It could go unnoticed that standing alone, heroic against abuses of power, he’d presided over an unlikely outbreak of goodness. Cardinals in purple with full heads of hair were too busy noticing with a smirk that Calvin meant Baldhead. They underestimated his ability to change, and to act out of character. He arrived in Geneva a shy and minor cleric, humble and meek except in defence of the honour of God. As it turned out, as long as Calvin lived, God’s honour nearly always needed defending.
In the early days, though no one dared say it, and he wouldn’t have wanted to hear it, John Calvin reminded his Geneva citizenry of Jesus.
I looked at my watch again, and there were things to be done. This was my last chance to back out, and even though I already knew the outcome, that did nothing to lessen the struggle. Inside myself I could locate a certain sternness, and a capacity to believe myself special. They weren’t Calvin’s best qualities, but if I was special, if I was chosen, then it hardly mattered because nothing could go against me.
Calvinism faced the facts. Some people were chosen, and some were not. Life was unfair. From what I’d seen, and from what I’d read, that was what life was most like.
I wanted so much to be among the lucky ones. I’d always wanted to be divinely elected, someone who could get away with anything, and still end up in heaven. That’s what at last I was finding out, if I was among the chosen. I was thirty-four years old. I was privileged and English and still hadn’t suffered, not really. I had a tenacious and loving girlfriend, and a baby on the way, and a solid gene-memory of linseed and glorious flashes through extra cover. How much luckier could anyone get?
I stood up, and brushed crumbs of waffled cone from the blackness of my clothes, using the predestination of Calvinism as a source of self-belief. It was like Zen for the colder climates, inspiring unmatchable courage. You can do it. If it’s predestined, as Calvin claimed, it’s already done.
In the vestry I robed up in a simple black cassock, thinking myself back into Geneva’s glorious past. I felt pale, stick-thin, though also determined and more than a match for Joseph Moholy.
It was risky, but too late to change my mind. I did wonder if I could have gone any other way, and been somewhere else, doing other things. I was perhaps living out the wrong destiny, one which belonged to a different type of person, but at my age it seemed ridiculous not yet to have settled on who I was, still waiting for the breaking of the first morning, the singing of the first bird.
This is where I found myself on the journey. And for me, however it may have been for anyone else, the most convincing sermon for the journey of life was always hitching. This wasn’t necessarily the best place to be. Or even where I actually wanted to be. But it was where I was. I had doubts, of course I did, but I repressed them, and then made repression a virtue.
I went to the sink, and vigorously scrubbed my hands. Given a free choice, I’d have preferred to be almost anywhere else. I felt a bit ill, but then so did John Calvin, more often than not. Responsibility made him sick, physically sick, giving him sporadic one-sided headaches. Big decisions brought on anxiety attacks. As did insufficient sleep. He suffered a malady of the trachea which made him spit blood while sermonising, and he was often laid up with an internal abscess, wicked intestinal influenza, and haemorrhoids. He bled from a thousand wounds, but found comfort in the well-established Calvinist principle of doing what he didn’t want to do. If he was chosen, it would all work out. If he wasn’t, then he was bad and benighted and doomed forever to failure.
Calvin kept it going for the twenty-one years he ruled in Geneva, his health ruined by ferocious discipline and a stern internal world impervious to temptation and relief. Surely I could do it for an hour or so. Anyone could.
I was still nail-brushing my knuckles when someone opened the main door and briefly let in the traffic. I scurried out, shaking my hands, but it was only Helena.
‘What? You didn’t think I’d desert you? What’s wrong?’
She’d stopped me short, because I didn’t know if Calvin ought to be seen with a woman, not this early in the morning. And especially not a pregnant one.
‘I brought tea, to keep everyone civil.’
She carried her plastic shopping-bag into the vestry, and emptied it beside the sink. There was a thermos flask, several tea-bags, three mugs, and, I saw with horror, a packet of chocolate biscuits.
‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘Hide the biscuits.’
