It wasn’t long into daylight, but I soon noticed we weren’t the only people that morning heading towards the cemetery. And all of us on foot. There were no buses running, and no trams. There were no taxis, and only a few parked cars. Like everyone else, we walked freely in the middle of the road, enjoying the early air off the lake, and the simple everyday sight-gag of Geneva’s pelican crossings. The red man was Swiss, patiently waiting his pedestrian turn. But the green man, when his time came to cross, was manic, with swinging arms and pumping legs, racing for the other side.
Except today, with no traffic, there was no reason to run. We didn’t take the shortest route. Instead, like fish, our growing crowd flicked left and right, out-thinking riot vans and road-blocks, those at the front excited on mobiles, converging us with others blocked and rebounded from different directions.
It was somewhere near the Rue de Coutance that we saw our first young woman in a black leotard, with sewn-on fluorescent bones. I assumed I’d been overdoing it, and pretended she wasn’t there. On Plainpalais, over the inverted concrete arcs of the skate-park, I glimpsed someone dragging what looked like a supple and bouncing rubber skeleton. At the head of our group, I now noticed as we surged down Rue de la Muse, we were proudly flying the skull and crossbones.
‘It was on the television,’ Rifka said. ‘It was in all the papers.’
It was a front-page sensation, the brazen theft from the Cimetière des Rois of Geneva’s acclaimed John Calvin. For the first time in nearly 500 years, Calvin was world-wide news, his grave desecrated in broad daylight by the bucket of a mechanical digger. In the absence of witnesses, there were pages of after-the-event pictures, reports, commentary. It was the exact opposite of Moholy’s stated intention to keep the project secret, and the press had no educated sense of proportion, no theological perspective. They were calling it an outrage against the safety of the dead. All cemeteries everywhere could soon need protection, fencing, night-patrols with dogs. In fact, this was bad, very bad, almost as bad as the last time.
In the cold winter of 1977, on Christmas Day, the tramp and millionaire Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin had died from complications. He was buried near his Swiss home the Manoir du Ban in the cemetery of Corsier-sur-Vevey, with views overlooking the lake. Two months later, in the early hours of 2 March, as the year’s thaw was just beginning, his diminutive oak coffin was disinterred by two Eastern European refugees, Roman Wardas and Gantcho Ganev.
Wardas was Polish, tall and agile, a natural leader to the slower and rounder Bulgarian, Gantcho. After an evening’s drinking, the two men decided that Oona Chaplin, Charlie’s recent widow, could be expected to pay handsomely for the safe return of her famous husband’s remains. They stumbled out to the graveyard, and encouraged each other to dream. The heavy and affable Gantcho visualised a people’s republic in which everyone was genuinely free. Wardas pictured a fully equipped garage and body-shop. He’d already priced it, and the latest pits and hoists required a ransom not far short of 600,000 Swiss francs.
It didn’t seem extortionate.
On the night of the crime, jittery Gantcho forgot the torch. As a punishment, Wardas made him do the digging. They squabbled, then bickered, but both men fell silent at the sight of the actual coffin. It was the size of it. They’d forgotten that Chaplin had shrunk to the age of eighty-eight, and from a start of only five foot three. Roman Wardas couldn’t help laughing: he pulled the coffin out, and lifted it high above his head. He balanced it on one flat hand, the other behind his back, dipping and cavorting like a waiter in Modern Times. Something inside the coffin lurched, tipping it from Roman’s grip. It dived point first on to Gantcho’s foot.
Then their stolen van wouldn’t start. Roman took a look under the bonnet, and scalded his hands on the radiator cap. Stumbling backwards, snorting, he jogged the bonnet prop, and the bonnet slammed bang on Gantcho’s fingers.
In the village of Corsier, the coffin clamped between their forearms, they realised they’d locked themselves out of their flat. They therefore carried Charlie to a nearby wheat-field, and with the sun already rising they reburied him, not very deeply, in the nearest corner.
The next day the cemetery was discovered in such a mess that news of the macabre theft spread quickly across the globe, in a dizzying series of spinning front pages. Roman and Gantcho took cover in the nearby city of Lausanne, waiting for their fingers to heal before telephoning Oona, only to discover that theirs was at least the fifteenth call claiming a ransom. Oona needed to know which of the claimants genuinely had the body.
