by Sarah Rayne
The singing was still struggling to maintain its momentum, and there was something so heart-rending about those frightened, determined voices that renewed determination washed over me. A dozen more steps – perhaps a dozen and a half – and I would be within reach of the stone plinth. I would have to trust to luck that the statue was not cemented down, and I would also have to trust to luck that the nuns and whatever was behind the rood screens would respond fast enough for an escape.
I am not sure if Sister Clothilde was entirely sane at that point. From where I stood I could not hear very clearly, nor could I entirely follow what she was saying, but I think it was something about not yielding to the emissaries of Satan and standing firm in the face of Satan’s armies. Mad or sane, she had a grandiloquent line in rhetoric.
The officer said, in a cold voice, ‘You expect us to shoot you, Sister?’
‘We will die in God’s love.’
‘So you have a hankering for the Martyr’s Crown,’ he said, very sarcastically. ‘Well, we shall disappoint you over that, for we do not commit murder if we can avoid it, at least not against religieuses. But there are other methods of persuasion, Sister.’ There was a gloating lasciviousness in his voice, and he rapped out another of the orders to the soldiers. I thought one of them hesitated, but the others moved at once, grabbing the arms of the two youngest nuns and pulling them into the main aisle.
I took several more steps nearer the statue, praying not to be noticed, hoping none of the sisters would remember I was there and give away my presence.
‘Well, Sister?’ said the officer. ‘We have two of your choicest pigeons. Now will you stand aside and let us into the convent?’
‘I will not. Sisters, stay brave. God’s love and His strength are with you.’
The two young nuns were struggling and sobbing, and I don’t think they really heard her. They both wore what looked like the garb of novices, and one of the soldiers had pulled away the headdress of the smaller one. Beneath it she had cropped hair, soft and silky, like a baby’s. She looked about seventeen and even tear-streaked and terrified she was extremely pretty. The men reached for the headdress of the other and snatched that off as well, standing around the two girls, laughing and jeering.
‘Now, Sister,’ said the officer to Clothilde, ‘you see what is about to happen, I think? My men have not seen females for a very long time. Will you allow us into your convent to use it for our headquarters, or do I persuade you to do so by letting my men make use of these two choice little morsels?’
(He may have used words other than morsels, but my German was not equal to translating obscenity.)
Whatever words he used, there was no doubt about his meaning. Sister Clothilde turned white to the lips, and Sister Jeanne let out a cry of fear and anguish.
But, ‘We do not allow you into God’s house to practice your brutality and wage your war on innocent people,’ said Clothilde. ‘We will never allow it, no matter the cost.’ Her eyes flickered to the two girls – one of them was trying to cover her poor shorn head, and the pity of it slammed into my throat. ‘No matter the cost,’ she said again.
One of the nuns added, challengingly, ‘And Belgium will never surrender. Even if you kill all of its people one by one, it will not yield to you.’
‘It will not,’ said Clothilde. She looked at the two girls and then at the avid-eyed soldiers. ‘If you wish to perform that act of savagery, take me instead,’ she said. ‘I do not care, and God will understand.’
The officer laughed, and the sound echoed mockingly around the chapel.
‘We prefer younger meat,’ he said. ‘But if we have to, we will take you one by one until you agree to let us into your convent. You understand me? One by one. All of us in turn.’
Clothilde stared at him. ‘I understand you,’ she said. ‘But we will resist you with the small strength we have.’
‘I think, Sister, that you will not resist for long,’ said the officer. ‘Perhaps after the third or fourth time – when your nuns are screaming with the pain and humiliation – you will be begging us to take over your convent.’
The two sentries from the door moved into the chapel then, whether to watch what was about to happen, or simply to make sure no one tried to escape, I have no idea, but it meant they now stood between me and the stone plinth with its statue. I managed to dart behind a stone column without being seen, but anger and frustration swept through me in a scalding flood.
The two novices were thrown to the ground, the soldiers standing around them, already loosening their belts. Two of the older nuns moved, as if trying to go to the girls’ assistance, but the soldiers barred their way.
The faces of all the men were avid, and in the light from the flickering altar candles and the rays from the setting sun, their eyes gleamed with lust. The anger surged up again, and I tensed my muscles, ready to make a run for the stone plinth. To hell with being seen or shot; if there was any justice in the world, I would manage to send the statue crashing to the ground and pray to whatever gods were listening that the nuns would have the wit to escape in the ensuing mêlée. But before I could do so, the same two nuns ran forward again, straight at the soldiers, their hands outstretched to push the men away from the two novices. It was brave in the extreme, but it was also foolhardy in the extreme, and of course it was fatal. As if by reflex, the two sentries lifted their rifles and fired several rapid rounds. Screams filled the chapel, and the two nuns fell, clutching gunshot wounds. Blood spattered over the quiet old stones, and across the lovely old organ, and Sister Jeanne screamed and recoiled from the bench, cowering against the wall.
