An uncomfortable silence ensued. He looked at her calmly and persistently, his light brown eyes with honey-colored tones gradually becoming darker.
“To quote from one of our Russian books,” he finally said, ‘O Queen, why was it necessary for you to suffer personally?’ I read it in French translation, by the way, they told me it was the best.”
“I can’t stand Bulgakov,” bristled Sonya. “In his works, you have a bunch of retirees instead of fighters. The country needs saving and they’re sitting at home and sighing, ‘Ah, how nice it is to sit at home and drink tea next to a shaded lamp!’ ”
“Pickwick from a bag. By the way, I would really love it if you would offer me a glass of mineral water. Carbonated would be best. I can’t stand the social propriety of saying, ‘Oh, I only drink non-carbonated water’!”
“Listen, I’m tempted to dump your glass of carbonated water on your head,” laughed Sonya.
“That’s fine, it will put us on an even footing,” answered Leonid seriously. “By the way, you must have very good hair. Only women with good hair don’t use a hair dryer. The others have nothing to lose. Although I’m just assuming, what I see on top of your head right now looks more like a rat’s tail. So, are you going to leave?”
“Agnes Blacktomb could recognize me. Therefore, I have no reason to stay in Europe. I’m going to go and work on my tan on the Dead Sea.”
“Lord, how crazy you are! Please don’t be angry, but couldn’t you have shot him without a witness?”
“But she had to be the witness. I condemned her to that. Instead of the court in Strasbourg. Somebody has to carry out judgments.”
“Nonsense! You condemned her to be a witness! Normal people do such things without a witness. Bad people kill the witnesses, too. It never occurred to me that a third variant was possible that was so stupid.”
“She got what she deserved. She didn’t deserve the benefit of dying.”
“Where are the airports in this silly book?” Leonid was flipping through the telephone book, putting the receiver on his ear with his other hand. He looked up. “What are you doing standing there? Go pack! I’m taking you to the airport—if not to the Dead Sea, then to some place like Australia! Or perhaps to Katmandu, the world capital of the youth hippie movement of the 1960’s. Do you have money?”
Suddenly everything became very easy for Sonya, as if she had been pulling a heavy load for a long time and someone had suddenly jumped in and grabbed one of the handles.
“Will you be able to add my documents to this book of ours by yourself?” she asked, although she really wanted to know something completely different: “Do you think this book will get me killed?”
“We’ll always be in touch by email.” He put down the receiver and touched her hand with unexpected caution. “Everything will be fine with the book, Sophia.”
“Elektra continued to exist after Leonid’s death. Although it was progressively more difficult for it to publish books. Under pressure from the Muslim diaspora, the government came up with more and more obstacles. Alright, Slobo, we may have the opportunity to continue this conversation later. You see that the people are gathered.”
CHAPTER 14
A plan
It became obvious that there were not enough of the improvised benches that Eugène-Olivier and Father Lothaire had prepared the day before. Many people were sitting on the stairs, like Sophia.
“Hey, hey! Paul! Paul Guermi!” shouted Jeanne, pushing her way through the crowd to her motorcycle mechanic.
Eugène-Olivier felt strangely insulted. Jeanne disappeared right at the moment when he felt so bad because of Sophia Sevazmios’ strange behavior. What was that Arab doing here?
“Hi, I just wanted to thank you.” Jeanne managed to make her way to Guermi, although with great difficulty. “I asked you to change the plates but you also tightened the nuts.”
“It was nothing,” answered Guermi happily. He had paid dearly to come to this Maquis meeting, which would completely change his life. But whatever happened, happened; he had no regrets. “You drive like a maniac. It’s important that your motorcycle is well-maintained.”
“So true!” Jeanne disappeared, sliding out under someone’s elbow.
In the middle of the platform, where the light was the strongest, several people were setting up something that looked like a podium. Sophia was standing with her strange friend. Brisseville and Father Lothaire approached her from different sides.
