‘It can’t hurt, can it?’ Rifka said, taking the last piece. She closed one eye, and looked at me with the other through the hollow core of the neck-bone of Jesus. ‘Why shouldn’t we try to be good?’
Because one year ago, or perhaps in a couple of years’ time, depending on the reliability of historical sources, Jesus was being nailed in public to a large wooden cross. That’s what happens to the good guys, and it was quickly becoming clear that Moholy’s Jesus wasn’t a rabbinical Hasid, in the peaceful tradition of Hanina ben Dosa or Honi the Circle Drawer, wise miracle-workers with privileged access to the power of God. He was earthier than that, bonier. He was the raw factual Jesus of history, and not the tinkered Christ of Christianity. He wasn’t serene, divine, detached. He was the pre-Easter Jesus, impatient, a rebel and man of action exhorting the villagers of Galilee to resist the Romans and their pampered client kings.
‘Right then,’ Moholy said. ‘I hope we can agree that we’re men of the people.’
Nailed through his palms and feet as an example to others, with so much more to come: the spear in the side and the broken legs and the crows and the dogs, buried alive, for crimes of public disorder. Moholy needed slowing down, and clever Helena insisted on breakfast. Coffee, some rolls she’d spied in the bread-bin. Moholy could hardly refuse, because the gospel Jesus stops to eat with just about everyone. He did hesitate, but only briefly, and then his better nature prevailed.
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Whatever you want.’
I liked to think, when it came to stalling and holding Moholy back, that I made an important contribution. ‘Any unsalted butter?’
Rifka found some in the fridge.
And perhaps some marmalade. She found some in the cupboard.
Too easy. Lemon curd. In another cupboard. How did she do that?
‘Tinned pilchards,’ I suggested. What I really fancied for my breakfast, with a long day of goodness ahead of me, was a tin of oily pilchards.
‘No problem,’ Rifka said, ‘cupboard under the sink.’
And of course when she tossed me the tin the last thing I wanted was pilchards. We put the fish and some uneaten rolls in Rifka’s canvas bag. This was Helena’s idea, and a sensible precaution against any far-fetched notions Moholy might be having that we’d eaten our final meal, a kind of last breakfast. We wanted to keep everything less ominous than that, less fatal.
‘Lunch,’ I explained, a little too loudly, handing the bag back to Rifka. Unfortunately, this also acted as a signal that we must be eager to leave. Moholy was already at the door from the kitchen to the garden, swinging it open.
‘About time,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’
And we did. And fully intended to continue following, without hesitation, until the first opportunity to run away. Moholy stopped at an outhouse for some long-handled wire-cutters, then led us down the terraced lawns to his private jetty. Looking back at the villa, elegantly smudged by the dawn mist, it was tempting to run straight back up the dark green trails we’d made in the dew.
Like a prayer answered, the outboard motor on the small wooden boat wouldn’t start.
‘Let me have a go,’ Rifka said. She pulled the cord, and it started first time in a rich blue cloud of two-stroke. She slowed it by the choke to an easy putter, and Moholy helped us on board. Wrapped in our duvets we faced forward as Rifka steered us away from land, into the mist lifting from the surface of glassy Lake Geneva.
In the boat I was cold, and I was also frightened. There were no bones of Jesus. Moholy’s Jesus was a compound body I’d personally constructed from his upstairs collection of historical figures. They weren’t even particularly virtuous. As a mix, they were neither all good nor all bad, but the full range of what was possible.
Jesus was Moholy’s imagined triumph, a trophy beyond compare which made significant his empty and lonely existence. It was only now that I began to understand how lonely, and how empty. Moholy needed the bones of Jesus, more urgently than we’d realised, and our only chance of saving ourselves was to humour him. Now that he’d given us each a section of neck-bone, we had a vested interest in pretending the bones had influence.
We too would have to act like Jesus; he had us trapped in the necessity of goodness.
