‘What the hell is it?’ he asks.
‘So you admit it’s more than wooden floorboards warming up after a long winter. I told you yesterday, that is a creature!’
‘Ooooooooh,’ Eva-Marie interjects.
‘Ooooooooh,’ the Thing returns and we all jump out of our seats.
‘It’s a bird,’ Theo suggests.
‘It’s a plane!’ Alexander sings.
Just then we hear a horrible squawk, a sudden fluttering of feathers, a scuffle breaking out directly over our heads, followed by the unmistakable sound of jaws crunching on bone.
‘Oh my God! It’s eating something!’ squeals Eva-Marie. ‘Now that’s a bird,’ Alexander says. ‘I mean, it was a bird.’
‘Walled up alive, like in Fortunato in Edgar Allan Poe’s Cask of the Amontillado,’ I say with a shudder.’
‘There’s a hunter of some kind trapped inside the insulation of the house,’ Peter concludes.
We search for the entry point of this mystery beast and locate one possibility; a loose chunk of molding at the base of the house’s exterior that seems to lead nowhere. Peter loosens the opening to release the captive, but the scuffling and crunching continues for another week. Worse, the Phantom of the Farmhouse has come to love us and regularly caterwauls through the ceiling boards along with our mealtime conversations.
This macabre atmosphere, more suited to Halloween than March, pervades our household. One day, V. has just graciously admitted me into my own office, when a small voice cries out, ‘BOO!’
I look down to see the face of Frankenstein rendered on green construction paper staring up at me. My little girl’s hazel eyes twinkle through two jagged holes.
‘Did I scare you?’
‘Not me, but you might knock out someone more delicate who’s not ready for the shock.’ I glance at V. staggering against my desk, clutching his fragile ribcage.
‘What’s it for, sweetheart? It’s not Halloween.’
‘They don’t have Halloween here. They have Carnaval. Is it really horrible?’
‘Suits you perfectly.’
‘I made one, and then Levy and Nicholas copied me, so there were three Frankensteins in class today. Everybody else wanted to be a princess or Pikachu. So boring.’
Eva-Marie got her idea, I assume, from Alexander’s French edition of Frankenstein.’
‘This is one of the most horrible and moving stories I’ve ever read,’ he intones solemnly over his breakfast cereaL I’m not entirely happy thinking my children will make their way through the English classics via French translations.
‘It’ d be better in the original language,’ I suggest.
‘Why? This is already horrible enough. It’s wonderful.’
He cannot put the book down. Its ghoulish illustrations enliven every meal. He must be still very young, I reflect, to wallow safely in gore and mutilation with such innocent glee.
I can think of enough horrible things without Frankenstein’s help. And sometimes, I think, things are getting worse as I get older. Or do I simply feel more helpless about the horror we thought we could change when we were so young, so ambitious, and so busy?
The China-watcher Jonathan Mirsky e-mails a copy of his latest editorial for the IHT. He cites reports that Mainland Chinese jailers are torturing followers of the religious movement, Falun Gong. An officer has castrated one convert with a clothes hanger, before bludgeoning him to death in front of his wife. Of course, there was no trial, neither for the Falun Gong adherent, nor for the state sadist.
I cannot do anything about the horrors in Afghanistan or Africa, the abuses in South America or the poverty in Eastern Europe. But China was once my stomping ground, my playing field. I feel somehow responsible that too little has changed, for all the talk of rising living standards and social freedoms. And far away in a sleepy Swiss village, I brood on these reports of modern horror.
‘You look fatigued, Madame,’ V. says gently. He has found me sitting with a mug of green tea on the balcony off the bedroom. The Alps range across the horizon in the distance, rivaling in grandeur my memory of the Himalayas.
‘Don’t you think it’s ironic that I’m sitting here obsessing about the persecution of the religious in China, when you spent your whole life fighting persecution of the irreligious? You’ve got to admit, were you Voltaire today, you’d be on the other side.’
