YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN . . . EVEN WHEN HE’S DEAD!
A Visit From Voltaire was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004.
“In the tradition of the best self-help novels, Voltaire teaches her how to live a happy and full life,” Nicholas Cronk, The Cambridge Guide to Voltaire, March 2009.
Voted second “Must Read” by UK library borrowers, after the winner, Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, and ahead of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Lovely Bones, The Bookseller of Kabul, My Sister’s Keeper and the Sharpe books of Bernard Cornwell. World Book Day April 2005
Definitely my book of the year.” Irene Double, librarian for Bradford Libraries, UK, Shelf Life
A Visit From
Voltaire
by
Dinah Lee Küng
E&E
EYES AND EARS
Eyes and Ears Edition
Geneva, Hong Kong, New York
Eyes and Ears
Publishers, Inc.
130 E. 63rd St. Suite 6F
New York City, USA
10065-7334
email to:
eyesandears.editions@gmail.com
Copyright 2005 by Dinah Lee Küng
Küng, Dinah Lee
www.dinahleekung.com
A
Visit from Voltaire/Dinah Lee Küng—1st Eyes and Ears
ed.
Smashwords edition ISBN 978-2-9700748-6-1
Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Originally published in Great Britain by Peter Halban Publishers Ltd
2003
ISBN 1870015 84 3
Reprinted 2004
A CIP catalogue record
for this book is available from the British Library
Dinah Lee Küng has asserted her right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Monsieur V. says merci
To Helen, Mike, Nina, and
Kadi
Katie, George and Martine
Dedicated to my husband, Peter
Fiction by the same
author
Under Their Skin
Love and the Art of
War
The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries I)
The
End of May Road (The Handover Mysteries II)
The Shadows of
Shigatse (The Handover Mysteries III)
A Note from the Author
This book is part of that genre of fiction in which well-known persons, both living and dead, feature in the narrative. Only those persons given their real names exist. All others are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is nothing more than a coincidence.
Chapter One The Last Straw
Chapter Two A Real Nobody
Chapter Three The Price of Imagination
Chapter Four Call Me V.
Chapter Five The Bastille
Chapter Six This Young House
Chapter Seven L’Académie Vaudoise
Chapter Eight There’ll Always Be an England
Chapter Nine The Froth at the Top
Chapter Ten Elementary, My Dear Voltaire
Chapter Eleven The Eternal Contest
Chapter Twelve May the Force be Damned
Chapter Thirteen Mission Implausible
Chapter Fourteen A Morsel for a King
Chapter Fifteen A Cat Can Look at an Oyster
Chapter Sixteen Birth and Death in Exile
Chapter Seventeen Double Delivery
Chapter Eighteen The Bodhisattva Babes
Chapter Nineteen The Best of All Possible Worlds
Chapter Twenty Courts and Clubs
Chapter Twenty-one The Walls Can Talk
Chapter Twenty-two L’ Infâme.org
Chapter Twenty-three Les Délices
Chapter Twenty-four Grief
Chapter Twenty-five Casanova’s Advice
Chapter Twenty-six I Believe in God
Chapter Twenty-seven The Patriarch
Chapter Twenty-eight To Dust Even Voltaire Shalt Return
‘We’re broke.’
‘No, we’re not,’ I correct my husband. ‘We have $85,000 in the bank.’
‘We did yesterday,’ Peter says. ‘We don’t now. I’ve just had a chat with our so-called contractor.’ His haunted face glances in the direction of the gutted kitchen. The workers are enjoying their second coffee break of the morning—croissants, butter, jam, black coffee, and cigarettes.
‘They’re running seventy-five per cent over his original estimate.’
‘This includes installing the kitchen and rebuilding the stairs to the third floor, right?’
Peter shakes his head. ‘Apparently not.’
A burst of raucous French laughter from the kitchen makes us wince.
‘Where’d he go after you talked to him?’
‘The contractor? He left to look in on another job.’
‘Off to bankrupt someone else. Isn’t there anything we can do?’
There is a long silence. Peter, hypnotized by sudden destitution only five years away from retirement, stares right through me. In Manhattan, I would suggest we sue the pants off the contractor. Now we’ve moved to Peter’s country. This time I’m the foreigner, in a small village in the Jura mountains.
I bite back the word, ‘lawsuit,’ and wait to hear the Swiss solution. .
‘I’m taking the kids skiing.’
‘Peter, are you okay? Skiing? Now? Shouldn’t we talk to lawyer? Or an accountant? Isn’t there some kind of contractors’ tribunal we can appeal to before it’s too late?’ He isn’t listening. ‘Where are you going? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I’m going skiing.’
‘But you promised to put up shelves this morning so I can unpack our books. We’ve waited six weeks for this stuff to arrive. You go back to work on Monday. And you can’t leave me alone with those guys! What if they try to ask me something? I can hardly understand a word they say. Besides . . . besides . . . our kids don’t ski!’
‘You forget I was a ski instructor to pay my way through university. They’re half-Swiss. It’s time I taught them,’ he says with eerie resolution. ‘Are they upstairs? We’d better hurry before the rental place closes for lunch.’
‘Don’t you think we should talk more about what the contractor said?’
I’ve seen this movie. The parched Legionnaire stumbles off into the desert without a drop of water, never to be seen again. The diver delirious with nitrogen pulls off his oxygen tank and drifts away. The space walker disconnects from the mother ship and spirals off into blackness. A Swiss facing financial min takes the ski lift to oblivion.
He summons the children.
‘Peter, not right now, with these guys installing—’
‘Oh, boy! Finally! Is the snow deep enough now? You said we had to wait a few more weeks. Theo, those are my gloves. Hey, Mama, we’re going skiing! Mama? Don’t you want to learn how to ski?’ The eager faces of Alexander, Theo, and Eva-Marie glance up at me over the tumble of snow boots and parkas.
Ten minutes later, I stand abandoned in our empty living room, surrounded by one hundred and forty-four cardboard boxes. An electric saw whines from the kitchen. I can just make out the carpenter shouting some vulgarities over Franco-Arab rap music from a radio. The gasman adds some salacious riposte. My French is only good enough to make out that the innuendoes are about me—this New Yorkaise who ordered a ‘wok’ gas-burner.
