The Mosque of Notre Dame

by Elena Chudinova

  “D’accord!”

  * * *

  After handing the imam’ s former wife to the evacuation command, Eugène-Olivier hurried to get out of the metro. Shooting had broken out on the bridges. Now it could be heard all around; apparently, the order had been given to use machine guns. He had to hurry. On the stairs he met Roger Moulinier, who was descending with another boy.

  “Hi! Has Mass started?”

  “Not yet. Imagine, it will be a Requiem Mass!” exclaimed the freckled boy.

  “I’d like to attend,” said Eugène-Olivier, “But how?... I have to go to the Little Bridge. I wanted to wait for Father Lothaire to come down into the metro. Does anyone know when he’s coming out of the church?”

  The others looked at each other strangely.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Lévêque, withdraw when you’re ordered,” said Roger.

  “And Father Lothaire?” Eugène-Olivier gripped his elbow like a vise. “Moulinier, answer me!”

  “Haven’t you heard? Father Lothaire and... Sophia Sevazmios. They’re going to stay in Notre Dame to the end. To the very end. That’s what they decided. Now let me go, Lévêque, I have a lot of things to do.”

  Eugène-Olivier’s fingers were already loosened. He started toward the Little Bridge, slowly at first, then picking up speed.

  Something unbelievable was happening there. Neither the burned barricade nor the pathway on the bridge was visible, because of all the bodies in blue uniforms. Other blue uniforms were clambering over them. It looked like someone had used kerosene to set an enormous anthill on fire.

  “Are they drugged? The devil take them!” exclaimed Georges Pernoud. “They’re still pushing forward! God have mercy, how they are dying! Hey, Bertaud!”

  Bertaud put aside his Kalashnikov and took Pernoud’s place behind the machine gun.

  “Hello, Paul, hello!” shouted Pernoud. “Do we have any more grenades? Give us more, half my people have been killed, more than half, two thirds. I need reinforcements.”

  Yes, two thirds and in just half an hour, thought Eugène-Olivier, looking at the crushed head of Yves Montoux. They were no longer able to move the bodies aside.

  “Lévêque, go get grenades while they’re still giving them out!” George ordered, smiling desperately. A lock of someone’s hair, black with coagulated blood, fell on his forehead.

  Eugène-Olivier jumped up and ran. He paid no more attention to the whistling of the bullets than to the chirping of the May crickets.

  * * *

  Kasim moved his company along the Little Bridge as the advance guard. He was casual about staying behind his Kevlar shield. Here he was, leading the attack, even though he could have been sitting peacefully in Shakespeare’s library instead. He wondered whether anyone would notice that he himself was not firing. He didn’t understand why he wasn’t. He didn’t want to know what force was drawing him toward the bullets.

  * * *

  “Bertaud, I’ll replace you!” shouted Georges Pernoud before he understood why the machine gun with Roger behind it was not firing.

  He didn’t even move the body; he simply moved his shoulder a little and lay down next to his dead friend. He fired for about five minutes until the machine gun fell silent again.

  Larochejaquelein had succeeded: Eugène-Olivier brought back not only grenades, but a reinforcement of seven people from a quieter location, St. Ludovic.

  There we go! Kasim easily jumped up onto the embankment of the second barricade. Another second more and he was on the other side. They had arrived in the Cité!... They? He looked behind him and noted that he had arrived alone. The dead who now lay before him had managed, before they fell, to kill all the attackers—all except Kasim.

  Now, time began flowing more slowly than the waters of the Seine down below. He was alone with the dead, the only one still alive. A Maquisard with a baseball cap, small and skinny, was in fact a young woman. Not even a young woman—a girl, a child not older than thirteen. Next to her lay a middle-aged man. Kasim knew him from the cheap auto mechanic’s shop where he got his car repaired. He had worked there, there was no doubt. I would never have guessed he was a Maquisard . And the one behind the machine gun looked a lot like Antoine. Antoine? No, it must be someone else, it was just a resemblance.

  How many years did those few seconds last?

