Why not Moholy? Why not any of us? We could all be Jesus. Jesus could be us.
‘Our Father,’ I said, instantly becoming Jesus, as every one of us did every time we said this prayer, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’
It was an impersonation, and always had been, and this sudden revelation filled me with joy. I reached out for everything I was certain of, a conclusion with which the Jesus in Moholy must surely agree, and the same revelation my father shared at the end of every Lent. Help the weak. Doubt the powerful.
‘People, for God’s sake, be good to each other.’
We had to keep coming back to this, as Jesus always did, because it was the truth.
I skipped the Eucharist, despite the reserves in the safe, the back-up box of a thousand hosts and the bottles of dark red Sanctifex. I wasn’t prepared to wrestle with the issue of whether Jesus would eat himself. It was the kind of exquisite complication a professional theologian would love, but I wasn’t that, so I jumped straight to the dismissal, and for superstitious reasons omitted the last words of the last line of my very brief service. It had always felt like bad luck to bring it to an end, a final full stop.
God will show us the path of life; in his presence is
And after a little doubtful murmuring, my small but loyal share of God’s people agreeably finished it on my behalf: Amen.
That was it, that was all. Now it was Moholy’s turn for his own version of Jesus, his impersonation, and the always vital task of feeding the hungry.
Moholy was true to his word. He had a plan. He stood at the front of the church, where until recently I had stood, and he offered leadership. His plan was simple.
To give the demonstration a focus, and a heart, we would enlist as many protesters as possible to tear down the nailed chipboard protecting the city’s franchised fast-food restaurants. Damage to the properties themselves should be minimal. Among the demonstrators, there were hordes who’d already worked for these chains, in this and all the other countries of the world. That was one of the reasons they were here, protesting, dissatisfied with the way the planet was organised.
The franchise operations were identical everywhere, so the ex-employees would be familiar with the equipment and stocks. They knew how to break out the cold-store and turn up the music. They knew how the griddles worked, but after that their imaginations could run free, unfranchised. Come and get it: fast food, but not as the accountants would know it.
That was one aspect of the plan. But Moholy also had another, more specific objective, for which he’d need one wired skeleton, a real one, and a handful of courageous volunteers. While the main demonstration created a diversion at the entrance to the United Nations, this small group of volunteers would go by boat to a hole already cut in the perimeter fence. After entering the park of the Palace of Nations, they would infiltrate the World Intellectual Property Organisation, and hang the wired skeleton by the neck from a top-floor window, beside a large banner proclaiming the execution and death of Geneva’s John Calvin.
Moholy didn’t explain why or exactly how the parable was supposed to work. To some people, this didn’t seem to matter, though it was also true that many others were unsure what to make of him. There were those who grinned smugly and walked off, shaking their heads, as if there was a better answer which was perfectly obvious and which they alone perceived, but which equally they had no intention of sharing, now or ever.
It had been the same the first time round. His own family thought Jesus insane. Others saw him as simply eccentric, and a tiny minority considered him a dangerous threat to the prevailing political system. But even if Jesus wasn’t the son of God, he still had popular appeal as a reasonable first-century visionary, and it was on this understanding that many agreed to follow him.
Inspired, I was one of the first to leave the church, dashing out into the bright Swiss morning. Helena and I were going to help with the diversion at the UN, and already Moholy had his volunteers for the boat. He and Rifka would be in neither one place nor the other, but instead they’d be here, there and everywhere, ensuring that everything worked out well. It was so unexpectedly wonderful, I forgot that it ended unhappily.
On the road out to the Palace of Nations, we were able to recruit any number of ex-short-order chefs who wanted, at last, to compose wild and unbudgeted combinations of their own unlimited invention. I found three Spanish girls who’d worked dunking fries through two years of their Masters on the Economics of Democracy. They were happy to lend a hand. In some of the franchises, people were already eating, and they’d made long tables out of the slabs of chipboard from the windows, overlaying the little bitterness of the standard plastic seating arrangements.