Something the carpenter adds about my bottom inspires suggestive retorts from the tiling man from Ticino. I contemplate our new poverty and wonder which happy jokester will be the very last to be paid.
There is a restful silence that grows ominous, some grunting, and a change in tone. Worryingly serious discussion follows. Then footsteps.
‘Madame?’
I follow the carpenter and the gasman to the kitchen where the work island stands on bricks smack in the center of the room, a granite cube blocking all passage.
‘Oh, uh, no, not in the middle, put it here, ici,’ I stand an arm’s reach from the sink.
‘Non.’ The lanky carpenter dolefully wags his head.
‘ICI!’ No, I mustn’t shout. ‘lci, here. Not there. Pas là.’
‘Non,’ squeaks the gasman. ‘Regardez les règles.’
The carpenter thrusts five pages of Swiss regulations into my hands. Flicking his cigarette butt on what would be a parquet floor if they weren’t so many weeks behind schedule, he shifts his weight to the other hip and coolly points to the second page. I can just make out some tiny print to the effect that an île must be placed far enough from the counter to allow three full-grown men to pass. Trois hommes. At the same time.
‘There must be some mistake,’ I insist. ‘That would mean—’
‘lci,’ the gas man squeaks, swinging his legs from his perch on the island.
‘Wait a minute.’ I flip back to the first page. ‘These are restaurant regulations!’
The carpenter explains in slow, simple French, as if I were a backward child. Swiss kitchens are too small to have islands. Counters, oui, les îles, non. My kitchen is too big, too American. Hence he’s resorted to the rules for installing professional cooking spaces, comme pour l’Armee.
Down in the village, the Protestant chapel and Catholic church bells ring out noon. All around me there is a clank of tools hitting the floor, The workers wave, ‘Bon appetit,’ and file through the kitchen door like a circus act retreating from the ring, Out in the snow, I see the tiling man light up a cigarette and cellphone in one seamless gesture,
I return to the living room and savagely attack packing tape with a fruit knife. I wrench open the top of the first box and a whiff of mildew hits my nostrils. I peer into the box and pull off wads of the Los Angeles Times. Something’s wrong here. We just moved from New York, not L.A.
‘Wait a minute,’ I mutter, panicking, I’m staring at sixty-year-old paperbacks by John Masters and James Mitchener with yellowing, lurid covers.
Under Bhowani Junction lie The Complete Works of Eugene O’Neill. At the bottom of the box rest five-years’ worth of Theater Arts magazines.
Where are my books? A vision of my late mother wagging a finger at me from her deathbed, insisting no one ever throw out her Theater Arts haunts me.
‘A complete play in each issue. You couldn’t find some of these plays in print anywhere else.’
I know, Mother, I know.
Wildly, I rip open box after box, Our kitchenware is here and the toys already went upstairs. But the shippers have sent my parents’ books from storage in L.A. and kept back at least half of the books belonging to Peter and me.
I’m whipped. I sit down, holding in my hand a flat package. Folding back a corner of brown paper wrapping, I unveil a framed black-and-white photo of a middle-aged Leonard Bernstein pointing a gun to his temple and smiling at the camera with chagrin.
A caption on the back reads, ‘The critics will shoot me. L.B., New York.’
New York. Only weeks since our departure, it seems a lifetime ago. Through the whirlwind of open suitcases, sawdust, and drills, here is the great composer of West Side Story, pantomiming during rehearsal that he’d reached the end of his rope.
I know just how you feel, Lenny.
I unwrap eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant—the glue of the spines crackling with age. My heart gives a turn when I see my mother’s handwriting in the margins. She didn’t just read, she chatted back in a torrent of comments down the margins of each page. She had a relationship with dead people going back centuries.
Here in these foreign mountains, so far from anything I regard as civilization, the finality of my emigration hits me. My mother will never see her books arranged in my first real home, bought after decades of overseas assignments and rented apartments.
I hoist the heavy tomes on to the new shelves—The Age of Louis XIV, The Age of Voltaire, Rouss—
Frantic pounding at the living-room door alerts me to Peter’s panicked face hunting for me through the frosted window.
‘What is it?’
His expensive ski suit is ripped open at the sleeve and covered up to his shoulders in clumps of snow. His drained expression freezes my heart.
‘Eva-Marie’s had an accident. Her ski caught in the underbrush at the side of the piste. She ricocheted off a tree. I found her lying in a snow drift with her leg facing the wrong way.’
‘What? Wha . . .?’
I’m leaving the boys with you. The doctor is waiting for us at a clinic in Genolier. Wait—I have to warn you. Her face is pretty bad.’
I rush out to the car and find my six-year-old lying across the back seat of the Subaru, her entire right leg enveloped up to her hip in an inflatable red casing. Her face is awash with blood, cuts and bruises. I feel faint at seeing a ghastly quarter-inch hole dug by a tree branch into the bridge of her perfectly sculpted nose.
‘I’m sorry, Mama.’
Under all the congealing blood, she is sheet-white with pain and she hasn’t even seen herself in a mirror yet. I’m dizzy with horror.
‘It’s not your fault, baby.’
I want to throttle my husband, Mr ‘I-was-a-ski-instructor,’ but he drives off too soon for that. I never learned to ski. I always disliked the clumsy equipment of skiing, and the social pretensions of après-ski. Now watching father and daughter race off to the hospital, there is no remaining doubt. I, who have just moved to a Swiss ski station, really hate skiing.
‘I feel funny, Mama,’ says a forgotten voice at my side. Theo and his older brother Alexander are waiting in their ski suits just inside the kitchen door. Theo, who is asthmatic, has red-rimmed eyes.
‘How’s your breathing?’
‘Not so good. I’m getting that rubber band feeling across my chest.’
