A Visit From Voltaire Read online

  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: [email protected]

  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.

  Table of Contents

  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

  Acknowledgements

  Afterword

  Chapter One THE LAST STRAW

  ‘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 r
oom, 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.’