Moholy turned on his heel, as if he meant to skip back and slap me. His head was trembling, and he had to bite his lip. ‘I think you’re aware of what I’m looking for. By now, you must be. If you’d found it, we would not be here speaking like this. As you well know.’
He opened the door, letting in the traffic, and by the time it swung shut both he and Rifka had gone.
‘Oh damn it,’ Helena said. She kicked the leg of the chair, making it skitter round at an angle. ‘I knew it. I knew this was going to happen.’
‘Then maybe you should have said something a little earlier.’
She walked to the wall with her head in her hands. ‘It was a bad and stupid idea. Stupid and foolish. But you wouldn’t listen, would you?’
‘My Calvin must have been rubbish.’
‘It wasn’t. It was actually pretty convincing.’
‘Though not to Moholy.’
‘God, this is such a fuck-up. Such a simple idea to earn some serious money, and we’ve completely botched it.’
‘I botched it.’
‘Maybe that was the problem,’ Helena said. ‘Your Calvin was too good. And it turns out Moholy isn’t a total nutcase. I didn’t know that before, but he wasn’t how I pictured him. Whatever he lets his clients think, that man I just met isn’t a believer in relics.’
‘He is. We talked about it.’
‘Oh grow up. And listen. He never expects relics to have any influence. That’s a sales pitch. In which case, he must have thought it was you who was half insane, and acting like a lunatic. Once he worked out you were acting Calvin, he concluded we must be up to something.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Although there is another possibility.’
I planted my fingers on the top of my head, as if physically I had to hold my racing thoughts inside. ‘Moholy believes in relics. Bear with me. Moholy was expecting Calvin. Calvin hated relics, thought relics were a nonsense, and a waste of time. Perhaps I should have acted indifference.’
‘Oh God,’ Helena’s hands went to her mouth. Then she squatted on her heels, bouncing gently up and down. ‘We never thought of that. It’s Calvin who wasn’t a believer. In the role of Calvin, you therefore wouldn’t have let the relics have any effect. I’m such a bloody fool.’
‘No, I’m a fool. I should never have believed I could carry it off.’
I was not chosen, not special. I had no plated destiny out there waiting, nor any of the perception or presence of the truly great. I wrenched at my black cassock, yanking it over my head, badly snagging my ear. God that hurt. I dashed the cassock to the ground, not Calvin, and with no desire to be Calvin. I expected far less of myself.
‘I’ve had enough,’ I said, scooping the sports-bag off the floor. My underneath clothes were dark, nondescript, a uniform of defeat. I was not any kind of messiah, in any given sphere of human achievement. ‘This whole scene is definitely not me. Whoever this is, I’m putting him back.’
Mr Smith’s Back
‘In a good country virtues wouldn’t be necessary. Everybody could be quite ordinary, middling, and for all I care, cowards.’
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage
EVEN IN GENEVA’S CIMETIÈRE des Rois, only a third of the graves were amateur shrines. More likely than not, our unnamed bones didn’t belong to anyone famous, but instead to one of Switzerland’s majority of Mr and Mrs Smiths, ordinary men and women who lived their fears and dreams in private, their weakness and envy, their failure. There was something dreadful and unforgiving about digging up the bones of someone unknown.
The bones, even though the plastic sports-bag was now zipped tight as we crossed the city, had made no discernible impression. It wasn’t John Calvin, or anyone special; it was a Mr Smith, a Helena Byczynski, a Jay Mason Minor. That night in the cemetery, drunk as I was and in a fearful hurry, it would have been easier even for Richard Burton feeling wild and dangerous to pick out a Mr Smith. No pesky sauerkraut jars and candles. And later, no keen-eyed fanatics to seize on the slightest mistake.
The bones in the bag were a nobody, any old Mr or Mrs Smith, and there was a vacancy under the stone of Calvin. I was going to put them back, in broad daylight if I had to, because I was also a Mr Smith, a loyal member of the same family, and no one would blink an eye.