Roman and Gantcho went back to the field, in the dead of night, to take a flash photograph of Charlie’s coffin to send as evidence. They started digging. The spade broke. Walking backwards with the camera, to get the coffin into focus, Gantcho fell in a ditch. Two days later, in the developed photos, Roman’s cap was clearly visible on the ground at the edge of the frame.
At three o’clock the next morning, by moonlight, in the increasingly trampled corner of the field, Roman yet again uncovered the tiny coffin. He prised open the lid, and flinched. Charlie’s lips had withered, uncovering his teeth in an evil rigid grin. Roman kept clear of Chaplin’s eyeline as he pulled tentatively at a patent leather and spatted ankle-boot, which came away in his hands. The foot was still inside. Grimacing, turning his head away and looking from the corner of his eye, Roman tried to pinch out a single bone from the many small bones in the weakness of the human ankle. It was too horrible. He respectfully, though approximately, replaced the boot and the spat.
He called Gantcho over. Think of the perfect republic, he said, in which all people are genuinely free. Gantcho closed his eyes and plunged his hand into the coffin. He came back up with a bone from the shoulder. While Gantcho reburied the coffin, Roman wiped off the shoulder-bone on the hunched back of his partner’s jacket, sniffed it, rubbed it off again, then sealed it in an envelope addressed to Oona, with a note already inside.
Give us the money, or your husband will. Just give us the money.
Roman and Gantcho then bombarded Oona with calls from a Lausanne public phone. They dropped their ransom from 600,000 francs to 250,000, in only enough time for police to trace the line. It had been seventy-six days since they’d first lifted Charlie from the cemetery in Corsier-sur-Vevey.
On 17 May 1978, they made their final call from the traced public phone, which was now under all-day surveillance. Looking out for the cap in the photograph supplied by the developers, armed with information from the landlord of the flat, and fingerprints from the broken-down van, police identified two Eastern European mechanics named Roman Wardas and Gantcho Ganev. After a botched raid on the phonebox, there then followed a lengthy chase involving truncheons and whistles, and some tricky business in and out and up and down with an open window and an escalator. Finally, both men were restrained and arrested, and thrown into the back of a van.
They pleaded guilty, but swore in court caps in hand on their mothers’ hearts that they’d acted out of character. They couldn’t explain themselves, and had no idea what had ever possessed them.
More than twenty years later, for Calvin not Chaplin, the protesters seemed only too happy to take the blame. Attitudes had changed, and they were actively volunteering. Someone smart had already constructed an instant website (www.johncalvinsbody.org) to drip-feed suggestions to the gerbil press. It started with rumours, followed by denials, until it was all but certain.
Latest: Angry Protesters Resurrect John Calvin.
There was even the possibility, offered globally by the website as an exclusive, that tomorrow, as a climax to the weekend of protest, the skeleton of John Calvin would be hanged from a window in the UN International enclave. And then burnt. And then the ashes scattered in the lobbies of Geneva’s banks.
In one of many online interviews, johncalvinsbody.org agreed that yes, the newspapers were right, a stunt like this must have taken an enormous amount of organisation and planning. Why Calvin? It was the will of the peopl
e. It was Mr Smith with attitude, the revenge of the little man against the work ethic, and tightened belts, and the joyless accumulation of capital. It was an impudent better had after 500 years of one-way better not. They even invented a name, the Calvinistas, for anyone who supported their action.
Calvin’s bones were the compelling media event that every protest needed. The story had everything. There were sinister masterminds, historical perspectives, human interest and, in natural light on Saturday morning as the sun climbed higher, a massive photo-opportunity involving hundreds of protesters arriving at the cemetery either carrying or dressed as skeletons.
Geneva was suddenly full of them, including real bones wired up from toe to skull, riding with big toothy grins on the shoulders of supportive medical students. There were soft-toy skeletons, and plastic skeletons, and skeleton rave masks which glowed in the dark. There were life-size cardboard cut-out skeletons from children’s bumper books of the human body. The protesters were claiming that every single skeleton was Calvin, and photographs featuring bones and baffled police were already pasted on web-pages across the world.
