After nearly 500 years underground, if anyone was to believe it was Calvin, they’d have to concede that the skeleton was wearing well. The cleaned-up bones looked surprisingly modern, but we couldn’t claim to be experts. We had no knowledge of how bones were supposed to age. They were the famously undecaying part. A bone is a bone is a bone.
‘Except for the teeth,’ I said. Would anyone know if Calvin still had his teeth?
‘You’d expect bad teeth, five hundred years ago.’
‘Would you? I think these bones look newer than that.’
Though now we looked more closely, new and old hardly seemed like useful terms. Bones in bogs from the Iron Age were found in better shape than these, younger, as good as new. It depended on the composition of the soil, and other inexact factors, such as the godliness of the soul. We might be looking at the miracle of pure living, its very own preservative.
‘If we can’t tell it’s not Calvin,’ Helena said, ‘then neither can Joseph Moholy.’
‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘We pretend it’s Calvin, and sell it to Moholy as Calvin. He’ll never know. The fact is, we’re all the same beneath the skin. All bones look alike.’
‘He wants John Calvin. He was fairly decided about that.’
‘Joyce, Calvin, what’s the difference?’
‘If he ever finds out, I shouldn’t imagine he’ll be thrilled.’
‘How will he tell?’
‘The effect.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The intercession of the relic. That’s what keeps him interested. The effect the relics have. If the bones fail to make his clients think and act like John Calvin, Moholy will know we’ve sold him a fake.’
‘Back to the real world, Jay. They’re just bones, things. They can’t intercede, whatever his customers may like to imagine. They have no effect.’
‘In your opinion, which is irrelevant. As is mine. All that counts is Moholy’s opinion, and he expects his relics to intercede.’
‘You’re moving into strange territory here.’
I wondered where it could get any stranger. ‘Let’s not pretend it’s John Calvin,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ll get away with it.’
I told Helena everything I could remember about Moholy’s gallery, with Jung’s knee and the silk cloth and the compass, and Moholy’s abrupt change of mind from Joyce to Calvin. To Moholy, Calvin was more important than just another relic. He was a significant waymark on Jung’s map. It wasn’t clear, but Calvin was either a vital indicator along the way, or he was actually the end, the aim, the objective answer to everything.
‘In which case,’ Helena said, ‘even more reason to deliver. It’s the jackpot.’
‘What about the Iraqi salesman?’
‘Don’t be such a fatalist. We’ll be fine.’
Helena went to the bookcase, and picked out the I-Ching. She then stepped astride the stern assembly of Calvin, feet firmly planted either side of his hips. She licked one of her fingers.
‘Page one,’ she read. ‘To ask a question of the oracle, you will need yarrow stalks, coins, or in the oldest tradition for the most authentic reading, bones. And bones,’ she said, looking up brightly, ‘we got.’
With the I-Ching open around one thumb, she selected three bones with obvious sides, deciding on the shins and a cracked section of pelvis. ‘Ready to roll,’ she said. ‘You go first.’
‘Is it wrong to dig up dead people?’
‘That’s not in question,’ Helena said.
‘Ask that question first.’
The I-Ching was a sophisticated version of cleromancy, reading significance into patterns of bones scattered from a shaman’s bag. Helena was now down on her knees, weight forward on her elbows as she rolled the bones, consulted the book, then rolled again. She did this six times, while I recorded each result on the back of an envelope. According to the lie of the bones, the I-Ching was unambiguous in its response. Not necessarily. Yes and no. It was the same wise advice I recognised from the Church of England.
Helena sat back on her heels, and clicked the end of the pencil between her teeth. Now for the bigger question, of much greater relevance.
‘Should we carry on regardless?’
The bones rolled and stopped, trapping permutations from the air, ravelling the ancient hazard that everything was connected, and the world hid endless readable meanings. The I-Ching’s final decision was that we had no choice but to carry on regardless, in this and all other matters.
‘Well,’ Helena said, ‘there you have it.’