To convince him that we were carrying the holiest of relics, I pretended not to suffer. I even tried a form of meditation popular at theology college, in which the aim was to visualise an event in the life of Christ. Shivering, tucked up in a small open boat, all that came to mind was Jesus frightened. Jesus frightened in a small open boat. On a lake. I could do better than that. Jesus frightened in the desert, or in an overcrowded manger, cows snuffling at his new-born head. Jesus frightened by the rest of the day, every day, and the passing of time towards his immovable ordained death.
Jesus frightened as he moved west towards Rome, of his growing reputation as a Messiah ascended into heaven. Below decks, hiding from spies and atheists, how could he ever live up to that? Already at Patmos, he wanted to moderate the extravagance of his growing cult. He tried to talk to John of Zebedee, a visit which John exaggerated into a visitation, and the opening excesses of the Book of Revelation. It was getting out of control, even though Jesus personally explained his intentions and the implications of his thinking to Paul, and later Luke. Life and the best way to live wasn’t as complicated as those two seemed to think.
‘People, be good to each other.’
‘Yes, fine,’ Paul said. ‘Now what about the details of the resurrection?’
‘I am not the son of God.’
‘We are all sons of God.’
‘Yes, I know. I know that, Paul. But I am not the perfect example you want me to be.’
‘But you could have been. Couldn’t you?’
Jesus so frightened by the time he reached Philippi that he ignored Paul’s advice to stay hidden, and defiantly married the Hellenist Bishop Lydia, to remind his followers he was both human and fallible. Frightened the last time he was seen in Rome, in AD 64, ageing and feeble on the Appian Way, limping in the flame-light of Christians burning, his broken hands clamped in his armpits, thirty years since he was supposed to have died and risen and saved us from sin, and now with no imminent hope of salvation.
Jesus remembered simpler days, back in Galilee, when he and his brothers had confounded the powerful with no thought for policy, or replacement programmes. They’d just known instinctively that the world could be better than it was. He forgot how they knew that, but they weren’t alone in their conviction that the rich were not obliged to be selfish. The powerful could be more considerate in their use of power. Jesus had never been any kind of monk, detaching himself from the world and believing it a virtue. He’d made his objections known.
Rifka cut the engine, and the boat drifted alongside an impressive chain-link fence, which emerged from the mist like a dappled trick of the light. On the other side was a sandy walkway in the grounds of the United Nations, which in times less fearful had been open to the public. We clutched the boat close to the fence while Moholy clipped an opening with the cutters.
‘Is this a good idea?’ Helena asked, huddled up in the middle of the boat. ‘You’re supposed to be a pacifist.’
‘Never.’
Moholy was struggling with a stubborn link, but he persisted, and it gave with a snap. He was already prising the edges of the fence apart when Rifka stepped along the boat and tugged at his shirt, toppling him back on to his seat at the front.
‘Not yet,’ Rifka said gently. ‘You’ll get yourself killed.’
Moholy gave her a strange look, but Rifka had already cast off the boat, and back in the stern she restarted the outboard. She steered us into clear water, and then turned through the mist towards the city. We came in past the machinery of the water-jet, which was off, and the marina where the slightest breeze rattled the masts and steel-sheets of the yachts. We sensed the closeness of the city before seeing it, and then the hillside Cathedral rising like a minor Turner from the
fog. Moholy casually tossed the wire-cutters over the side, and we slid in to the base of the concrete dock usually reserved for day-trippers from Evian, and Thonon-les-Bains.
Rifka tied the boat to an iron ring in the wall, then jumped out on to the concrete steps leading up to the quay. Helena quickly followed, leaving the duvet behind and stamping her feet for warmth. Then it was my turn. I jumped level with Helena, then climbed a step or two above Rifka, to leave room for Moholy. We all waited, but Moholy didn’t jump. Rifka held out her hand, as Moholy balanced himself against the roll of the boat. He licked his lips, and looked closely at the dark water lapping at the lowest dry step, another ghostly step blurred but visible below. Moholy could easily have taken Rifka’s hand and stepped on up, but he seemed transfixed by the sight of the lower step, shifting under the lurch and retreat of the lake. He rubbed the back of his hand across his unshaven chin. His bottom lip reached up towards his nose. He steadied himself on the edge of the boat, took Rifka’s hand, and then deliberately stepped straight down on to the submerged lower step.