The skull and crossbones was everywhere, as a flag, as a bandanna, on hats. It was roughly cut from cloth of all colours and patterns, and sewn into clothes, or the scarves pulled up to hide the faces of the reticent. Everyone was a pirate, just for the day, a convert to the little man’s ancient battle against authority, in which backsides needed kicking, ears tweaking and noses snubbing. Toes needed to be trod upon, and beards needed twisting.
I saw uniformed police take wild swings with batons, and chase after bones which looked authentic. The more portly constables stood sweating and panting on corners, scratching their foreheads, tilting back their uniform caps.
The cemetery itself had been cordoned off, a plastic police-tape backed by a chain of officers on the cemetery side of the wall. Only journalists were allowed inside, and the international press took photographs from behind the police, looking for exciting angles on a body-snatched Protestant Reformer.
On the street side of the wall, there was whistling and a growing chant: ‘We’ve got John Calvin. We’ve got John Calvin.’ The protesters bobbed their various skeletons up and down, and a bony girl in a skeleton suit jumped on to the flat-topped wall, and did a spiny contemporary dance.
Helena was up near the front, stretching to see over the police and into the cemetery, a solid and indifferent mass of people keeping us apart. I felt my shoulders drop, the victim of some terrible, unknowable injustice. It wasn’t fair. But I couldn’t be swayed by that. I quickly perked up, rubbed my hands together, and gave a little hop. I shaped my hands for a dive, and lowered my head. Then I wrinkled my nose, and tunnelled straight through. Or not quite straight, actually in several circles, intermittently bobbing up my head to check my position, before diving again and finally popping up only inches behind her.
She seemed so much taller than me, but that couldn’t be right. Inspired by a huge surge of sentimental affection, I wanted to weep for joy, but I couldn’t. I stood behind Helena and strained and grimaced, but no tears came.
Unscripted, she turned round, and I scratched the back of my head.
‘Jay!’
She yelled out my name above the whistles and chants, and the press-pack baying for poses. She clasped me to her bosom, lifting me off my feet, then dropped me and grabbed at my hands, fumbling for all ten of my remarkably intact fingers.
‘How?’ She was still having to shout. ‘How did you get yourself free?’
She clasped me again to her bosom, swinging me this way and that, and I had to steady my hat.
It was quite clear that the Cimetière des Rois wouldn’t be providing us with any more bones, not today. We’d need to think of something else. As we nudged our way out, escaping the growing crush at the front, I inadvertently stepped on the toes of the minister from the American church. Even ravaged and unfrocked as I was, I think he almost recognised me. I flicked my eyebrows and thumbed my nose. I think he was probably mistaken. To confirm him in this impression, and in the absence of mallets and pies, I zipped behind him and administered a kick to the rear, before dropping to my knees and crawling away, through an otherwise impassable thicket of boots.
When I found my feet again, at the outside edge of the growing crowd for Calvin (We’ve got John Calvin. We’ve got John Calvin), I’d lost all sight of Helena. And Rifka had simply vanished. The numbers, the popularity of the protest, made it almost impossible to locate individuals. I made several false pursuits in one and all directions. Then I saw Helena, waving both arms at me from the forecourt of the fire-station. I waved back, and had just set off towards her when I was caught up by a surge of gardeners, streaming in the opposite direction. I dodged my head between bobbing rakes and hoes, as her wave slowly faltered.
They put me down again at the Place Neuve, by the central statue of General Dufour. On any normal day, the equestrian statue was surrounded by constant traffic, with seven roads large and small converging on the one besieged square. Today, between the gates of the Parc des Bastions on one side and the columns of the Victoria Hall on the other, the roads were being relaid as lawn. This was the French group who’d been intending to plant wheat at the entrance to the United Nations, but who’d found the security overwhelming, with paramilitaries under orders to prevent popular disruption at all costs. And this time, because they couldn’t get any wheat, they had grass.
