The Sixth Station (33 page)

This one was titled
Cathar Country History.

I opened and read with all grammatical and spelling errors intact:

Catharism was for many years the prevalent form of Christianity in large areas of France, Spain, and Italy. The Cathars called themselves the friends of God and condemned the Catholic Church as the Church of the Anti-Christ. Like the original Christians, the Cathars were vegetarians (Cathars interpreted the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” as referring to all animals), believed in reincarnation, and considered the Old Testament God Jehovah to be a tyrant.…

Then there was a note typed separately and inserted into the text:

Perfecti observed complete celibacy, while the Credentes—true believers—believed that sexual activity was to be enjoyed, but procreation was strongly discouraged. This resulted in the charge by their opponents of sexual perversion. (Wikipedia entry)

Did Pantera mean that since little Theo was a Perfectae, they didn’t have sex? Dear God, say it
is
so!

The regular text then continued:

The Albigensian Crusade and subsequent Inquisition was launched by Pope Innocent III specifically to eradicate the Cathars, the largest and fastest growing Christina sect in Europe. The Crusaders undertook the task with ferocious enthusiasm, burning alive men, women and children. From 1139 onwards the pope declared that ‘anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of God which conflicted with Church dogma must be burned without pity.’

Upwards of half a million people were maimed, dispossessed, slaughtered by the king’s soldiers (French King Philippe Auguste who wanted to confiscate Cathar’s lands joined the pope in this Crusade) or burned at the stake by the officials of the Catholic Church.

In 1208 he offered land to anyone killing Cathars, which launched a brutal 30-year pogrom, which decimated southern France killing at least 250,000 Cathars.

Instead of being lulled to sleep, I was fully awake now. The Inquisition here in France was created just to eradicate the Cathars? Damn. They did such a good job, I never even heard of them.

Catharism disappeared from the northern Italian cities after the 1260s, under pressure from the Inquisition. The last known Cathar stronghold was at Montségur.

I was dumbstruck to find out that there had been Italian Cathars. Who knew? The Russos, for sure, weren’t among them. For one thing, we wouldn’t belong to any group that preferred celibacy and vegetables to sex and meatballs. Agnostic over ascetic was definitely our motto!

And finally, there was this reprint from a guidebook:

The castle at Montségur was besieged in 1243 by Hughes des Arci, Seneschal of Carcassonne for the King of France, under the guidance of the Pope. For nine months a few hundred Cathars successfully resisted 10,000 Catholic forces until shortly before Christmas when a small group of Basque mercenaries scaled a seemingly impossible sheer cliff-face, and overran a forward position. They were defeated.

The 225 or so remaining Cathars were given a choice: renounce Catharism or be burned alive at the stake.

On March 2, 1244, Pierre-Roger de Mirepoix, the Cathar’s military leader, negotiated a two-week truce with the king’s forces for the defeated religious group. Fourteen days, he reasoned, would give the lay population among the Cathars time to leave the fortress, while granting those Cathars who sought to become Perfecti time enough to take their vows and die in grace.

Sometime on the night before the mass execution, two males, most likely rogue Templars, and two female Perfecti rappelled down the impenetrable and nearly impossible sheer 4,000-foot cliff face on the northeastern slope of the mountain.

They carried with them
Le trésor Cathare.

Theories vary widely about the nature of that treasure—ranging from gold to the Holy Grail itself.

The next morning, on March 16, between 200–225 Cathars willingly marched down the opposite, southern face to the meadow below where they
climbed up ladders and positioned themselves onto the hundreds of huge stakes erected by the Catholic army. The pyres were lit and as the flames engulfed them the martyrs sang hymns of forgiveness.

Many people in Languedoc, France, still believe that when the wind is blowing in the right direction, a chosen few will always smell the stench of the burning flesh.

I fell into a light sleep—I was more concerned about the assassin I knew than the assassins that I didn’t know sneaking up on me. Nonetheless I began to dream—a nightmare.

In it, I, scary clown hairdo intact but looking like the lady in the tapestry, was standing on the sheer cliff face of a mountain. I was balancing on a rock with one hand, a rope around my waist, thousands of feet above the ground. From the belt of my tunic hung a small leather bag and a sword.

I looked down and saw a massive bonfire in the valley below. My eyes, like binoculars, watched as hundreds of men, women, and children climbed ladders and found places for themselves on the massive woodpile, where they were tied to stakes.

Crusaders lit the wood, while they laughingly made obscene gestures and yelled obscenities to any Templar Knights who had joined the martyrs.

The flames caught immediately and the fire began to lick the soles of the feet of the doomed. They started singing and screaming as they writhed in the flames and their flesh burned off their bones.

I could see faces melting and babies at their mothers’ breasts screaming in torment as their little bodies were consumed.

In a uniform gesture, all those melting faces then turned toward
me
high above them on the mountaintop. They were beseeching me to do—what? I didn’t know! I could smell the horrible stench of burning flesh and hair. The screams, the screams! The near-dead on the flaming bier sang out words that seared into my brain the way the fires seared into their flesh.

I made a double sign of the cross, turned my back to the mountain, and fell backward into a giant abyss.

I sat straight up in bed—yet again—gasping for breath, covered in sweat, my heart pounding.

There was a horrible stench—and it was real—burning up my nostrils.

Baghdad. God—no. It’s burning flesh!

I jumped out of bed, ran to the window, and threw open the wooden shutters. All seemed peaceful outside, but the smell was so overwhelming that I started to gag.

We’re on fire! I have to wake everyone up!

I ripped the door open to warn the family in the house—and there
he
was, right outside my door. Calm as can be—Pantera, I mean—sitting on a chair that was propped up against the wall, still sporting that shit-eating smirk.

“You! Why are you sitting here? There’s a fire!”