He growls, ‘I will always be Voltaire.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘—and it’s not true I fought for the irreligious, but I fought against the evils of the established Church, against the persecution of anyone who disagreed, including the religious. I argued for tolerance. I tell you that one should regard all human beings as one’s brothers. A Turk my brother? A Chinaman my brother? A Jew? A Siamese? Yes, of course. Are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?’
He takes off his knitted cap, scratching at his scalp, and turns his face to the sun. ‘Take Calas for instance. You must have heard of that affair.’
‘Um. . .’
He’s astonished at my ignorance. ‘But for Calas, I might be a forgotten scribe, a mere poet.’
‘Sounds unlikely.’
‘Ah, Madame, the defense of Monseiur Calas was the turning point of my life. May I?’
He callously tosses Frisbee—a tiger-striped rug of snoring fur—off the seat and takes her place next to me. Indignant, Frisbee stares at the empty air.
‘Jean Calas was a Huguenot, a Calvinist Protestant, among the few left in Toulouse after a century of rabid Church persecution. By then, Huguenots couldn’t hold office, couldn’t be lawyers, doctors, midwives or booksellers, goldsmiths or grocers. Their marriages were illegal and their wives considered concubines and their children bastards. Anyone found at a Huguenot service was arrested; the men sent to the galleys of the French navy for life, women put in prison, their clergymen put to death.’
Not so far below us, the two little churches of St-Cergue—Protestant and Catholic—chime out noon bells. Voltaire smiles cynically while he waits for the clanging to stop.
‘Depressed one night because his faith prevented him from pursuing a law career, one of Jean Calas’s sons hung himself from the rafters of the family linen shop. The terrified members of the family knew Toulouse law ruled that a suicide must be drawn naked through the streets to be pelted with mud and stones and then be hanged. Jean Calas lied to the police, saying his son had died a natural death. The police seized the father, accusing him of murdering his own son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism in order to practice law.’
‘Surely friends and neighbors knew better.’
‘Of course, but two trials and a parade of witnesses full of hearsay and gossip silenced those who knew Calas was innocent. The Calas family governess, a Catholic no less, was jailed for five years for defending her employer. A friend who had dined upstairs with the family the very night of the tragedy was sent to the galleys for telling the truth.’
V. glances at me, ‘You do know what that means?’
‘Well, I saw Ben Hur—’
‘The Navy’s powers in the Mediterranean had to be maintained. The rowing benches had to be filled! On thirty double benches sat three hundred rowers, shackled six to an oar. Naked to the waist they were never, never, unchained, winter or summer, day or night. They ate and slept on that bench. Think of it, Madame, a gentleman named Jean Pierre Espinas was sentenced to the galleys for life, chained to one spot for twenty-three years because he once gave a night’s lodging to a Protestant clergyman. Many killed themselves and became corpses chained to an oar.’
‘What happened to Calas?’
‘You talk of horror, Madame. Your society devours Monsieur Stephen King’s books and watches these Hannibal-cannibal movies. You have never endured daily horror as we did in France. Is it not telling to you, a child of the twentieth-century’s revulsion at Nazism, that it was to Germany that I first fled the tortures and killings of France, even th
ough it was Germany who taught the French torturers the use of the stake and wheel? Because it was the French who turned torture into an exercise of such legal precision.’
He spits contemptuously over the balcony.
‘Please, tell me, what happened to Calas?’
‘Imagine, after months of court testimony, you are condemned for killing your own beloved son. You deny it. You are subjected to the question ordinaire.’ He shudders, and sees from my bewildered expression that I have no idea of the question ordinaire.
‘Your arms and legs are stretched, Madame, until they pop from their sockets. Your hands and feet are twisted until they disconnect from the limbs.’
I gulp.
‘After a short pause, you are revived, to be put to the question extraordinaire. Still curious? Fifteen pints of water are poured down your throat. Calas, of course, protested his innocence. Another fifteen pints, forced down him until his broken, useless body swelled to twice its normal size. Then he was dragged to a public square before the cathedral and laid upon a cross. An executioner, with exactly eleven blows of an iron bar, broke each of his limbs in two places. The old man, calling upon Jesus Christ, proclaimed his innocence still, but that was not enough to convince the screaming mob. He dangled there, his head still connected to a pulped, swelling mass of mangled guts, until mercifully, he was strangled, bound to a stake and burned.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘March 10th, 1762.’