Even here, in the morning sunshine, there was a squad of riot police under the ramparts of the Old Town, at the junction with the Avenue Corraterie. A riot sergeant stepped forward towards some shoeless Basques juggling spangly batons. He told them they weren’t allowed on the grass.
‘This isn’t grass,’ they said, looking down. ‘It’s road.’
‘You’re not allowed.’
At which point, all the philosophical young people decided to sit down. At first they sat on the pavement and traffic islands, then increasingly on the turfed road itself, and then, for one intrepid skeleton, up on the horse behind General Dufour. The horse was wearing an orange eye-patch, and a pink and blue bandanna sporting the skull and bones.
I looked everywhere for Helena, my hand shading my eyes, stepping forward and back, narrowly missing the upturned tines of several unattended rakes. She was nowhere to be seen, and among all these people I wondered how I’d ever be able to find her. Then I remembered we were supposed to be looking for Jesus. There was an obvious place to start.
*
The church floor was coloured with clusters of yellow and green Karrimats, rumpled sleeping bags; there was the lingering smell of living human bodies. This was the deal Helena had made with the protesters. In return for sitting through my sermon as Calvin, they could set up camp in the empty spaces of the Church of All Saints, although today they were up and already out, reforming the Western world. And like the good Calvinistas they were, they’d been busy.
Either side of the aisle was a scatter of unfinished banners (Capitalism Kills the Plan; Bread Not), and placards painted with blood-stained pound and dollar signs. I stopped to be impressed by two stacks of flat yellow life-jackets, of the inflatable type in demand on aeroplanes. Then my gaze travelled over bags of pink fright wigs, some papier-mâché cartoon bombs, and many paper sacks soft with the petals of flowers.
‘Nearly finished.’
There was a young boy sitting barefoot on the stairs to the pulpit, sewing skulls and bones of many colours on to three-pointed hats in black.
‘No hurry,’ I said, but he was already collecting up his work, and humming his way past me to the door. As it closed behind him, the whistles and klaxons of the protest blurred, became distant, like the horns and halloos of sabs at shire-hunts in merry old England.
There was no sign of Helena, or Rifka, but I couldn’t think where else they’d go to look for Jesus. From inside the doorway, I sized up the long strip of polished aisle. It was like one side of a convincing argument. Black tile connected with bl
ack, and white with white, each deftly touching at the corner, but that didn’t make the aisle all black, or all white. I took off my shoes. With a short run-up, I slid as far as I could in my socks.
Then I carried my shoes into the vestry, using my other hand to hold up my trousers, which had a new habit of accordioning towards the ankle. I closed the vestry door, and turned the head-and-shoulders mirror the right way round. Yes, just as I thought.
My head and shoulders were blessed with the look. I looked funny. Vicars were funny, and they had funny clothes, with their tunics and dalmatics, their chasubles and pallium with pins. In Europe, men of God were small and funny, relicts of another age in black and white, religion a frivolous pursuit compared, say, to factory work on the one hand, and on the other to accumulating as much money as humanly possible in a single show-biz lifetime.
Still clutching my trousers, I found a fresh collar in the laundry and slipped it one-handed into the ragged clerical shirt I was still wearing from yesterday. Then, for the benefit of the mirror, I grabbed my throat with both hands, thumbs pointing forward and fingers at the back, and squeezed until my face went red and my eyes popped out. My trousers fell down.
Take yourself seriously. Leave the trousers: they can’t fall any further. I settled my neck with a twist and a grimace. Then I jutted my head forward, getting into my own face. I checked the whites of my eyes (yellow), my gums (one shade of red short of bleeding), and asked myself what, exactly, was holding me back. Maybe it was the teeth. It was my Anglican teeth, a delicate shade of sweet sherry, stained forever by biscuits and crystallised fudge at the fête.
I should have been more conformist, like the rest of them, and happy to act the buffoon. I stepped out of the wreckage of my trousers, and crossed my hands demurely to each opposite shoulder of my clerical shirt. In my socks, I skated slowly but elegantly into the church, past the altar, and then backwards past the altar, then forwards again, enjoying the lightness of the draught on my bare white shanks. I slid with some élan to a halt, and faced my imaginary flock.
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