As I walked in anger ever further from the church, clutching the blue sports-bag to my chest, Helena struggled to keep up. She kept telling me not to panic, and that it wasn’t the end of the world. We didn’t even know what kind of test Moholy was planning for the bone. There was still hope. Which was easy for her to say because the fact of the matter, as far as I was concerned, was this: for women, the discovery of Mrs Smithness had always been less of a disaster. She frowned at that, meaning as a thinker I was inferior in every imaginable way. I assumed she was probably right.
In Geneva, I’d taken hold of my destiny. It hadn’t worked out. Or it had, but I was destined to be a nobody. I was Mr Smith, not even Major Smith from Where Eagles Dare. I wasn’t even convincing as plain John Calvin.
The failure of my Calvin bothered me. Moholy had definitely been looking for some specific reaction to the bones, but not my reaction, or not the Calvin reaction. Perhaps I shouldn’t have simplified, and insisted instead on Calvin’s secret doubts and essential confusion. I’d offered an unfair portrait, not the whole man, and Moholy was consistently more subtle than I’d anticipated.
We stopped at the flat for my digging tools, and there was no particular trick to it, nothing special to record or report. I was no longer convinced that the world had something to tell me, was sending me messages, signals, warnings. Instead, this was the first day of my relinquished life. I was giving up, my nothingness increasingly apparent to me.
In the manner of Mr Smith, whose obscurity is always an injustice, I was very angry. On the way to the cemetery, we had to push past some protesters urgent on mobile phones, all engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary. But not everybody could be extraordinary, because who would that leave to be ordinary? They were getting in my way, and I resented their presumption that anything would ever change. Who did they think they were? I knew as well as anybody what was wrong (the weak and innocent suffer, the rich and manipulative flourish, simple), but I wasn’t the kind of person who could expect to make a difference.
Consume, stay silent. If they weren’t careful, the protesters would destroy the few small pleasures we had. Die. Shopping wasn’t much, and television had its faults, but both were better than nothing.
Thankfully, the cemetery was quiet, an annexe of the city separate from today’s advance sparring between protesters and police. It was empty, only the small yellow digger on its rubber caterpillar tracks jolting awkwardly left and right, pursuing its endless business.
We cut directly across the grass to Calvin’s corner. I threw down the tools and the bag of bones, rolled up my sleeves, and was about to get cracking when Helena pulled me back, yelling something I couldn’t hear over the creaking digger scrushing the gravel of a nearby path.
‘Wait till the digger’s gone!’
‘What?’
‘Wait!’ she said, shouting louder. ‘Let me check something!’
She knelt down beside Calvin, and clawed away a few of the white pebbles bordering the grave’s edge. She was looking for the join, the seam. She wanted to satisfy herself that I’d at least been man enough to make an actual attempt on John Calvin. She dabbed her fingers along the bottom edge of his recumbent stone.
‘A-ha,’ she held up the pad of her index finger, for both of us to see. It was now an undercoat colour, like paint on a battleship. ‘You actually did it.’
‘Of course I did.’
‘What? You’ll have to speak up!’
The digger had jerked right then left. We both turned to see where it was headed, and watched it rattle and shudder directly towards us. It stopped at the edge of the path closest to Calvin, its poised bucket only metres away, raised and shaking. The driver was w
earing ear-protectors attached to an orange hard hat, and dark glasses. He had a black fleece zipped to his chin. There was something familiar about him.
It was Rifka. She hooked her sunglasses on to the end of her nose, and looked out over the top. Then she cut the engine, flipped off the hard hat, and jumped down from the cab. Her glasses fell off, but she caught them as they fell, and slipped them into her fleece.
‘People.’
‘What are you doing here?’
She greeted us both with a smile, as if nothing could be more ordinary than the three of us here, like this. She hadn’t changed. There was something amused in her eyes, but her natural authority now seemed more pronounced, unmissable.
‘If you could both just stand aside for a moment, I’m about to dig for Calvin.’
‘Good one,’ I said, but even though Rifka was still smiling, and standing there relaxed and not aggressive in any way, I knew she wasn’t joking.
‘Moholy’s decision. About ten minutes after we left the church. You made him all twitchy.’
‘We noticed.’
