose not, but then nobody knows exactly what she looked like. Do they?’

  She pointedly ignored the question. ‘But they have always known where she came from, where she is supposed to have lived, what her origins were.’

  ‘What would you have preferred?’

  ‘It’s … it’s not a question of “preferring”. It’s just that I thought she might look, at least, a little bit … Semitic.’

  Marcus raised his eyebrows: ‘In Bavaria? I don’t think so. I’ll tell you something an old English teacher of mine back in Pretoria used to say when asked why our traditional image of God was always some genial English country squire or sturdy Afrikaner Voortrekker. He said, “What do you expect? We made him in our own image.” I suppose that goes for his mother too.’

  Nazreem gave him a scowl. ‘That is why Muslims forbid images,’ she said mock sternly. ‘When I see things like this, I feel maybe we are right.’

  ‘Maybe you are,’ said Marcus. ‘Let’s go and see if we can take a look at the real thing. If you’ll pardon the expression.’

  The great square that spread out in front of them as they climbed the gentle cobbled hill seemed totally out of proportion for the little town it dominated. Here in bricks, mortar, soaring spires and gilded stonework stood the physical manifestation of centuries of ecclesiastical institutionalism, monastic seclusion and the temporal power of the spiritual establishment.

  Yet like pilgrims down the centuries, Marcus and Nazreem found their attention drawn as if by psychic magnetism towards the tiny building that stood amidst a formally planted grove of linden trees in the middle of the vast open expanse, a strange octagonal chapel with a high, pointed witch’s hat roof.

  They drew near, the curious little building exerting on them the same power as it had on tens of thousands of others. Several dozen people were clustered around. Two of them, women in middle age, stood out from the crowd: each carried a large wooden cross over her shoulder and circled the building incessantly. Marcus and Nazreem stood in silence for a few minutes, watching this display of ritualised devotion.

  ‘Just like Mecca,’ muttered Nazreem at length.

  Marcus looked at her.

  ‘The pilgrims, during the Hajj, endlessly circling the Ka’aba.’

  It was only when they came close to the canopied walkway that surrounded the chapel itself that they understood that what appeared to be a complex form of decoration was in fact hundreds of individual paintings.

  ‘But this,’ said Nazreem, ‘this is strange.’

  ‘Strange isn’t the word,’ said Marcus, under his breath. ‘More like weird. It spooks me. This sort of thing always has.’

  He wasn’t sure what precisely made him so uncomfortable but it had something to do with the fusion of the sacred and absurd, the tragic and mundane. Here was a drawing by a child on a life-support machine, a terrible intimation of mortality suffused with innocent hope and faith; here a grittily realistic amateur oil of a soldier cowering by a tank tread, a token of thanks for safekeeping throughout the Second World War – but surely that had been the devil’s war, hadn’t it, and the soldier was on the wrong side? And here, from as recently as 1998, a painting of men in suits gesticulating at one another across a desk. Beneath it was a prayer of thanks to the Virgin for getting the artist through ‘a very difficult investigation at work’. The Mother of God was a busy lady.

  Each and every one depicted in the corner a dark-faced crowned figure with doll-like baby descending from the sky in glittering robes surrounded by a halo of power. Reduced to such naïve renderings they reminded Marcus of the American superhero comics of his youth: a stylised Wonder Woman to the rescue, with babe in arms – the modern miracle mother. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Nazreem, on the other hand, was rapt, the expression on her face a mix of absorption and incredulity. To most Muslims, even Sunday-school pictures of Jesus appeared blasphemous. This ‘painting by numbers’ display of devotion to the ‘Mother of God’ must have seemed like pagan idolatry run rampant.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand it.’

  ‘It’s just a different tradition. We’re used to pictures of Christ and Mary and the saints. That’s why people couldn’t understand all that fuss about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Why some people thought it was all played up by extremists.’

  ‘It was.’

  Marcus gave her a quizzical look. It was a subject he had been reluctant even to mention.

  ‘The whole thing was distorted,’ she said. ‘People got annoyed – rightly – because the cartoons implied all Muslims were terrorists, but the extremists played up the fact that infidels had broken the ban on portraying images of the prophet because they knew images corrupt religion and they did not want infidels to corrupt Islam.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow …?’

  ‘Mohammed’ – and Marcus noted that although she didn’t say
it aloud, internally she had automatically repeated the mantra ‘peace be upon him’ – ‘did not issue his ban on images of himself because he was vain! It was because he had looked around him and saw what was happening in Christianity at the time. This! He saw that the statues, the pictures had taken over from the idea, they had become idols, fetishes. In his lifetime people had begun to worship the objects, not what they represented. He banned pictures of himself, not because he was afraid of criticism, but because people might come to worship them. Isn’t that what’s happened here?’

  Marcus looked around them, at the devout kissing crosses and genuflecting before entering the chapel. He reached out a hand to Nazreem, but she didn’t notice. ‘Want to go inside?’ he said.

  He watched her weigh it up for a few seconds, seeing that she had not fully realised she would be allowed – most of Islam’s holiest places are off-limits to non-believers, and several others even to the most devout of the faithful, if they happen to be women. Then she nodded. He pushed open the door, and stood back to let her go in ahead of him.

  She looked back at him, apprehensively, then, out of instinct covering her head with the scarf she had until then worn loosely around her neck, walked into the sacrosanct darkness. And Marcus realised, all of a sudden, that in more ways than one she was crossing a threshold.

  20

  Inside it was dark. The antechapel was windowless and the walls and ceiling were painted black, or perhaps had just been blackened over the centuries by the rows of thin, smoking devotional candles that provided the only illumination. There were more paintings like those outside the building, but older: dark, sombre antique depictions of miraculous deliverance.