The Mosque of Notre Dame Page 5

  The only problem was fingerprints. That was how identity was determined. But in order to catch anyone that way, the authorities had to pull up the electronic database, and nobody wanted to take the trouble. There was no photo you could put up at every street corner. There wasn’t a computer-generated portrait you could show to witnesses.

  As early as the first decade of the twenty-first century—well before the revolution—Muslim women had won the right to cover their hair and ears in photographs. Ten years later, they had the right not to be photographed at all, in order not to show their chaste faces in front of brazen state officials. After the revolution, all that was left to do was to add that any image of the human face was inherently sinful—it being a Muslim belief that making any image of a living thing is sinful.

  Eugène-Olivier knew that the higher and middle echelons of the police, comprised of educated men from families who had lived in France for three or four generations, were doing everything possible to encourage the return to the use of photographs in official documents, at least for men. They understood how much easier this would make the lives of the police, and how much it would complicate things for illegals. But, luckily, those efforts clashed with the conservatism of government circles.

  “All right then, if you need anything, just follow the map! There’s always somebody here.”

  Then Jeanne slipped out the door.

  Eugène-Olivier peered into the closet: four identical volumes bound in leather impressed with Christ’s monogram—breviaries. Divided into three trimesters, apparently. There were embarrassingly few ordinary books: There was a biography of Monseigneur Marcel Lefebvre published at the beginning of the century. There were a few children’s books: The Little Duke by Charlotte Mary Yonge, in English, and Sire by Jean Raspail. Now that was much better! He had started reading Sire once but he didn’t get to finish it. It was in the ghetto and the book was confiscated from its owners.

  Eugène-Olivier pulled the bed down from the wall and lay down. He could read for the next twenty-four hours!

  The day itself had been a rather successful one. He had “sent the devil back to hell,” seen yet another sharia-style execution, found real Christians, seen Sophia Sevazmios and spoken with her again, and moreover, he... The open book slid slowly from his hands. But the face that then appeared before his closed eyes was not the sweet, unbearably dear face of Jeanne. It was the amazingly pretty face of little Valerie—glowering with anger.

  CHAPTER 3

  Slobodan

  Gusts of spring wind played in the darkness like benevolent night spirits. They tousled his hair, slipping under the collar of his silk pajamas. It was a little chilly, standing on the balcony of the twentieth floor, but he didn’t feel like going in to the warm, brightly lit room.

  Paris lay below him, silently sleeping as always—except during Ramadan, when the fires in the streets flashed and fluctuated. Then, true believers would sit until dawn in restaurants like the elegant Monde Arabe, Maxim’s, or Procope, admiring the view of the Seine and Al Fraconi Mosque—which was once Notre Dame. If their means did not allow, then they went to Grand Véfour or Fouquet’s to stuff their gut with charcoal-braised meat from the small restaurant on the corner of Bastille Square; or have couscous in some Charly de Bab el Oued. Fortunately, Ramadan was finished. Nights in Paris were unpopulated.

  How pleasant the silence was, and what a good thing that he had chosen an apartment on a high floor, far above the ones where you couldn’t have a window looking out on the street.

  He wasn’t sleepy. The few remaining hours were too precious. Soon the loudspeakers would be filled with the voices of muezzins , and the devil would set out on patrol through Paris to piss in the ears of true believers insufficiently devout to get up for early morning prayers.

  Enjoy your just desserts, Frenchmen! Dear God, didn’t you have it coming? Weren’t you the ones who shaped this day with your very own hands? Now live in what you have made, because there is a God.

  You didn’t know anything about the history of Serbia; you didn’t know anything about Kosovo. You didn’t know how the Serbs died heroically on the battlefield of Kosovo Polje. The soldiers of Prince Lazarus, defending the cradle of their people, stood in the path of the foul army of Sultan Murad. You didn’t know that Bayazit came in like a mortal plague, and that the Muslim Albanians followed in his footsteps.