My eight-year-old sounds apologetic, the classic middle child. We climb past broken planks to his attic bedroom. Sadly, I unpack his nebulizer, switch the voltage from 120 to 240 and place the mask over his small face. He greedily sucks in the aerated medicine, panting in the hope of relief. There is no question he’s going into an asthma crisis. I take his pulse, feel his stomach, and fetch a saucepan for the inevitable vomit. The same damned, hateful routine I thought we had left behind in the polluted Manhattan air.
My husband returns with Eva-Marie in his arms around five that afternoon. Underneath fresh bandages, her face is still pale, but the drama of a leg cast reaching up to the hip is enhanced by painkillers and bravado. The fresh plaster has been wrapped with neon-pink protective tape.
‘It’s a spiral break of the tibia, from here to here.’ My eyes follow the tracing of my husband’s finger. I start cutting up her brand-new school pants, the ones I bought at Gap in New York just days before our flight. I slash angrily all the way up to the crotch to accommodate the plastered limb.
The village doctor is coming to check on both of them as soon as he can, a Dr. Claude,’ Peter says.
I marvel. A doctor who makes house calls? This is so far the only reason I can think of to live in Switzerland. We agree that Dr. Claude will first visit Eva-Marie and Peter on the second floor while I wait with Theo on the third.
The merciless snowfall starts up again, amassing on Theo’s skylight, flake by flake. Soon the windowpane is a square of pure white. I lay my head, my eyes burning with the day’s unshed tears, at the foot of Theo’s bed. Even his rasping can’t keep me from dozing off.
I’m awakened by a polite cough and faint tap at the open door. I look up to see a slender young man of medium height dressed in pants fastened below the knees—the kind that people wear for cross-country skiing—with heavy white socks finished off by soft leather shoes. He’s wearing a long, padded coat, a hand-knitted scarf, and a woolly cap on his head.
His white flesh stretches across the bones like a drum skin. His aquiline nose has a slight aristocratic bump and is tinged with blue from the cold. He has a wide, smiling mouth and a strong, almost pointed, chin. What is that pleasant, almost spicy smell he carries in from the snow? I can’t imagine anyone looking less like Dr. Rothberg, our sixty-year-old pediatrician back in New York. He always smelled like antiseptic hand wash.
I sit upright at attention. It’s obvious our emergency call has interrupted this man’s afternoon outing.
‘Merci, merci, thanks for coming to us on a Saturday evening.’
He brushes this aside. His hands are delicate, and adorned with two ornate rings. Doctors in America don’t wear fussy rings, but on an evening like this, I’ll take what I get.
‘You’ve seen Eva-Marie? Will her leg really be all right?’
‘I’m sure it will. A delightful little patient. The doctor who set the leg has done a very thorough—and if I might say so—colorful job.’
I am relieved this man speaks good English. I was dreading a country doctor who sounded like Inspector Clouseau.
He darts to Theo’s bedside and gently places long, thin fingers on the boy’s forehead. Theo’s face is flushed red, but his sweat is cold.
I shift into ‘competent mother mode.’ ‘Theo’s had bronchial variant asthma since he was eighteen months old, I may have given him too much Ventolin, but I haven’t got on top of the wheezing yet.’
‘His pulse is very high, Madame.’
‘Yes, well, I probably started the medicine too late. We were all distracted by the broken leg. He must’ve caught a chill on the slope while waiting for Eva-Marie to be rescued.’
The man ignores my despairing noises. Moving Theo’s noisy nebulizer carefully out of his way, he reaches for a chair with a polite lifting of the eyebrows.
‘Oh, yes, please,’ I say. Only then does he sit down, so European.
‘The cold wind brought it on, non?’
‘Well, in New York, his triggers were cold air, fatigue, and over-exercise. No problem with dust mites or animals. They did allergy tests on him at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.’
‘Any bleeding?’
‘No,’ I recoil. ‘He’s never coughed up blood,’
‘I beg your pardon, Madame, It’s my poor English. It is so long I haven’t spoken English. I ask myself, have you bled him?’
The room is softly lit. I hope my momentary confusion doesn’t show.
‘Nooo,’ I say, ‘but I do have a bottle of ephedrine, just for emergencies. I brought it from New York.’
‘It’s probably just as well. I was never terribly convinced by leeches or the dried toads of my father’s day. Such remedies supposedly cleanse the blood when combined with lots of liquids.’
Peter warned me St-Cergue was rural, but leeches?
‘Have you tried lemonade?’ he goes on.
‘You did say lemonade, didn’t you?’
‘Oui, les citrons.’ He seems accustomed to a Doubting Thomas like me. ‘At the age of twenty-nine I caught smallpox during a house party at the Château des Maisons. The other guests fled in terror. Dr. Gervais rode out from Paris to attend me. I locked myself up and drank nothing, nothing you understand, but two hundred pints of lemonade and voilà, I was cured.’
Those sharp brown eyes test my reaction. ‘Never underestimate lemonade.’
‘Lemonade.’
‘It can work miracles. If you’ll pardon the expression.’
‘Doctor, would you excuse me?’
I leap over the broken planks and scattered nails to find Peter reading And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street at Eva-Marie’s bedside.
‘Peter, please come upstairs and join us,’ I hiss. ‘I think you’ll find this Dr. Claude is a total quack. A careful quack, I’ll give him that. He’s ruled out leeches and dried toads, but he’s opting for the lemonade cure.’
Peter glances up, uncomprehending.
‘I’ve had it, Peter. We camp for weeks eating off a grocery store hibachi, sleeping with bats, and blasted by Arab hip-hop. This morning we find out we’re broke, that our kitchen has to look like an army canteen, that the shippers sent the wrong boxes.’
‘What?’
‘YES! And to round things off, two out of our three children are taken seriously ill. NOW we get a local doctor who prescribes lemonade for smallpox. Peter, I’m done! I’m cooked! Take me out of the oven! I want to go home!’
A thickset man in sweater and dark pants emerges from our master bathroom, drying his hands with one of my brand new Bloomingdales towels,
This stranger smiles politely, ‘Enchanté, Madame, Docteur Grégoire Claude, Je suis prêt pour Theodor. Or we speak the English, if you prefer it.’
I shake Dr. Claude’s moist hand and mutter, ‘Peter, who’s the guy upstairs?’