There was something inevitable about what happened next. Thinking it through, I condensed all the possibilities into one single option. Either do something, or do nothing. That was the on/off switch, the most basic of human choices.
If I did nothing, it seemed likely that I’d regress to wherever I’d been before, somewhere shy of square one, disintegrating as a person. Doing nothing was a surrender, a kind of torpor, which I’d always instinctively understood was a danger to my state of health. It was the duty of all good Christians, I reminded myself, to serve some useful purpose.
I dismantled the skeleton and gathered up the bones, tumbling them in handfuls into the blue plastic sports-bag I’d salvaged from the jumble at the church. Helena hovered around me, though we still hadn’t agreed on any definite plan of action. Think of the baby, we were both thinking, think of the money.
‘For God’s sake,’ Helena said, ‘it’s either this or living like clergy, always scrabbling for cash. Is that really what God wants?’
I checked the weather, and dressed while accepting I didn’t really know what God wanted. I had no idea what he had in store for me. Except, it ought to be said, the weather was fine and holding, and despite all my idiocy and cruelty, Helena had found and saved me, and had recently risen from my bed. Maybe I was just lucky.
By accident, it turned out I was wearing black, all black. Honestly, I hadn’t even looked. I’d randomly picked out my black church shoes and my black trousers, and my black polo-shirt and my bobbly black cardigan. So John Calvin was known to dress in black, but coincidence was just one of those things. The future was not already written.
My breakdown had not been inevitable, nor destined. More likely, it was the devil’s work made light for idle hands. If I’d been working as hard as God intended his ministers to work, none of this would have happened. It was the result of laziness, and a refusal to act when actions defined us. It wasn’t as if not knowing which way to turn had marked me out as special. Self-doubt and conflicting impulses were universal, but they weren’t the way to get things done.
In fact, I had to snap out of it. It was such a waste. I had to put myself to work, not necessarily paid employment, but the diligent and productive use of whatever talents and resources I had.
And in Geneva, this Friday morning, my major resource was bones. Don’t just sit there. Get up and go. With the assistance of an inbred work ethic, Helena’s idea quickly developed into a project. I would deliver the anonymous bones in the blue plastic sports-bag to Joseph Moholy. I would offer them as John Calvin, and Moholy would reward me handsomely, and Helena would be in my bed tonight like last night, and also tomorrow night, and the night after that. We would, as it happened, live happily ever after. I could see the destined future quite clearly, including the more immediate future of what to do next.
‘Have you made up your mind?’ Helena asked. ‘What is it we’re going to do?’
‘I’ll phone Moholy.’
And that’s exactly what I did. I phoned Moholy, and between us we shared the excitement of being so amazingly fortunate with the weather. Fate must be with us. The conditions had been perfect. And yes, I’d managed to do what he asked.
Moholy was euphoric. He wanted to send Rifka to pick me up right away, but I countered with a better idea, one I’d prepared in advance. After considering what Calvin himself would have wanted, Moholy’s rich villa seemed inappropriate, as did the gallery. We set a t
ime to meet at the church.
Even cancelling his other appointments, Moholy couldn’t be there before ten.
I fetched my black zip-up jacket, and the bag of bones, and headed for the door. Helena was still undressed, in the Jesus T-shirt and looking bemused. ‘Where are you going? It’s much too early.’
I said I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
‘What will be will be, Jay.’
Except I didn’t believe that. John Calvin would have believed it, or something like it, but I wasn’t John Calvin. I didn’t have John Calvin’s bones. In fact, all we had in common was a thorough disdain for the history and influence of relics.
That morning, for the first time since I’d arrived from England, I was disappointed by the city of Geneva. The sky was cloudless but the sun hazed, as if fighting its way through the warm wind crawling off the lake like a gas. This was the dreaded Föhn, which had evaporated last night’s cloud.
