Eva-Marie shrieks, ‘It’s the Thing!’
I think of the animals that populate the forested plateau behind our house—foxes, marmosets, and bats.
‘Why doesn’t it move?’ Theo whispers.
Peter looks into the blinking orbs.
‘It’s blinded by the light. And it’s used to our voices by now.’
He fetches a strip of ham and very carefully places it at the edge of the hole. In a split-second, a clawed paw whips the meat off his fingertips.
‘Aiiihhh!’ Peter grabs his bleeding fingers. ‘Um Gottes’willes’ he swears in Swiss-German. ‘At least its sense of smell is intact.’
Suddenly a black, elongated wraith slithers and stumbles out of the hole, flipping and scrambling down the cookbook shelves. The kids are screaming as the pipe-like beast flings itself from room to room in a panicked search for an exit from the house.
‘This way! It went this way,’ Eva-Marie yells. ‘Into the playroom.’
The Thing cowers in a corner under the videotapes.
Peter shouts, ‘Block all the doorways.’
He throws open the kitchen door to the terrace. The Thing makes a desperate dash, here blocked by Alexander like a hockey goalie from the living room, there blocked by Theo like a line-back from the route up the stairs. The maddened beast ricochets off the walls, knocking down Lego set-ups, snow boots, and brooms, until at last it flies out of the kitchen and streaks away across the frozen yard.
‘It was only a cat,’ Eva-Marie says.
‘Probably a wild kitten hidden for the winter by its mother inside our insulation piping. It got trapped and lived on bats from the attic.’ Peter speculates.
‘The crunching sound! Eewwwwww,’ says Alexander.
‘I vant to drink your blooood,’ Theo says with a Dracula sneer.
If only it were so easy to shed light on human suffering.
Voltaire showed what could be done with a witty, persistent pen. He was Europe’s first one-man NGO, the first modem humanitarian organization. Now women and men fight the powers-that-be for causes all over the world—against drug barons, Mafiosi, child prostitution, child soldiers, hunger, powdered milk, corruption, assault weapons, slavery, corporate greed, on and on, but Voltaire did it first.
It has been some years since I saw my byline in a newspaper. Something that once seemed so easy, so accessible, now gives me pause. I wrote beneath the standard of a magazine or sheltered behind the authority of a respected institution. The girl who put a chemical weapons smuggler behind German bars from her obscure Hong Kong two-room office, who won an award for prison labor coverage, who shot out letter after letter from New York demanding release and relief for imprisoned journalists—well? What has happened to that feisty female? Alone, without a calling card, she has been muffled by Swiss expectations of motherhood, by those deadly social anesthetizers—laundry and lunch-boxes.
Xu Wenli sits in a barred cell, hidden away from the Potemkinesque China shown the visiting Olympic Committee from Lausanne. My mends in China e-mail me that China has changed beyond my ken, that I know nothing about the ‘new’ China. They cannot erase this fact, however; the innocent Xu rots in jail. If V. can send a message from Switzerland, so can I.
I e-mail the IHT:
Dear Editors,
Regarding Olympic Sleuths Need to See Through the Beijing Whitewash by Jonathan Mirsky and China Quiets Critics for Olympic Visit by Elizabeth Rosenthal: Might I suggest a logo for Beijing’s Olympics? How about a set of interlinked handcuffs replacing the traditional Olympian hoops, and two circles of barbed wire for the ‘zeros’ in 2008?
‘Bravo!’
Three days later, V. returns grinning from our mailbox, brandishing the paper. ‘Your few lines reached beyond the schoolyard! Beyond Arzier, Genolier, Givrins, Trelex, down to Nyon, across to Geneva and Lausanne, up to Zurich, Paris, London, New York, and hee! hee! Beijing! Ah, the golden years! The years when the whole world knew what I fought for! What I fought against!’
He narrows his eyes and adds pointedly, ‘Some of us even did it without e-mail! You know, you give me an idea, Madame . . . ’
Why does he look like Frisbee when she’s just caught a bird?