He shrugs, ‘The workers all left, ‘
‘Nobody, I guess.’
I’ve lost my mind, that’s all. The Swiss are so sensible. We’ll deal with the small question of my sanity later.
The second Dr. Claude and I clamber up to the third floor.
Theo’s rales—a sound like rolling pebbles rising from his small lungs—greet our ears before we even reach the landing. Dr. Claude runs me through the procedure: two vials of Ventolin administered via the nebulizer every three hours throughout the night, extended to an interval of four hours if the gravelly sound subsides. If Theo starts to suck hard at his stomach or the muscles of his small neck start to flutter, I should give him the first dose of ephedrine and drive him immediately to a hospital.
As for our girl, I must bring her to the clinic for a check-up in three days. Her facial bandages will be changed, but no one can judge the damage to the nose until the swelling subsides in about ten days. He can recommend an ear, nose and throat man, and a plastic surgeon later.
My husband accompanies Dr. Claude to the kitchen for coffee. I march back up to the attic. The pine chair next to Theo’s bed is empty. I nervously look around me, but see only packing cartons covered in a childish scrawl, ‘Theos Toy.’
‘People always underestimate lemonade.’
I jump in shock. The voice came from under the low eaves at the back of the room. I wheel around and there, leaning easily against the beams in the shadow, is that lemonade guy. There is no way this weirdo is touching my child again. I move protectively in front of Theo who lies, eyes closed, breathing noisily.
‘What’d you say?’
‘Calm yourself, Madame. Sometimes it is only the puniest who survives. For example, take me, born on this very day, November 21st, the runt of five children. ‘He won’t last an hour,’ my nurse wept! She called the priest to baptize me still wet from my mother’s loins. Then a week passed, then a month and—oh, I was always sick, but here I am.’
‘Are you?’
I’m playing for time. He’s probably the village idiot, somebody who’s used to this old house standing empty. If he came in through the upper back door that connects the second floor to the rising slope behind the house, he could have snuck up to the attic bedrooms unobserved. It’s just that he looks rather insubstantial in the dark. And where did he learn English?
‘Oui. Here to reassure you, I survived tuberculosis contracted from my own mother, then—oh, let me see—’ he ticks off diseases on his fingers with ghoulish delight, ‘dysentery, smallpox, la grippe, fever, colic, erysipelas, gout, apoplexy, inflammation of the lungs, scurvy, herpes, rheumatism, and strangury!’
‘That all sounds,’ I hesitate for fear of offending a loony, ‘awfully uncomfortable.’
‘Oui, oui. I finished off with deafness, indigestion, dropsy, falling teeth, loss of voice, neuritis, blindness and paralysis.’
‘Um, you seem better now. Where do you live? In the village? I’ll just go catch Dr. Claude to give you a lift home.’
‘Oh, he can’t see me,’ the visitor says, as if this is a small thing hardly worth mentioning.
I fight off rising panic.
‘Theo?’ I nudge my son gently,
‘Hmm?’ He opens his eyes over his mask.
‘Is there anybody over there, at the end of the room?’
Theo glances down the length of scattered boxes and toys.
‘Nope.’
‘Maybe the light is bad. Wait a minute.’ I shine his toy flashlight into the deeper recesses of the room. I play the beam across the wall. The visitor casts no shadow.
‘I’m tired,’ Theo sighs, and closes his eyes.
‘You demand of yourself, am I a creature of the imagination?’ the Frenchman asks blithely. ‘No. Cogito ergo sum, as they say.’ He chuckles, ‘Although I once changed that to, ‘I have a body and I think; I know no more.’
He glances at me, ‘You catch the difference, I hope?’
‘More like Cogito, ergo non es, I would say—I can think straight, therefore you don’t exist, Monsieur. Am I having a nervous breakdown?’
‘Au contraire! I am the real me! I apologize for being somewhat materially diminished by circumstances beyond my control, although I think I could still lift something, if I just concentrate . . . ’
The visitor grimaces almost comically with the effort of focusing on one of Theo’s Playmobil cannibals. His fingers reach out and miss entirely. With an enormous grunt, the Frenchman manages to coalesce his digits into something more solid and the second time, he succeeds in grasping the little plastic figure and lifting it an inch or two in the air.
‘Erh! Voilà!’
The cannibal drops back on the table. He looks at it for a second and mutters, ‘Zut. It’s a question of monads, I think. Leibniz would know. I’ll have to practice more if I want to get anything done.’
He has such a frustrated expression on his face that I giggle despite myself.
‘I trust you didn’t appear in my son’s room just to perform party tricks. Why are you here?’
‘Well, it’s my birthday,’ he suggests, brightening. ‘Are you giving me a fête?’
‘A birthday party?’
‘Obviously, you summoned me,’ he says, slightly offended.
‘Sorry, I did not.’
‘Pardonnez-moi.’
He turns impatient. ‘Perhaps . . .perhaps you needed someone to remind you of the fragility and resilience of childhood, the eternal and often unwarranted fears of parents throughout the centuries? So, look whom you got! Death always stood at my elbow,’ he laughs, but there is a creepy echo that dies a second too late.
‘Now you plan to stand at mine?’
‘Well, I thought I might stay right here,’ he suggests. ‘I’m no longer alive, so I won’t take up much space or food. Although I was never able to give up coffee. Do I smell some brewing downstairs?’
‘You’re joking.’
‘It might be entertaining to linger for a while, keep you company, help you settle in. I take it your life has changed greatly without warning?’
I’m mesmerized. This invisible lunatic is reading my mind and I answer him carefully, racing to understand this new madness.
‘Well, last year I was a correspondent with twenty years of reporting in China behind me, wife of the International Red Cross delegate to the United Nations in New York’
Wait a minute. Why am I confiding in this guy? I should be screaming for help.
‘And now?’ He lightly brushes some cobwebs caught in his luxurious curls. I’m beginning to suspect this character of wearing some kind of hairpiece.
‘Now, we’re camping in a near-derelict house in the middle of a ski station in economic decline. The wiring won’t be finished ‘til Christmas.’
