The Mosque of Notre Dame

^{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 stupidity—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.

The Poles, on the other hand, benefited from their faults. They had always been foolish nationalists, the stingy Lachs. Their stubbornness had always outweighed their stinginess and all else. In earlier times they intrigued all of Europe with their desire to profit from going their own way—which they perhaps learned from the Jews, whom they had harbored so long and loved so little—until the Nazis decimated them. Like their Jews, Poles were hard, petty pragmatists almost incapable of generosity—and yet deeply, deeply religious.

At the start of the twenty-first century, the Poles typically went their own way. They were the first from the former Soviet bloc to understand that they did not need the labor of rivers of Muslims from the Third World. During the first years of Polish membership in the EU, there were no heavy influxes. The Polish standard of living was lower than in old Europe, making Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia less attractive to poor migrants.

However, the differences gradually diminished and migrants pressed forward into the former socialist countries. Still torn asunder by their newness, many of these countries dreaded the disapproval of their EU masters in Brussels, and dared not risk appearing insufficiently committed to the ideals of democracy.

But the Poles immediately opposed any Muslim immigration. At first, they acted through quiet bureaucratic sabotage. But soon that was not enough. So the President of Poland, Marek Stasinsky, announced that his country was pulling out of the EU and NATO—after working for so many years to get in! President Stasinsky was hailed as a national hero.

Since he was now freezing on the balcony, Slobodan went back into the apartment, into the kitchen. Oh, the Russian habit of drinking cup after cup of tea during sleepless nights, pondering the fate of humanity! But what could he do?

He would have been far happier to honor another Russian tradition and have a juniper brandy instead of tea. Yes, juniper brandy. Two glasses of it and his insomnia would disappear like historical geopolitics. And with it he would nibble some pink wedges of smoked bacon, cut translucently thin and interlaced with meat. Hey, stop that! He mustn’t even think about juniper brandy or smoked bacon, or his mission would be exposed.

The Poles paid dearly for their rebelliousness. The opposition proclaimed Stasinsky insane. How could he imagine sharing a border with Germany—with its army comprised of three-fourths Muslims—and not playing by the general European rules? But the people believed their president. The second Polish ploy was even crazier than the first. The famous pact of May 5, 2034 brought the former socialist camp to a frenzy. Not even old Europe could believe it when one beautiful morning, it found the Russian Army on the Germany-Poland border.

Russia had not invaded. Nor had Poland suddenly learned to love Russia. It simply undertook, yet again, realistic measures. Without the Russian military presence, the armed incursion of Euroislam into Poland would have been only a matter of time. For its part, Russia wanted to push the border of Euroislam as far from Russia as possible. Better to maintain a buffer state like Poland between itself and Euroislam than to stare at minarets across a dotted line. The move was in the interest of two countries who were bound into alliance by a thousand years of mutual annexation of each other’s territory. An old enemy is better than two new ones.

In 1990, the grandmothers and grandfathers of today’s Lachs wouldn’t have believed that one day, not only would the Russian Army be in Poland, but that this would be to the betterment and satisfaction of their grandchildren! Moreover, as the Russian soldiers admitted, it is blissful to serve in Poland today. It can be dangerous, of course—occasionally there are shots fired at the border. But there are also very few Sundays when they are not invited to partake in Sunday lunch with a local family.

Yes, it is a festal Sunday lunch because the Poles, like the Russians, observe Sunday, not Friday, as a religious day of rest. The Poles remained Catholic. When the ill-starred year of 2031 began, and the Roman Pope surrendered, exactly one month later, white smoke appeared above Holy Trinity Monastery in Krakow. A new Papal see was established in Poland. Its borders were now identical with the borders of the Catholic world. The Polish clergy began to ardently advocate for the old, pre-Vatican II Mass. Things did not go so far as reverting to the use of Latin. No one knew Latin anymore, or how to serve the Tridentine Mass. The oldest priests celebrated it as best they could, but in Polish.

That’s how matters stood. Poland was the alpha and omega of modern Catholicism. Who, at the end of the twentieth century, could have imagined that Catholicism would be the religion of only one country? History advances in unpredictable steps. In Poland, the simple colored bulbs of small chapels still shone by the side of the road, with statues that looked as if children had painted them.

After celebrating the Poles’ liberation from halal smoked-horsemeat sausage, Slobodan opened his refrigerator with a frown. He still could not force himself to eat the meat of livestock slaughtered according to their practice. He remembered all too well from his childhood that they slit the throat of a ram or a man with the same expression, and even the same words: “Bismillah allahu akbar!”

He cut the pie with revulsion. If it was peach pie, it would go well with the tea. Especially once warmed in the microwave. That was why he had been putting on weight, but what was one to do?

Yes, a lot had changed since NATO disintegrated. A weakened United States now had only itself to think about. The white south and the black-Muslim-Hispanic-UrbanWhite north engaged in a tug of war for power in the Senate and House of Representatives, maintaining a fragile balance to avoid civil war.

The southern U.S. Christians were very fortunate in that they were confronted, not just by the Muslims, but by four mutually inimical religions (if you count voodoo and atheism). None of them wanted a vicious, well-armed, redneck wave of revenge. Thus, America was too preoccupied to be the world’s power-broker anymore.

There were no global power-brokers, in fact. Everyone was involved in this confrontation of opposites. Most territories inhabited by Russians formed a protectorate; the army was there. It was useless to draw maps. Governments changed almost overnight—today Christian, tomorrow Muslim. This took place not only in every country and city, but in every village.

And what about proud, independent, little Chechnya, Russia’s main headache at the turn of the century? Nothing. The flow of Saudi money had been cut off. And there were no fools willing to fight for nothing. Dear God, let it never be forgotten or erased that in every place in the world, there can always arise “a fifth column”—like the microbe of a monstrous disease able to sleep a million years in salt crystals.

Before Slobodan’s eyes on sleepless nights, sometimes the virtual map of the world moved steadily, like wool in the hands of an old Serb peasant woman. Sometimes a fragment of it would suddenly change its format and grow larger, like Israel, which had grown unusually strong thanks to massive immigration in the 2010’s, beginning with Sharon’s historic invitation. Or Australia, which remained an idyllic oasis of old-fashioned Western life, but played no role in world politics. Or Japan, even more enclosed in its cultural isolation, like a pearl that had returned to its shell. Or India, which lived in a state of permanent war that it had not lost, thanks only to the numerousness of its population.

And who was he, Slobodan Vuković, whose thoughts were so engrossed by the geopolitical kaleidoscope? Perhaps he was a man who had replaced his tribal passions with abstractions. In particular, his mind had become a fine tool that accurately gauged the balance of power.

The arrow on the device was quivering dangerously. Something could be changed. That is what Paris at night whispered to Slobodan through the windows of his luxurious apartment. That is what the piece of already-cold pie muttered to him from the plate. That is what the rhythm of the blood pulsing in his temples told him:

The balance could be disrupted.