The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marcus said. ‘I … we thought you were a nun, a sister in holy orders.’

  The gentle tone evaporated: ‘And what makes you think that is not the case,’ she said staring at him sternly, exaggerating the feeling that he was talking to a stern schoolmistress.

  ‘It’s just … you don’t wear religious dress, and your organisation has an English name, but I’ve never heard of it in England.’

  The dowdy little woman reseated herself in the armchair and tutted: ‘Our order does not have an English name; it is German. It merely refers to England, the country that banished our founder from its shores. Our order began as an order of exile. Mary Ward was an English Catholic girl who fled from the Protestants taking over her country in the early seventeenth century and established a house for her co-religionists in northern France.

  ‘We do not wear religious dress because there were times in our history when we were forced to conceal our faith. Even today there are those who think devotion to the Mother of God a blasphemy rather than a sacred duty, that only the male aspect of divinity is worthy of worship. There have always been men who believed communities of women should be closeted away behind locked doors. Sometimes they have called it a convent, sometimes a harem. And there have even been some,’ it was said with an unexpected twinkle in her eye, ‘who confused the two. It was an elector of Bavaria who eventually became our order’s protector. That is why, although today we have branches in many countries, we still consider here, southern Germany, to be our spiritual home.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Marcus, ‘I stand corrected. It’s very good of you to see us.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ she replied dismissing Marcus and turning towards Nazreem with a gaze filled with a suddenly childlike mixture of awe, envy, hope and longing. ‘It is a miracle that you have come to us. You who were chosen.’

  ‘Chosen?’ said Nazreem self-consciously.

  The little woman smiled as if nothing could be more evident. ‘Of course. We are not so cloistered here that we do not read the newspapers, or watch the television. Sister Ursula is surely right in thinking you are the one who discovered the likeness of Our Lady? And these things do not happen by accident, you know. For this you were surely chosen. Tell me my child, is it true you have looked on the true image of the Mother of God?’

  ‘Yes, that is, no. I don’t know,’ said Nazreem awkwardly, wrong-footed at the awestruck tone of the little nun’s interrogation. ‘I have seen the image we found underneath a church in Gaza.’

  ‘An image that dated from the time of the Christian gospels?’

  Nazreem bowed her head and shook it. ‘There was no opportunity to carry out a definitive dating, but because of the location it seems almost certain that it dates back to at least the second century AD, and probably earlier …’

  The nun looked at her sternly. ‘But you have doubts?’ she said. And then, ‘I am sorry. Of course you have. You are a Muslim, that is correct? You do not believe in “graven images”.’

  ‘Yes. But I am a scholar first.’

  ‘And this is why you have come here? Now?’

  ‘Yes … no,’ said Nazreem. ‘I believe there is a link, between the theft of the image we found in Gaza and the …’ she struggled for suitable words, ‘what happened here. The package that was delivered to the chapel.’

  The nun let her head drop suddenly, and Marcus feared they had sent her back into some state of shock from which she had only just recovered.

  ‘Go on,’ she said quietly.

  ‘It was just a feeling, no, more than a feeling, an instinct, when we saw the report in an English paper. About the heart. So horrible, and yet now, here, in this place, the chapel, you keep hearts, hearts of dead people, like sacred relics.’

  The nun was nodding, silently, her eyes uplifted now, studying the mass of contradictions playing itself out on Nazreem’s face.

  ‘There is a difference,’ she said at last. ‘A difference between a heart given freely, of love, after death, and a heart ripped from a living body. And not the heart alone.’

  Nazreem recoiled automatically at the image conjured up by the nun’s uncompromising language.

  ‘What do you mean, not only the heart?’

  The nun’s face contorted as if even the memory was excruciating.

  ‘We are nuns,’ she said. ‘We have taken vows of chastity. That does not say we do not know the bodies of men.’