Without moving so much as a muscle, Pantera said, “No. That would be the smoke from the Prat des Cramats you smell.”

“The Valley of the Burned?”

“Precisely.”

“It’s on fire again?”

“No.”

“But—”

“But does your mother know you open the door to strange men in your underwear?”

I looked down and could feel my face getting red. No, it wasn’t because I had ripped the door open in my panties, but because I had ripped the door open in giant white gramma drugstore panties.

His smirk almost widened into a smile. For the first time I noticed he had a gap in his front teeth.

Shit. This isn’t good.

31

Screw him.… I’m not going to try to cover up. Tough it out.

He looked me up and down. “Don’t worry, I have no desire to overwhelm you and make you mine.”

“You should do stand-up. Ha. Ha. Ha. And frankly, I’d rather eat a pound of escargot. Two pounds.”

I slammed the door, bolted it, and tried to go back to sleep, but the horrid, rancid-smoke smell kept me from falling into a deep sleep. Loath as I was to admit it, however, knowing that Pantera was outside my door, and clearly without malicious intent, did make me less anxious.

A rooster crowed at daybreak, then the church bells began pealing right outside the window, it seemed, and so I rolled around and finally got up.

What are they all rushing to get up to do? There’s nothing to do here.

I took a brisk shower with the handheld faucet in the tub, wiped off with that same one towel, and got dressed.

Again, the choice was jeans, a T-shirt, the same jacket, and boots. I ran my fingers through my tragic ’do and put on the red lipstick.

Why did you do that?

I opened the door. No Pantera.

Huh?

There were two ways downstairs, I discovered. One was via the outside staircase, and the other through a tiny door, which opened to an even tinier spiral staircase that was barely wide enough for my frame. It opened into the kitchen, where Pantera, I was astonished to see, was yucking it up with the family and taking the fresh croissants out of the ancient oven for the landlady, who was clearly smitten.

“Bonjour, Madame Roussel,” Pantera said.

“Yes, good morning. I see you are up early.”

“Early? Not really, it’s five forty-five.”

I had several cups of café au lait and one croissant (I was sort of embarrassed to eat like I had four stomachs in front of all these people), while Pantera took his sweet time about finishing off two cups of espresso and one croissant.

Finally, he said, “You should see this,” and he handed me yesterday’s edition of the
International Herald Tribune.

Front-page story: by Dona Grimm; photos by Donald Zaluckyj.

Accompanying the story were photos of Donald and me at our makeshift Baghdad wedding. There were also photos of an older man identified as Dr. Mikaeel Hussein.

Tears sprung into my eyes.

“What?”

Pantera said nothing.

“Sorry if we were both of legal age and there are actual photos of our nuptials.”

He pointed to the story. “You need to read this.”

The article described a bomb scare outside the UN tribunal the day before and the details of the day’s proceedings, which had begun hours late due to the scare.

The package turned out to be nothing other than a medical bag with a priest’s stole and six empty transfusion bags marked “NYU Hospital: #4th, 6th.”

There was also the testimony of Dr. Mikaeel Hussein, the astrophysicist who recanted the testimony I’d read in that old newspaper article wherein he first said it was a star, then a comet they discovered in 1982. Now he was saying that the heavenly body was in fact a star.

The article stated:

Dr. Hussein, under examination by ben Yusef’s counsel (and without the cooperation of the defendant) admitted that he had lied in 1982 about the sighting of a comet.

Dr. Hussein had testified back then that the heavenly body in the skies over Turkey had been in fact a comet, after first claiming it had been a star. He testified, “Under intense pressure in 1982, I lied to the scientific community, and to the world.

“My colleagues went along with me in the ruse,” he said. “It was in fact the emergence of a new star, which disappeared as quickly as it had arisen over a small area of Ephesus, in Turkey.”

On redirect, lead attorney for the prosecution Lawrence Finegold pounded the timid scientist, demanding to know why he’d lied back in 1982. “If you had told the truth, and had actually discovered a star, wouldn’t you have, A: recognized it as such, being an astrophysicist?…” His voice was dripping with sarcasm, causing the courtroom to break out in stifled laughter, as Chief Justice Fatoumata Bagayoko slammed down her gavel.

“… and, B: hailed your discovery to the world? Instead, you expect this court to believe that you, an eminent astrophysicist, along with your colleagues Dr. Gaspar Bar-Cohen, of the University of Tel Aviv, and Dr. Balaaditya Pawar, now of U.C. Berkeley, went along with this lie of yours? Or was it—what did you call it?—ah, yes, a ‘mistake’?”

“But it is the truth that now I speak.”

“And who forced you to compromise your principles back in 1982, may I ask?”

To the astonishment of the court, Hussein stood up and pointed toward the front “distinguished spectators” row. “That man, the Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe,” he said, his accent making it at first hard for anyone to understand.

When the reality sank in, Finegold spun around, approached Hussein, and said, “You say that this man of God asked you to lie? And, even if we were to believe you—an admitted liar—that you, a Muslim, along with your colleagues, an Orthodox Jew and a Buddhist, capitulated to the wishes of a Baptist minister?”

Since Finegold asked the question in a rhetorical manner, he was visibly shaken by the answer, which also shocked the courtroom, and by now the world.

“The minister told us that he came at the behest of the White House.”

“What did you say?” Finegold said, stunned.

“I took that to mean the president of the United States as well as the prime ministers of many countries, perhaps as many as sixty. He said that revealing this would have caused a worldwide panic, because the star signaled the birth of the ‘soulless one,’ a baby born in the House of the Blessed Mother in Turkey. A black mass ritual.

“I told him we saw the boy, or as he called it, the ‘creature’ and the ‘soulless one.’ And that he was a beautiful little brown baby boy. The minister threatened our families and ourselves.