‘March 10 . . . Why that’s today!’
He takes a deep breath, and sighs, ‘Yes, the same as today, a beautiful spring day.’ He gestures towards the scattered French villages nestling across the base of the powerful mountains in the distance. Off in Toulouse, the great-great-great-great grandchildren of that frenzied, shrieking mob are taking their lunch break.
The air is thin. Only the bright sun protects us from a chill. When V. discovered me on the balcony, I felt I was gazing far across the world, removed from ancient schedules, petty anxieties, old deadlines met and trivial obligations discarded. I will be fifty years old in a month and time is shrinking for me. Strange road signs mark the passage of years. This week the UN High Commissioner will visit Beijing to plead, among other things, for medical parole for the dissident Xu Wenli, locked up in a Chinese jail.
I met Xu before he served the entirety of his first, eleven-year sentence. We sat in his bare, tiny concrete hutch of an apartment. His small daughter helped her mother make us tea. It was the spring of 1980, in the flush of the Democracy Wall movement. Xu spoke to our visiting BBC film team of his desire to reform the Communist Party, not to overthrow it. His friends turned their faces safely away from the camera. Although his fingers uncontrollably, this skinny fellow faced the lens. His was only a thin voice rising from a little cement box out of a city of faceless millions. He dared to become a face.
No sooner was he released from prison, than he joined the founders of a new democratic party for China. The hammer fell on his head again. Another sentence, this time thirteen years.
How this stubborn toothpick of a prematurely ageing man, struggling with hepatitis B two years into his second sentence in a fetid cell, seems to terrorize the Communist gerontocracy cowering behind the high walls of Beijing’s Jongnanhai! Just after leaving Hong Kong for good, I got a reporting award in New York. I can only think of the irony that Xu serves a quarter of his life behind bars while I’m fêted with a free dinner at the New York Hilton for merely writing about the Chinese prison system.
From time to time, I e-mail or write encouragement to that little tea-making daughter, Jing, now a grown woman, a sculptress in Boston. And the years . . . the years . . . the years tick by, and I count them.
The older I get, the more important that soul chained-up from wife and daughter is to me, I tell V.
‘I didn’t urge the overthrow of the monarchy,’ V. admits.
‘Let’s face it. You idolized Frederick and Catherine.’
‘Only because of the potential for good that lay in their power. Yet they say I fathered the French Revolution just by calling for the truth.’
‘Yes, but I’m sitting in St-Cergue. There’s nothing anybody could do for Xu Wenli from a Swiss border town.’
He snaps at me, ‘Madame, I did everything from Switzerland’s border! You think someone with your energy can sit on the things you’ve seen, and wrap them up like those little sandwiches your children devour? One speaks out, Madame. One makes trouble. One doesn’t equivocate or compromise! There are enough people who will do the compromising for you.
‘Where did the desperate Calas family seek my help? In Switzerland! I wrote to the Cardinal de Bernis, to d’Argental, to the Duchesse d’Enville, to the Marquise de Nicolaï, to the Duc de Villars, to the Duc de Richelieu. I begged the King’s ministers—Choiseul, Saint-Florentin—to investigate the Calas trial. I engaged lawyers. I published a pamphlet, a treatise, then more pamphlets. I begged fellow authors, ‘Cry out yourself and let others cry out; cry out for the Calas family. Cry out against fanaticism, stupidity, oppression. Shout everywhere, I beg you, for it is l’infâme that has caused their misery.’’’
‘The infamy again?’
He shakes his head. ‘Non, non, not l’infamie. L’infâme. That meant the murderous Church with its lies, tortures, hypocrisies, its terror so despicable and vile. The name Voltaire was quickly everywhere, linked to that of Jean Calas. Ecrasez l’infâme, crush the monster! became my slogan. By the time I was sixty-eight, I suffered almost all the time from colic, but whenever I attacked l’infâme, the pains mysteriously disappeared. I had the energy of a youth and why not?’