  Marcus’s eyes opened wide and then he involuntarily retched as he realised the implication of the nun’s statement. He glanced at Nazreem to see if she realised what was being said, but saw only a look of almost Mona Lisa-like inscrutability on her face, eyes open wide, with almost the ghostly trace of a smile about her lips. Although he was sure he was imagining that.

  24

  Otap Cevik looked up at the heavy cloud formations coming in from the west. It was going to rain, a heavy summer rain, the sort his father said they used to dream of in the parched summer of the Anatolian uplands. Otap didn’t know about that. He had never been there. He had grown up in the Saarland, but he had never felt at home there and did so even less down here in Bavaria. His religion forbade him beer and down here local life seemed to revolve around it. Beer and coffee and cakes.

  All around Altötting’s great pilgrimage square, the little tourist shops that nestled at the feet of the great ecclesiastical monoliths were bringing their outdoor displays inside, pulling down shutters and closing the doors as the approaching thunderstorm brought an early dusk.

  In the Wiener Kaffeehaus cake shop on the corner a large woman with a candyfloss hairdo was shovelling a final wedge of cream torte into her mouth when she spotted the swarthy-skinned man polishing his motorbike outside staring at her. She scowled and turned away. Otap spat on the ground to show his disdain, then put away the polishing cloth

  He had no time for the fat bourgeoisie with their BMWs, their ridiculous religion and their grinning pagan pope. He had never been particularly devout as a child but as he had grown into an increasingly estranged adulthood, he had realised that Islam was a badge of his ethnicity, and he wore it with pride. All the more so now that he at last had been called to be of service.

  It did not concern him that the higher purpose of what he did was not explained to him. It sufficed to know that it was indeed a higher purpose. It was not demanding work. It was more like a game, a game that gave him an adrenalin rush while putting him in no real danger. He had not even been required to break the law, except perhaps in the avoidance of motorcycle license plate regulations; he kept a plate in his pannier in case he was stopped when ‘on business’; that way he could say it had simply fallen off. At worst he risked a fine. And what was that to a soldier of the Kurdish nation in exile? A soldier, the imam had hinted to him, in the tradition of the greatest Kurd of them all: Saladin, the scourge of the crusaders, the man who had turned the infidels back into the sea and recaptured Al-Quds, the city the Jews who had stolen it again called Jerusalem. The imam had spoken of a new Saladin, but of that Otap knew nothing. The name itself was enough to inspire him. In the name Saladin he saw a thread that led him back to the roots his parents had abandoned when they came to this miserable country for the sake of mere money.

  Pretending to be a messenger for a courier company had been the easiest thing imaginable – it was a job he used to do, back in Neunkirchen. Why the imam had wished to deliver a special package to a Christian nun in the vile little temple of idolatry the people around here regarded as a shrine – as if it were the tomb of a prophet – he had no idea. It was not his business to ask. In the same way he had no idea why he had been told since to stake out the site, to report any unusual visitors, either to the shrine or the building where the nuns lived. He took it in turns with another soldier, who also had a bike – it made it more convincing, they had been told – if they occasionally were seen together. Bikers did that.

  In particular he was to watch for one woman, an attractive woman; he had a pho
tograph, a picture that had been sent electronically to the imam but printed out from the computer on the best quality Kodak photographic paper. He carried it in the inside pocket of his leather motorcycle jacket, so that he could take it out regularly to refresh his memory. It might almost have been a photograph of his girlfriend. In fact, he had been in a bar just the previous night – drinking hot sweet coffee – when one of the pig-like locals sweating profusely and exuding sickly beer fumes had leaned over his shoulder and ogled her: ‘Who’s that then, Ahmed? Your girlfriend?’ They all said ‘Ahmed’ if they didn’t know his name, as if it was some sort of generic title for Muslims.