‘Ah, bien, I see workers haven’t changed in two centuries.’
The stranger’s sympathy is frighteningly soothing to my nerves. I can’t help continuing, ‘What’s worse, my husband loves it. He’s finally back in Switzerland, ‘the best of all possible worlds’.’
‘Aaaah,’ that expressive mouth breaks into a broad, knowing smile. ‘I can imagine a woman who has traveled and experienced life as you describe could not imagine being very happy in this petit village, ‘the best of all possible worlds’.’
‘I hold out little hope . . . ’
‘I made a flourishing life in exile, so to speak, dragged from the excitement of Paris, the social whirl of the Court—’
‘Court? There isn’t even a bookstore here.’
‘Madame, life is always either ennui or whipped cream. I expect today you’ve seen more whipping than cream, that’s all. You just need a friend. Reading nurtures the soul, but an enlightened friend brings it solace.’
‘Yes. Yes! Solace, solace! Good word! I could use some of that.’
My burst of despair surprises even me.
‘Sadly, my name is not Solace, Madame. I have yet to introduce myself properly.’
Where’s my sense of humor? Remember the Woody Allen story when he ends up playing poker with the Devil? I could unpack the chess set . . . ’You can skip the formalities. Let’s cut to the chase. Just reverse the events of today, starting with the contractor’s little announcement, in exchange for my soul. I’m ready to cut a deal. Let’s say my people call your people.’
The visitor laughs, but it sounds kindly, not satanic. ‘Oh, chère Madame, I’m not the DEVIL—although the Jesuits do call me the Anti-Christ.’
He stands up and puts one hand behind his back and thrusts a toe in front of him. He bows very slightly, a minimal gesture that bespeaks merely basic courtesy.
‘François-Marie Arouet, Seigneur de Tournay et Ferney, at your service,’ he says. He sits back down, a quicksilver motion of his slight frame. ‘You know, I overheard you downstairs just now, when you referred to me as ‘Nobody.’ I hope you now stand corrected. You may apologize.’
‘Well, Mr Arouet, I’m sorry.’
‘I should think so,’ he sniffs. ‘I’m the greatest playwright, philosopher and essayist ever.’
‘Ever? When exactly were you born?’
His eyes widen. ‘Surely you’ve heard of me? Born in 1694, I came of age between the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Oh, what a period of political mayhem and social dissolution! It is I who broke the shackles of the Catholic Church over Western thinking!’
Now I know he can’t be my own hallucination. I was a Chinese Studies major who slept through European history class. I’ll have to look him up in Wikipedia.
‘You gape at me, Madame? Everywhere I go, I defy that royal terror, the Keeper of the Seals. I’ve mastered the scientific theories of Newton, have won my place at last in the Académie Française and, I might add,’ his bright eyes glitter, ‘have had my luck with the ladies.’
He takes off his woolen scarf. ‘Which reminds me, are you married or widowed?’
‘Married,’ I mumble.
‘That never made any difference before. I can always fit in. I’m a tutor to kings and empresses, a millionaire financier, a benevolent landlord, and a gentleman-farmer.’
‘Is that all? You can’t be the Devil. Even the Devil would’ve been more modest.’
He ignores my sarcasm.
‘Non. They call me the true king of my time, La Lumière, the light. But that’s enough for now. I can see you are énervée.’
‘I’ve lost my mind,’ I mumble. ‘I am bantering with a transparent person.’
‘I leave you now to tend to your child. Bonne nuit, chère Madame.’
With a sweeping bow, this Lord of Light goes out by Theo’s door. At least he’s got the good taste not to fade through walls.
I sit, waiting for the next ghost to appear. The Headless Horseman? My Great Aunt Nell? Why this particular vision? I have nothing in common with this guy except, perhaps, that I graduated from UC Berkeley in the seventies, a period of mayhem and dissolution, for sure. Is this house haunted? And after a day like today, do I really deserve a ghost with a major attitude?
Chapter Three THE PRICE OF IMAGINATION
I bolt upright in bed.
Harry Lime was right about Switzerland. It’s quiet out there. Too quiet. My New Yorker’s subconscious can’t stand this tranquility. I miss the comforting clatter of the garbage truck on 80th Street.
I hear sniffles next door. Eva-Marie is crying through her bandages in the dark. Stupidly I assume that what upsets me—the broken leg, the facial wounds and the painful, inconvenient months to come—are the cause of her sleeplessness.
As usual with my third child, I’ve got it all wrong.
‘I don’t want to grow old,’ she sobs. ‘Next February, I’ll be seven, and that’s so old. That’s the limit. Six is best. After six, it’s, it’s . . . ’
‘What?’
‘Over. Seven is the last time you have imagination.’
I embrace her tightly, the edge of her plastered hip cutting into my side. I croon into her ear, ‘No, no, look at me, I’m forty-nine and I still have imagination.’
She closes her eyes, wrinkling the bandages around her temples. ‘You’re different.’
I haven’t forgotten Saturday night’s departure from lucidity, but everything was back to normal on Sunday—no apparitions in knee breeches—just hours of tedious unpacking. Having an imaginary friend at age four or even six is right on schedule. Having one at forty-nine is worrying. I fish around for more reassuring examples.
‘Well, then, take Theo. He’s eight and—’
‘Right! And he doesn’t believe in anything anymore—not even unicorns!’
This diagnosis of Theo’s senility strikes me as a tad premature. He spent most of the weekend before the asthma attack playing I, Claudius, his beloved ‘blankie’ draped over one hairless, pudgy shoulder. I hold to one hard and fast rule: they must not watch the episode where Caligula disembowels his sister pregnant with his love child. The boys might find this too inspiring.
‘Playing I, Claudius takes imagination, doesn’t it?’
‘No, Mama. That’s acting. Roman senators were real. I mean imagining real magic things.’
I sigh, recalling when a five-year-old Singaporean visited Alexander in Manhattan for a play-date. He marched into my bedroom at 3:58 pm, announcing it was time to watch Batman.
‘We don’t watch TV during play-dates,’ I told the visitor firmly. ‘In this house, we play with our imagination.’