Apart from sapping the will, the Föhn made distant objects seem closer. Or so the Chaplain had once told me, Mont Blanc near enough to touch, its summit like Napoleon in bed (is what he said), with his hat on and the sheets pulled up to his nose (if that was the way I chose to see it). It was one way of seeing it, and today the mountains did seem alarmingly close, almost ominous, a disturbing debris of the Flood, the consequence of one among many of man’s grave disobediences. Which was another way.
Helena was right, and I was hours early, so I took an indirect route. All in black, carrying my bank robber’s bag, I felt self-conscious, as if it was obvious I was about to do a bad and terrible thing. I bought a ticket for the passenger ferry, to Eaux-Vives, hoping for fresher air out on the lake, and I sat in the stern watching the spread and fizz of the wake, breaking green and white like beer-bottles.
Cities, like people, could change on a daily basis. Geneva’s most famous landmark, the 450-foot water-jet in, the sheltered V of the lake, was off. It simply wasn’t there, leaving unmasked the grand façades and garish rooftop acronyms of the city’s 500 banks, fat on the wealth of human wickedness. Geneva was a great idea unlived, an ideal city sunk in corruption, a local economy financed by the life’s work of dictators and pimps and assassins, of non-executive directors and emergency ministers for defence. The quiet of the city was the still outside of the can of worms. It was the calm of the rock, under which countless crawly things creep.
The Clerical Appointments Board, at my interview, had suggested that the city of Geneva might be the saving of a man like me.
‘It’s only a few weeks, but you’ll be perfect. You’re already half a Calvinist as it is.’
‘I’m an Anglican, as are we all.’
‘Yes, indeed. But you don’t really enjoy it, do you, James?’
‘Who does?’
‘Learn something from Geneva, James, before it’s too late. Reflect a little. Grow as a person.’
And so on. I wondered now in what way exactly they’d thought I was a Calvinist. They must have said that for a reason. In what way, exactly?
John Calvin had a vision of Geneva as a holy city, a new Jerusalem offering a tangible image of the presence and providence of God. It would stand at the crossroads of the human adventure, a pivotal centre negotiating the problems of the planet. The idea survived the man, and Geneva persisted in modelling itself as the capital of civilisation. From headquarters in Geneva, for example, the League of Nations would supposedly ensure peace on earth for a thousand years. Instead, it had been superseded by the limp United Nations, and the ineffective High Commission for Refugees, and the vicious World Intellectual Property Organisation. Calvin’s treasured Geneva was in decline, a favourite site for the stalling of treaty negotiations, for peace not to break out, for hope punctured, for disappointment.
And to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t even all that clean.
I checked my watch. Once, in the reformed Christian city of Geneva, strangers could tell the time by the regularity of religious devotions. Now, Genevans and tourists owned luxury watches and clocks. So what was I planning to do? Herd the watch-wearing population into the Champs du Bourreau, and have them all burnt?
I was not Calvin. I didn’t want to be Calvin. There was no imperative to go go go. There was plenty of time to get to the church, and I should just slow down, stop, remind myself that relics, and especially pretend ones like the bones in my bag, had no supernatural powers.
At the entrance to the Jardin des Anglais, on the south side of the lake, there was a precision Swiss timepiece made from flowers: a clock-face of geraniums and pansies in a sloping grass bank. The gardens themselves were a walkable pattern of lawn and tended flower-bed, and deliberately resisting the influence of Calvin, I bought myself an ice-cream. A red-flecked red ice-cream from the Mövenpick kiosk, open again after the long winter, and not just two scoops, but three.
With little regard for the urgency of doing good, I found a bench beside the bandstand which faced a sculpted fountain depicting all of the big four seasons. Around the fountain, lounging on their rucksacks, youngsters here for the protest shared bread and hunks of cheese. They were like flashes of colour and hope, so much more colourful and hopeful than the city itself, and they deserved to be indulged. My tolerance, I suspected, wouldn’t last long. At the very latest, by the time I reached All Saints, I’d have to be acting securely in character. If this was going to work, I had to locate my inner Calvin.