  Five hundred years under the Ottoman Empire! You didn’t know what a scourge the Ottoman Empire was; you didn’t know how much Serb blood was spilled to vanquish it. After the Serbs returned to the banks of the Sitnica River, not many years passed before they were expelled again!

  Adolf Hitler became the new Bayazit. Did you humane Europeans forget about that? How many among those of you who applauded the bombing of Belgrade were taught in school that it was none other than Hitler who toppled the Serbian Peter II and pushed Kosovo into the hands of the Albanian Zog I as a gift?

  The Albanians descended into Serbian lands like new Bayazits, like hyenas trailing the scent of blood, occupying once again the abandoned homes, reaping once again the crops sown in Serbian fields. But how many armies did Hitler and Mussolini have to keep there, to keep Kosovo Albanian? You Europeans, have you even bothered to thank the Serbs because Draža Mihailović’s Chetniks began to fight the Nazis long before you?

  In the 1990s, what inspired you to help the Albanians to etch in stone the borders drawn by Hitler? How could you believe so gullibly the simple-minded lies about Serb brutality?

  Obviously, the question was not what or how —but who . You were poisoned. You were led on a leash by the Muslim diaspora. And you, toys in the hands of puppeteers, believed yourselves to be fighters for “human rights.” You thought you were enlightened humanists—when you were only traitors to Christian civilization.

  You were still reading Dostoevsky than. Alarm bells should have sounded in your heads. Today, none of you knows who Dostoevsky was. And it serves you right.

  Milošević was already a mangy old wolf, but you poked at him like bear-baiters with sharpened sticks, forcing him to retreat and retreat. His soul bears responsibility for the shame of the Dayton peace agreement, but even that was not enough for you. When he finally realized there was no more room to retreat, a new war began. Oh, how closely your “peacekeepers” watched, to make sure that the Serbs didn’t raise their heads!

  But in 1997 they didn’t see what was going on under their very noses. And when the Albanian Muslim KLA snake hatched in your shadow and began to carry out ethnic cleansing—not imaginary, like your claims of Serbian mass murder, but real—you were blind, or worse than blind. Your television channels showed footage of Kosovo Albanians covering the coffins of their fallen comrades with red flags with black eagles, of the thunder of gun salutes in their honor, and of wild peonies swaying over fresh graves. Meanwhile, behind the cameras, your heroes slaughtered Christian families and murdered teachers and priests. And when Milošević defended his people, bombs fell on Serbia.

  Churches that had existed for almost ten centuries were turned into ruins under your bombs. Of course, these were not your holy shrines. What makes you different from the Afghan Talibans who blew up Buddhist statues?

  Your oh-so-civilized Albanians needed Kosovo as a drug-trafficking route. The money involved was too big; the Serbs didn’t stand a chance.

  So peace came at last to Kosovo, the hub of European drug traffic. That was when the last Serb was expelled or slaughtered, when the last Orthodox church was destroyed and desecrated. The peacekeepers eventually left the region, because they were no longer needed.

  But the poison was still brewing in the pot. The dirty foam of Islam and corruption rose until it spilled over the whole region. Bujanovac, Preševo and Medveđa shared the same fate as Kosovo.

  The Serbs were pushed back further and further. When Belgrade became the capital of Greater Albania, the European Union began to be afraid. So, out of fear, it continued to do what it had previously done out of stupi
dity—concede.

  So it was only right that Parisian women now walked around in chador, whose grandmothers had wept sentimental tears watching roses laid on the graves of Kosovo Muslims on television.

  * * *

  Slobodan Vuković was fifty years old, but he remembered the events of his childhood with incredible precision.

  He remembered the house that looked like a half-peeled Easter egg from the outside—white walls under a red roof of tile. Inside, the walls were painted a warm terracotta red-brown. He could see the ceramic floor polished to a shine, the creaky wooden stairs. The two-year-old boy crawled along them, holding onto the banisters, toward the hearth where his father had already placed the Yule log. It still needed to be sprinkled with a bit of flour and some wine.