These transformations were evidence of divine justice, or the revenge of the exploited, or a sign that the police were simply tired of standing in the way of reforms the majority clearly wanted. As the day wore on, the police were softened by so much non-violence, by playful skeletons, and flower-petals, and a phalanx of protesters in inflated yellow life-jackets, for no obvious reason.
I slipped my crumpled collar back into place, finally beginning to understand. I wasn’t Jesus. I knew my neck-bone wasn’t Jesus, the primary resource of the Christian life, the pivot of Western history. But I did believe in Jesus, or at least the possibility of someone with a more solid grasp than the rest of us on the true patterns of existence. Whatever the disputed truth about his death, there remained the example of his life, and the one-time wonder of a Jesus of blood and bones. His kind of enlightenment was open to us all. He was a man. Act like him: no divine paternity required.
We ducked into an alley to avoid three speeding police vans. Moholy and Rifka were near by. They were always near by, and wherever they went there was a perceptible surge of energy. None of us claimed to have all the answers. We were more like heralds, delivering an urgent message which couldn’t wait: there must be better ways to organise how we live now, before it ends in disaster. We were following in a long tradition of dissenting prophets, from Micaiah ben Imlah to Ezekiel to Jeremiah, Jonah and Amos, Elijah and Elisha. Come one, come all.
Come Joseph Moholy and the mysterious Rifka, and Helena Byczynski and me.
For years you look for Jesus, and nothing. Then several come along at once. In all my life I’d never seen Helena so radiant, as if channelling the goodness of all the causes she’d ever defended, making up for God’s absence with her own commitment and energy. This might not have been the second coming, and He may not ever be coming, but it was a day of joy, and we could still believe in days like this.
At the Palace of Nations, and it was the middle of the afternoon before we reached the main entrance, the atmosphere suddenly changed.
In front of the two-metre-high fence, the human cordon was made up of soldiers, not police, and they were all very young, and carrying guns. Many of the protesters wore scratched motorcycle helmets, and the front rank stood less than a metre from the line of soldiers, while a loudspeaker in three languages advised us to disperse. It was a recording, not a person. Smoke and particles of tear-gas drifted in the wind.
Helena insisted on snaking through to the front. Someone going the other way handed her a flat box, and my heart gradually sank as I followed her ever closer to the fence.
There was no sign of Moholy, or Rifka. I felt strangely lost without them, and even as Helena smartly identified open channels through the packed crowd of bodies, I looked beneath our feet for lingering evidence of Moholy’s one wet sandal. I couldn’t believe that he’d abandon us now. For reassurance, I took out my fragment of neck-bone, and clenched it in my fist. Nothing happened. It didn’t help. I dropped it, and didn’t even look to see where it fell. I’d have to find another way to explain myself.
We were now only two or three heads from the front. Helena opened the flat box, and handed me several rolls of coloured cotton. They were miniature flags, wrapped round sticks of balsa, and it was as if everyone else had taken a step back. We could now see
the hair in the nostrils of the paramilitaries fronting the fence. They kept raising and lowering their guns, and making defensive gestures with their elbows. The loudspeaker went on and on behind them, advising us to disperse, getting on everyone’s nerves.
Helena stepped forward and slotted a little red flag into the rifle-barrel of a national serviceman. It unrolled from its stick, Bang!
‘Time to be good,’ she said.
Being good was one of the ways to be different. Like the other times I’d acted with high hopes, I still wanted to distinguish myself. That would explain why I believed in Jesus. It had nothing to do with Moholy or pieces of bone. Knowing my own weakness, I needed to believe in people different from and better than myself, and before I knew it I was an ordained deacon in a religion founded on the greatness of a single individual. From the start, in even the strictest Christian households, for 2000 years, Jesus had been feeding and reinforcing and perhaps even creating our Western need for heroes. The history of Christianity was founded on our willingness to believe that some people were special. Meaning that I, too, could be special. If Him, why not me?