Some of the members of Maquis , especially the younger ones, looked at Father Lothaire with no less confusion than Ahmad ibn Salih. This time, the priest was not disguised as a workman, but in formal dress: black, floor-length cassock, white collar, and biretta with a black tassel.
“It’s starting!”
Eugène-Olivier was radiant; Jeanne was again standing next to him.
“Quiet, please. May I have complete quiet, please.” Larochejaquelein, whom Eugène-Olivier had not seen before, climbed to the very top of the podium. “There are more than five hundred of us here. If we can’t hear, then we’ve gathered here for nothing. There’s no microphone.”
For a moment the crowd clamored even more loudly than before, as if a wind had blown through it. However, soon there was absolute silence.
“First, to avoid confusion!” Sophia raised her hand. “There are no Arabs here. This man is our ally from Russia, Slobodan Knezhevich.”
“He’s still a creep,” Jeanne whispered in Eugène-Olivier’s ear. Her eyes were completely round. “From Russia! Isn’t that where they keep Saracens in reservations?”
“I don’t know about reservations,” whispered Eugène-Olivier. “But they’re not in power there because for the creeps, Russia is Dar al-Harb or, as the newspapers say, a kafir -state.
He felt a little better. He was no Ahmad and no Salih, just your normal, average Russian spy. But... why had he been so angry with him for breaking into his apartment?
“Today, we also have people from the Christian parishes here,” continued Larochejaquelein. “They are led by the Reverend Father Lothaire. Forgive me for simplifying, but if I understood properly, you make all the final decisions?”
“Temporarily,” answered the priest. “Only temporarily. Next summer a new Paris bishop will be elected. But if I understood correctly, we no longer have time to wait for his appointment.”
“Not even a day more. It may be a matter of hours,” said Larochejaquelein. “Basically, we have reliable information that there will be changes in Paris. They are equally important for us and for those who live in the catacombs.”
Larochejaquelein was silent for a moment. Eugène-Olivier was convinced that he would now say the most important thing, perhaps something quite terrible. Larochejaquelein next words were these:
“The government has decided to destroy the ghettos.”
The silence they had carefully maintained turned into an uproar and engulfed the crowd. No further explanations were necessary, everything was quite clear.
“Silence, friends!” It was difficult for Brisseville to raise his voice. So he used something that resembled a hammer to pound on the podium.
“Is it true? Is it true?” The sentence thudded in Eugène-Olivier temples. A strange coldness in his chest responded, “It’s true.”
“Since we have nothing to lose, we may have something to win,” said Brisseville. “The time has come to show then that they are not the only masters of this city.”
Someone raised his hand: “If this is a rebellion, does it make any sense?” Eugène-Olivier only knew the speaker by sight. “Brisseville, I’m not saying I’m opposed, I don’t think anyone is opposed. Without the ghettos, the underground cannot survive in Paris. The only thing I don’t understand is what we possibly have to win, except our deaths?”
“Perhaps, when the chaos starts, we’ll manage to lead the people from the ghettos out of the city through underground passages,” said Larochejaquelein. “The rebellion will incite the infidels to slaug
hter everyone. Five units will be organized for the evacuation. In the meanwhile, the others—”
“But where? Where are we going to engage them?” someone shouted.
“In Paris there is only one location that we can hold to some extent with minimal casualties,” Larochejaquelein’s strong voice rose above the crowd. “Just one place, seemingly made for this purpose. It is the easiest to occupy. We won’t have to fight for every house. And none of the Saracens will be under our feet. There are almost no residential buildings, only fortifications. If we act at night, it will be enough for us to kill the guards. I am talking about L’Île de la Cité.”
“And all we will have to defend is nine small barricades,” exclaimed Lescure like a boy. “But the Cité station itself is a weak link. It’s not abandoned, unfortunately, but operational. Some of our soldiers will have to go down in the tunnels to secure the withdrawal.”
