The Black Madonna by Peter Millar

‘I’d love a little white wine. Hamas have banned all alcohol in Gaza.’ Marcus chose a half bottle of Petit Chablis and said, ‘This do?’ She nodded again, blushing like a guilty schoolgirl.
    When they entered Priji’s, Ali himself was sitting by the kitchen door and immediately came over to greet them. He was a plump cheerful man with an accent that mixed broad East End cockney with just a hint of the subcontinent: ‘’Ow are you, Professor Fry,’ – healways overstated Marcus’s academic status and missed the nuance in his surname – ‘and ’ow’s your luvvly lady friend? Table in the window, or perhaps the corner, a bit more private?’
    ‘The corner would be fine, Ali,’ said Marcus, and let them be shepherded to a small table near the rear of the restaurant. A waiter brought menus and took the wine and beer away to open the bottles.
    Marcus ordered starters, the famous chicken tikka masala as well as a couple of more authentically Bengali dishes including balti lamb, shorisha king prawns in chilli and mustard sauce and a garlicky lentil tarka dall. He was hungry. The service was quick and attentive. He sipped at the cold beer, while Nazreem sipped her white wine with her eyes closed. He waited for her to begin the conversation, but the starters arrived almost immediately. Nazreem picked up a pappadum, dribbled some mint yoghurt on it, raised it to her lips and then put it down again without eating.
    ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Marcus said at last.
    ‘Hmm?’
    ‘What’s going on … in your mind. Is it what happened in Gaza. This find of yours, the theft. I just wondered if you wanted to talk about it.’
    She looked up at him and gave him a thin resigned smile.
    ‘Of course. More than anything else.’ But she didn’t.
    ‘In the paper,’ prompted Marcus. ‘They hinted that this find … was something rather special. Particularly for Christians.’
    She gave him the same thin-lipped smile of resignation, accompanied by a slight shrug of the shoulders.
    ‘Who knows? Who knows what to believe?’
    ‘How did it happen?’ Marcus tried, then sensing from her frown that he had trodden on sensitive territory he retracked, ‘the find, I mean? The paper seemed to imply that the context dated it to the first century.’
    Nazreem took a long sip of her wine and leaned forward. ‘That much is indisputable,’ she said. All of a sudden, as if the memory itself had reinvigorated her, she began talking quietly, briskly as if reliving the moment itself:
    ‘It was just to the north of Gaza City itself, a place the Israelis call Tel a-Shakef, a sensitive location. Not so long ago it was an Israeli army base before they pulled out of Gaza. About three weeks ago bulldozers went in, to clear away rubble. The road leads towardsErez, the crossing point. They were pushing back the drifting sand when they came across old stones, paving, very obviously ancient not modern.’
    Marcus was struck by how her mood had changed. Archaeology was her life blood.
    ‘They stopped work immediately – it does not take much to make them stop work,’ she added with a pertinent look. ‘The foreman sent someone to the museum, to ask for advice. In the past, during the occupation, the Israeli archaeologists would have been all over it. We were lucky. If you can describe anything that happens in Gaza as luck.
    ‘I went with some workers, a few volunteers. It did not take much to discover we had found an old Christian church, a very old church.’
    ‘Not from the first century?’ Marcus looked puzzled. The early Christians had met in private homes. Under the Roman persecution they had gathered in caves and cellars. Purpose-built churches didn’t start to appear in any number until the Romans did a U-turn when the Emperor Constantine made it the state religion in the fourth century.
    ‘No, of course not,’ Nazreem said dismissively. ‘The uppermost ruins included a beautiful mosaic floor – the sand dunes had