Chapter Twenty-two L’INFME.ORG
I tackle my house ghost trying to sneak the coffee machine back up to his office.
This Sisyphean feat of psychic lifting has been going on for weeks, although V. practically fades into half-transparency for hours after plugging it in. Peter yanks it back to the kitchen counter and mutters about my early morning habits, and V. smuggles it back up the next morning.
‘Monsieur Voltaire!’
He futilely tries hiding the coffee machine behind his back.
A soft white ink-stained cap gives his graying hair a sheepish air.
‘Forget the machine,’ I scoff. ‘Who's this?’ I point to this morning's ‘Letters to the Editor’ column in the IHT. The very first letter is from a ‘Frank Arouet, Philosopher and Playwright.' ,
‘Oh, that. C'est moi.’
‘Frank Arouet?’
‘No one would believe François Voltaire, for obvious reasons.’
‘And what is Frank Arouet doing, exactly?’
‘Oh, in print again at last! I was inspired by your little note to the newspaper. I sent in my thoughts on globalization and the inevitability of a single morality governing the behavior of civilized men of different cultures. They published me already? This is delightful!’
Voltaire has overstayed his welcome. Despite our long hours, I’m getting very little writing done because he insists on reading aloud to me everything he composes. He may be a playwright-turned-polemicist, but at heart, he’ll always be a ham.
And an expensive ham. . .
‘I’m sorry to bring up these costs, but I may have to give you up for Lent,’ I joke a little to ease the blow.
‘Ah, it is the Lenten season, of course. Is there a higher tax on beef and pork? Are the profits being given to the hospitals? Do they still do that?’
‘Not any more. The meat prices are rock bottom, more thanks to mad cow disease than Church laws and—stop changing the subject! This is the Mastercard bill. Last month you spent more than $500 on book orders from Amazon and Alibris. And now long distance calls to Pakistan! Would you care to explain those?’
‘It’s the comfortable people like you who have to suffer price rises.’ He wags a finger. ‘Don’t complain. Remember, the poor fast all the year long.’
‘I’m sure. Now about these calls to Pakistan—?’
‘I should have known that the Lenten laws would change. It’s just like I say here in the paper. All societies do not have the same laws. What is a crime in Europe might be a virtue in Asia, just as certain German stews will never please the French epicures. All societies will not have the same laws, but no society will be without any laws at all. Here, read this line, right here, it’s quite good—’
I read out loud, ‘The good of society is established by all men from Beijing to Ireland as the immutable rule of virtue; what is useful to society will be therefore good in all countries.’
‘Exactly!’ He straightens with pride. ‘Now, Madame, mail these, if you would be so kind!’ He balances the machine on one buckled knee breech, while he fishes in his canvas apron for a bundle of hand-addressed envelopes bound together with coarse string. The top envelope is addressed to ‘Monsieur Le Secretary General, Kofi Annan,’ the next one to ‘Monsieur George Soros,’ the next to ‘Le President Vicente Fox,’ and so on.
Return addressee: Frank Arouet.
‘There are more than two dozen letters here, Frank.’ I arch an eyebrow. ‘Send them all by messenger to the Hotel Steigenberger Bélvedère in Davos. They’re all attending the World Economic Forum. Hurry! The conference ends soon.’
I don’t budge. ‘You think your pensées de Frank will fit into the Davos discussions?’
He struggles to comprehend my stupidity. Out of his deep pocket he pulls a news photo
of rioters fighting heavily padded Swiss policemen.
‘Why, Madame, it’s obvious that there is a difference of opinion raging in the streets not a day’s drive from where we stand, from the hushed dining rooms of the world’s privileged to the hordes behind these barricades of barbed wire surrounding that town.’
‘Yes, I know, about the WTO and the World Bank, that happens every year in Davos, but—’
‘And why? An inability to agree on what is good for society! You see, place two men on the earth; they will only call good, virtuous, and just that which is good for both of them. Place four, and there will be nothing virtuous except what is suitable to all four. What I say of these four men must be said of the whole universe! These leaders in Davos cannot go forward without any thought for what will be for the good of all.’
