Dry Bones

by Richard Beard

  I put my head inside the entrance hall, and called out. No reply. I stepped inside. Nobody. Selecting a door at random, I found a room so long, and so wide, it had an eleven-piece suite. There was a fireplace at each end, and over each fireplace a mirror reflecting telescopically for miles, or ages. On other walls there were chivalric crests and more mirrors, too high to reflect anything but themselves, and I was abruptly a provincial Englishman, from as far away as Penzance, too easily impressed by all that was universally impressive: money, power, the proof that not all men are equal.

  I stepped back from the doorway when I heard feet on the stone staircase. I’d been expecting Rifka, but it was Moholy himself, though not the hard and acquisitive businessman I remembered from his visits to the church. He saw me and clapped his hands. I didn’t move, but he was already turning and skipping back up the stairs.

  ‘Come on up,’ he said, and waved me to join him. I decided to pretend I was used to it. This was my kind of house, after all, though perhaps a little unambitious, at least when compared to the estate I was always planning to buy at Stowey, with its own private woodcocks.

  Moholy was wearing jeans and a tucked-in business shirt buttoned to the wrists, no tie. As in the church, I had the impression of neatness, dapperness. Tasselled loafers, yellow socks, and nothing like the monster of Rifka’s warning.

  ‘I’ve heard all about yesterday,’ he said, as I followed him up the staircase. It forked at about half-way. We turned left. ‘You have quite a gift, by the sounds of it.’

  The stairs led to a landing, and up a few more steps into a long narrow room. Tall windows overlooked a terrace, and a lawn sloping down to the lake, where a bobbing rowing-boat was tied to a jetty.

  ‘We should go out one day,’ I said, admiring the view, hands clasped behind my back, having a go at some upwardly mobile chat.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Fishing.’

  ‘Oh. Do you fish?’

  And I thought no, never, of course I didn’t. I was out of my depth and didn’t know what I was saying. ‘Whenever I can. Mostly salmon and trout.’

  It soon became clear that this room was Moholy’s storage for his gallery’s ever changing stock of historical material things. Floating in white polystyrene chips, in steel trunks and tea-chests, he had the global range of gods and demons. There was no space left for furniture except in the gaps between the windows, occupied by carvings of life-sized pot-bellied black boys, with red and gold fruit at their feet.

  Moholy was weaving between the crates to the end of the room, expecting me to follow. He had the brightness of eye of the true enthusiast, and nothing to hold him back. ‘Come on. Come and say hello to Becket. I gather you’re already acquainted.’

  He spoke English with the classic Geneva accent. There was sometimes a trace of French, like flour on a bread roll, but the dough was pre-baked somewhere in the United States. In Switzerland, like the rest of Europe, English with an English accent was increasingly rare: it betrayed second-rate language learning, or a lack of ambition.

  The second and smaller room had a lower ceiling, and heavily closed curtains. A single switch operated all the spots at once, trained on sloping glass-topped tables, and round all four walls display cabinets mounted on cupboards with closed wicker doors.

  ‘Voilà,’ he said, stepping aside, and just for a moment I hesitated. Where was Rifka? Why was Moholy so eager?

  But, despite his reputation, I was openly intrigued by the plinth.

  The centre of this second room was dominated not by one, but in fact by three black plinths, of different heights, pushed together like a rostrum. On the lowest level, on a burnished bronze plate, was a blackened walnut: Van Gogh’s Ear. A little higher, in second place, floating in liquid in a polished glass jar, was something which looked like a sun-dried tomato: Van Gogh’s Ear. On the highest level, supreme, there was a closed golden pill-box: The Holy Prepuce.

  ‘Becket’s over here,’ Moholy said, skipping to one of the cabinets, and there he was, Becket’s Toe, 1170, labelled on velvet beside The Arm of Leonardo da Vinci, 1519.

  ‘How does he look?’

  ‘Smaller,’ I said.

  ‘Take your time. It’s a little cramped, I know, but the tour starts to the left of the door, goes round the room, and finishes at the central podium.’