‘Excellent,’ she said, dropping them back in the bag. She appeared to be amused, ‘John.’
‘Not funny.’
‘Very good.’
‘Thank you.’
I still had a nagging feeling that something was wrong, but convinced myself it couldn’t be Helena. Three years ago, John Calvin had married the widow Idelette de Bure, who already had two children of her own. By my age, he was trying for more, and there were three babies, perhaps four, who died at birth. In a few years’ time, as a widower, Calvin’s only serious dispute with Geneva’s English community would involve an attempted abduction of his five-month-old godson. The boy’s mother, Lady Dorothy Stafford, disputed Calvin’s urgent assurances that the child’s father, on his death-bed, had willed it so. The episode made Calvin look weak and foolish, human.
It made me more confident of my impersonation, but still I sensed something amiss.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Helena said, reaching up to touch my cheek. I flinched away. ‘Perfect. And don’t ever smile.’
‘There’s still something wrong.’
‘Maybe it’s the emptiness,’ Helena suggested, looking round the church, hands on hips. ‘Shall I put out some chairs?’
‘Definitely not. He can stand.’
And Helena had to do what I said, because even though I was famously kind to women I was a man, and unlike any woman on the sixteenth-century earth I’d started University in Paris at the age of twelve. I therefore knew almost everything, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew and the importance of correcting the punctuation and spelling in other people’s editions of Seneca’s De Clementia. I knew what was right and wrong, and was suddenly struck by what was wrong.
‘We need a congregation.’
‘Just like that.’
‘We need some people.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Trust me. It’s a Protestant thing. The minister carries out the wishes of the congregation, and when Moholy arrives I want you to ask for a sermon.’
Helena looked at me closely, checking the whites of my eyes. ‘You don’t think you’re overdoing this?’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘With relics it’s all or nothing.’
‘Alright. I’ll see what I can do. But you’re beginning to make me nervous.’
Helena went back out into the noise of Geneva, and I made good use of my time alone by rubbing my hands raw on a towel. During his years in Geneva, Calvin had preached 4000 sermons. My own talent for preaching was limited, because there was nothing simple I wanted to say. However, one more short one ought to be possible.
Sooner than I’d expected, Helena was back in the church with six or seven people, not dissimilar to those I’d seen earlier at the fountain. They were girls with slightly alarming eyes, and pale bearded men, with a disillusioned curl to the lip.
‘I had to make a deal,’ Helena said.
‘Tell me later.’
‘You may not like it.’
‘Maybe not. But that man at the back is Joseph Moholy.’
I lifted my chin, clean red hands lightly clasped at about the level of my chest, and welcomed Moholy to the front of the church. Rifka was with him, and I suddenly realised I’d missed her. She looked so sensible, and kind, and it was as if I could always be certain, without taking any special trouble, that she’d be on my side and protect me from coming to harm. I had no idea why this should be.
Against my express wishes, Helena was bringing a chair from the vestry. Noted, marked down, recorded for later judgement by the Consistorial Court of Discipline. Moholy show
ed some interest in the various youngsters, leaning nonchalantly against the walls or sitting cross-legged at the back. Some of them had brought in boxes and bags, and even bicycles.
‘Get rid of these people.’
Clever, I thought. Very clever. It was already a test, the first stage in Moholy’s authentication of the bones. I didn’t hurry. I was increasingly confident of my Calvin.
‘No,’ I said. ‘The doors of the church remain always open. The people of Geneva are welcome.’
‘Says who?’
‘These people are not anarchists. There’s no cause for alarm. They’re cyclists.’
‘Jesus was on the side of the needy,’ Rifka said, as if to Moholy, then looking to me for confirmation. ‘Isn’t that right?’
I was grateful to her, understanding that she wanted to help, even if I didn’t see exactly how. Or why. Unexpectedly, I had a flashed memory of how easily Calvin’s stone had moved and slid. Underneath, the earth had been loose, and quick to work, as if someone had already been in there, and broken it up quite recently.
I had a new, unexpected thought: I wasn’t the first.
