The Mosque of Notre Dame

by Elena Chudinova

  “Then why do you all lick the heels of Arabs?”

  “They’re the descendants of the Prophets,” explained Iman, starting to get a little confused at the contradiction. “That is, some of the Arabs.”

  “Fine,” sighed Jeanne. “And you and I are the descendants of those who defeated those descendants of the Prophet. But your ancestors would have taken a vow of holy celibacy if they had known they would have a descendant like you.”

  “The truth is more important!”

  “Of course. But how would you know the truth? You’re not a girl—you’re a doll that walks. They decorate you, they feed you, they pet you. They’ve poured a few short ideas into your head and told you not to move your arms. Now you obey your parents. Later they’ll choose a husband for you. You’ll have to accept what is offered. Then you’ll obey your husband and bear his children. You’ll get old and die without leaving the house. And then there will be nothing left for you anymore.”

  “That’s what you think!” Iman was turning red and pale with anger.

  “Not at all!” Jeanne smiled. “Here’s what I think: I think you have an immortal soul. Your soul was made for Heaven. But it’s in danger now of going to hell because it is the soul of a traitoress, the soul of a servant of Christ’s persecutors. The idea of your soul disappearing into nothingness after you’re dead—that’s what you think.”

  “What nonsense! Of course I don’t believe that.”

  “You’re a Muslim?”

  “Yes, I’m a Muslim!”

  “Well, that’s what you should think. And nothing else.”

  “You kafirs don’t know anything!” protested Iman. “If I pray five times, if I go on pilgrimage, if...”

  “Can you stop counting on your fingers?”

  “...I will go to Heaven,” concluded Iman triumphantly.

  “You’re a girl. Heaven is for men, according to Islam. A Muslim woman has no soul, like a dog, or a fish in your aquarium.”

  “That’s not true! Imam Chapelier says—”

  “Your imam Chapelier is making a fool out of you. He knows that the Qu’ran and the religious authorities don’t teach that women have souls.”

  “How dare you talk that way about imam Chapelier!”

  From a distant room the crying of a child could be heard.

  “That’s Aziza, my sister,” explained Iman, sighing. “She’s almost two.”

  Jeanne suddenly realized there was something strange in this house. Apparently, Iman had only one sister, and her father had only one wife. They didn’t need all those servants for three women. The luxurious, empty rooms seemed to say that they should be full of many women giving orders and women serving, who constantly vied among each other for male attention and for authority over other women. But the golden skeleton looked empty.

  “You converts sold your souls to please the Arabs. But they will always look down on you.”

  “And you kafirs , they say, have truly disgusting habits,” continued Iman. “Tell me, is it true that you make no distinction between clean and unclean hands?”

  “When they are dirty, we do.”

  “You mean, you eat and clean yourself with the same hand?” Iman was horrified.

  The glasses with warm chocolate and cookies rattled on the serving tray in the hands of Aset, who had been standing a long time at the door, listening.

  I must have gone mad! How could I have brought this strange, dangerous child home to my Iman? This girl is twisting and confusing her. It’s just what I didn’t want—for Iman to go through what I did growing up. Snooty looks from grand’mère, who never left the house after we converted, and called us “fools.” Yes, Iman believes in Allah, the way she believes in Little Red Riding Hood! But she’s a practical, intelligent girl. When she grows up, she’ll understand there’s no Allah, but she’ll respect what’s expected of her. If you want to play the game, you follow the rules. The most important thing is the family, and the spiritual peace of Iman and Aziza.

  The parents of this Jeanne were obviously eccentrics who would sacrifice the future of their own child for their idea of “the historical and religious values of the nation.” When was the last time a Frenchman took religion seriously? This poor child has bought into the myth of Christ. She’s no more normal than an Arab, in the opposite direction.

  I better just interrupt them right now. This conversation is completely unnecessary, and Zuraida is eavesdropping. Change the subject, feed the children. And then the girl will go away, that’s best... But it will be sad. Why do I think the house will be dead without her, like in a body without a soul?