‘And now this. He wants Calvin, the real Calvin, and quickly. Even though a mechanical excavator isn’t normally our style.’
‘You could have refused.’
‘Moholy isn’t always a very nice man. If he was, he wouldn’t always get what he wants.’
Rifka unzipped her fleece and reached into the top pocket of her shirt, bringing out her pills. She shook some out into her cupped hand, and slapped them into her mouth. She chewed before swallowing.
‘Those pills,’ I said. ‘Rifka, what are those pills?’
‘They thin the blood. Now. I’d like to stay and chat, but Moholy’s in a hurry. I don’t want to be rude, but I ought to be getting on.’
‘You can’t,’ Helena said. ‘Not with the digger. What about discretion?’
‘He doesn’t care any more. It’s suddenly more important than that.’
‘Someone might come.’
‘Who? The police are busy with protesters. And in cemeteries mechanical diggers work every day of the week, except Sundays.’
‘What about Calvin?’
‘John? He wouldn’t have minded. He never wanted to be buried here in the first place.’
‘We know that,’ Helena said. ‘That’s not what I mean. You can’t dig him up because we’ve got him here in this bag. Moholy obviously wasn’t happy. So we were planning to put him back. However, if you really want Calvin that badly, you can just have him. Give her the bag, Jay.’
It was a nice try, and more evidence of the Helena who never surrendered, but it didn’t work. I held out the bag, but Rifka barely glanced at it.
‘Well, you’re right about one thing,’ she said. ‘Moholy definitely wasn’t happy. After the church he went straight to the University lab. There’s a technician there who boosts his salary by carrying out Carbon-14 tests for cautious antiquities dealers. He’ll have preliminary results by tea-time.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘Moholy knows it isn’t Calvin. And let’s not be childish here. It isn’t, is it? So then Moholy decided if he wanted something doing, he’d better do it himself.’
‘Or through you. Why you, Rifka? Why do you always do what he says?’
I was still thinking about the pills in her top pocket, beginning to understand why I’d never worked her out. She could be anybody. ‘You do this by choice, don’t you? You’re not scared in the least. If it’s not the money, and you’re not frightened of what he might do to you, then what’s really in those pills? Who are you?’
‘I’m one of God’s many children. Who just happens to have an aversion to John Calvin. Always disliked him, from the day he arrived in Geneva. He had his chance to make this city astonishing, but John could be very wrong-headed, especially about relics. We both know how wrong he was about relics, don’t we, Jay? He should have known better, especially at the beginning, and I don’t feel any particular sympathy for the sour-faced kill-joy he let himself become. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
‘Wait,’ I said, though with no real idea of how to stop her as she vaulted back up into the digger’s cab. She paused, her fingers already closed on the ignition key. ‘How did you get the keys to that thing?’
‘I asked the driver.’
‘And he just handed them over?’
‘I asked him nicely.’
‘And where did you learn to operate heavy machinery?’
‘I don’t know. I just seem to get the hang of things.’
She fired up the engine, which coughed a crab of black smoke from the upright exhaust. She put her dark glasses back on, and the hard hat, settling the ear protectors. Then she bumped the digger off the path and on to the grass, its scratched bucket nodding at the end of its jointed hydraulic arm. We stepped back, looking left and right, sure that someone would come. The digger lurched and twitched to within feet of Calvin’s stone, sliding one final turn on the grass to bring the clawed bucket directly above it, poised and trembling.
I shouted up at Rifka that the other method was better, there was no need for this, but she couldn’t hear a thing above the mechanical racket. I was still shouting as Helena tugged me by the elbow, the two of us backing away between François Simon and a couple of nobodies, back past the self-important vault of Sir Humphry Davy.
The steel bucket of the mechanical digger pitched down on to Calvin’s stone, bouncing the front curve of the caterpillar tracks off the grass. It lifted, and pitched again, and this time the stone cracked. At the third attempt, the stone smashed, and the bucket broke clean through. This was no place for Mr Smith. Someone would come, and there’d be trouble. Mr Smith would get the blame. Let Rifka sort it out, if she was so special.