‘You were taking on the whole of Mother Church.’
‘Madame, I was taking on the most powerful institution in the history of mankind! A prominent lawyer in Paris prepared the case for the Council of State. I raised contributions from a hundred quarters, including the Queen of England, the Empress of Russia and the King of Poland.’
He leans back, to catch his breath, then adds, ‘Finally, I appealed to God.’
‘And what did you say to Him?’
It’s no longer ridiculous that God would listen to Voltaire.
‘I wrote, ‘Thou hast not given us hearts to hate, nor hands to kill one another. May the trifling differences in the garments that cover our frail bodies, in the mode of expressing our thoughts, in our ridiculous customs and imperfect laws not be used by us as signal of mutual hatred and persecution’.’
‘Pretty wordy. Did God answer?’
‘Of course.’
My eyes widen.
‘Well, through Louis the King. The King’s Council pronounced Jean Calas innocent in 1765. The King granted 30,000 livres to the widow and children for loss of property.’
‘And you did all that with your pen . . . ’
‘When I heard the decision, I wept for joy. Me at seventy-one, crying like un enfant! I did it all over again for the Sirven family, accused in Toulouse of killing their own daughter who had converted to Catholicism and committed suicide by throwing herself down a well. Sirven saw with horror what had happened to Jean Calas. His trial was to be heard in Toulouse before the same authorities who had pulled Calas limb from limb. The Sirven family fled to Geneva. It took two hours to condemn that man to death and nine years for me to prove him innocent.’
‘So the royal entertainer and science buff became a crusader?’
V. starts. ‘A Crusader? Hardly.’
I explain, ‘I mean someone who campaigns doggedly against impossible odds.’
‘Not a seeker for the Holy Grail?’
‘In your case, the Grail was Enlightenment.’
He likes this comparison. ‘Yes, and freedom from guilt. The sort of guilt you feel sitting on this balcony in the sun while the Messieurs Xus of our world sit in rancid cells.’
Of our world. He’s right, of course. When Xu’s first trial came up, his words were twisted against him, the verdict as rigged as that against Calas. His B
eijing friends asked the BBC for its recording of the entire interview. The tape would prove he hadn’t argued for ‘revolution’ but had called for reform within the Socialist system. No one in London could find the cassette that had been tossed away after the broadcast.
I feel sick recalling the disappointment in Beijing.
‘Never feel guilty. If you were perfect, you would be God.’
‘That’s good to remember.’
He chuckles, ‘Oh, I felt guilt, but I had better reason than you. A general’s son of nineteen years old named La Barre was charged with smearing a crucifix with ordure. La Barre confirmed he was a heretic, that he couldn’t understand why anyone would celebrate the Host at Mass or what he dared to call The God of Dough. Among his books, they found my Dictionnaire Philosophique. The Parliament of Paris argued that I was the real criminal, but that as I was safe from their clutches, hiding in Rolle—’
‘That’s only a few villages away from here!’
‘My disciple should suffer in my stead. They ordered his tongue be tom out. He was beheaded and his body burnt while they were looking for mine.’
He tosses me a wicked wink. ‘Hearing they had carried out the execution and were now hunting for my head, I laid in a large supply of Holy Water.’
‘How can you joke?’
‘Oh, one jokes to cover fear. And there was so much to do! So many cases, so many letters to write! I petitioned Louis XV, then Louis XVI, attacking the extremists of the Church. A Protestant minister in Geneva said to me, ‘You attack Christianity, yet do a Christian’s work’’.’
That night Peter takes his turn to do something Christian for a tortured soul. As an ICRC veteran of prison visits in war-torn countries, he’s used to shedding light into dark places.
‘I’ve had it with the Thing buried alive in our walls.’
He disappears, returning moments later with a saw and a stepladder.
‘You’re not going to saw a hole in the ceiling of my new kitchen!’
It’s too late. My spouse has already penciled a large circle on the white-painted trim. He saws around it and removes a neat plug of wood. Two huge, demonic green eyes blink out of the hole at us, totally blinded by the light.
A Visit From Voltaire Page 26