  “That’s silly,” Jeanne said. “Our hands are like our thoughts. We’re always touching what’s dirty and what’s clean. Only an idiot can consider himself sterile in this sinful world just because he cleans himself with his left hand and eats with his right. If you touch dirt, you wash your hands. If you think something dirty, you wash your soul. Everything else is nonsense.”

  “Why are you always against everything?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t grow up in a glass garden. Why not ask why your servant, the old one, isn’t French?”

  “Zuraida? Of course she’s not French. Maman says they don’t like it if everyone in the house is French...”

  “You girls must be hungry!” said Aset, coming in with the tray.

  “It’s hard to get hungry here! The rooms are like warehouses,” answered Jeanne, grinning her broadest grin.

  These converts were not to blame because they’re just weak. At least some of the food in this house is normal. Hot chocolate with milk, not bad at all.

  Apparently Jeanne was hungry after all. But her hand stopped at a sound: The crying of the child had long since mingled with a monotonous song in lingua franca:

  If everything in the house is well,

  If the zakat has been paid,

  Rest peacefully and don’t be afraid of the dark.

  Toora, loora, loora, hush, now, don’t you cry.

  “That’s Zuraida putting the baby to sleep,” said Aset quickly, blushing. “Please have some hot chocolate, Jeanne... What’s the matter?”

  “Thank you very much, I’m quite full.” Jeanne suddenly stood up from the soft armchair. Her head spun slightly. How could she have spent so much time in these stuffy rooms without windows—that smelled of overly sweet candy and incense? She couldn’t breathe!

  “I’m sorry, I just realized, I have to go.”

  “Wait, daughter, where will you go at this time of day?... Did something offend you?”

  “No, not at all!” Jeanne decisively moved toward the door. Aset headed after her.

  Iman called after her, “You forgot to put on the chador!”

  Aset took Jeanne aside: “Jeanne, you mustn’t walk around the city without a chador! That’s dangerous, very dangerous, you have to understand that!”

  “I’ll survive somehow.”

  “All right. I’ll drive you. Wait.” Aset put her hand on Jeanne’s shoulder and added with quiet intensity, “In God’s name, don’t go like that into the street!”

  “Which god? Allah?” Jeanne said, and ducked out the door.

  It turned out that the weather had changed—you couldn’t see anything through the darkened windows. The sky was covered with heavy autumn clouds. The first drops had already fallen on the path between the chestnuts when Jeanne dashed toward the gate.

  “Jeanne! Jeanne! If you need anything, come here, do you hear me?”

  Aset, who felt suddenly felt weak, had to grab the doorjamb for support. During the thirty-two years of her life, she had never felt such complete, absolute despair. The girl would not come back; she would never come back. The rain was now pouring. Good. When it rained, people looked at each other less.

  Jeanne’s hair and jeans were instantly wet, but the fabric of her light jacket resisted several minutes before letting the water through.

  No, one shouldn’t forgive traitors, not even if they have beautiful and
good hands and warmly call you “daughter.” Even if they understand that they are traitors. And traitors should also not be forgiven, even if they have Madeleine’s eyes and Gael’s chin, and not one iota of awareness that they are traitors.

  Jeanne ran through the rain to Lucile, to a tiny chamber that was not as stuffy as the entire house she had just left. To a shelter she received from one of her own, safe people.

  Above Paris, on every side, the shrill call of the muezzin to prayer could be heard.

  CHAPTER 10

  An underground camp

  Within the concrete walls, a surface of water shimmered, alive like the black pupil of an enormous eye.

  “We made a mistake!” shouted Eugène-Olivier, jumping from the handcart. “We can’t go any further; the platform is flooded.”

  “Yes, occasionally underground waters flood the area,” said Father Lothaire. “But we’re going to drain them right now.”

  “Drain them? How?”

  “This is an artificial flooding. I knew the engineer who rigged it. We’re going to drain it, if I can just find the rope that pulls the stopper from the tub.”