  As Kasim settled in behind the machine gun and began to fire it, time again began to race forward. Strangers wearing blue uniforms were already rushing over the bridge. He was able to cut them down methodically, drawing on his years of training, until the survivors fled back to the other side in panic.

  Eugène-Olivier raced so fast he thought his heart would jump out of his throat onto the cobblestones. Was it his imagination, or had the shooting from the Little Bridge stopped? It was his imagination.

  Out of two machine guns and a dozen Kalashnikovs, only a machine gun was still firing. Someone had apparently managed to climb over and take the place of a wounded gunner. It had been enough to stop the attackers from crossing the barricade. The shots had become intermittent. Eugène-Olivier ran up to see if he could help. A strange sight confronted him.

  “What the hell . . ?”

  “Shit!” swore the gunner. “They can go... up the devil’s ass.” The badly wounded man, who was wearing the uniform of a Muslim officer, spoke with difficulty. He had little time left to live. “I am not Kasim!” he growled. “I am... Xavier!”

  * * *

  It was good that they were bringing people from St. Ludovic to the Little Bridge, thought Jeanne. On the other island you couldn’t even turn around. They attacked constantly. Here, even two men were enough. And a third was due to arrive at any second.

  “We repelled them,” said Slobodan to himself. “I can even have a cigarette. A cigar. Anything, even these disgusting Galoises.” Slobodan opened a new box. He would not have refused one of the Belomorkanals Sophia was smoking, but he could not ask the woman to share her expensive smuggled cigarettes.

  “Hey, have you heard the news?” announced a young Maquisard Jeanne didn’t recognize. Nor did Slobodan.

  “No, what?”

  “They’ve stopped attacking. They don’t want to die anymore. We managed to intercept the telephone conversation of one of them. We listened to his voicemail. They’re not doing anything for at least a whole hour! They want to prepare an artillery attack in response. That means they’ll probably come from the river. I almost regret to say they won’t have anyone to attack in an hour! We’ve been ordered to withdraw.”

  “Great!” Jeanne jumped up. “Great, we’ve beat them! Oh, I’m going to dance a passage from Giselle!”

  Slobodan smiled reluctantly and continued to enjoy his cigarette. He also stood up, leaning his leg on a bag; it felt so good to be able to straighten his back. He threw away his cigarette butt, carefully following where it would land. It fell on enemy territory, on the asphalt next to the hand of a dead man gripping a pistol. The hand slowly began to rise; the man looked at Jeanne jumping around on the barricade next to Slobodan.

  The pistol recoiled, a shot rang out. The body on the asphalt jerked in its final convulsion.

  But Slobodan had managed to half push away, half-protect Jeanne with his chest. “This is bad,” thought Slobodan calmly, as if nothing had happened. “It’s stupid.”

  “Wounded? Hey, the creep really got you good...”

  “I don’t know yet. When you run to the metro, send me back... medical... help.” At first, his words came easily, and then with greater difficulty. He slipped down to his knees. He didn’t fall, no, he was simply leaning his back on the bags. His consciousness, which until now had been clear, was suddenly foggy, as if someone had breathed on translucent glass.

  “You heard... the... order. You can’t stay here. Run!”

  “Like hell!”

  Slobodan felt the cobblestones moving under him like a bumpy ride on a sled. Then the stones stopped moving and his vision became clear. He understood tha
t he was lying at the entrance of the metro with Jeanne bending over him. He hadn’t recognized her right away. Jeanne’s usually pale face shone from within with an unnatural ruddiness. It was like a bright bulb, while her soft bangs were now dark and shiny, lying smoothly on her forehead as if they were wet. Ah, that was from the rain that was falling on his face.

  But there was no rain. Jeanne wiped her face with the sleeve of her denim shirt. Slobodan finally understood with horror that the girl had dragged him from the bridge of St. Ludovic all the way to the entrance of the metro. How had she even managed to move him, when he weighed more than 200 pounds?

  “Why... are you doing this?” His words tasted somehow salty.

  “Be quiet!” Jeanne could barely breathe. “You can’t talk... the blood... But why did you do that?”