The sole of his sandal, just for an instant, for a tiny moment, seemed to hesitate on the surface of the water.
Then it slapped straight through, and he sank.
‘Let’s go!’ Moholy said, planting his dry foot two steps further up, shaking free of Rifka’s hand, and leaping past us up the rest of the steps several at a time. We caught up with him at the top, and stood there on the quay waiting for whatever occurred to him next.
‘What?’ he said. We were all looking at his one damp sandal, and the water of the lake draining across concrete in a single timid rivulet. ‘Let’s go.’
Further along the quay, there was a man dressed as a cruise-missile lying in the shelter of the Brunswick Monument. Two of his friends were cutting open the foam rubber of the costume, and examining one of his legs. He couldn’t walk. The others hadn’t actually been there, but they thought he’d been hit by a plastic bullet.
I watched Moholy closely. At no stage did he make any attempt to touch the injured man.
For some time afterwards, we gamely tracked the print of Moholy’s one sandal, as the wetness and shape of the impression gradually faded along the grey Geneva roads and pavements. This early in the morning, demonstrators were easily outnumbered by police, solid in squads at the strategic ends of the streets. They were impervious behind their plastic shields and their plastic visors, their plastic knee-caps and inarticulate plastic knuckles, safeguarding the complacent and powerful from the vexed and powerless. There wasn’t much doubt: we did need Jesus at this time.
As the sun finally broke through, at last dispersing the mist and haze from the lake, skeletons appeared everywhere, spontaneously, even more skeletons than we’d seen yesterday at the cemetery. This was now officially The Protest of Bones, as proclaimed on banners and hurriedly printed T-shirts. But the demonstration itself was everywhere at once, and nowhere. We couldn’t find its heart.
At Place Neuve, we came across jugglers and cyclists, fire-eaters and violinists, and great masses of young people in all the brightest colours doing nothing much but sitting on the new-laid grass. The entire square, until yesterday thrumming with traffic, was like a park in summer, and along with the tom-toms and chatter was a heady sense of expectation. There was also the strong feeling that nobody knew what to do next.
We picked our way through a sit-in of youngsters, our hands held high to apologise, treading carefully in search of steps on solid earth. We joined them at the edge, sitting, doing nothing. Calvin would have disapproved, but Moholy looked on kindly, and we were taking our lead from him.
For the first time in twenty-four hours, I slipped out of my grubby collar, and stuffed it roughly in my pocket. I loosened the top buttons of my clerical shirt. I saw a T-shirt saying Eat the Rich, but then a more comradely one with Jesus Saves Sights of Specific Scientific Interest, which was in among a giggle of evangelist Americans. They all had day-glo badges, WWJD, What Would Jesus Do? There were so many different groups making up the protest, from the Red Brigade to the Christian Bicycle Alliance, that nobody knew how best to make their complaint.
Moholy, full of faith, confidence and optimism, all the best bits of religion, set off on a tour of the square to find out what was planned for the rest of the day. We admired his enthusiasm, but from afar, and while sharing the bread and pilchards. We offered a fish-roll to a Dane wearing a sky-blue bandanna with a yellow skull and bones. And he halved it with the skeleton-girl next to him, making this the feeding of the five. Several days ago, I might have mistaken the Danes for Smiths, but to Jesus there were no Mr Smiths, and in fact this was brother and sister Lars and Karen Knudsen from Silkeborg, who objected to Shell’s disposal of North Sea oil platforms in the Scandinavian fjords, and who along with thousands of like-minded named and motivated protesters would carry on moving from city to city with ever brighter ideas until the world eventually changed.
By the time Moholy came back from his tour, we’d finished the food and there were no baskets of leftovers, not even for him. He’d somehow collected a small band of followers, though not the evangelists, and discovered that our earlier perception of the protest was correct. It had no focus. There were the skeletons, which were fine and highly mediatic, but they weren’t actually doing much. And before dawn, some Italians in white overalls had liberated a thousand refugees of many nationalities from an enclosed camp on the southern outskirts of the city. This had created an unexpected problem. The refugees were now streaming into the city-centre, and, like everyone else, they were hungry. The city had closed up for the day, and nobody could find anything to eat.
