Fluntern cemetery was held back from the pavement by a hip-high wall, flat and inviting on top. Trees bustled on the other side, with the active quiet of a park. I walked as far as the end of the wall, and the next block along, right after the cemetery, was the Zurich City Zoo. All closed up and quiet. Hearing nothing but a distant moped, I turned and swung myself neatly over the cemetery wall, immediately crouching low so I couldn’t be seen from the road. I stayed there for a while, hunched over my kit-bag wrap of tools, breathing through my nose, waiting for my eyes to adapt.
It did occur to me, as I squatted there in the shadow of the wall, that I wasn’t frightened of getting caught. Maybe I wanted to get caught, like a shoplifter. It was a cry for help. But that wasn’t Mum’s style. She was more practical than that, and quietly confident that among the famous dead few would be easier to raise than Joyce. The older the stone, the harder it was to shift, but in burial years James Joyce was barely sixty. Nora, buried in with him, was a sprightly fifty, so the stone had been moved once already, and was unlikely to have become fixed and brittle. Nor was it one of the more complicated designs: no headstone, and the inscribed recumbent was free of gravel or turf. It was a simple lift and shift. Just as importantly, from what I knew about Joyce, I didn’t think the old tinker would mind. He’d see it as a tribute to his genius: of course he was first up. And also he quite fancied some company, a drink or two, and maybe later a spider-dance and a racy but convivial sing-song, I gave it to Nellie To stick in her belly The leg of the duck The leg of the duck.
Under cover behind the wall, I rehearsed the siting of the Joyce plot, James and Nora under a single stone up some steps on a raised terrace, in the shade of some fancy bushes and a blustery yew. I ought to get started. Fluntern was twice the size of the cemetery in Geneva, and Joyce was away at the back, and the dark was often impenetrable. Cradling the kit-bag in my arms like a baby, I crouched low. With knees bent, I stalked between the gravestones, my stride long and slow, carefully landing each foot on the grass to avoid the tell-tale gravel of the paths. There was something dark, right in front of me. I stopped. It stopped. I nudged it with my toe, and it was an angel in night-black marble, easy to miss.
I thought I heard something. I heard something. I thought I did. I dropped to one knee. It was a grunting, or sniffing. I stopped breathing, shrinking down, listening more closely. Leaves, an aeroplane at high altitude, a window closing. I was suddenly afraid of dogs. An owl. Then another snuffle, but further off. Then silence again, except for a vehicle, ignorant in the distance.
The noises were coming from the zoo. I kept listening, to make sure that this was where the noise was coming from. Restless warthogs, wild buffalo, that was it. A sound would start up, as the animals in straw turned and groaned, then flopped and settled just as suddenly.
It stopped, it started again, and even though it was definitely the zoo, I had another sensation, very intense, that in the dark of the cemetery, among the irregular rows of squat graves, I was no longer alone. My breathing was shallow, less than silent. In any direction I could see no further than a single headstone, but I was overwhelmed by this sudden acute sense of other people. The cemetery was full of them. They may have been dead, but they were still there, all of them, just below the surface.
More noise from the zoo, mammals shifting and sighing, and then clearly, distinctly, the air splitting with the roar of a lion. A lion.
It took me a while to readjust, remembering which way was Joyce, and which way back. As the restless lion quietened down, I reminded myself that theologically, theologically speaking, it was watertight. The Church of England didn’t insist on the resurrection of the body. The souls were long gone, or, if you preferred, had never been. It was just stones and bones and mud. Only ordinary people got scared, spooked out. They didn’t have the hardness of heart of the educated, which the educated like me called enlightenment.
I slowly made my way closer to James and Nora, climbing the steps to their narrow terrace, reaching out blindly and fumbling forward until I was right on top of them. I carefully laid down my tools, and checked the lettering on their broad recumbent stone, like Braille. I crawled my way round it, then back again, before quietly emptying the canvas kit-bag, and turning it inside-out just as Rifka had shown me. I spread the bag flat next to the stone, edge to edge, to catch chips of mortar and any disturbed earth. More mammal noises, rising into the night, but I was learning to ignore them. I cleared a devotional bunch of wild daisies on to the kit-bag, and a homage scrawled in eye-shadow which was utter nonsense. Steadying myself in a kneeling position, I was reaching forward with my chisel when I noticed two additional names on the stone. I sat back on my heels. Then I traced the names with my fingers. George Joyce (Trieste 27 VII 1903 – Konstanz 12 VI 1970). Anna Osterwalder Joyce (München 8 III 1917 – Konstanz 17 VI 1993).