  Slobodan looked at her young face and could not take his eyes off her. The French girl was angry with him for protecting her with his body, and now that he was wounded, she refused to let him die.

  Suddenly everything became easy for him, incredibly easy, his heart filled with an almost unbearable sense of happiness that he had thought he had forgotten, the happiness of a child as he watched them pouring wine on the Yule log in the hearth.

  He understood. He understood everything.

  His soul was far smarter than he was himself. No, he had not come here to seek revenge against the Muslims, although that was what he had fantasized about for years. Sophia was right, a normal person could not derive any satisfaction from revenge. He hadn’t known that before, but his soul knew. He had come here to share the difficulties of rebellion with this people, a people that had once done wrong to his own people, but now suffered just as much, inasmuch as suffering could be compared. He had come here to be together with a people whom he had forgiven.

  In order to understand that he had forgiven, in order to feel the blessing and joy of Christian forgiveness, he needed but little. He had needed only to see before him the angry, tear-stained face of a young French girl.

  He said to her, “You must live... please...” His words seemed unbelievably loud. The blood rushed from his mouth like water from a broken fountain.

  “No!” cried Jeanne desperately. But Slobodan heard the cry as if it were coming from a very great distance, and he stopped hearing it before Jeanne stopped crying out.

  * * *

  “Did you hear me, Lévêque? We’ve been ordered to withdraw. We’ve lasted as long as we needed to! They have a whole hour left in the church, which is far more than they need!”

  Eugène-Olivier nodded and took a bottle of water someone passed to him. He understood only one thing: He did not have to fight or shoot, at least for a while. He closed his eyes. It was dark. He didn’t sleep; he simply enjoyed his relaxed muscles and empty head.

  A minute passed. Five minutes. Then Eugène-Olivier gave a sudden start.

  He remembered.

  CHAPTER 18

  The ship is sailing

  The machine-gun fire was no longer coming just from the bridges. There was also firing from the platform of the St. Michel metro station.

  “The artillery has almost begun,” said Vincent de Lescure. “Our artillery. My parents could never have imagined that I would take part in such a Ritus reconcilliandi ecclesiam violatam. ”

  “How can you know what’s going on in the battle by the sound of the shooting?” Father Lothaire was turning the pages of a pocket edition of the Rituale Romanum. “I must say, Monsieur de Lescure, you really surprised me with your contribution to the defensive plan. Even Sophia Sevazmios had to listen to you.”

  “You forget how old I am,” said de Lescure with a smile. “I studied at St. Cyr. The only place in our atrocious republic where a young man who was not from a wealthy family, but a member of the poor aristocracy, could go to begin a great military career. I didn’t manage to do that because I was too young. Otherwise, today I would not be a book seller but a staff general.”

  “It never occurred to me.” Father Lothaire marked the page, handed the book to de Lescure and donned a white cope over his cassock. “Let us begin with God. It’s time.”

  They were sitting in front of the doors of the main entrance. The breeze was fluttering the pages of the Rituale and billowing folds of the alb de Lescure was wearing, which was too wide for his spare frame.

  The charcoal hissed and spat in the censor as a thin wisp of incense began to swirl in the wind.

  Father Lothaire’s voice flew toward Heaven, echoing from the walls. It was strange, very strange, to carry out the ritual without fear, not underground, and under the bright light of the sun.

  They began to move slowly along the walls. Before the small procession had circled the façade, two people carrying large sacks appeared in the courtyard and hurried toward the main entrance.

  Sophia looked at her watch and sighed with relief.

  “Madame, please be so kind as to accept twenty kilos of chocolate!” sighed Thomas Bourdelle—the short, freckled, unbelievably young man to whom every onerous task seemed like a trifle. Since early childhood, he had been coming to Mass in the ghetto, first with his parents; then, after they were killed, on his own.

  “Quiet, you nut,” Roger Moulinier told him, transferring his own load to his other shoulder. “Father Lothaire has already begun.”

  Only a month ago, the nineteen year-old Moulinier, who was a very important member of Maquis , didn’t even know Mass existed.