The child shook his head. ‘My mother hasn’t bought me one of those yet.’
Peter and I immediately disconnected the kids’ TV from the cable feed and bought Broadway musicals, old-fashioned swashbucklers, the old Robin Hood black-and-white series—anything with more acting and imagination than special effects. I’ll have to order more. Can videos keep them speaking decent English for the next decade? Or will they start slipping into French with a backwoods Vaudois dialect? Given a few more years on this Swiss mountain, where will they fit in? Where will I?
‘My leg hurts,’ says Eva-Marie.
I give her a painkiller and soon she falls asleep, stringy hair pasted to her cheeks. The garish pink cast is propped up on a doll’s bed at the foot of her mattress. I ache at the sight of those tiny toes, painted blue with washable marker. She won’t be able to touch them until after Christmas.
I tiptoe downstairs across the ground floor of our Grit Palace, kicking aside scraps of wall trim. It’s still too soon to say how well our Hong Kong furniture will go with a low-ceilinged stone farmhouse. Suzy Wong meets Heidi.
The silence is broken by the rustling of paper packaging. Oh, God, is the loony back? I creep across the dining room and peer into the kitchen, hoping it’s something I can handle, like rats.
‘Hi, Mama.’
‘Oh, Alexander.’ I take a deep breath. ‘You’re up early.’
‘I want more reading time before the train leaves.’ He pours himself a second bowl of cereal.
‘Alexander?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Who reigned in France between Louis XIV and Louis XV?’ He glances at me over a thick history book. ‘Louis XIV and a half.’
‘Your mother is not that stupid.’
‘The Moon King.’
‘Yuk, yuk. Okay, you don’t know.’
‘I know,’ he says, putting the book down with feigned reluctance. ‘The Regent, Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, a nephew of the Sun King.’
‘Was that a period of mayhem and dissolution?’
‘I’m not sure,’ my skinny pedant weighs this question. ‘Depends on what you call dissolution.’ He gives his eyebrows a lusty Groucho Marx twitch.
‘Who are his teachers?’ a French voice butts in.
‘Oh my God!’ I cry.
‘Sit on something?’ Alexander hardly glances up from his tome.
Our ghost saunters into the kitchen from the living room. I see he has been busy near the fireplace. On the coffee table sits one of my mother’s porcelain coffee cups. Somehow, he has excavated this delicate vessel from a newspaper-wrapped jumble of jelly-jar glasses, cheap Hong Kong dinnerware, and kid-proof plastic cups.
‘I spent Sunday warming up my physical capacities,’ he explains. ‘I’ve moved on from cannibals.’
He seats himself unobtrusively next to Alexander who doesn’t blink an eye. My child is already dressed in his jeans and sweater and in a few minutes he’ll head out into the pre-dawn chill. Gone are the days of the Jamaican nanny laying out his St. Boniface uniform in time for the private yellow bus service.
What do I smell? A trace of carnation?
‘Alexander, do you smell something?’
‘I took a bath last night. Theo didn’t.’
‘My toilet water, Madame.’
The ghost is not only freshly perfumed, he looks as perky as if he’d been up for hours. He’s wearing a floppy red velvet cap over thick brown curls tied loosely at the nape of his thin neck with a black ribbon. His face is scraped clean of whiskers. His dressing gown of green brocade reaches below his stocking’ed knees. His rather bony feet are encased in needlepointed slippers. In a word, gorgeous.
‘History student?’ he asks casually, glancing at Alexander’s book.
I nod slowly. Are there any English-speaking shrinks closer to us than Geneva? This’ll take more than one consultation, for sure.
Alexander goes upstairs to brush his teeth.
‘History is often just a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of other people,’ the phantom quips. ‘Or a picture of human crimes and misfortunes.’
‘Why have you come back?’ I whisper. ‘Your birthday’s over. My little crisis is over. I’m fine. You’re fine. Goodbye.’
‘You’re fine, Madame? Well, we’re all contented! As for me, I hardly slept last night for working my way through your books. It was good lifting practice, but such a disappointment! Not a single edition of Locke or Newton! On the other hand, no Descartes or that rubbishy Pascal. Some books of philosophy, literature, and history. And most wonderfully, anthologies and biographies pertaining to your modern theater.’
‘Those were my mother’s books,’ I whisper through my teeth. ‘Those theater anthologies are fifty years old.’
‘The theater is éternal, Madame. A passion that knows no bounds. I recall a certain Mr Bond in London—a very wealthy man. He loved my play Zaïre so much he produced it only so that he could star in the leading role. Well, on opening night, Mr Bond was so enthusiastic about his death scene, he actually dropped dead on stage!’
‘In front of the audience?’
‘Now there’s someone who appreciated drama! I tell you, the audience went wild.’
‘What did you do?’
He shrugs. ‘I was only sad that the performance couldn’t be repeated. Ticket sales flew heavenward.’ One elegant digit points at my low ceiling beams.
‘My mother never took her love of theater that seriously,’ I reflect.
The ghost is practicing moving Corn Puffs into the shape of a fleur-de-lis. ‘In one of your boxes I found nothing but factual books on Asiatic subjects and slim little novels about murder and death—a morbid obsession!’
‘So they did send some of my books. I’ve given up journalism. I’m trying a new career as a mystery writer.’
‘Your husband’s bibliothèque was more rewarding—Goethe, Schiller, and an encyclopedia, unreadable of course, as it’s in German. Frederick the Great and I corresponded in French for forty-two years. You and I can manage in English very well until you learn French. My dear friend Madame du Châtelet learned English in about six months. You’ll just do the same, but in reverse.’
‘You can’t stay here for six months!’
He scrutinizes his surroundings. ‘Now, I look forward to hearing the boy’s lessons.’
‘He can’t see you—I hope?’
‘I said I’ll listen. Who’s his tutor?’
Where to begin? Peter and I had looked forward to an escape from patronizing New York private school ‘educators’ dripping phrases like ‘the gift of time,’ ‘age-appropriate,’ and ‘reading readiness.’ Now we find that Swiss youngsters learn by filling in worksheets as if they are all training to be clerks. Given Switzerland’s fame for banking secrecy and hotel management, perhaps that’s not far off.