Joyce had had children, who had children. Had they? There was space on the stone for more. Several more. Had the grandchildren had children? James Jesus Joyce spent his final afternoons, in the last days of 1940, walking the concrete promenades of the Zürichsee, hand in hand with his grandson Stephen. For God’s sake, I scolded myself, it’s James Joyce with a pint of stout and his spider-dance and small round specs. It’s not even anyone scary.
A blinding light exploded inches from my face. A click. A torch, an electric torch clicked on, inches away, the enflamed bulb beaming straight into my flaring, blinded eyes. I was unsighted and stupefied, eyes trapped open, a rabbit, and then my heart overgulped and my eyelids were useless and I keeled over backwards.
When I came to, seconds later, I found myself enfolded in the strong and consoling arms of a muscular adult wearing a vest. ‘Shhh,’ he said, rocking me gently. ‘Schlaf, Chindli, schlaf, der Vater huetet d’Schaf.’ He was stroking my cheek, with the utmost kindness and concern. ‘Mein Name ist Harald.’ He placed a consoling kiss on my pale and clammy brow. ‘Wie heisst-du, mein Liebling?’
I disentangled myself, elbowing him away, shaking my head, hissing into the quietness that I had no prejudice, really, and in fact a quarter of my professional colleagues were commonly estimated to be gay, but personally I wasn’t, and had mentally slept with thousands of women, honestly I had.
I clashed the tools back inside the kit-bag, and crawled and scurried away between the gravestones, the pursuing torch-beam stretching and scrambling my shadow. Other torches came on all around me, tracking me, narrow searchlights darting and probing through the cemetery’s spaces and stones.
‘Halt! Komm zurück! Lass uns miteinander sprechen! Einfach nur sprechen!’
Breathless, confused, I vaulted the wall of the Fluntern cemetery, Zurich’s premier gay cruising ground. Landing, I lost my footing and crumpled to the pavement. I pushed myself up again, limping and stumbling towards the van, not deluding myself that only the scuffle of gay lust had kept me from the bones of James Jesus Joyce. Physically I just couldn’t have done it. I knew that now. I wasn’t up to it, and it was never going to happen, but it wasn’t entirely my fault.
It was Joyce’s fault. James Joyce, whose outright eminence went unsung, buried abroad without honour, his daughter insane, his son abandoned, his understandable books dimly misunderstood. He wasn’t like Thomas à Becket, the incurable show-off. He wasn’t the furious Davy, who still had so much to prove. James Joyce could live without a comeback.
By the ancient logic of relics, in which the bones themselves had personality and power, it therefore couldn’t happen. The bones had resisted, conspired, insisted on staying where they were, wrapped safely in the black earth with Nora, endlessly entertained by the flitter and skim of men and heaven above. Joyce didn’t want to come back. He’d said all he had to say.
My hands shook on the steering wheel as I turned left and right, following each floodlit and lime-green sign to the autoroute. I’m not gay, I told myself, I’m perfectly normal. I’m just an Anglican deacon in a Swiss cemetery in the middle of the night with a spade and James Jesus Joyce. Or I was a failure:
it had nothing to do with Joyce, and the fault and the fear were mine, all mine. When it came down to it, my hands and knees and ear to the ground, pressing down, pushing down, getting beneath the surface, concentrating, listening, getting right down and grounded to hear the infinitesimal rumour, when I was actually called on to chip and dig, I was nothing but my own dad, more Dad than Mum, that endless argument coming out in his favour, which I’d never thought was fair.
This was something Dad would never have done. Never.
Please God, make Mum right, and let me amount to more than that. Being my father’s son, and nothing more, was a long way short of the distinguished ideal I had of myself. I’d always wanted to be someone, to be someone. I wanted to be different, my own self-made man.
Dad was dead. He would not be back in a minute. He was unable to help. At last, after thirty-four years, I was free to do anything I wanted. Helena was arriving tomorrow. Not tomorrow, later today, at a quarter past ten in the morning. I had absolutely no idea what it was I wanted.