  “Sophie, everything is fine,” he said brightly. “It’s not easy to enter the metro anymore. They’ve finally managed to cut the power, so we’ve made torches out of branches. The stations still in service are now in the same kind of darkness as the abandoned ones. And there really is twenty kilos of plastic explosive—ten in each bag, already divided by kilo.”

  David’s repentance could be heard in the words of Psalm 50, begging the Lord to wash him from iniquity and cleanse him from sin. Passing under the outside stairs leading to the “women’s” floor of the soon-to-be-former mosque, de Lescure frowned and with some difficulty refrained from cursing.

  “You’ve done very well, boys!” Sophia Sevazmios lifted her dark glasses to her forehead. Cheerful flames played in her eyes. “Roger, you may die today, too,” Sophia smiled and the glasses again hid the cheerful look, “Especially if you hurry. All the Kalashnikovs are in their places. Boys, bring it all into the center of the church. Don’t make an old woman break her back.”

  The procession of two men was already passing under the cobweb-covered paws of the flying buttresses. This was certainly where Sophia would attach the explosive, thought Father Lothaire reluctantly as he swung the aspergillum . The drops fell on the stones, glistening cheerfully.

  If only we can circle the church as quickly as possible, thought de Lescure, fighting the desire to speed up his step. Lord, let us finish, because everything depends on this boy who carries the heavy burden of dreams on his breast. Even my youngest son, Étienne, if he were still alive, would now be six years older than he. Why does it seem to me that as soon as we circle the church the danger will disappear? Perhaps it doesn’t exist after all?

  A sniper bullet coming from who-knows-where whizzed by and dully struck a stone. The censer shook. They missed, thought Father Lothaire, before he saw that de Lescure was down on one knee.

  “A nasty thing... that... ricochet,” said he, holding the vessel with the aspergillum out to the priest.

  “Are you seriously wounded, Lescure?” Fumbling with the censer, the Rituale and the water, Father Lothaire was trying to free one hand to help his altar server.

  “Wounded, killed, how can I know?” De Lescure raised his voice commandingly. “Go on! We’re not playing a game here; this is still a mosque!”

  Father Lothaire bit his lip deeply, turned his back to the wounded man and walked around the corner. Another bullet hit the stone, but as de Lescure had thought, the priest behind the corner was now out of reach of the sniper.

  Leaning heavily
against the wall, de Lescure tried to calculate where the shooting was coming from. But there were no more shots fired. What had happened, and from where, was impossible to know in this bloody mess. The pain brought scenes from his childhood before his eyes. De Lescure finally allowed himself to cry out, hoping that the priest was already far away.

  Father Lothaire heard the cry nevertheless, because he now worked at half speed, forced to manage by himself with the Rituale , the censer, and the holy water. But he could not go on like this. In extremis , Sophia could help, but she was busy.

  Sophia was already inside, distributing the contents of the bags, attaching a timer to each small package. Bourdelle and Moulinier had already returned to their positions.

  Father Lothaire was back at the entrance ordering the devil to flee before the Savior who was to come. His work of reclaiming the space outside for Christ was finished. Now, for the church itself.

  The door was open, which was fortunate, since he could not have opened it himself, with all he was carrying.

  Sophia, who was kneeling with plastic explosive in her hands forty feet from the entrance, lifted her head. A shadow fell over her face. She jumped to her feet in obvious confusion unique to her—whether to run toward the priest and relieve him of some of his burdens, or was that not allowed?

  Father Lothaire smiled, as if to say, In extremis, many things are allowed. In Soviet camps where there were no priests, women baptized children. Couldn’t a woman now hold a censer? They’ve managed to slow us down by killing Vincent de Lescure; his absence will cost us another dozen lives.

  Rapid footsteps could be heard from their backs, but Father Lothaire didn’t even turn around; from Sophia’s face, he could see there was no imminent danger.

  The Kalashnikov thrown on the floor clattered. Eugène-Olivier Lévêque, panting, with barely dry hands stained with blood, gasoline, dirt, and cement— and wearing pants torn at the knee—was already reaching for the censer.