Michael Pearce - The Mingrelian Conspiracy

It was against the Muslim invaders that the Copts had built the Ders. For the Copts had been here before the Arabs, before even the Romans. They were the original inhabitants of the place and had clung on to their identity despite successive waves of invaders. Was there not a lesson here for Sorgos, Owen wondered?

If there was, he was not sure that he liked it. For the Copts had survived by going underground: underground literally, beneath and behind their great walls, but underground in other ways too, burying themselves in the general population, distinguishable by their clothes and their features, but never seemingly asserting themselves. If there was a nationalism here, it was a secret, covert one, though perhaps none the less tenacious for that.

Owen preferred to look at the Ders from up here. At ground level he had too much of the feeling of being in a ghetto. You were too conscious of the walls barring out the rest of the world. And everything seemed somehow underground. It was an effect, perhaps, of the architectural search for shade, but it made everything dark, claustrophobic.

He heard footsteps on the stairs. Georgiades emerged, breathing heavily.

‘Grandmother’s pleased,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Pleased at me coming here,’ he said. ‘To the cathedral. She thinks there’s hope yet.’

‘I didn’t know you had a grandmother.’

‘Not mine, Rosa’s. She used to come here regularly when the family first came to Egypt. They lived down here for a while before moving up to the city.’

He came across to the parapet and stood beside Owen. The catheral was built into a bastion of the old Roman fortress.

‘It’s the vineyards, too. Like home, she says. Greece.’

He bent over the parapet.

‘It’s over there,’ he said, pointing.

‘Al-Mo’allaka? The church where they’re restoring ikons?’

‘Yes. You can’t really see it from here.’

‘I’ve been there, I think.’

‘If you had, you’d remember it. Shall we take a look?’ They went back down the stairs and out into the cloisters. Within a few yards Owen lost his bearings. Cloisters became tunnels, tunnels, dark alleyways and then cloisters again. They went through underground arcades where the shops were illuminated only by candles. Eventually they emerged into sunlight, the sunlight of a small palm-tree court with a fountain in its middle. From one end of the court a staircase led upwards. Al-Mo’allaka, the Hanging Church, was at the top of that.

The church got its name not from the fact of being actually suspended, but from its having been built high up in one of the ancient gateways of the old Roman fort. To reach it you had to climb up the staircase. At the top was a kind of atrium and the church opened off this.

Owen stopped for a moment in the doorway to let his eyes get used to the darkness. The church was lit by old hanging lamps and the light that came from their tiny flames was hardly enough at first for him to be able to make anything out. But then he saw the antique columns of marble taken, so Georgiades said, from some Roman temple, which broke the space up into the traditional three parts of a Coptic church: the place of the women, the place of the men, and the place of the priests. Gradually he became aware of the old barrel roof, bolted to open woodwork like the timbers of a ship: and then of the low Moresco arches, outlined in ivory, which led to the sanctuary. His eye came back to more marble, that of an incredibly finely carved pulpit, very long and narrow, standing on delicate marble shafts. Only very slowly, because of the darkness of the wood, did he become aware of the backdrop to everything, a screen which, unusually, ran right round the church and which seemed, unbelievably, to glow in the darkness.

He went forward into the church and saw that the screen was covered with golden ikons. The gold caught the light from the swinging lamps and seemed both to absorb and reflect it, to take it into itself as a kind of inner energy and then to release it again, slowly.

Georgiades touched his arm. At first he did not see, but then Georgiades pointed and he realized that over in a corner a man was working on one of the ikons.

They went across. The man looked up. Owen couldn’t see him well but saw enough to know that he was not an Arab. Or a Copt, for that matter.

‘Fine work!’ said Owen.

‘Just the finishing touches,’ said the man. They spoke in Arabic but although the man spoke it well, it was not his first tongue. ‘We do most of the work in our workshop out the back.’

‘You have a lot of work here, then?’

The man nodded.

‘We are working on five. Just restoring, of course.’

‘Difficult, with the materials. Is that real gold?’

The man smiled.

‘Dust,’ he said, ‘fixed with paint. I wouldn’t try to get it off.’

‘Still,’ said Owen, ‘not cheap!’

‘We’re the ones who are cheap,’ said the man, cheerfully, however.

‘Even you have to be paid for, though.’

‘There is a cost,’ the man agreed.

‘I didn’t know the Church was that rich,’ said Owen.

‘Oh, this kind of thing isn’t paid for by the Church. It’s financed by donations.’

‘And someone has given the money for you to do these?’

‘Enough for five of them only, unfortunately.’

‘Well, I suppose the cost adds up. I mean, the dust by itself…How much dust would you need to do a job like this?’

‘Very little,’ said the man. ‘That’s why it’s not worth your trying to take it off!’

Owen laughed.

‘I’ll have to find some other way of getting rich.’

They stood watching the man for a little while.

‘The workshop’s out the back, if you’d like to put your head in.’

Owen followed Georgiades down the stairs and out into the court with the palm trees and the fountain. A high wooden trellis of fine old meshrebiya work divided off a small garden at one end, on the other side of which were what looked like low cloisters. A man was working in one of them.

‘Just been talking to your mate upstairs,’ said Owen.

‘Oh, yes?’

The man stayed bent over his work. It was another ikon and he was gently brushing the face. Out here in the daylight the ikon seemed flatter, had lost its glow.

‘Difficult work,’ said Owen.

‘Not when you know how.’

‘Ah, yes, but it’s the knowing how! Not many people with your skills, I fancy.’

‘Not many,’ said the man, ‘but too many.’

‘Too many for the jobs available?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Churches aren’t the best customers. Still, from what your mate was saying, someone else is paying this time.’

‘Lucky for once.’

‘A sick patron?’

‘A dead patron. This was a bequest.’

‘Ah, so there won’t be any more when it’s finished?’

‘That’s right.’

They watched for a while and then turned away. Back up in the church a priest was lighting candles.

‘The bequest? All very fine, but it won’t buy salvation. Not by itself, that is. God isn’t bribable. Though Arturos probably thought he was. He certainly thought everyone else was.’

‘It’s a genuine bequest, then?’

‘In what sense?’

‘The church has actually received the money?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And decided to allocate it to restoration of the ikons? Or was that Arturos’s idea?’

‘Ours.’

‘Ah! A considerable sum?’

‘Considerable in Arturos’s eyes.’

‘Enough to restore five ikons?’

‘That’s about it.’

‘The materials are costly,’ Owen observed.

‘We’re used to tight budgeting.’

‘And Arturos himself, what sort of man was he? Interested in the Church?’