I saw Céligny signposted off the autoroute. I indicated, took the slip-road, and started to climb. To avoid ending up a poor copy of Dad, to have any hope, I needed consciously at all times to will myself to be more and other than I was. Joyce had been a blip, an anomaly, but there was nothing to worry about. Dad was dead, Joyce was dead. They were all dead.
There was no need to worry.
In the village of Céligny, I parked in the church car-park. Carrying my tools, I stumbled past the new cemetery and along the grassy track to the old one, where the high rusting gates were chained and padlocked. My breath was silver in sudden moonlight. Hanging the kit-bag over my shoulder, I climbed up and over.
Richard Burton was three stones along to the left. I brushed away some loose gravel, and called to mind everything Rifka had taught me. I started slowly, with the chisel. I knelt, and found the angles, and chiselled. And discovered it was no different from excavating Mr Woo, or Een So. When it came to the crowbar, I dismissed any last doubts by consoling myself that famous movie actors, preserved for all eternity on film, unchanged by death, must always have imagined a performing afterlife. Living, they’d wanted whatever was the opposite of being in the dark, dead and buried. It was a bit late now to be expecting peace and quiet.
Richard Burton was easy. I’d done the practice, I’d put in the time, and his blocks of clay-heavy mud lifted tidily into Dad’s faded kit-bag. I then replaced the stone, confident that no one but Rifka would ever have guessed. I applied the finishing seal of mixed cement and filler, and as I did so, I confirmed at long last my sure exclusion from a world overwatched by the English God; cheerful, amiably distant, Lord of all mildness, and Lord of all calm.
It felt like a curtain rising, or a crust breaking. It was like falling through a safety-net, my whole life until now the progress, sometimes willed, sometimes resisted, towards this inevitable breakthrough.
What harm would it do?
I didn’t believe in a watchful God. I didn’t believe, if I did this, that I’d burn forever in the eternal fires of hell. Sorry, Dad. I think Mum was right.
Burton’s Leg
‘Believer who does not believe,
Munificent and mean
Trustless and trusting, insecure,
How will you get you clean?’
T. H. White, Vodka Poem to Richard Burton
I WOKE UP a new man, feeling seventy-five million dollars. In cash. In the bank. In Geneva.
If I could have chosen freely from Moholy’s catalogue (if I was Moholy, or one of his customers), I’d have chosen Richard Burton. I’d seen him first in Desert Rats, at a time when I was seeing all the films featuring James Mason. Meaning the real James Mason, the film actor, who in Desert Rats plays Rommel. Richard Burton was born Richard Jenkins, but he rejected his natural father and his natural father’s name. Given a free choice, I too would have taken a Burton for my father, like Burton did, and Richard Burton was really something.
I jumped out of bed, checked my watch, ran my fingers over the pockmarks in my cheeks, then sprinted on the spot, a flurry of paces from a tireless wing-forward. And then I jogged to the bathroom. After my late night in the two cemeteries, I’d slept in, and it was only an hour and a half until Helena arrived at the airport. My nerves had vanished. I was actively looking forward to it.
I was feeling good. Better. I admired myself in the mirror and puffed out my chest. Maybe a little better even than that.
In the kitchen, I circled Dad’s kit-bag, upright on the linoleum. I supposed I ought to hide it. I bent at the knees and prepared to lift, a simple task for a man of vigour such as myself. However, I soon discovered that Swiss earth and the remains of Richard Burton were surprisingly heavy. I squatted down with my elbows on my knees, confronting the bag, contemplating it. Then I unclipped the strap at the top, loosened the bunched canvas, and peeked inside. I felt around with my fingertips, and with my thumb and forefinger I carefully pinched out a bone. It was covered in mud. I pushed most of it off with the flat of my free hand, and recognised the bone as a tibia, or fibula. It was Richard Burton’s leg-bone.
Washing it off at the sink, turning it from end to end, I was soon thinking that without the mud the bone was surprisingly light, inconsequential. I left it to drain with the plates and saucepans. Then I closed up the kit-bag, hauled it through to the bedroom, and bumped it to the back of the closet.
I went hunting for breakfast. This meant the kitchen again, and a search through all the cabinets and cupboards until I found the Chaplain’s sherry. It was a sensible precaution to take, I thought, because Richard Burton’s real father was a drunk. He was also a miner, a man, but Burton always had grander ambitions. From the valley he escaped to the grammar school, then to Oxford, then Stratford and the Old Vic. And on to Hollywood, where as the popular star of many blockbusters it would take only a small step to enter the public affections, earn a knighthood, and inherit from Olivier the crown at the National Theatre, which he’d lead in triumph to the twenty-first century.