‘Well, Bill Gates will do whatever he wants . . . ’
V. loses patience with me, ‘Now, here, here, take these as well,’ he says, thrusting a second pile of envelopes so high they slither to the floor.
He throws up his hands. ‘I should’ve gone myself I could have used a ‘Hotmail’ address at the hotel business center.’
‘Speaking of going—’
‘Yes, please do. I’m so very busy now . . . ’
It’s true. He seems to have a hundred irons burning away in that feverish brain of his.
In fact, just yesterday, he got one of the biggest thrills of his after-life. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported in a two-inch squib that the Arnheim Provincial City Archives’ Edwin van Meerkerk had unveiled a lost fragment of V.’s sci-fi hit, Micromégas, that tale featuring two intergalactic spacemen. The absurdities of war, the vanities of intellectual elites and the ignorant superstitions of V.’s time, are artfully satirized.
Is it my imagination, or has V. abandoned his frothy verses and his scientific apparatus for something new? His fables like Micromégas are more political, almost philosophical, and (if I may say so out of his earshot), a lot more readable than his notes on Leibniz’s monads.
V. fondles the tiny NZZ clipping for the fiftieth time.
‘They could have included my portrait,’ he comments.
‘Of what, your bones?’
‘Tsk, well, maybe that painting by de Largillière that I had done for that actress, what was her name?’
‘Suzanne something.’
Really, I think the guy’s getting on in years.
With or without the mug shot, this posthumous publicity pleases him. One of his latest ideas is to produce more fragments—which I will conveniently unearth somewhere under Peter’s wine bottles in the bike room.
Another phone bill arrives, demanding two hundred francs just for calls to Pakistan.
‘It’s about Pakistan,’ I say the next morning. V. looks like he hasn’t slept for days. The desk is covered with print-outs and drafts of letters.
‘I used the fax. There’s so much to do—’
‘Yes, I know, but even if you stayed here for another two hundred years, you couldn’t remake the world now, any more than you did then. These calls to Pakistan—’
‘Ahh, but I did remake the world once, you see,’ he says. There are black circles under his eyes.
‘They call me the Father of the French Revolution, and it was those very calls for liberty, fraternity, etc., that inspired your American Founding Fathers, or so Mr Franklin told me when he visited me in Paris. If it hadn’t been for me—’
‘What do you think you can do, when no one but me can see you or hear you?’
He looks at me dismayed. ‘You don’t need to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ something to know that it is part of a sequence of cause and effect. But if you want to be so tediously literal about it, well, today I’ve devoted myself to the question of slavery in Sudan.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’ve put a call out on my web site, L’infâme.org, for manifestations at all the Sudanese embassies next month.’ He giggles wickedly, ‘I got the idea from those Falun Gong people. They mobilize thousands of people within days without warning.’
‘Monsieur Voltaire—’
‘Speaking of the Chinese, I’ve got a hyperlink on my website to the Tiananmen Mothers campaign. But you know,’ he sighs, totally distracted now by his own train of thought, ‘Overall, I’m rather disappointed by the Chinese.
‘These phone calls to Pakistan?’
‘Faxes, not calls,’ he corrects me.
‘They still cost two—’
He thrusts a clipboard in my face. ‘Could you sign this petition demanding the Communists tell the truth about Tiananmen?’
‘I’ll sign only if you layoff the fax machine.’
His eyes fill with incredulity. ‘And how do I send this in after you sign? Or—or—these briefing papers to the Washington lobby against capital punishment? I’ve got lots of experience with wrongful executions that’s coming in useful here!’
‘Monsieur Voltaire—’
‘You can’t cut me off like this! You can’t! Just last week, I learned that people actually want to stop inoculating their children against disease. Unbelievable, isn’t it, after the trouble I took to introduce smallpox inoculation to France! It was one of my Letters from London!’
‘Monsieur Voltaire! Frank!’
‘Look, look, I’ve had—un instant,’ he pecks frantically with two fingers at my keyboard, ‘voilà! Two thousand and seventy-two hits on my Sudan page since Monday. Timed for a Congressional hearing on oil companies evading the embargo on trading with the Khartoum regime. I shall use your Real Player to regard it on C-Span!’