“We thought of that,” Henri Larochejaquelein replied, interrupting the old man from the catacombs. “We have sufficient forces for the evacuation of the ghettos. The Saracens will divert their entire army from the ghettos to protect l’Île de la Cité—to protect several stations nearby...”
“Until when?” exclaimed Father Lothaire. “You’ll all be killed for no reason, friends.”
“Are you against a rebellion, venerable Father? You don’t think we should leave the people in the ghetto to die like sheep, do you? You Christians can die for your faith. But there are very few Christians in the ghettos!” Even in the weak light, one could see that Larochejaquelein’s face had gone completely white. “We Maquisards could leave Paris this moment if we wanted to! But those who aren’t Christians, and aren’t Maquisards —ordinary Frenchmen from the ghettos, their mothers, wives, children—why must they die?”
“I’m not proposing that they be abandoned to the mercy of the Saracens,” responded Father Lothaire. “I have another plan.”
“What is it?”
“You should leave immediately. You just said that you could. Take those children and young girls who are so drawn to weapons to the villages, toward the borders, abroad—the further, the better... And leave the ghetto to us. To us Christians. I remember that I myself recently said that it was impossible to evacuate the ghetto because it is against human nature to believe in catastrophe. But if we go from house to house before the killers, God will give us the power to convince them—His all-powerful strength, not our own paltry one. Just leave us the evacuators.”
To Eugène-Olivier, it seemed as if someone had colored all the human faces in two different colors, like the lights of a traffic signal: Those whose faces clearly said “yes” were indisputably the faces of the people from the catacombs. Those whose faces lit up with an unequivocal “no” belonged to the soldiers of the Resistance Movement.
“Look around you, Reverend Father.” Larochejaquelein apparently saw the same thing. “Your plan would be a good one if we, too, were not Parisians.”
Father Lothaire slowly looked at the faces that surrounded him. His face gradually grew gloomier.
Sophia, who had remained silent the whole time, jumped up onto the podium next to Larochejaquelein and said, “In a sense His Reverence is right. Our plan isn’t good.”
“But it’s your plan, Sophie!” Brisseville coughed, his confusion greater than his need to breathe. “Aren’t you the one who developed it?”
“I am. But now I see it has shortcomings.”
“And you’re proposing that we withdraw it?”
“Why?” Sophia shook her head, as if she didn’t understand that there were two hundred and fifty confused pairs of eyes looking at her. “I propose that we improve it. When we do that, it also will be better than Father Lothaire’s plan.”
“Sophie, it’s not the time to speak in riddles.”
“In order to demoralize them, it’s not enough to rebel,” Sophia declared in her resonant smoker’s voice. “There must be a small, but decisive victory of the Cross versus the crescent. Your Reverence, what do you think about serving some sort of Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral?”
“ ‘Some sort of Mass’ is the word for it, Sophie.” The warm smile in Father Lothaire’s voice was at odds with his momentarily overcast face. “You understand that’s impossible.”
“It’s possible.”
“In order to celebrate Mass, the church needs to be re-consecrated. That could be accomplished. But the rebellion will not last long. And what then, Sophie? Condemn the church to yet another humiliation when it is inevitably turned back into a mosque after the Saracens recapture it?”
“My dear Father Lothaire, it’s not inevitable. Now, everybody try to understand what I’m about to say. We can calculate how long we will hold the Île de la Cité. We can calculate in advance how many people we are going to sacrifice and when we are going to withdraw. Even though we don’t want to withdraw, we’ll have to. And then they’ll think they’ve put down the rebellion.”
“But Sophie, does that make sense?” called out Larochejaquelein. “That’s what you yourself said, do you remember? A rebellion can’t end on a happy note. We knew from the start that a rebellion would be a shock to them. There is no way we can achieve more than that. With all due respect to those of you from the catacombs, what does that have to do with the Cross and with Mass?”