And at that moment, looking closely into Rifka’s wide and innocent eyes, I had the strong conviction that Moholy didn’t know this, but that Rifka did. Her innocence was an act. It was a form of mockery. She knew I couldn’t be Calvin, because somehow she already knew I didn’t have Calvin’s bones. So why hadn’t she told Moholy?
John Calvin the chaste minister of God had once come home to find his sister having sex with a trusted colleague. He was incensed when his mentor, Guillaume Farel, aged sixty-nine, married a much younger woman. Betrayals and disappointments happened, all the time, to everyone. If Rifka had tricked me, after getting me involved in the first place, I’d call her to account. And then by God I’d burn her.
Moholy had something else to say, but thought better of it. He nodded, hitched up his elegant trousers, and sat down on the single chair which Helena had provided. She’d positioned it in the centre of the black and white aisle, level with the absent front row of pews, and Rifka stood beside and slightly behind him.
Out of habit, as I took my place on the step, I sought inspiration from the church itself, and found myself uplifted to see it so empty and undecorated, even unfurnished. Yet with a decent congregation, too, of the unwashed. For everyone’s benefit, as I began, I made a rhetorical point of saying I’d be brief. It was purely rhetorical. Calvin was rarely brief, and in the nineteenth century the pastor in charge of the Bibliothèque de Genève, when disposing of the manuscripts of Calvin’s sermons, had offered them for sale by weight. They were all on the same subject, sin, and John Calvin was mostly against it.
I started by asking a universally relevant question. ‘How many among you have been looking for Jesus?’
Moholy was paying close attention. In his chair at the front he sat with arms and legs crossed, indulging me with his patience. At the same time, his eyes were unwavering, missing nothing, his head quite still as he listened carefully. It was all part of the test. We’d have to be careful, Calvin and I. We’d have to be very severe indeed.
I was vigilant against any taint of humour. I conscripted all of Calvin’s favourite words, and then assembled them for battle. On the one side, there was pollution, pure filth, impurity, defilement, befoulment, spatter, stains, infinite depravity, ordure, stench, and stink. On the other, as well as confidence and sure salvation, there was reform, rebirth, restoration, restitution, renewal, and even revolution.
Follow in the footsteps of the lives of the saints, I advised. Act like Job, like Daniel, like Jeremiah. Emulate the Apostles, or anyone more and greater than you are. Aspire to the imitatio Christi. Stretch to your full potential. And then you will truly be followers of Jesus.
I was aware of the door opening and closing on the traffic, like an ear unblocking, then blocking again. It was one of the surly young men, leaving. He wasn’t going to stay and be insulted like this, addressed like a Christian, but by then I’d pretty much finished. I bowed stiffly, by nature a shy and scholarly man, and meekly withdrew to the vestry. Helena followed me in, and after checking the door was properly shut, she hugged me. I didn’t respond, my arms tensed chastely at my sides.
‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘Fantastic. You’re such a star.’
I reached into the mugs and took out a tea-bag, leaving two between three.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘In a minute. Let’s just see if it worked.’
‘He looked pleased. He didn’t look doubtful, anyway. And he never took his eyes from your face, not once.’
‘I’ll take the bones. You bring the tea.’
Secretly, under the surface, I was delighted with my sermon. I too had noticed Moholy’s apparent satisfaction. It had gone more smoothly than I’d anticipated, and we were going to get away with it. Calvin wanted to be back. There was so much sin in the world, in need of correction.
Moholy was still in his chair as I handed him a mug of tea, and offered him sugar. ‘One lump? Or none at all?’
And then I introduced him to Helena. At first he seemed confused, as if he’d never heard of Idelette de Bure. ‘She knows everything,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t have done it on my own.’
‘Everything?’
He must have known, surely, that John Calvin was in favour of marriage for priests. It was one of his chief disagreements with the Catholics. Marriage was an evident improvement on feigned chastity, and syphilis, and Moholy should have known that. I offered him the blue plastic sports-bag. He carefully put down his mug, and then balanced the bag on his knees. He coughed into his hand, and unzipped the bag a few inches, widening the gap with his fingers and peering inside.