Worse, in Switzerland, the sixth-grade teachers decide who will go to college. Is this some kind of scholastic homage to Genevan Calvinist theories of predestination? Alexander is already terrified by next year’s ‘cut.’ You’d think his lack of French was the first concern, but no. His new teacher warned us he might not make university-track because his backpack is too messy.
Alexander, now transformed into a huge wad of Gore-Tex, shuffles through the kitchen into the laundry room. He never gives Monsieur Arouet a glance, although he stuffs the Corn Puff fleur-de-lis into his mouth. In a second, we hear him rummaging around for his snow boots.
‘He doesn’t have a tutor. He goes to public school by train.’
M. Arouet is astonished. ‘No tutor? By train? Alone? It’s black as a Jesuit’s cassock out there. Well, it was five minutes ago.’
Dawn’s pink rays are just cresting the Alps across the lake, waking a pack of huskies caged next door. Their howling fills the neighborhood and wakes up the second team down the road.
My skittish companion jumps in alarm. ‘A royal hunting pack?’
‘Sled dogs. Big winter sport around here.’
M. Arouet recovers, but is still astonished at my callous maternal behavior. He wags one of his skinny fingers in my face.
‘And you’re sending your son to the dogs! I know this part of the world. A boy who reads such books deserves better! Madame, as the son of a mere Parisian notary, I was tutored at home by the Abbé de Châteauneuf, a man of wide culture and blessedly broad views.’
The phantom turns reflective, ‘Ah, the Abbé ! He was the last love of the great courtesan, Ninon de Lenclos, who seduced even Cardinal Richelieu in her time. In 1704 the Abbé took me to her house in Paris and there she was at eighty-four, still swathed in fine satins and lace.’ He leans over the table and giggles, ‘She was dry as a mummy.’
‘You don’t say!’ I too, leaning forward, repress a smile.
‘Yes, but she bequeathed me 2,000 francs for book money—by the way, don’t you drink coffee?’
This morbid picture of a desiccated courtesan makes me think Alexander might be just as well off with Swiss worksheets and neat backpacks.
‘Did the Abbé introduce you to anything besides prostitutes?’
He straightens in indignation. ‘Mais oui! He taught me that religion was a device used by rulers to keep the ruled in order and awe. For saying that, Madame, he could be hung from the gallows! And he prepared me well for seven more years with the Jesuits in Paris, men who trained the mind of Descartes, and all the great dissenters of France.’
He adds, ‘Although those damned Jesuits buggered me to such a degree that I shall never get over it as long as I live.’
He gazes longingly at the coffee machine. ‘Perhaps some coffee flavored with cloves, the way they serve it in Versailles?’
Alexander returns from the laundry room and dons gloves and scarf I have no wish to see him raped by priests, but I do wish he were going off to sharpen his wits on Aristotle, Epicurus, and Descartes. I kiss my first-born and pull his balaclava down over his forehead in a maternal gesture bravely borne.
Monsieur Arouet appears beside us in the doorway, struggling with a heavy woolen coat that covers his dressing gown and changing into hand-cobbled shoes. It seems he’s come equipped with his own wardrobe.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘To the train, Mama. Bye.’ Alexander kisses my cheek and opens the kitchen door, shooting a blast of frozen air straight up my Japanese yukata.
‘To the train! You are a careless woman, I vow. When nine-year-old Zozo Arouet left for the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand, he did not walk alone. I was accompanied by a man-servant as well as my tutor.’
‘Well, as you may have noticed, Zozo,’ I retort, ‘we don’t have any servants at all. The station’s just down the hill. This isn’t Paris or, for that matter, New York. He’s perfectly safe.’
But l can see it is more than concern for Alexander’s physical welfare that is drawing this will-o’-the-wisp’s attention. ‘Which train, Madame?’ Out of his pocket, Monsieur Arouet takes an enormous jewel-encrusted watch on a gold chain.
‘7:12. Why bother if he can’t see you?’
‘I’ll be back tout de suite for coffee. Maybe mixed with champagne, or mustard, the way Frederick the Great served it? Or with a touch of ginger, Dutch-style?’
‘How can you drink—?’ I protest, but the Phantom of the Overcoat’s already scurrying after Alexander. Amazed, I watch my son’s slender form, bent over with the weight of his backpack, trudging past the pines at the end of our property and down the shoveled path between the snow banks. He never glances at the reedy figure dancing lightly at his side.
The winter sun rises behind them in a blood-red sky to the east of Europe’s tallest mountain, Mont Blanc.
As the two of them turn at our gate, I hear the ghost’s breathy voice in the morning air like an actor declaiming to an unseeing audience. ‘I may have fought the Jesuits’ doctrines all my life, but I never forgot what they taught me. The most industrious, frugal, regulated life possible . . . Nothing will ever erase in my heart the memory of Father Porée. Never did a man make study and virtue so pleasant . . . ’
Alexander is oblivious to this flow of advice, but something has communicated itself to the child. A more positive breeze in the air? The rousing sight of a blazing sky? He straightens his shoulders as he disappears from my view.
My bones have felt chilled since I got off that plane, but now, thinking of Monsieur Arouet at my son’s side, my heart feels a welcome warmth. So what if Alexander can’t see his talkative escort? I guess this lunacy is all mine to enjoy. Maybe I’ll hold off the appointment with a shrink. This eighteenth-century blabbermouth has brought an unexpected perspective to all the newness of our life here by talking of things even stranger. His withered whores and buggering Jesuits pour balm on my panicked soul.
I’m shivering in my cotton wrap. I’ll have to order one of those ugly duvet bathrobes from a catalogue—the kind that makes you look like a rolled-up mattress. Any pretense at being fashionably dressed is going down the tubes in this rustic setting. Since we left New York, I’ve piled on clothing without regard for cut or color, skipped my make-up, and scraped my hair into a careless ponytail.
Wait. This house ghost’s got more style than me—and he’s dead. I better slap on some blusher. I just hope he won’t want to borrow my face powder.