With my tongue, I loosened a pilchard bone from between my teeth. I looked at Helena, who looked at Rifka, who looked at her fingernails. Interestingly, I thought, a police helicopter was hovering overhead.
‘Geneva is full of food,’ Moholy said. ‘This is ridiculous.’
He’d found an objective, and there was nothing overly grand about the responsibility he now assumed. He was concerned with essentials, whether people had enough to eat, and he had an idea for solving the problem. A few of those he’d assembled together quietly murmured their approval. Moholy was offering leadership, and these people were desperate for leaders, hoping that this time, when they did emerge, they wouldn’t be as fake as Ben and Jerry.
‘We need to get organised,’ Moholy said. ‘We need a base of operations.’
Moholy gave a good impression of knowing what he was doing. He therefore quickly gathered a crowd, which increased as he led the way through embattled streets to the former Anglican Church of All Saints. ‘It’s my church,’ Moholy said. ‘I’ll do as I like with it.’
It was a few minutes before eleven, and we were met at All Saints by an awkward stand-off. The protesters who’d been sleeping in the church, in return for attending my sermon as Calvin, had been using the tower as a lookout. In the last half-hour, a different congregation, the one which had assembled unbidden at the same time last Sunday, had once again arrived at the door. They would not be deterred from coming together, to think on spiritual things.
The protesters in the doorway were stubbornly keeping them out.
Led by Mr Oti and Mrs Meier, the Anglicans were refusing to leave.
Moholy came between them. Undeniably, there were those who already knew that Moholy owned the church. And there were others, mostly among the protesters, who were impressed by the following he’d collected between Place Neuve and here. But it was easy to rationalise, and lose sight of the facts. Later, there would be many different versions of events, but it was still a fact that this localised argument was swiftly resolved by the presence and self-assurance of Joseph Moholy.
He insisted that both congregations stay, and that Anglicans as well as protesters could contribute to the success of the second reformation.
Jesus, as always, was full of surprises. He asked me to lead a service. ‘Just a short one,’ he said. ‘A few words to keep everyone happy,
and then we’ll change the world.’
The heavy door, as it always did, soon closed us into the soft brown bag of England, as quiet as mushrooms growing. Like last Sunday, and too many Sundays to remember before that, in the days of the former Chaplain, the church committee and the Sri Lankans and the other English-speaking regulars assembled in neat rows, but from the back, as if the pews were still in place. The protesters were less experienced. Some of them even came to the front.
Moholy nudged me, and I moved reluctantly forward towards the altar, feeling under-dressed and unsure of myself. I remembered the last time I was here, as Chaplin, but I resisted a slide along the aisle. Christianity couldn’t be laughed away. It had to be taken seriously. In my country, on my continent, it represented the most persistent collective attempt to account for the human condition. For more than 2000 years, millions of people had used it to make sense of everything, and you couldn’t just laugh that off.
Up on the step I turned. I lifted up my hands.
The protesters, arms crossed or hands in pockets. The loyal Anglicans, heads bowed. And Moholy in a chance beam of sunlight at the back, Helena on one side, Rifka on the other. Rifka popped a couple of pills. For the first time in my career in the Church, it was as if I were genuinely being held to account, an Anglican deacon in a position to preach to Jesus. With the added complication that Moholy believed he’d given me a Jesus-bone. In his eyes, I was a deacon and I was Jesus, and so was he. So what would the son of God preach to the son of God?
Keep it simple. Be yourself.
But no, that wasn’t right. I was finding it difficult to grasp the personality of Jesus. He was so selfless. He was changeable, unpredictable, as an innate characteristic of sharing what it meant to be human. He could be anyone. He was a carpenter and King of the Jews, a peasant and heir to the royal line of David. He was a revolutionary, a prophet, a mystic, a teacher, a charismatic leader and a misguided clown. He was father and son, lamb and shepherd, and the shifts could be so sudden and radical that sometimes he wasn’t recognised even by those who loved him most. Mary Magdalene once mistook him for a gardener. The disciples on the road to Emmaus talked with him for many hours before realising who he was.
Dry Bones Page 29