  He had pushed the man away and put the picture back in his pocket. One of the others, who had been leaning on the bar also drinking heavily, had put an arm out and grabbed him, but the man he had pushed restrained the other, saying: ‘Leave it off, Dieter, bloke’s got a pretty bird, fair enough, he doesn’t want an old fart like me giving her the eye. That right, Ahmed? No offence, mate,’ and he had raised his glass and given him a beery smile. ‘Girl from back home, eh?’

  Otap had wanted to hit him, to smack him in the face, to smash his glass and jam it in his eye, for flaunting his drunken camaraderie, for patronising him, for calling him ‘Ahmed’ and thinking he was a recent immigrant when he was a born German, with a German passport, except that he knew deep down, that that was a lie. His parents had hoped that he would live the lie. His parents had been fools.

  But he had been told not to draw attention to himself so instead he raised his coffee cup, gave a terse smile and paid his tab and left. On the way out, standing in the doorway before he headed off for the cheap labourers’ rooming house where he had booked in for the duration of his task, he took out the photograph again and looked at it from a new perspective. A girl from back home? Hardly. There was no way the woman in the picture was a Kurd – the cheekbones were wrong, for one thing – but up until then he had assumed that, despite her jet black hair and sallow complexion, she was a German, or at least a European, Italian maybe, or Greek. The possibility that she came from further East had not occurred to him, but he had to admit now that it was possible.

  Now, all of a sudden, he was certain of it. He had never really expected that this woman would cross his path – the imam had said it was possible, but not likely – and yet at this moment he was almost sure she had done precisely that: climbed out of a Volkswagen Polo and walked straight past him, her eyes unseeing, focused on the infidels’ temples, in the company of a man, this one almost certainly a German, he had thought until he heard them speak to one another, and recognised the language as English.

  He looked again at the photograph, staring hard to memorise every detail of her bone structure, the colour of her eyes. He had been told that on no account was he to make a mistake. He had watched from a distance as she and the man had gone into the little chapel. He had timed them. They were in there for nearly half an hour, then had come out, spoken to someone and then walked straight across the square to the house of the nuns. That had been the decisive factor. Whoever this girl was, whatever the imam or his distant masters required of her, it had surely to do with the package he had delivered to the nun.

  There was no doubt now in his mind what he had to do. He moved into the doorway of the Kaffeehaus which had now closed and turned out its interior lights, and pulled out his mobile phone. He would ask for his orders. And then he would obey them. It was what a good soldier did.

  25

  ‘I need to know more,’ Nazreem was saying. ‘There are other black Madonnas. There is one in Poland, I believe, Chennsto … what was it?’ she glanced at Marcus but it was the nun who finished the difficult word for her.

  ‘Czestochowa. Yes, but it is different. It is two-dimensional, an icon, more in the Eastern manner.’

  ‘But isn’t that the legend?’ Marcus could not help himself. He was not going to be ignored. He had an input to make too; after all that was why Nazreem had come to him in the first place, wasn’t it? ‘That St Luke painted the Virgin’s portrait on her kitchen table.’

  ‘That is the legend indeed,’ the nun actually turned towards him. ‘But there are many legends. And that is only one of many. There are paintings, in the Polish style, and indeed these are often attributed to St Luke, though not even the most pious in faith can believe he managed them all, in so many different styles. God works in mysterious ways, Dr Frey. As this young lady’s presence here proves.’

  ‘But the oldest images are not paintings?’ Nazreem prompted.

  The nun nodded, sagely, looking at her as if trying to read her mind. ‘There are many of us who believe, particularly here in Altötting, that the oldest depictions of the Mother of God have always been figurines.’

  Marcus blinked. It was the first time it had actually dawned on him that what Nazreem had found was not a painting but a sculpture. He wondered how he could have been so stupid: that was why they were here. Nazreem wanted to compare the figurine in the church across the road with the one she had found. How could he ever have thought anything else?