Nothing could stop him but the drink, rendering him fluent and incapable for days on end, vulnerable to poetry and bad behaviour and blackouts. Burton had a horror of blacking out, which he entirely forgot when under the influence. And then he’d black out.
I’d intended to pour the sherry away, but instead slid it to the back of the counter, confident I was man enough to resist. Then I went back into the open cupboards, looking for food and sellotape.
In Cointrin International Airport, about ten miles north of Geneva, the information announcements are preceded by an electronic chime identical to the first five notes of ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?’ Twice already, after an airport announcement, I’d sung the second five notes, and both times it had made me laugh. The loudspeakers went How Much Is That Dog—, and I can’t have been alone in the airport instinctive with my —gy in the Window. I loved being abroad. It gave me an advantage. Abroad, I was part of the world. At home, I was part of the scenery.
I’d left Moholy’s van skewed diagonally at Setting Down Only. I was in that kind of mood. Burton’s leg-bone was now sellotaped along the inside of my own lower leg, and Richard Burton was the famously handsome unstoppable, bunching the impressive muscles in his shoulders, setting the jaw in his magnificent head.
The boy had come from nowhere. Or not from nowhere, but the village of Pontrhydyfen, the twelfth of thirteen children, flinging his grapple-hook at the moon. He conquered Stratford, and the West End, and Los Angeles. He made the impossible possible. He had seventy-five million pounds in Swiss bank accounts and was married to the most beautiful woman in the world, not once, but twice.
‘Don’t be daft, boyo. It doesn’t happen.’
‘You just watch me.’
Looking for International Arrivals, I turned and whacked my knee against an abandoned trolley. I chomped my lower lip and grabbed my leg, hopping a semi-circle and grimacing. My top front teeth were showing, in the process of not, just a
bout, saying Fuck, or something worse, like Ach Fie! or Mocchhyn Du!
Who was I trying to fool? It was an act, I knew it was, but it was also my contemporary and changing character, part of what it meant to be living and breathing now. I was a deacon adrift, waiting for Helena in Geneva airport, but that was never all. Richard Burton was a Welsh valley boyo but also a Commander of the British Empire. He was a lover of lyric poetry, but also a hard bastard when the ball was buried at a ruck. He was a ladies’ man, but with a weakness for the costume and posture of celibates (Becket (1964), Night of the Iguana (1964), The Sandpiper (1965), Exorcist II – The Heretic (1977), and Absolution (1979)).
It was fine being an impostor, or an actor, as long as you gave it everything. I shouldn’t worry so much. I could marry. Helena could have my children. And if it didn’t work out, I could marry someone else.
She’d probably be expecting a present. I had no flowers, no chocolates, but I didn’t care. I was a Richard Burton of the twenty-first century, and Richard Burton was a Casanova of the twentieth century, and Casanova, and so on. I was an international swordsman, and Helena was at the Arrivals gate. I could see her. She was looking the other way, wearing a green puffa and a dark bobble-hat, jeans, her bag at her feet beside her boots, and from this distance she seemed almost vulnerable.
She turned and saw me. And she smiled. Life was almost worth living again. If I wasn’t mistaken, she paused just for a second, falling in love afresh, I thought, with my wide-apart blue-green eyes, the ravaged face with its sculpted bones, my romantically wasted skin. As she felt for the handles of her bag, I flashed her a rare and winning smile.
Courage, man. She’s right there, lounging at the edge of the pool with her famously violet eyes. All you have to do is talk. Open your mouth. Talk. This is your moment, your time. This is the instant which makes all the difference. This is your fatal Cleopatra.
I took a deep breath, looking down from my full five feet and ten inches and also one extra half-an-inch, though I felt much taller. We were now as close as we could come without embracing, or stepping back. There was Helena, dark hair escaping the edges of the hat, blue almost violet eyes, dark eyebrows, almost a smile, and observably the same Helena who in the night, and in the dark morning, no matter how hard I tried to banish her from my mind, still had the power of ambush. And there was I, Jay Mason, pocked, devious and in trouble. I smiled a great deal, and then wrapped her in my arms.
Dry Bones Page 10