The Mosque of Notre Dame

by Elena Chudinova

  Shelter was not far away, about ten minutes. It was a very special place, used only in exceptional cases. Actually, he doubted there could be anywhere to hide near the Champs-Élysées. But the address he had learned only this morning was carved in his memory as if he had always lived there. Here it was, a two-story building from the nineteenth century.

  Vaulting up the marble steps of the main entrance, Eugène-Olivier hurried toward the side door. An old electric buzzer that must have been a hundred years old rang shrilly. The intercom came on.

  “Hello?”

  A stupid word, even the Arabs could pronounce it correctly. And the voice was young, female.

  “Artos.” He didn’t even try to guess who had come up with the secret code. Someone, somewhere still liked Greek words.

  “Inos,” she replied, and the door cracked open. The figure of a shortish girl appeared out of the semi-darkness on a dim, narrow, steep little staircase.

  She motioned him into the shadows, murmuring, “Faster, faster!” The girl opened the door wider, and with an impatient gesture caught him by the arm and pulled him in.

  The door bolt fell back in place.

  “Follow me.” The girl did not continue up the stairs, but stepped around them into a small, glass-enclosed veranda that led to an inner courtyard. Usually such verandas are used for flowerpots. But here, there was a pile of newspapers and an almost-full case of Perrier.

  “Wow, your heart is really pounding,” said the girl, using her foot to push open the unlocked door while she grabbed a bottle from the case. “Take those rags off. You want some water?”

  “No,” answered Eugène-Olivier in an unexpectedly hoarse voice. He followed the girl. The courtyard, which had once been enclosed only by hedges, was now hidden from the world in accordance with Muslim custom by a solid concrete wall. Conveniently, as it turned out.

  * * *

  Here were several trees once sculpted to make the shape of a pyramid, but now uneven, a lawn, and a garage door on the wall leading to the street. Eugène-Olivier looked around the drab place with curiosity before he took a closer look at the girl.

  She was about sixteen years old with chestnut brown hair, slightly wavy, inexpertly trimmed with scissors. The haircut looked like that of a medieval boy page. Her clothing was also boyish—worn-out jeans and a blue-and-white checked shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow and an unbuttoned collar. But her figure was not at all boyish, although not fully mature. She looked plumper than she really was.

  “Relax,” said the girl, opening the bottle and taking a sip of water. “This is the safest place in all of Paris. You can start stripping.”

  “The safest place,” snapped Eugène-Olivier, nevertheless removing his chador. “Even if all your documents are in order, where are you going to hide a stranger when they start combing the neighborhood? They could be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “In fifteen minutes we won’t be here,” she said with a smile. Her mouth was small and soft pink, and even after she stopped smiling, the smile remained in the corners of her lips. Eugène-Olivier’s heart really was beating more strongly. He was still enjoying her simplicity and naturalness in grabbing his arm with her small, firm hand to pull him through the door to the staircase—a young man she didn’t even know. It was like something her grandmother might have done in her youth, and so different from her peers today. They might have done the same thing just to prove to themselves that they were not poor Muslim girls. But violating the haraam they were under constant pressure. They reluctantly thought about how it all might end, and their moves were unnatural and affected. But she acted indifferent to danger.

  Not suspecting the storm she had awoken, the girl stood before him, sipping her water, which sparkled with tiny bubbles. With her head tossed back and her shirt unbuttoned at the collar, her raised hand stretched the worn fabric in such a way as to leave no doubt—there was no trace of a brassiere underneath.

  Eugène-Olivier had traveled several times to regions where Muslims still permitted women in the streets with the upper part of their face uncovered. He would remember the eyes of these Muslim women forever—with their eyelashes lengthened with mascara or simply glued on, edged with pencil, with metallic shadow on their eyelids, or eyeshadow that glittered, or eyeshadow that changed color. You could argue with those eyes the women looked less decent than if they had been completely nude. Whereas this girl with her bare neck and arms, with small breasts swelling against a shirt that had become too tight for them shone from within with chastity.

  She took another sip. Eugène-Olivier would really have liked to have had some water from her bottle, but not because of thirst. She noticed his intense gaze.

  “Hey, what’s the matter, are my ears green?” The empty bottle went into the wooden trash receptacle standing on the asphalt. “Let’s go!”

  The girl approached the garage. Behind the open door there was an old Citroën that didn’t take up a lot of room. She began to move a toolbox standing beside the wall.

  Eugène-Olivier also started pushing the box. It was so heavy, you would have thought the tools in it were made of lead.

  “I’m Eugène-Olivier,” he said, continuing to push.

  “I’m Jeanne.”

  Eugène-Olivier had never met a girl named Jeanne before in his life. His father once told him that by the end of the twentieth century, this name, once so popular, had almost disappeared. City dwellers had begun to consider it too peasant-like and vulgar. Then people in the villages tried to show the city dwellers that they, too, were sophisticated and could name their daughters Renée and Leonie.