  ‘There are many such figures,’ the nun was saying. ‘Many more than most people realise, and the majority of the ancient ones are black. They can be found all across Europe: in Bucharest, on Malta, in France, Belgium, Ireland, Italy. There is a particularly famed example in the monastery at Einsiedeln in Switzerland …’

  ‘That was where they put the heart of the Austrian Empress Zita!’ exclaimed Marcus, suddenly remembering the piece of information he had been searching for earlier.

  The nun smiled at him as if indulging a child: ‘You are well informed,’ she said, before turning her intent gaze back to Nazreem to add: ‘but the most important by far are the figure here and those on the Iberian peninsula. None of them, however, as far as we know can definitely be ascribed to a date older than the early Middle Ages. You believe the carving you found was substantially older, I believe.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nazreem. ‘It had to be. Much older. It had almost certainly lain undisturbed since at least 200 AD, and probably earlier. If the figure in Gaza was the original, then perhaps the others, some of them at least, might have been copies, made later but perhaps not much later, as a way of perpetuating the image, of allowing more people to see it.’

  ‘We have long wondered the same,’ the nun said. ‘But only you know, my child. You and whatever evil or misguided people have snatched this treasure from the world.’

  Sister Galina lifted both of Nazreem’s hands in hers, raising them until they were almost in the classic gesture of Christian prayer, and then lowered them again to her lap. The two women were close together, looking into one another’s eyes as if each could read the other’s mind.

  ‘But the figure here then,’ the nun said eventually, her eyes focused on the face of the woman in front of her, as if everything she had ever believed on depended on the answer, ‘is not the same?’

  Nazreem was quiet a moment. Marcus wondered if she was worried what effect her words might have on a woman who had devoted her life to a wooden idol.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It is not the same. It is similar, the same style. But not the same. To start with, I thought maybe it too was ancient, that maybe it was as old as …’ Her voice trailed off. ‘But now that I have seen it, close up. I am not so sure. It has many of the same qualities, the simplicity, but …’

  She hesitated and Marcus had the impression she was trying once again, even here, to decide just how much of a description of her lost treasure she should share with others, even those she trusted implicitly. ‘It is not the same, but I see now that maybe it makes sense. Maybe, if this was a copy of the copy, there could have been changes made.’

  The nun was nodding, a wry smile on her face. ‘The figure of the Madonna in the Chapel of Grace is ancient indeed,’ she began, speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Although no one knows exactly how old. One legend says the reason it is black is because it was scorched when saved from a fire in the chapel in the
early tenth century. But there are similar stories about the Einsiedeln Madonna – it is an easy way to explain away the dark colour which some find inconvenient.

  ‘Art historians – the sort of people who claim to be able to determine such things – have said the figurine here is of Burgundian or Rhineland origin, no earlier than 1330 AD. The same people insist that the Swiss statue was made locally as late as the mid-fifteenth century. I have seen it and I can tell you that they are almost certainly correct.

  ‘But in neither case does that rule out the possibility that the statues were copies, merely that the artist at the time preferred not to be slavish in his imitation. Or that the originals were indeed damaged by fire. I have no doubt that the figure here today is an early mediaeval copy of a Madonna brought to Altötting six hundred years earlier.’

  ‘Six hundred,’ Marcus intervened automatically. ‘But that would take us back to the seventh century or earlier, before Christianity arrived in Germany.’

  The nun raised her bushy eyebrows briefly but continued talking to Nazreem, scarcely acknowledging his presence.

  ‘The legend has it that the statue was first referred to on the occasion of the baptism of Theodoric, or Dietrich as they call him in German. He is considered to be the first duke of Bavaria, but he was probably just a tribal leader. He became a Christian and insisted all his people do likewise. According to local tradition, the chapel was built for his baptism.’

  ‘And was it?’ Marcus couldn’t help himself asking.

  ‘People have been arguing for centuries,’ the nun said, answering his question without looking at him, ‘about the age of the chapel. I am no expert in architectural history. It is very ancient. That is enough. Suffice to say that this has been a holy place for as long as we have any sort of historical records.’