I fed some crumbs from the bottom of my waffled cone to sparrows, jumping two-footed back and forth like wind-up toys. More young people arrived, many of them women, all with breasts and interesting buttocks. The world was rude and suggestive, and that was the way I liked it.
Since Helena had brought me back to my senses, I was less likely to make the mistake of supposing a Calvinist thought turned me into Calvin. I had Calvin in me, just as I had Becket and Davy and the others. They were all in there somewhere, but this time I planned to stay in control. I patted the plastic sports-bag on my lap. I was about to deliver bones to Joseph Moholy. If I was going to convince him that they were once John Calvin, the great reformer of Geneva, I’d have to act like Calvin, as if I were under the influence.
I finished my ice-cream, and reached into my pocket for a paper handkerchief. I shook one out, and dabbed at the corners of my mouth. I wiped off my fingers, then jammed the used tissue between the slats of the bench, looked at it (‘Litter-bug and sinner,’ said John), picked it out and returned it to my pocket.
Consciously making an effort to act like Calvin, in this day and age, what would I actually be like? A girl sat next to me, a dusty cyclist in an expressive T-shirt. Love Me Love My Bike. She started unlacing her boot, and most probably these self-styled freedom fighters saw John Calvin as an established enemy of freedom. They’d be wrong, or at least partly wrong. At the beginning, especially then, Calvin was better than that.
Against the bandstand, I now saw the layers of mountain-bikes D-locked together, with soft panniers and motorcycle helmets weighing heavily on the back wheels. Some of the protesters looked normal, others didn’t. They were a mixture of fluffies and spikies, though in agreement about shoes. They all wore boots.
The girl next to me was now relacing hers, and in the spirit of community I asked her if she was looking forward to the weekend. She was very friendly, and happily answered all my questions, explaining that her particular group were a mixture of Danish, Dutch, English and Americans. They were planning, as their contribution to the protest against the evident inequalities in world capitalism, some carefully choreographed cycling. Some of them were anarchists. She thought that most of them were probably atheists.
I dared to ask, as the sun shifted through the trees, scattering sparkles across the fountain, what was actually so wrong with the world.
‘The good suffer and the evil prosper.’
‘In Geneva?’
‘Especially in Geneva. It’s a favourite location for the headquarters of multinationals. It’s where Calvin wrote the rul
es, and where the conditions for inequality were perfected.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘thank you very much. Most informative.’
She was mistaken about Calvin. He was a fearless progressive, and had boldly rebelled against corrupt institutions and unjust authority. His steely northern core was our Protestant inheritance, and, atheists though they might be, these protesters were northern Protestant atheists. Whatever religion they’d rejected, they’d inherited to some degree the Protestant revolution. It was as inescapable as the industrial version, and no one could live as if it hadn’t ever happened.
The faith itself might be eroding, but the structures and values remained. To save the planet, there were legions of new Calvinists prepared to persevere and make sacrifices and dedicate themselves diligently to the cause. Even their battle-cry was a version of Calvin’s work ethic: something must be done. The Protestants of yesterday were the protesters of today, when it was only resistance which kept spiritual issues visible to the eyes of the people.
The Appointments Committee had been quite correct, and in many ways I was already a Calvinist. I was in sympathy with the protesters, and full of respect for John Calvin himself. After routing the established Church he was initially famed for his tolerance and wisdom. He decreed that sins only counted after the age of twenty. It was as sensible a theological reform as I’d ever heard. He laughed at fortune-telling, and advised men of seventy not to marry women of twenty-five, and dismissed a minister who insisted that anyone who’d died before the Reformation was damned.
In his pamphlet An Admonition Concerning Relics, John Calvin correctly pointed out that all bones looked the same. Therefore nobody could be confident of the saint they were actually venerating (or, it may be, the bones of a dog, or a horse, or an ass). High expectations led to disappointment, he warned. Don’t set yourself up to fall flat on your face. It was all eminently wise, and John Calvin had been much maligned, usually by libertines and Catholic historians, for the obvious common sense of opposing cakes before sandwiches, television before breakfast.
Dry Bones Page 20