  With Davy in my pocket, I was curious and couldn’t resist, although at first, close to the door, the collection seemed surprisingly tame. Moholy had started with lockets, open on their forgetful remnants of love, ancient curls in discoloured ribbon. After that, he progressed to several extracts from the poet Byron’s anthology of pubic hair, which Byron had systematically collected from the women he slept with, each clump filed neatly in a separate, named envelope. I winced, but in a nice revenge, in a cabinet about a third of the way round the room, Moholy also had Byron’s bleakly crippled foot, embalmed in tattered bandages.

  ‘Why are you showing me this?’

  ‘Rifka thinks you have a special talent.’

  He was leaning back against a display cabinet on the other side of the exhibition, his feet daintily crossed at the ankles. ‘You’ve felt it, haven’t you, James? Can I call you James?’

  ‘Jay.’

  ‘And besides, you’re exactly the kind of adaptable chap I need.’

  The self-made Davy, half his mind forever trapped in Penzance with his poor widowed mother, had little defence against flattery. It was everything he wanted to hear, a justification of his evasion of the grind of paying his father’s debts, and a blessing on his absence from his mother’s pitiful milliner’s shop at the far edge of England, Europe, the world and everywhere.

  ‘I could really believe in someone like you,’ Moholy said. ‘And even better, you’re a vicar.’

  ‘I’m not a vicar.’

  ‘You have the hardness of heart of the educated. I can use that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘All in good time. Have a look at what I’ve got.’

  The Jaw of Suleiman the Magnificent, 1566.

  The Finger of Michelangelo Buonarotti, 1564.

  Oliver Cromwell’s Skull, 1658.

  This continuing fascination, even after death, was the genuine measure of any one person’s greatness. I felt a little unsteady, and if I hadn’t known that I too was also destined for greatness, I might briefly have been overwhelmed by my own insignificance.

  ‘What’s a prepuce?’ I asked, swallowing and turning all my attention to the podium at the centre of the room. Moholy’s eyes sparkled.

  ‘This is my favourite. It’s a triumph of the collectors’ logic.’

  ‘But what exactly is it?’

  ‘It’s the carne vera sancta. It’s the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the son of God.’

  I was appalled, and felt a little sick. What a horrible idea. How fascinating. ‘I never heard of that before.’

  ‘Want to see it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do I?’

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘It’s not real, is it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, if it was, I’d have heard about it. Everyone would.’

  ‘It is what it is, that much I know. It is a detached and dried human foreskin. Whether it was ever attached to Jesus is admittedly less easy to authenticate.’ Moholy reached for the pill-box, his elegant fingers trembling slightly as he opened it up. ‘Even the Vatican disapproves,’ he said, approvingly. ‘Since 1900 they’ve threatened excommunication to anyone writing about it, or even talking about it.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘That’s a fact.’

  I peeked inside the box. After twenty centuries, the foreskin of Jesus Christ was dry and hard like a discard of rusty glue.

  Moholy proudly explained that all other relics of Christ were secondary: splinters of the True Cross, the fateful nails, the chalice used to collect his blood, the shroud. There could be no actual primary relic from the body of Christ the incarnate son of God, no physical proof of
his existence, because the New Testament swore on the Holy Bible that his mortal body ascended whole into heaven. It stood to reason: there was none of the physical body left behind, only belongings.

  ‘What about fingernails?’ I asked, detached and scientific as I was.

  ‘Five have been recorded,’ Moholy said confidently, holding up his own fingers, ‘all, strangely enough, from the left hand.’

  ‘Haircuts,’ I suggested, exploring the possibilities, thinking through the logic. ‘He must occasionally have had his hair trimmed. What about his hair?’

  ‘The milk teeth of Jesus, the spilt blood of the son of God, the sweat and tears of Christ our Lord. Anything he might have left behind, however small and seemingly insignificant, somebody, somewhere, has tried to collect.’

  ‘Placenta?’

  ‘Good thinking. Haven’t come across that one. Though there’s a school of thought which contests that the Holy Grail is the womb of Mary, the literal container of Christ’s blood.’