  Father Lothaire moved cautiously along the wall, scanning it carefully with the flashlight.

  It was clear to Eugène-Olivier that the Wahhabis would never manage to deprive Parisians of safe shelters. There were so many of them that even he, who had been a fighter since the age of ten, hadn’t known about the 20th century atomic shelters—like the one where he’d met Father Lothaire.

  The Saracens ceded a good third of the subway system to us out of laziness, but even without that, there are plenty of locations. Paris is connected to the underground at a thousand points, like a twisted labyrinth. No army can search it or control it. They must resign themselves to the existence of fighters in the catacombs.

  But there is another way to exert control, and we in the catacombs of Paris, the small underground cities under the forests of Brittany, and the limestone caves are helpless against it: If the children of the Crescent can take absolute control of life in the sunlight, then, oh! What use are the weapon depots guarded by the skeletons of our ancestors if the secret meeting-places in the city have disappeared?

  His thoughts were interrupted by the deafening sound of water flowing out.

  The two men silently watched the underground “lake” gradually disappearing in the vortex.

  Father Lothaire spurred them into motion. “We’ll hav e to get our feet wet unless we want to wait for two hours. But we have a place to get warm and dry just ahead.”

  Splashing around in the wet, smelly dirt with disgust, Eugène-Olivier followed the priest. When they passed the platform, they found themselves in front of a small passageway in which stairs could be seen leading up toward the street. When the station was working, these probably led to offices.

  “The water usually closes the entrance,” said the priest. “Be careful, it’s slippery.”

  An area of about 200 square feet at the top of the stairs had not been flooded. It was covered with linoleum and filled with crates and items wrapped in rags.

  “This is the main church depot, among other things,” said Father Lothaire, beginning to rummage through something that looked like a small refrigerator.

  “Your bomb shelter is a lot more comfortable, Father.”

  “And a lot more accessible. The problem is that it’s too easy to find—although sometimes God helps. I just have one set of relics there and I’ve placed them in a portable stone tablet. Now we’re going to turn on the lights; here you can even turn on the reflectors. I wouldn’t mind some hot tea. What about you, young Lévêque?”

  Eugène-Olivier eagerly agreed. He stopped at what looked like a small engine mounted on legs of steel tubing like a bug.

  “Forgive me, but what kind of junk is this, Father?”

  “I can tell you what it’s called, but it will mean nothing to you. You will find all sorts of relics in a place where urban life used to unfold. When we found those, they had already been gathering dust for seventy years. But they work. It’s called a generator.”

  Father Lothaire smiled contentedly as he searched for something in the drawers. “It’s a weak local source of electricity that runs on diesel fuel. There are also some that work on gasoline. It could also use kerosene, if I could get some. Aha, here we go: diesel. Hold the light here, please.”

  “That looks like a can that’s been banged with a hammer for a long time,” said Eugène-Olivier. “Your reverence, you apparently prove to sinners that miracles are possible. If that can helps you turn on any electrical lamp, let alone a heater, I will believe in miracles.”

  “If it’s miracles you want...” murmured Father Lothaire, tipping the diesel canister and pouring fuel into the generator. “With the help of this can, as you so disrespectfully call it, we have to maintain the entire station—to light it and dry it. Quite a bit of work.”

  “And how does it do that?”

  “You’ll see.” Father Lothaire began to pull a rope on the generator with quick jerks. The engine began to snort, giving off an unpleasant smell, and then settled into a moderately noisy rumble. The lights on the ceiling came on.

  “Go see if there is light on the platform,” the priest called to him over the noise.

  Eugène-Olivier ran down the stairs. The recently flooded, recently black and darkly repulsive platform, when lit by its dozens of electric sconces, looked almost pleasant.

  “Light!”

  “We used generators when I was a boy.” Father Lothaire pulled an electric heater toward the center of the room. “As I remember, we had the same kind in the castle.”

  “Candles seem more fitting in a castle.”