We turned and jogged away, and round the first corner we heard another bang, and then another. Then we collided with a march against third-world debt, which carried us back towards the cemetery, before veering sharply away towards the city. As ordinary, law-abiding citizens, quite conformist and therefore non-believers in God, we wondered where on earth we could look for refuge, or any kind of sanctuary.
Mr Smith had no cathedrals, no palaces, no castles with invincible hidden keeps. Frequently, he was barged off the pavements. The public places still open to him, still his, were the library and the park. In Geneva, the libraries and parks would be closed until this particular movement for popular reform had passed on by. We couldn’t go back to the church. Moholy would find us there, and ordinary people no longer found sanctuary in church. They went shopping. They consumed, they were silent, they died.
We put our heads round the red door of a Pizza Hut, but so much plastic deadened our spirits like it did the bones. It becalmed and smothered us. The more forceful of our Mr Smith emotions were embarrassed to show themselves, and hunkered down.
The only sanctuary open to us, when everything else failed, was each other. I suddenly loved Helena very much. We kept moving, arm in arm, often glancing behind as I conceded that I’d never now amount to a man in any way remarkable. Surrounded by banks, I felt encouraged to stop, to save, to bank whatever adventures I’d already had and return gratefully, humbly, as curate to Morton in the Marsh, where in the out-of-town supermarket without my collar not one of the Christmas regulars would quite be able to place me.
We eventually came up short against the United Nations anti-protester perimeter. It was a chain-link fence two metres high which closed off the Palace of Nations and all its public parkland, including the lakeside frontage, in case anti-capitalist anarchists planned to attack by boat. Only policemen and diplomats were allowed inside the fence, and also journalists, to ensure their safety, even though the sense of being safe was never truly what was going on. That wasn’t what was truthfully happening to Mr Smith, which was never accurately reported.
On the safe side of the fence there were soldiers carrying machine-guns which at a thousand yards could kill 250 people in a minute. We were about two feet away. A national servi
ceman shouted at us, and waved us off, because any unauthorised approach to the fencing was classified as a provocative act.
Keep your head down. Consume, stay silent, die. It didn’t seem such a bad strategy.
On the opposite side of the road was the grandly stepped entrance to the Museum of Human Atrocity. It remained open to the public, all year round, all week long, except Tuesdays. It was usually empty. Even rebranded, as the Red Cross International Museum, it had never sounded like a fun attraction for all the family.
The attendants were so pleased to see us they forgot to check our zipped blue bag for bombs. They ushered us straight in, and down some metal stairs to a large air-conditioned room divided into several separate boxes, each offering a full audio-visual experience of flood, earthquake, famine.
It was always the ordinary people who suffered.
There was a life-size reproduction of a concrete cell, three metres by two, which somewhere in Liberia had once contained seventeen political prisoners. The floor was printed with seventeen pairs of different-coloured footprints, making it more footprint than floor, the crowd of missing bodies echoing to soundscape recreations of tortures, garrottes, mutilations.
It was a permanent exhibition of bad luck. Along the outside walls, a simple line at eye-level traced the dates of wars and natural disasters that had killed at least 100,000 Mr Smiths: 100,000 was the number needed to qualify for memorial. At first, the line was only occasionally interrupted, cut with lethal volcanoes and plagues. In the modern era, disasters mobbed year after year, the line of the times heavily stacked with man against man, and many more than 100,000 dead.
In the next room there was a cinema screen, a row of metal benches and, in floor-to-ceiling perspex blocks, the original Geneva Convention catalogues of five million World War One prisoners. The screen was showing a looped sequence of stills from the Battle of Solferino, in 1859, paying special attention to amputation before the age of anaesthetic. And also, fortunately, before the age of colour.
Helena went to fetch coffee from a vending machine she’d spotted in the corridor. I sat on a middle bench facing the catalogues, my back to the screen, but reflected in the perspex I saw the stills become moving pictures, war becoming mobile in the spoked iron wheels of artillery. There was film of black and white explosions, though also, again fortunately, before the age of sound.
Dry Bones Page 22