  It was the last Christmas in the house of his birth in Priština. They celebrated Easter that year in the same house, but it was a wartime Easter with little joy. Could one call it war—bombs falling from the sky from an invisible, unpunishable, enemy?

  He did not know when his child’s eyes had seen the image he now remembered in its minutest detail: nuns in robes red with their own blood, their throats all slit, lying on the white ground; pieces of shattered icons; the broken doors of a church. How many such martyrs, how many such churches were there?

  He recalled the flight from Kosovo to Belgrade when he was three, when his mother prayed for hours clutching the child to her breast in dumb fear as the old car rolled down the ravaged road.

  Less horrible, but more hopeless, would be their departure from Belgrade—which was also their departure from Serbia.

  He spent his youth in Belgrade-on-the-Amur, a completely new city in Siberia that grew in height like mushrooms after the rain. What powerful mind had conceived this plan—to offer the 300,000 remaining Serbs autonomy near China? Some people said—then and later—that Russia simply wanted to rake the hot coals with someone else’s hands, but Slobodan never believed this.

  Everyone knows that it’s difficult for a demobilized soldier to adjust to civilian life. But who can understand what it’s like for a demobilized nation? The blood doesn’t cool so quickly.

  His youth, in short, was not a pampered one. But nevertheless, many of his peers, as they matured, fell into the groove of a life that was perhaps perhaps Cossack-like, but at least peaceful. They started their own families—beginning to rear the first generation of Serbs after Serbia.

  Slobodan could not. As a nineteen-year-old, he left for Moscow by train because he did not have the money for a plane ticket. At that time, Serb young men were not conscripted into the army; instead, they were required to attend regular military exercises from the age of 16 to 25 for one month each year. Young Slobodan excelled as a marksman. He had a good number of parachute jumps, driver’s and pilot’s licenses, and sniping and explosives skills. He also had an intimate knowledge of Muslims, like something dirty that could not be washed away. It was almost genetic, from the days of his childhood, eagerly absorbed from the stories of old people, read in books. He wanted only one thing. To return to Kosovo.

  But instead of Kosovo, seven years later they offered him France, one of the three main countries of the Islamic bloc. Moreover, his childish lust for revenge was already balanced by the ambitions of a mature intellectual. It was clear to him that the French arena was more interesting and broader in scope. He agreed, although in fact the consent was not given by the brilliantly educated twenty-six year old master of sciences Vuković, but by the nineteen-year-old boy Slobo, who still resided within him, confident in his ignorance.

  It turned out that there were many things for which he was not prepared, despite all his preparations. He was prepared for cooperation with dense, anonymous brutes, basically amalgams of incompetence, lust and sadism. He was ready for battle against religious fanaticism. But naturally enough, he more often met very different Muslims—including intellectuals gifted with quite human qualities. They had become involved in scientific research after realizing, to their surprise, that the path to political power, if not completely shut, was full of bitterness.

  There were a great many whom he could not imagine taking pleasure in human agony, or slitting the throat of a living man. They were too cultured, too normal for that. They were Muslims of the third or fourth generation born in France. They had been educated in good French or English schools; they did not spend every day of their childhood reminding themselves who they were and what they were bringing into this hospitable world. And they, too, got what they had been fighting for, with paradoxical results for themselves.

  What they got was seeing the genie released from the bottle. Educated, with a European polish that fit in very nicely with Muslim life, they had become increasingly influential, relying on the masses of illiterate Muslim poor for whom they had opened the borders of France. What the Muslim intelligentsia imagined was that in a hundred years, Europe would simply wake up one beautiful spring morning and be Islamic. No one would even notice that anything had changed.