But, like him, I was also frightened.
I summoned the resolve of a Thomas à Becket, and projected his exultation at witnessing what I was doing: the first deacon in 500 years to risk his life for the Church of England. It was stupid. So stupid and unnecessary. But that had never stopped Becket. Come on, Thomas. The chainmail is sweeping the aisles, they’re thumping at the doors. You could bend. You could run. Moholy was out of his mind on Jesus, and this was the moment to run. Go on, run. Hide. This is suicidal.
I searched out all the Becketness I’d once ascribed to his cold and lifeless toe-bone. Becket was in me, not the bone, and I didn’t have to be close to Becket the relic to have him intercede. The bone was just an excuse, an explanation.
I stepped forward, and placed a green flag in the barrel of a shaking rifle. It unrolled. Pop! The soldier frantically nudged me away with his elbow, but was scared of breaking ranks.
And just then, on the other side of the fence, a wired skeleton was tumbled from a mid-floor window of the World Intellectual Property Organisation. It was bouncing from the neck, its bobbing skull grinning insanely above the neat cream ruff of a noose. From the next window along, a banner unfurled. CALVIN IS DEAD. They’d only made it half-way up the building, but it was still impressive. The crowd on our sidle of the fence cheered and whooped.
The paramilitaries were now isolated, with subversives on both sides of them. I felt their sudden fear and, also, a sharp pain, the absence of Moholy. We were undefended against folly, and error. I should have worn a crash helmet.
On our side of the fence, from way back in the crowd, protesters were pushing forward, hoping to break through to the pioneering heroes on the other side. The soldiers pushed back. Helena was turned in the wrong direction, standing on her toes, craning her neck in search of Moholy.
At least one gun was raised. At least one serviceman lost his nerve.
And then they shot my Helena in the back.
She fell. And as she fell, the crowd by instinct sucked itself out, leaving her alone in a suddenly silent hole of road. I was too slow to catch her, and the side of her head rebounded horribly off the tarmac. Do something, man. Jesus. Just do something.
I shouted at her. She didn’t respond. I was down on my knees. Pulse, breath, anything. Shout. In those first few seconds, I was already deep in my deepest resources, the surface closed over and expressionless, assessing the damage clinically like a Davy, with the information to hand, and hoping like Davy for positive scientific results. Helena was dying, was going to die. That was the entirety of my information. There may have been other factors which were also relevant, but just now I didn’t know what they were, and perhaps they wouldn’t become known for many centuries to come.
Pull yourself together.
Jung would have left no question unasked. Ask the dead, ask the living, but for God’s sake, ask. Is there any other possible outcome? I picked Helena up in my arms, and I started to run. There must be some other outcome.
At first, I had no idea where I was going, except away from the fence and through crowds and back towards town. Helena’s legs and arms and head were flopping heavily with each of my laboured paces, and it was true, in those first faltered steps, before I fully knew what I was doing or where I was going, that I had a moment of doubt, a wet blanket of Mr Smithness. Helena was dying, already dead in my arms. None of us were chosen people, not Helena, not Rifka, not even Moholy. We were never destined to get away with this, and all our efforts were vain. We were the same as everyone else.
But still I kept on running, running, because everyone else, too, could be like us, changing, adapting, one moment defeated as Mr Smith and the next blazing with faith as Richard Burton, physically invincible, rallying his indignant Possibles against all odds to one final effort.
Run, find Moholy, run.
I kept up a brutal pace by being severe on myself, knowing I deserved Helena dying in my arms because I’d never been sufficiently humble. I should have tried harder, and prayed more often, and been more grateful. It was a punishment for drinking and over-eating, for worrying, when I should have trusted without question my life and destiny to Calvin’s awkward city of Geneva. I didn’t dare check that Helena was still breathing, because what will be will be, and I found some comfort in that. Some.