I pause to take this in. ‘Two thousand and seventy-two people visited your web site?’ ‘The Dalai Lama gives cyber-blessings online. Why shouldn’t I have a few thousand disciples? You look pale, Madame. Are you unwell?’
I sink into a chair. ‘Two thousand and seventy-two people think you’re real?’
Voltaire groans. ‘Madame, I exist in the minds of generation after generation. I exist every time someone says, ‘I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,’ even if he’s never heard of Voltaire, and even though I actually never said that sentence?’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No, some biographer paraphrased me to sum up my point of view. But it’s not bad, and I’ll take credit. The point is, I was so wrong to despair. My spirit is not dead at all! Now! The BBC broadcasts a program called ‘Talking Point’. Let us call in. You will do the talking so I can make the point.’
‘Monsieur Voltaire, I’m trying to make a point right now.’
‘Please, Madame, there’ll be some technical problems if I try alone,’ he pleads. ‘The faxes to Pakistan are something else. It’s a support hotline for Dr. Shaikh. I’m part of a global letter-writing campaign to save his life.’
‘Oh, God. Who’s Dr. Shaikh?’
‘Ah, so little has changed! Dr. Younus Shaikh is a physiology teacher in Islamabad and a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. You’ve never heard of him?’
‘No,’ I whimper.
‘He spoke at the World Humanist Congress in 1999!’
‘I missed it.’
‘Well,’ V. shrugs, perplexed, ‘Dr. Shaikh now stands condemned to death because students at the Capital Homeopathic Medical College allege he taught that before Mohammed became the Prophet, he was uncircumcised, with unshaven armpits and,’ V. gestures below his waist, ‘et cetera.’
Now I can’t believe my ears. ‘They want to execute a professor for saying that Mohammed had body hair?’
‘Well, of course Mohammed had body hair. Mohammed adopted the ritual of circumcision and shaving only after he became the Prophet. Will it never end? Those who believe absurdities are bound to commit atrocities. I parodied these religious wars between turbaned fanatics and warmongering Europeans two centuries ago. I’m adding a cyber-link between L’infâme.org and Dr. Shaikh’s campaign before the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet can have him killed.’
‘Oh, in that regard, I’ve got felicitous news. Here’s a letter with an offer from some fruit vendors. Perhaps it will help to defray my website costs and they’ve offered me a free “e-reader.” A servant of some kind?’
‘This is an offer to appear in an Apple computer ad. How did they find you?’
‘My web site. I don’t approve of their grammatical style.’’
‘Don’t tell me. I can guess.’
He holds his quill up to his brow, his aquiline nose quivering . . . with energy, and his eyes shining with life. With mock gravitas, he intones, ‘Think Different’.’
Later that day, I try again, heading for the office with fresh determination. V. jumps up, covering the screen with his hands.
‘What’s this? Another letter to Kofi Annan?’
I lean over the laptop, but he quickly tilts the screen away. Amidst his frantic attempts to close the ‘window,’ I read aloud:
‘‘Eh, mon Dieu, my dear child, what are your legs and mine trying to say? If they were together they would be well . . . Those lovely thighs so soon to be kissed are now shamefully treated . . . I shall be coming only for you, if my miserable condition permits, I will throw myself at your knees and kiss all your beauties’—’
‘Madame!’ he shouts, ‘That is private!’
‘I’ll say! Wooooooa, what is this?’
I continue reading, trying hard not to laugh with the shock of catching him in flagrante delicto, ‘Stop pushing me!’ ‘‘In the meantime, I press a thousand kisses on your round breasts, on your ravishing cunt, on all your person, which has so often given me erections and plunged me into a flood of delight’—’
‘Madame, you’ve no right to read my letters!’
‘Are you blushing?’ I’m laughing hard now.
‘Reading other people’s letters is a despicable, shameful thing! Frederick the Great lowered himself in my eyes, that monster, by doing just that in Potsdam.’
A Visit From Voltaire Page 27