‘Play the prayer,’ cried Clothilde. ‘God is listening – God will not abandon us. The Magnificat … “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she received the Holy Ghost …” All of you, join with me – trust in God, in our Blessed Lady—’
The terrible, the macabre and pitiful thing, is that they tried to obey her. Jeanne made her trembling way back to the organ bench, and fumblingly started to play, and after a few chords, the ragged, fearful singing came in. It was to the accompaniment of those sounds – that music – that the soldiers held down the two young novices – both of them too frightened to resist – and raped them. They did it there on the prayer-drenched stones, one after the other, with the blind, watchful statues, with the slippery tainting blood everywhere, and the nuns they had shot lying dead on the ground.
I am not ashamed of many things in my life, but I have always been deeply ashamed that I did not move sufficiently fast to stop that particular brutality. But hearing the sobs and the cries, I ran out of the shadows, straight at the stone plinth. I am no hero – I would like to repeat that for my reader – but I do not think any man could have cowered in hiding and done nothing to help those women. So I bounded across the chapel, straight at the statue.
To some extent I had the advantage of surprise – the soldiers had no idea I was there – and by the time they did realize it, I had reached the plinth and was throwing my whole weight against it. There was a panic-filled moment when I thought the statue was not going to move, then it shuddered and there was a harsh, hard sound of stone scraping against stone. The soldiers spun round, levelling their rifles. They saw me, and they fired, but by then I was behind the statue and the plinth, and the bullets buried themselves in the statue. Sprays of stone-dust clouded out, and under cover of this I pushed again at the figure. The teeth-wincing scraping came again, and then, with a kind of stately menace, Christ’s figure began to move. I pushed it for the third time, and this time it dislodged from its base. For a moment the emotive, legendary features reproduced in hundreds of statues and paintings, slowly – oh God, so slowly – toppled forward.
They say you often get more than you planned for in life and that was certainly the case in that chapel. Not only did the statue fall, it took the plinth with it. They both went crashing down, hitting the ground with an explosion of sound, painful and deafening. Lumps of stone and fragments o
f shattered marble flew out in every direction, and the sound of the crash reverberated through the small chapel, causing the glass to shiver and dislodging several of the Mass vessels from the altar. Huge eruptions of dust billowed out, snuffing the candles, plunging the chapel into an eerie, grey-tinged gloaming. But worst of all, the organ pipes, jarred by the crash, thrummed with angry discordance, sending out ugly confused sounds as if the organ itself were wounded and moaning in agony.
The soldiers were running everywhere, gasping and coughing from the dust that was clogging their lungs and causing their eyes to stream, trying to regroup. They could not see me – I could barely see them, in fact, but I had been behind the dust explosion and I was probably in better shape than anyone. Sister Jeanne half fell from her organ stool, looked about her in fearful confusion, then turned to where I stood, as if in appeal.
I pointed to the rood screens. ‘Get them all out at once. Get everyone into the convent then barricade yourselves in,’ I said. ‘If I can dodge the soldiers, I’ll get out and try to send help to you.’
It was a jumble of French and heaven-knows what other languages, but she understood well enough, and nodded, turning to the screens. One had fallen and was leaning drunken and splintered against a column. The other was still in place, and it was around this second screen that I stepped.
And saw what was behind it.
Nine
I ought not to have been surprised. I certainly ought not to have recoiled in pity. But, sadly, it’s an instinct most of us have – faced with the abnormal, the grotesque, with those poor specimens of humanity that nature has mistreated, we flinch and want to run away.
The scene that lay behind those screens was like something from one of the famous disturbing paintings or engravings by people such as William Hogarth or Bruegel or Goya. Scenes from asylums, from pauper hospitals. At first the canvas appears to contain normal, ordinary faces with normal, ordinary bodies. But as you go on looking, you begin to see something subtly wrong with every one of the figures. Deformities of body – perhaps even worse, deformities of mind that look out through the eyes.
Those cruel tweaks of Nature confronted me as I stepped around the screens. Twenty, perhaps twenty-five, young women, some barely fourteen years old, others probably nineteen or twenty, huddled together in a terrified cluster, their eyes wide, their faces streaked with tears and stone-dust. Every one bearing the vicious pawmark of deformity. Hunchbacked, crippled, malformed, some of the faces even bearing the unmistakable stamp of idiocy – it’s pitifully obvious, that last one. As if a malicious hand smeared the raw material before it had quite set. I’ve heard them called the sweet and holy fools of the world, but I don’t know if I subscribe to that.
But in one thing they were alike in that moment. They were all terrified, and as soon as they saw me they shrank back. God knows what terrors they must have gone through herded together here, hearing what was happening, perhaps glimpsing some of it. Many of them would not entirely have understood, but all of them would have known they were in danger.
All around us, the organ pipes were still thrumming with discordance, and through it I could hear the soldiers crashing everywhere and swearing. But the dust was already clearing, and it would only take minutes for them to recover and regroup. I had minutes to get these girls across the chapel and into the main part of the convent behind locked doors. The alternative – to get them out to the gardens and out into the countryside – was impossible.
The pitiful thing – the thing that still twists painfully at the root of my soul when I think about it – is that they began to sing again. It was as if they were offering the only defence they had, and despite the danger and the chaos, tears stung my eyes.