  “We had candles, too. At one o’clock in the morning, the generator was turned off. It had the abominable habit of going out in the middle of the most interesting place in the book. But I was forbidden to finish reading by candlelight.”

  Father Lothaire smiled, wiping his dirty hands with a handkerchief. “They had cut off our electricity where it passed through the village. But we had lived in that castle for centuries without electricity. We just hooked up a generator, which our ancestors could not do. It wasn’t powerful enough to run a refrigerator, but we had cellars. We didn’t lack for anything.”

  Father Lothaire filled the tea kettle with water from a plastic container. On an old-fashioned table, which must have once served as a desk, plates with cheese and biscuits appeared. Eugène-Olivier waited as patiently as he could as the priest said “Oculi omnium in te sperant Domine...” and so on over them for an entire minute. The biscuits with Camembert out of a can were very tasty and he would have gladly eaten them all, but he didn’t know if they were scarce.

  Father Lothaire read his mind: “Please help yourself; we have enough food for everyone who will gather tomorrow. There are old military warehouses nearby that the Saracens never knew about. You and I will pick up a few cases from there in the morning.”

  From the platform below, they heard footsteps on the stairs. It did not sound like Saracens.

  “When the floor of the station is dry, we need to make as many benches as possible from these boards,” said Father Lothaire brightly. “I think we can rest the boards on empty canisters for legs... Oh, it’s you, Monsieur Lescure!”

  “I’m not alone, your reverence,” answered the man who entered. Eugène-Olivier immediately recognized him from the chapel by his white hair gathered in a ponytail.

  He was followed by a small slip of a shadow. Eugène-Olivier, who had warmed himself in front of the heater, suddenly felt a cold shiver. Valerie! It was horrible to see how the soles of her bare, bleeding feet were black with mud.

  “Grandpa Vincent promised me an apple candy if I hid with him here,” she said in her silvery little voice. “But I wouldn’t let him carry me across the mud in his arms. There’s too much dirt everywhere. One has to walk through it on one’s own feet and that’s what I did.”

  “I don’t kno
w how appropriate her presence here is, but I was afraid to leave her in the street,” the old man quietly told Father Lothaire. “They’re very afraid of her, but they hate her even more.”

  Valerie came very close to Eugène-Olivier and he was surprised to discover something he hadn’t noticed before. The girl’s tangled hair, her unwashed, wrinkled T-shirt—all this should have borne at least a musty odor. But the only scent Valerie she off was a faint smell of flowers that are considered not to have a smell: tulips, water lilies. The damp smell of freshness.

  “Hello, grandson of a martyr,” she said to him, opening her blue eyes wide. Red blood dripped from the wound on her hand, which she used to remove a curl from her face. Traces of dried blood could be seen up to her elbow.

  E ugène-Olivier reminded himself that Jeanne would have brought some small gift for the girl. But he had nothing in his pockets: no chocolate, no candy, not even a piece of gum.

  “You don’t react when your grandfather is mentioned. That means you still don’t understand.” Valerie pursed her lips. “Dummy.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, Monsieur Lescure,” said Father Lothaire thoughtfully. “Eugène-Olivier, Monsieur Lescure performs the same service in our parish that your grandfather performed in Notre Dame Church. He is our altar server.”

  “In everyday life, a secondhand book dealer,” the old man explained, smiling gently. “I have a shop in the Défense ghetto. It’s a cover for my teaching the Latin language to our young people. If you want to learn, come to the ghetto. Anyone there will tell you where to find me.”

  “It’s unlikely our young friend will have time to learn much even if he begins at this very moment,” said Father Lothaire a little grimly.

  “Take your candy, Valerie,” said the old man. Having distracted her, he turned to Father Lothaire with concern in his faded blue eyes. “Your reverence, are things that bad? Since I walked in, you have been as tense as a wire.”

  It was strange how Lescure saw this, said Eugène-Olivier to himself. To him, the priest seemed the same as ever. Except... except that he was a little more talkative. And what did they talk about for three hours with that Arab? He didn’t ask. Soldiers don’t ask.