  “It was already clear then that France would fare badly without girls named Jeanne,” his father had told him. “If we had had a daughter, that’s what we would have named her. But unfortunately, you don’t have a sister.”

  “What a rare name you have,” said Eugène-Olivier.

  They looked at each other and smiled, their heads almost touching over the rough boards. The box suddenly moved, as if it were on rails—which in fact, it was.

  There was a trap door underneath, revealing stairs that led down. They looked nothing like the ordinary wooden stairs in Paris houses. Made of lightweight metal, they had a certain elegance.

  At the bottom of the steps was a metal cubicle lit by the glare of a fluorescent lamp. Two panels on one wall parted like the doors of an elevator. Beyond them a small passage appeared, and another sliding door, leading to a long, winding corridor.

  The corridor was not dank like a sewer depot or a rat-infested subway tunnel, or even like the passageway of a crypt from ancient times (there were a lot of those under Paris). The floor had tiles the color of sour cherries, without a single scratch or nick. The flat walls might have been smooth concrete, but were painted a glossy gray. A row of dimly glowing bulbs on the ceiling lighted the way down the corridor.

  “You’ve never been in a place like this?” There was a hint of boastfulness in Jeanne’s voice—as if to suggest that although she didn’t personally build these corridors, she had ruled them for at least two or three generations. “Luxurious, isn’t it?”

  “Almost too luxurious.” Eugène-Olivier could not hide his enthusiasm. “What is this place?”

  “It’s a bomb shelter. It’s very old, almost a hundred years.”

  “From World War II? The time of Hitler?” Eugène-Olivier was pleased to display a little knowledge of history once again.

  “Oh, no, about ten years later.”

  “What kind of bombs were they hiding from?” Apparently he should not have rushed to demonstrate his knowledge of history.

  “There were no bombs.” Jeanne was walking in front, and her walk seemed to be that of a girl younger than herself. “They were simply very afraid of nuclear war. So just in case, they dug a lot of places like this one. They’ve come in very handy for us. This one had entrances in several different locations and it could hold about a dozen families from the neighborhood.”

  The c
orridor was interrupted by yet another metal door. It was oval and also discreetly attractive. In front of the door there was a stool, on which was a white plastic bowl filled with water.

  “What’s the water for?”

  “Maybe it’s used to breed fish?” She was obviously kidding. “All right, let’s join the others. There’s no point in staying here by ourselves.”

  Eugène-Olivier wouldn’t have minded if they stayed by themselves, but there was work to be done.

  The doors were sound-proof. As soon as they opened, one could hear voices.

  In the enormous room, people filled two rows of tables with benches. Some were reading books. Others talked in small groups, speaking in low voices. There was a tall, old man with gray hair tied back in a ponytail like a lord from the eighteenth century. He welcomed them with a nod. The crowd was mostly old, but to Eugène-Olivier’s surprise, there were also children among them, even babies less than a year old. The children seemed unusually well behaved—very different from the Muslim children in the streets. A little boy of about three sat on the floor with great dignity, playing with a simple toy that looked like a turquoise necklace, with beads of varying size.

  The women’s clothing was an obvious rejection of Muslim dress — they did not even wear turtlenecks. Older women wore blouses with collars; the young women had denim jackets and men’s T-shirts.

  On the other side of the room there was another door, quite small, which now opened. A man entered. When he saw him, Eugène-Olivier concluded that all this must be a part of a dream, along with Jeanne and the strange, elegant underground of the war that never was.

  The man who entered was a priest—but not the sort of priest Eugène-Olivier had seen in photographs of the last days of Notre Dame Cathedral. He looked as if he had just stepped out of a time machine from centuries ago.

  His bell-bottomed black cassock was closed by a row of cloth-covered buttons that started at his neck and went down to the floor. There were thirty-three of those buttons, but Eugène-Olivier would not find that out—or why—until much later. The tall, light-haired priest was young, although his stiff expression made him seem much older. The room fell silent as he entered.

  “Today there will be no Mass,” he said in a melodious, husky voice. “Our wine provider has fallen into the hands of the Muslims. May the Lord grant repose to his soul.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Valerie

  “Poor Monsieur Simoulin!” said an old woman in a purple blouse that set off her gray hair. Her voice was measured, but Eugène-Olivier noticed that her thin body was trembling. “As a widower, he neglected all caution. No, not neglected it, but threw it away like a thing no longer needed.”

  “I spoke with him by telephone two days ago,” said the long-haired old man softly. “He was aware that it would have been better not to work for a week or two, but he really wanted today’s feast to be commemorated. He knew that the last bottle of wine had been opened and the last cruet used during the last Mass.

  “Today the vestments are red, because the Apostle John before the Latin Gate is willing to accept the martyr’s wreath—even though martyrdom does not come to him. But it is appropriate that the vestments are red, because now another martyr will be remembered on this day.”

  “And I thought he was a smuggler,” Eugène-Olivier whispered to Jeanne.

  “You thought?...” Jeanne clenched her fists. “You... you saw? You saw something?”

  “An hour ago.”