But mercifully Sister Jeanne was there as well, and they trusted her. She clapped her hands briskly, and I think she said, ‘Into the convent, girls, and quickly, please.’ They fell obediently into line, and Sister Jeanne nodded to me in a gesture that might have been a thanks or a blessing, and led them through the clouds of dust and the shuddering music from the disturbed organ pipes. I stayed where I was, seeing that despite the awkward gait of most of them they skirted the edges of the chapel nimbly enough, avoiding the soldiers, picking their way through the dust. They went through the far door, and Sister Jeanne turned and sketched the outline of the Sign of the Cross on the air. I put up a hand in acknowledgement, then they were gone, and I caught, very faintly, the sound of a key turning in a lock. I thought: they’ll barricade themselves in there, and if I can get away I’ll somehow get help to them.
If I could get away … One level of my mind – the professional burglar’s level – had continued to work at its usual pace. Almost without realizing it, I had worked out that I could get through a narrow window partly hidden by the remaining rood screen. It was just about accessible from the ground, and the glass would have to be knocked out, but thankfully it was plain glass. Even in that desperate situation I would have hesitated to destroy the beautiful stained glass panels in the other windows.
The soldiers were at the far door, trying to force the lock, and the officer was saying something about finding other ways in.
Praying that Sister Clothilde and the others had had the wit to make sure all doors and windows were secured, I reached up for the stone sill, grateful for the cover afforded by the screen. But before I could lever myself up on to it, there was a movement on my right and I looked round sharply, thinking one of the soldiers had found his way here, tensing all my muscles to fight him or dodge bullets, or both.
It was not a soldier. It was one of the girls from the choir – she was cowering in the deep shadow of a buttress, and she was a thin, pale little thing with dark hair. Unlike a number of the other girls, her features were regular, although slightly pointed in the way a cat’s features are or a pixie’s. Her eyes were clear and intelligent, but filled with terror and bewilderment. How she had been missed by Sister Jeanne I have no idea, but here she was. On the wrong side of the locked door.
I defy anyone, in that situation, to know the best course of action. We were in a dust-swept chapel with a thrumming discordance echoing all round us, the rest of the community was barricaded behind locked doors, the Kaiser’s soldiers were brandishing rifles at everything in sight, and two murdered nuns were lying in their own blood. I don’t think I was ever in a more awkward or bizarre situation.
There was no time to wonder whether I could get the girl into the locked section of the convent, because clearly I could not. So, in my unreliable French, I said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m here to help. We’ll climb through the window.’
I didn’t really expect her to acquiesce. I didn’t even expect her to understand. But she nodded and clambered out from her tiny hiding-place – I remember thinking: oh God, please don’t let her be as badly deformed as some of those other poor souls. Please let her be capable of walking normally, because if she’s severely crippled, we might as well surrender to the German army here and now.
As she walked to the narrow window, I saw that she limped quite badly, as if she might have one leg slightly shorter than the other, or possessed what I think is called a club foot. But somehow I got her through the window, pushing her on to the sill, and indicating to her to drop down on the grass on the other side.
‘Can you manage that?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said at once, which was one mercy in the midst of the chaos.
I turned back to survey the chapel. And now my burglar’s mind was undoubtedly in the ascendant. I thought: I’ve got to travel through Belgium and find help for those nuns, and I’ve got to do it fast. I might have to take that girl with me for a few miles.
I’m not particularly proud of what I did, but the soldiers would have looted the chapel, and to travel anywhere, it’s necessary to have money – or something that can be turned into money. I went for the icons, of course. I pocketed four of them – beautiful jewel-painted things in polished frames. Then I scrambled on to the stone window sill
and down on to the grass. The pixie-faced girl was waiting for me.
‘What’s your name?’
She hesitated, as if unsure whether to trust me that far, so I said, ‘I’m Iskander. I’m a Russian newspaper reporter.’
I’m not even sure if she knew what a reporter was, but she nodded, as if absorbing these new words. Then she said, ‘Leonora.’
‘I wish I could say I was happy to meet you, Leonora. But it will be all right. Take hold of my hand and don’t let go. We’re going to run away together.’
She only hesitated briefly. She said, ‘Run away? Away from here, do you mean? From Sacré-Coeur?’
‘Yes. Is that all right with you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, with a fervency I had not anticipated. ‘As far as possible.’
Her hand came into mine, and together we went through the scented gardens, and into the vast waiting night of the doomed land.
The journal ended there, but Iskander’s vivid word-pictures remained.
So, thought Michael, that grisly little legend about the Palestrina Choir had been true. The Choir really had sung the accompaniment to its own death throes. It had been a heart-rending attempt by the girls to placate the intruders, because it had been the only thing they had known – the only defence weapon they could offer. Like Iskander, the pity of it bit painfully into him.
At times, translating the narrative, Michael had had to guess at Iskander’s meaning, and there had been whole paragraphs – in one case almost an entire page – where the writing had been too cramped – or perhaps written too hastily – to decipher it with any certainty. But as he worked, understanding the journal had become progressively easier, like running down a flight of stairs – you moved so fast that your feet did not actually touch the stairs, and yet your own momentum and confidence propelled you safely to the bottom. Michael had been able to skim Iskander’s words so surely that he had reached an understanding.