“Slow down, Henri. I finally understand what’s been running through my mind for days: The rebellion can be a success if our task is not to maintain it for a specific time, but for enough time to do something. Something that can’t be undone. Then we can withdraw. If the Cité is the heart of Paris, then Notre Dame is the heart of the Cité. The whole mission needs to be refocused on Notre Dame. Do you, Your Reverence, agree to serve a Mass—after which the Saracens will not be able to desecrate the church?”
Father Lothaire stood up. “Sophie, you’ve gone completely mad. But insanity is probably contagious. I agree, although there are some conditions.”
“So Sophie, now you’ve understood!” Valerie slipped out of the darkness onto the lit piece of dirty concrete and suddenly embraced Sophia with both arms, squeezing her tightly in gratitude, as any child would do when she’d been given a new toy.
Eugène-Olivier and Jeanne looked at each other with confusion and a little bit of fear. On Lescure’s face, one could see that he had begun to understand. The black woman, Michelle, felt with her hand along her neck seeking her cross—without taking her eyes off Valerie.
“Do you remember how the Maquisards fought the Nazis— les Boches?” Sophia’s question fell into the dead silence. “Frenchmen, you are peasants by nature. If you can’t get your land back from your enemy, it is better to pour salt on it. If he has occupied your house, set it on fire, so he can’t rule your property.”
“Oh!” said Jeanne, sitting down. Her whisper seemed like a cry to Eugène-Olivier. “So that’s why we needed plastic explosives!” he said to himself. “She planned all this earlier!”
For a change, Eugène-Olivier stopped thinking about Jeanne. The small boat of the Île de la Cité, which had floated in the Seine for millennia, stood in place, connected to the city by bridges. Only six barricades would be needed, as Lescure had said. Barricades on bridges. You couldn’t find a better place to hold, until the moment when the second boat, a boat within a boat—Notre Dame—flew up into the air.
Wasn’t that better than leaving it to forever remain the Al Fraconi Mosque?
Sophia Sevazmios was right. She was right a thousand times over—it was just one Mass, but it would be worth as much as all of Paris.
Strange, that he had never felt this pain before. Was it his heart? In his whole life, he had never felt it hurt like this.
“The explosion of the church will serve as a signal to withdraw!” exclaimed Larochejaquelein, as if he had read Eugène-Olivier’s mind.
The words had finally been said out loud.
* * *
Strangely, no one disagreed. It was as if the shadows of their ancestors had emerg
ed from the ancient ossuaries and crypts into the modern underground of the metro:
We build churches, but not for our enemies. We build them for the glory, and not for the derision of Christ, they murmured. You thought for too long that the church was an architectural monument. Which is the very reason you will never be the equals of our architects. Clean the throne of God at least in this manner, if you are not able to do so differently, O descendants—if our blood is in your veins, if you are a bone among the bones of this land.
“Notre Dame has stood for centuries,” added a Maquisard of about forty cautiously. “It’s not a twentieth century high-rise. What kind of explosion do we need so that nothing is left? Even if we have enough material in our depots, how much time to we need to bring it, to set it? If walls are left standing, there’s no point in even beginning.”
“We need 30 to 60 pounds of C4, no more,” said an old man from the catacombs. “It depends on the power of the explosive. Don’t forget, friends, we’re talking about a Gothic structure. How can I explain? Bulletproof glass truly repels bullets, but there are places on it where it is enough to merely touch it and everything collapses into dust. If our architects hadn’t mastered this skill, the Gothic style would never have reached for the Heavens.”
“We would need to know where those places are, both on the glass and on the walls,” said Larochejaquelein, frowning doubtfully.
“Monsieur Peyran will show them to us,” answered Sophia cheerfully. “He’s an architect. Do you have the plans of Notre Dame, Monsieur Peyran?”
“Of course, Madame Sevazmios. The most detailed architectural drawings,” said the old man.
“We need four hours to take the Île de Cité,” Sophia said. “We need five hours to plant explosives in the church and for the Mass. Withdrawal will be in several phases, because as one group is coming, the others will have to cover them. We’ll hold the island for at least twelve hours.”
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