  Others also spoke. Some of the women wept. But the priest said nothing more. He turned and walked toward the wall. How could Eugène-Olivier not have seen the crucifix he was wearing right away? He now realized that the chest-high platform covered with a white cloth was the altar. The priest knelt. Silence fell. All that could be heard was the rustling of the pages of small books with many ribbons marking pages.

  Eugène-Olivier welcomed the silence, which let him collect his thoughts. Where did the priest come from? If there was a priest, there must be a bishop; and if there was a bishop, there should also be a Pope. But there had been no Pope for some time. The last one had renounced the Throne of St. Peter back in 2031. The Vatican itself had been leveled to the ground a long time ago and was now used as a garbage dump for the entire city of Rome.

  The little boy was still playing with his beads. How could Eugène-Olivier have not seen the small cross among them?

  Now everything seemed different. The small images on the walls represented moments on Christ’s path to the Cross. Also hanging from the wall was a silver icon lamp that had not been used today. The altar was set apart by a symbolic barrier—two rope-lines, one in front of the other.

  And how impressive, when one looked at it closely, was the cap on the priest’s head! Such caps were not even worn in the middle of the last century by the Lefebvrists, judging from the photos. It was a small, black cap, square in shape, with four corners and a tassel of soft wool.

  The priest periodically removed the cap, pressed it to his breast, bowed his head, then put the cap on again.

  During the silence of prayer, the muffled sobbing slowly faded. Then there was a whispering silence. The people were all doing things—reading from their books, murmuring prayers, making the sign of the cross, kissing small cards they pulled from their pockets—all except Eugène-Olivier. Finally, the priest arose.

  “He really liked to carve wood,” Jeanne remarked aloud, addressing no one in particular. “He made everything they had on the farm himself—the doors and the furniture.”

  “The hardest part was getting the wood,” said the long-haired old man with a smile. “Furniture factories today use wood right from the tree, before it has a chance to dry. That’s why it cracks. Simoulin bought barrels that were not fit for apple juice. Then he’d straighten the boards in water and let them dry. He said his work would last more than a hundred years. It was a whole philosophy. He would say that trees did not die when they were cut down if they were used to make something—but lived a new life, like man after his physical death.”

  “And how he hated varnish!” added another man, also well on in years. “I remember he used to say ‘Wood needs to breathe! Imagine if I painted you with a coat of varnish. In a week I would have to bury you!’ ”

  Everyone fell silent.

  The priest announced, “I have forbidden Jacques le Difarre and young Thomas Bordelaise to even try to reach the place where he was stoned. One victim today is more than enough.”

  “You were right, Father. The last attempt was unsuccessful, and we lost three more.”

  People began to disperse. Before leaving, groups of them knelt before the priest, as in old times. He would hold up his hand, make the sign of the Cross in the air and say:

  “Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

  Latin! Eugène-Olivier had studied Latin with his Grandfather Patrice, but he’d never finished his studies.

  “Who are these people?” whispered Eugène-Olivier.

  “You’ve never met them before? They let us use their shelters. Sometimes they hide with us, too. But they don’t fight the Saracens, they just keep the liturgy. They don’t want to fight. They believe that the Crusades can’t be repeated, and that there can be no more good on Earth. Until Judgment Day, they simply want the Mass to continue to exist as long as there are even a few Christians. There are three parishes in Paris. Christians began in the catacombs, and now they are going back to the catacombs.”

  “But where do they live?”

  “In the ghettos.”

  Eugène-Olivier was startled. He often went to each of the five large ghettos of Paris where the defeated French lived who refused to convert to Islam. Their life behind barbed wire was miserable and hopeless, with horrible poverty and misery. There were daily deaths at the hands of policemen—who considered “infidels” equal to dogs. But the ghetto residents took great pleasure in spitting at the cries of the muezzin while sitting in a street cafe, k
nowing that the collaborationists in their luxurious houses on the other side of the barbed wire were fearfully on their way to a mosque to bow on their faces toward a rock thousands of miles away, with their rear ends in the air.

  It was mortally dangerous to make wine in the ghettos. Women went out of their houses with scarves on their heads because if they were seen scarfless, the police had the right to kill them. But they did not cover their faces!

  The inhabitants of the ghetto remained French. They taught their children as best they could, even though there were few books left. Every Astérix comic book, every Babar the Elephant book, was falling apart, handed down from generation to generation as long as anything could be discerned on the worn pages. Sometimes there were random police raids on the ghettos, depleting these small, personal libraries even further.

  But there was something much worse. Occasionally, whether arbitrarily or as part of some strategy, the religious police would decide to harass one family. An imam would start visiting the house. Young assistants who were even more aggressive would follow him.

  It was painful to look at the petrified faces of the family members. They knew, as did everyone around them, that in three months—no one knew why it was exactly three—in the morning the neighbors would see either a moving truck transporting the new converts to a Muslim quarter, or an empty house or apartment with closed blinds and the door swinging open. On the thresholds of the empty dwellings, young people would sometimes take the risk of lighting candles.