  ‘Umbilical cord?’

  ‘Collectors call it the Holy Navel. But how likely is that? How likely are milk teeth, or individual drops of sweat? The holy prepuce is different.’

  Moholy pinched it out of its little box, and held it clamped between two fingers and a thumb, narrowing his eyes. ‘Circumcision was a major event. Of all the primary relics of Jesus, it seems most likely that the prepuce could have been saved, and venerated. They say it was a great comfort to Mary, after the crucifixion.’

  I nodded sympathetically, sure it would have been, and who could deny a grieving mother comfort, of any kind? There was something fantastically logical about it, impossibly believable.

  ‘So it really is his? Is it really His?’

  Moholy sighed, and carefully replaced the prepuce. He restored the pill-box to its place of honour, leaving open the lid.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, his disappointment unmistakable. ‘I feel no particular divine urge.’

  ‘As if you would.’

  ‘You’re not convinced, are you, James?’

  ‘Jay. Call me Jay.’

  ‘You’re still not a believer, are you?’

  ‘I’m a deacon.’

  ‘In the Church of England. I mean a real believer. In the passion. In the power of relics.’

  ‘I think it’s highly unlikely.’

  ‘Oh come now. Examples are widely documented, from St Augustine all the way through to the venerable Matt Talbot, who cures alcoholics in Dublin to this very day. It’s an ancient knowledge, another we’re in danger of losing. My personal breakthrough, though, my own small contribution, has been the discovery that it also works with secular remains.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘The influence. The power.’

  Moholy reached into one of the wicker cupboards beneath the display cabinets, and pulled out something flat wrapped in a paint-stained sheet. He clamped it under his arm as we went back to the stock-room, where I had to raise my hand against the bright surprise daylight. He threw the sheet aside, and propped two painted canvases in the angle between floor and wall, directly across from the first tall window.

  ‘Self-portraits,’ Moholy said. ‘That’s how I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this.’

  He separated the paintings, and balanced them side by side. ‘Before I acquired Vincent’s ears, I’d never picked up a paintbrush in my life.’

  We took a step back and looked solemnly at the two paintings, self-portraits by Moholy in the approximate style of Van Gogh; expressionist, instinctive, the brushwork swirled and broken.

  ‘In the other room you have two distinct ears,’ I said, remaining patient. In the process of scientific investigation, I’d discovered, it was essential to keep returning to first principles. ‘I seem to remember that Van Gogh only lost the one. He only cut off one of his ears.’

  ‘You’re right, and only one of them is the true relic. How can I tell? Because only one of them works. That’s how I know which of the two is authentic.’

  In the paintings, Moholy had lengthened his face and reddened his hair, making himself look a little like Vincent Van Gogh. His research into relics was clearly much more advanced than my own.

  ‘Give me an opinion.’

  Neither painting looked more obviously like a Van Gogh than the other.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Moholy said, ‘I can’t decide either.’

  He put his chin in his hand, and arched back his upper body. He squinted, then closed one eye. ‘I just get frustrated and depressed, and give up trying to tell them apart before I’m tempted to slice my ear off. Or something.’

  I took a step away from Moholy, my host, and turned this information one way and then the other with a platinum spatula, staying as neutral as possible while applying different acids and reagents, establishing the true nature of this particular madness. It wasn’t immediately evident. I put my hands in my pockets, to make closer contact with Sir Humphry, but it turned out that Davy was a pioneer at the forefront of the failure of science. It had started as organised common sense, but had since developed into something far stranger; quarks and gluons that nobody could see on strings round the huge underground doughnuts of CERN. Life couldn’t be explained by science, and in Davy’s time, as in ours, there was nothing so fatal to the human mind as to suppose that one view was ultimate, that there were no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs were complete, and we had no new worlds to discover.

  Davy accepted early in his career that matter changed under different conditions, as did human character. So why not the attributes and properties of human remains?