  How could they have known that those who didn’t know the strategy —those dark Islamic masses—didn’t want to wait? That they would boil over, flooding and surging over society like a lethal river? And that they, the enlightened European Muslims of the second or third generation, would have to submit to the masses to avoid being slaughtered or drowned?

  It was only because the impatience of the masses exploded prematurely that Maquis was founded and the catacombs appeared.

  The French resistance movement enjoyed neither Slobodan’s sympathies nor his support. He was aware of its existence, but without a real reason, he would not have worked for them under any conditions. Let them fend for themselves. He had lived in France for more than twenty years for the benefit of the Christian world—despite the fact that the price he had paid for this good deed was quite high. No, not every Orthodox Christian would have been as generous.

  Perhaps in his old age, if he lived to see it, he would succeed in obtaining forgiveness for his sins. It would be best to do so on the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, in one of its most isolated cells.

  Ah, Greeks! You paid a lower price than the Italians, of course. Greece remained a Christian country. But what national humiliation you experienced because of your pride! In all the rich countries at the end of the twentieth century, the Greek diaspora bloomed like a flower, and everywhere the Greeks lived according to European customs. A microcosm within a macrocosm, helping each other but never thinking of witnessing to the truth.

  The Greeks from birth considered Orthodoxy a national privilege. Orthodox people who were not Greeks were an unnecessary, lower class. And what do you have now, Hellenes! The Greek parishes did not upset anyone anywhere—simply because they did no missionary work. The only thing they managed to do in the end, they did only for their own.

  When Euroislam drew close to Greece, their millionaires from every country agreed on and proposed a ransom. The sum was so large that the joint Islamic governments of France, Germany, and England could not refuse. And that is how the Greeks became Islamic subjects, paying for the inviolability of their homeland as the Russians once paid the Tatars.

  There was one exception—and there was nothing the Greeks could do about it because for that, the Muslims would not take money in exchange. Euroislam wanted to destroy Mt. Athos.

  Horrible scenes from the chronicles have been preserved describing how the monks prepared for death. The frightful tolling of the bells echoed above the Holy Mountain announcing the end, calling the monks to martyrdom. Troop carriers filled with happy young Muslim men with green head bands in camouflage uniforms, armed with their perennial Kalashnikovs and equipped with mountaineering equipment, were on their way toward Athos on Easter morning in the year 2033.

  The first ship that approached Mount Athos broke in two like gingerbread in the hand of a child. It filled with water at lightning speed. No one understood what was happening before it was too late. Later, it was explained that the fuel tank of the main troop
carrier had exploded.

  The second ship sustained a hole in its prow. They managed to get many of the men thrashing in the water onto the third ship—before it, too, broke in half. Several of the carriers simply lost all engine power.

  The Muslim army pulled back, waiting for reinforcements to help them take on the opponent that had attacked them.

  But there was no opponent. No one was shooting from the cliffs of the “land of the monks” when three helicopter detachments smashed into smithereens on their approach to Athos. The choppers just fell out of the sky. Cannons suffocated on their own grenades, crippling the crews serving them. Healthy soldiers who sat to rest in the shade of a cypress became paralyzed. Military physicians could only surmise that they had had heart attacks. A soldier, having suddenly lost the use of his legs, would lie screaming and clawing at the white dust with his hands—but no one would hurry to help him. His comrades would pull back in horror, afraid of contamination.

  Some got fevers; others lost their sight or their hearing. One simply went mad and imagined he was a child; he cried and begged them to give him a lemon lollypop. This incomprehensible war lasted three months.

  The army didn’t withdraw. It fled. It fled despite its orders, with soldiers trampling each other to escape—at least as many as are trampled to death every year during the hajj.

  Athos had successfully defended itself, but Europe didn’t find out. Television and newspapers had already been censored for a long time. Internet use was also tightly controlled, using information-filtering technology devised long ago in Communist China and Korea.

  Ignorant of their countrymen’s—and Christendom’s—victory on Athos, the Greeks’ national vices came back to haunt them in the form of shame.