I relinquish the bathroom to Peter, in a hurry to ferry our daughter in his arms to the clinic. Upstairs, I hear Theo starting up his asthma machine. It’s at least comforting to know that when I packed up all our worldly and spiritual goods to come to Switzerland, my imagination came with me.
While I was finishing the unpacking, I did some sneaky research among my mother’s books and I’ve nailed down the Velvet One.
Why me? I’m unworthy, to say the least. He’s so cocky, I’m not ready to address him by his title just yet. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. I’ll wait for him to announce himself.
‘By the way, Monsieur Arouet is a bit formal. You may call me ‘V’ if you like. That’s how I signed many of my letters,’ he says, breezing in. ‘I was in a hurry. I wrote some fifty thousand in all. They fill ninety volumes. You must get a set.’
So he’s taking the modest tack for a change. I could have done worse in the poltergeist department. He’s quite the polite young gentleman. Not only does he not penetrate walls, but he’s always exquisitely mannered and discreet, not to mention freshly attired, shaved, and ready to please. He even smells good.
His presence also helps in more concrete ways. With V. as company, I don’t feel so besieged by workers who regard the restoration of our house as a communal New Deal project padding their wallets in time for Christmas shopping. When the carpenter announces after a three-hour lunch, ‘This is not America! I work to live, I don’t live to work!’ I swear I see V. push a winch off a shelf on to the carpenter’s toes.
I also appreciate that the sprightly Monsieur Arouet is a dirty ‘Entertainment Tonight!’ broadcast in wigs and shoe buckles, a walking I720s edition of Vanity Fair, a cavorting illustration of the joke, ‘I never repeat gossip, so listen well the first time.’
Put another way, he never shuts up. We’ve moved on from his early childhood to his start in salon society. What a flake! How this rhyming flibbertigibbet in lace cuffs ever became the Great You-Know-Who mystifies me. He’s obsessed with social tittle-tattle.
When he told me of the four Nesle sisters who served as mistresses to King Louis XV, each in her backs tabbing turn more venal than her sibling, I stopped worrying so much about rivalry between Theo and Eva-Marie. When he described yesterday how Madame d’Étioles caught Louis’ eye by hanging around the Sénart hunting grounds in a baroque carriage while his queen was looking the other way, I was relieved to learn that Peter’s new secretary is a spinster who wears twinsets and pearls.
Nor do I dismiss the sympathy of sharing the house with someone who, like me, is constantly cold. He’s always wrapping his fleshless form in shawls and finely fitted housecoats and vests.
But we all know how this plays out. I watched ‘Topper’ on our black-and-white TV when I was a kid. The ghosts George and Marian always got the old fuddy-duddy Cosmo Topper into trouble by arguing with him in front of his dingbat wife. In every episode, Henrietta fussed, ‘What did you say, dear? Who were you talking to? Really, Cosmo! Pull yourself together!’
There’s worse, I could slip into the Mrs Muir scenario. That’s where your uninvited haunter is so smooth and witty-—in short, so superior to the mere mortals you’re normally stuck with—that you decide to cross that final line of sanity and start turning see-through yourself.
I’ve resolved to remove Mr Wig politely from the house, but I’m having trouble working the conversation around to eviction.
Oblivious to my decision, he spends a full three days unpacking his personal necessities—-books, globes, maps, telescopes and his own Sèvres porcelain coffee set. My office reeks of lavender, carnation, vetiver, and cloves. He insists he’ll unpack himself, working non-stop on his powers of lifting, so as to resume material life, especially coffee-drinking, as he says, ‘toute de suite.’
‘Ah, good morning, Madame! I’ve moved your collection of dismal volumes about people murdering other people to the shelf behind that pile of old newspaper clippings. I’ll keep the oriental histories and maps. I always like to write about characters who travel long distances to exotic places. Have you read my story Micromégas yet? I’m sure you noticed the influence of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, but mine was better, I think —?’
‘Those are my clips,’ I shout, reaching to stop him from dumping my own collected works behind the printer.
‘Your ceilings are a bit low, but it’s nicer than that sinkhole they gave me as official historian to the Court in Versailles,’ he says, untying cumbersome quarto editions of Milton.
‘Is all this necessary? I mean, it’s all part of the . . . the ghost-package, isn’t it? You’re sure no one else can see all this stuff or trip over it?’
‘I find it easier to work with things of no substance. Less heavy.’
My resolve must be slipping again. Why am I feeling relieved nobody will notice all his accoutrements?
‘—And you never know what you’ll need in the countryside. Now Madame du Châtelet, my mistress—’
‘I think you’ve already mentioned her a few times—’
‘She brought two hundred parcels when we fled Paris for the countryside of Cirey. I’ve left quite a lot behind.’ He’s unrolling a larger-than-life oil painting of Catherine the Great at the foot of the guest bed. ‘It’s so pleasant to wake up with an Empress at my feet,’ he giggles, nailing the canvas Catherine to the wall.
‘Really, I think you better stop right there,’ I say, but he empties his brassbound trunk full of ruffled shirts and silk hose. ‘You won’t need a wardrobe like that in St-Cergue, The men around here look like they sleep in their snow boots. Come to think of it, so do the women.’
‘Ah, Madame,’ the Frenchman trills, ‘How sad they don’t appreciate the superflous, that element so essential to life!’
Okay, he’s funny, at least funnier than the young painter downstairs who is crying midway through the morning into his cellphone to his therapist. Apparently his middle-aged partner (and gay lover, the tiling man discreetly explains to me in hushed voice,) got hit by the ski train after a breakfast of coffee and white wine. St-Cergue’s single train platform is now spattered like vintage Pollock with two cans of our bedroom’s off-white latex acrylic, not to mention the various colors of the poor painter himself.
My kitchen has become an impromptu grief-counseling headquarters as the bereaved receives well-wishing electricians, wood-flooring teams, and plasterers for consolatory reminiscences and a drink. They’re using my mother’s crystal, goddammit. We’ve had two major snowstorms, and thanks to this informal wake, it’s the first time the snow plow man has cleared away the slush blocking our gateway. Death as a one-time maintenance bonus.