  I pulled back from the edge, because after all I was not a second Newton. My own ignorance frightened me, made me flinch away from the awful stretching realm of everything I’d never understand.

  ‘I said,’ Moholy said, evidently for the second time, ‘how’s the apartment?’

  He was stacking the two Van Goghs back together again, and covering them with the sheet. ‘Rather burnt your bridges yesterday, didn’t you?’

  ‘I could go back to England any time.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Thanks for letting me stay in the apartment.’

  It cost me nothing to say it. This was simply my phase of accepting patronage just as one day I’d surely be a patron myself, as Davy was to Faraday.

  ‘You need a job, don’t you?’

  Moholy carried his paintings back to their cupboard, and while he was bending down he said I could borrow any relic I wanted. ‘Just while you’re at a loose end,’ he added. ‘Don’t be shy. Take your pick.’

  I considered the bones, the labels, the possibilities, and had several rapid fantasies before reason intervened. Not wanting to disappoint him, I took one of the lockets by the door.

  ‘You can do better than that.’

  ‘No, really.’

  From another of the wicker cupboards he brought out a large book, bound in red leather. He straightened up and wiped off the cover. ‘Take a look at this.’

  He handed me the book, and the binding was very soft, like calfskin. I went into the next room and over to the window to read its spine, but the spine was blank. I opened it, and inside was a standard ring-binder, upsidedown. I turned it the right way up.

  The folder contained perhaps thirty typed pages, each one in an individual plastic wallet. Each page was headed with a famous name, then dates, followed by a short biography, and a price. The names were in alphabetical order, starting with Becket, Thomas. I flipped through to the back, where there was an index, and against the names in the index there was occasionally an adhesive red dot, like in an art catalogue. There was a dot against Davy, Sir Humphry, another against Mann, Thomas, and also Niven, David.

  ‘I know,’ Moholy tutted. ‘I hold up my hands and admit it. The list is short, and patchy, but we’re still quite a small operation and as yet active only in Switzerland. But tell me. Who would you pick?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s any of my business,’ I said, clo
sing the folder and handing it back.

  ‘Allow me to make a suggestion.’

  Moholy pulled some slim-profile glasses out of his shirt-pocket, perched them on the end of his nose, and turned to the index. He peered at it from top to bottom, his eyebrows bouncing curiously from one name to the next.

  Then he licked his finger, and flipped to the page he wanted, propping the open catalogue on a makeshift stand of plastic chips in a tea-chest. As he silently read the biography on the selected page, he reached up to scratch the side of his nose, then tapped his teeth with a fingernail.

  ‘I recommend number 23.’ He checked with me over the top of his glasses, as if at a restaurant. ‘Joyce, James. An excellent choice, I think. I have many clients who lack culture. It’s a type of insecurity, and often results in a mania for collection. Yes, James Joyce. He’d be perfect, especially when I mention that at the end of his life, to the cognoscenti of literary taste who know this sort of thing, and with whom personally my clients would like to be connected, he was known as Joyce, James Jesus. He’s a relic I could sell tomorrow.’

  I coughed, and Moholy stopped.

  ‘How about it?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t like to quibble, but isn’t James Joyce still buried?’

  Moholy looked at me with straight and steely eyes, closed the book, and held it against his chest. He carefully took off his specs. ‘James. Jay. This could be the answer to all your problems. What have you got to lose?’

  Sir Humphry Davy collapsed in a Geneva hotel-room at the age of fifty, only sixteen years from now, depressed and lonely, childless, estranged from his wife, not carrying a Davy-lamp to ensure his own safety. I was losing my way, too easily distracted from the discipline of a scientific approach, and I had to sit down.

  There was no furniture, so I sat on the floor, in the corner where we’d propped the Van Goghs. I didn’t want to think this through, because logic and reason were not infallible, and in moments of stress I became sentimental, professing undying love to Mrs Apreece, and composing sonnets to my very special mother. At that moment, disarmed by Moholy’s proposal, I wanted nothing else but to be back in the safety of Penzance, with Mum, and her home-made marinaded pilchards.