Keep going. Be stubborn. Back to Becket. In moments of true need, rising to my full potential, I was everybody. I was Becket and Davy and Burton and Jung and Calvin. Added up, I too was almost Jesus.
Out of breath, stumbling, head weightless and starved of oxygen, I saw Moholy and Rifka at the closed and chained gates to the Parc des Bastions. There were improvised ladders either side of them, and protesters were swarming up and over, into the park. They all had skeletons, of all shapes and sizes, all types and materials, dragging them behind, throwing them on ahead.
Rifka saw me first. She turned Moholy towards me, and Moholy lifted up his arms. I laid Helena at his feet, and we all knelt. It was too late. Helena’s face was white, and her head fell limply to one side. Moholy touched her neck, but it was too late. He leant down his head. He closed his eyes, and touched his unshaven cheek to the smooth coldness of her forehead.
And I couldn’t help but notice, as he was doing this, that Helena’s lifeless and half-opened fingers were taken up quietly by Rifka, and gently cradled in her compassionate and feminine hands.
While we built the pyre, the late sunshine turned the stonework of the Reformers’ Monument a colour close to mustard. In the open spaces inside the park, facing the Reformers’ Wall, this firelight vigil would be the final offering of the Protest of Bones to Geneva’s gods of reform.
Now, as darkness fell, the ten-foot statues of Farel and Calvin, of Knox and Theodore de Bèze, shifted and flickered in the flame-light. Post Tenebras Lux, said the monument, Light Follows Darkness.
After the disturbance at the United Nations, the park had been isolated by a siege of police. Thousands of us sat silently on the grass, watching the ritual burning of the weekend’s collected skeletons. In all their different materials, their different shapes and sizes, they fed the blaze of the pyre in the Parc des Bastions, the flames crackling like a memory of burning martyrs, like the sound of bodies breaking a thousand sticks. Television crews eager for footage panned out then zoomed in, each skeleton in flames like a Buddhist monk, about to topple. The real bones were gloriously stubborn, and solid in the flame-light like X-rays.
Helena hadn’t been shot. Or she had been shot, then been healed by a miracle. I didn’t know what to think. There was a spreading bruise on the side of her head where she’d hit the pavement, and she said her whole body hurt like hell.
‘What about the baby?’
‘Fine.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s fine.’
She clutched her knees and went back to fire-watching, at libert
y like everyone else to see in the flames pictures of the past, the future. Or nothing. Or swarms of early-evening insects, bouncing off the thermals.
We were sitting in a row, me and Helena, then Rifka and Moholy. Moholy had his feet stretched out towards the fire, and at least once today, the last time very recently, he must have found himself back at the lakeside. The synthetic sole of one of his sandals, as it dried, was gently steaming.
My Head
‘Over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As reward for his past and present virtues, every man merited every kindness – yet also every betrayal, as reward for his past and future iniquities.’
Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal
IN THE CITY of Buenos Aires, in the Palermo district, there is a newish museum dedicated to the memory of Argentina’s most celebrated writer, Jorge Luis Borges. It is in the Calle Anchorena, the setting of the young Georgie’s childhood fantasies, and the museum takes the form of a house refurbished in the style of the home where Borges once lived, also in the Calle Anchorena. The original is a little further along the street, and a little further on again, about as far as a fanatic’s stone throw, is another memorial, the slightly older Fundación Jorge Luis Borges, established in 1995 by the writer’s widow, Maria Kodama. Although the museum and the foundation coexist as rivals, boasting their differences, neither institution displays a single original manuscript or letter. They own nothing of Borges’s writing.
Between them, what they do have is a selection of photographs, and various ornaments and personal items once belonging to Borges the man. His favourite stick, for example, and some of his old man’s sombre and portly suits. They have his desk, and the watch which he couldn’t read but kept in his top pocket all the same, attached to his lapel with a chain. They have ticket stubs from his blindly optimistic trips to the cinema, and domestic objects of surprising intimacy, such as his double bridge of gleaming man-made teeth.
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