‘It’s all there,’ Helena said.
I shushed her, and borrowed a stern expression from the Reformer’s Wall. At the sound of Helena’s voice, Moholy let the gap in the bag close up, though he didn’t rezip it. I suddenly wondered how I’d ever thought that Helena wouldn’t be a problem.
‘Is this girl special to you?’
I think I blushed. Everyone was waiting, and this was not an innocent question. Moholy was probing, making up his mind, as if there was significant and decisive information he suspected me of somehow withholding. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what that information was.
‘Is she more special to you than anyone else?’
And now I sensed that Helena was also interested in my answer, perhaps even more so than Moholy. And she wasn’t expecting me to reply in character. She wanted an honest answer, and she wanted the world to know.
‘Come on, Jay. The man asked you a question.’
‘We cleaned him up,’ I said, but this wasn’t the important and decisive information that anyone wanted. ‘He’s all there, in the bag. John Calvin.’
I felt my face under scrutiny from every angle, as if everyone was searching for a confession, a betrayal. ‘In your sermon,’ Moholy said, ‘you kept talking about Jesus. Why was that?’
‘It’s not unusual. Jesus is a big subject for us Christians.’
‘Mr Moholy asked you if I was special.’
‘Yes,’ Moholy said. ‘Let’s go back to that one. Are you in love with this woman?’
‘I really don’t see the connection. It’s not relevant.’
‘You be careful,’ Helena said. ‘It’s very relevant.’
‘Have you and this woman had sexual relations?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Why not?’ Helena interrupted. ‘Why are you so ashamed to admit it? Yes, yes we have. And we do love each other. Very much. And I am very special to him, and he is very special to me.’
I looked at individual tiles on the floor of the aisle, one and then another, because Helena had ruined everything. She was very special to me. We loved each other very much. We did have sexual relations.
It seemed unlikely now that I’d ever live up to Calvin.
‘I’m sorry,’ Moholy said. ‘Sorry for you both.’
‘Are you? How very, very disappointing.’
Moholy unzipped the bag fully, and pulled out the first bone which came to hand, a cracked section of hip I thought, treating it with none of the veneration he usually reserved for relics. ‘There’s something not quite right here. Between the villa and the church I stopped at the cemetery. Calvin’s grave hardly looks disturbed at all.’
‘That’s how it’s supposed to look,’ Rifka said helpfully. ‘Jay has a gift for it.’
‘Money,’ I said. I could feel the situation slipping away, and in all my guises I was terrified of losing control. ‘I’ve delivered John Calvin. Let’s discuss the money.’
However convincing I may have been up to this point, I was now unmistakably Calvin. John Calvin had always been attentive to money. It was Calvin who’d decided, to the enduring benefit of Geneva and its banks, that lending money at interest was no longer usury. In fact, against the advice of that dusty user’s guide to good living, the Bible, money-lending could be actively encouraged, as long as the loan imposed no oppression or hardship. Geneva grew rich on loans to Louis XIV the Sun King, who at Versailles was building expansive man-made lakes at the cost of several men’s lives a day. Some people were chosen, and some were not. Life was unfair.
Moholy was knocking the hip-bone repeatedly into his palm. I’d never seen him so tight-lipped. ‘This is wrong,’ he said. ‘There’s something very wrong here.’
Rifka took the blue plastic sports-bag off his knees, and after looking round for a good place to put it, just dropped it on the floor. Moholy stood up.
‘I’m taking this bone with me, to have it tested. Think about that. And then perhaps, when I have the results, we should have this conversation again, starting from the beginning. It might even have a less predictable ending.’
He walked briskly towards the door of the church, his steel-tapped heels clacking along the aisle. Rifka followed him, leaving the bag behind like an insult.
‘Wait,’ I said, taking a few steps after them. ‘Come back. What’s the problem?’
Dry Bones Page 21
