Andrew Miller - Pure

He takes off his shoes, his pistachio breeches. He is interested, slightly disconcerted, to discover that he has an erection. Some strange after-effect of the drinking, the libidinous wine. He grips his cock through the material of his shirt. Is the life of the body the true life? The mind nothing but a freakish light, like the St Elmo’s fire sailors see circling the tips of their masts in mid-Atlantic? He is savouring this little pensée (in which he does not believe at all), holding his cock like a pen he might use to note it down with, when he is startled by a noise from the passage, the slow dragging of claws across wood, a sound he is starting to be familiar with. He waits. It comes again. He goes to the door. When he opens it, Ragoût looks up at him with yellow, unreadable eyes, eyes that seem to possess their own luminescence, as certain flowers do at dusk. He crouches, strokes the creature’s head, the mangled ear. ‘Very well, my friend. But mind you don’t stick those claws in my throat in the middle of the night.’

From the other side of the unlit passage a movement silences him. He squints. It is Ziguette Monnard. She is in her nightclothes. Her hair is unpinned, brushed free.

‘The cat,’ he says.

‘Ragoût,’ she says.

‘Yes.’ He cannot stand up; he is still hard. Even in this light it would be impossible to disguise the fact. ‘It must be late,’ he says.

‘I hope you are happy here,’ she says.

‘I am sure I shall be.’

‘You have begun your work?’

‘Some. . preliminaries.’

She nods. ‘Then good night, monsieur.’

‘Good night, mademoiselle.’

She turns away, slips into her room. Jean-Baptiste stands, rubs his back, looks down at the absurd puppet now, at last, making its slow bow between his thighs. On the end of the bed, Ragoût is licking his paws. Jean-Baptiste shrugs off the banyan, folds it over the back of the chair, puffs out the candle, feels his way between the slight dampness of the sheets. Then. .

‘Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in Normandy. What are you? An engineer, trained at the Ecole des Ponts. .’

Some nights more convincing than others.

A girl is crossing the burying ground of les Innocents. In one hand, from a length of twine knotted about its feet, she carries a hen; in the other a wicker basket full of vegetables, some fruit, a dark loaf. She was, as usual, one of the first at the market, her slight figure, the thick auburn hair, a familiar sight among the servants who make up the greater part of the early trade. Where she stops, the stall-holder never tries to cheat her. Nor does she need to squeeze and plump the produce, to sniff or haggle like the cook’s maids with their chapped fingers, or those bony matriarchs of pared-down households who live a peg or two above destitution. She is served quickly, respectfully. Perhaps she will be asked about her grandfather’s health, his stiffening joints, but no one will detain her long. It is not that they dislike her. What is there to dislike about Jeanne? But she comes from the other side of the cemetery wall, a place, in this last quarter of the eighteenth century, many people would prefer not to be reminded of. She is sweet, pretty, well mannered. She is also the little auburn-haired emissary of death.

The morning is cold, beautifully bright. Her shadow and the hen’s glide over the stiff grass as she follows the path — a path unmarked by anything other than her own feet — from the door onto the rue aux Fers to the sexton’s house by the corner of the church. In places the ground she passes is uneven, the grass lying in shallow hollows where a grave has subsided. A careless visitor, one who did not know his way, might plunge into one of these, plunge in up to waist or shoulders, even vanish entirely. But not Jeanne.

She stops by the preaching cross, that pillar of stone and iron where once wild-eyed men must have leaned to harangue the crowd. By the bottom of its steps is a clump of honesty, the seedpods bright as money in the sunlight. She bends to pick some, to snap the dry stalks, and puts them in her basket. Not much grows in les Innocents any more. The earth is exhausted from its work, though her grandfather, sexton for fifty years, has told her that when he first came there the cemetery in spring was like a country meadow and that in his predecessor’s time the priest and the locals had grazed their animals in it and the grass was cut for hay.

She picks up her hen. Upside down again, it immediately returns to its stupor. She takes a line that keeps her just beyond the heavy shadow of the church. She dawdles, listens to the city beyond the walls, to Paris going about its morning business, hears the geese in their pens at the market, the shrimp-girl singing her wares, the babies crying in the wet-nurse’s house on the rue de la Ferronnerie. .

As a young girl — she was nine when the last interment took place — the cemetery made its own sounds. The tap-tap of the mason, the rhythm of a spade, the tolling of the bell. Now — for how much noise can a girl and an old man make? — the place is silent unless its peace is disturbed by some visitor, the sort who slides uninvited over the walls at night. A winter dawn two years ago, a duel was fought in the corner by the rue de la Lingerie. From the house, she and her grandfather could hear it plainly enough, the brief clash of weapons, the shouting that ended it. Grandfather waited until it was full day before going out. All they had left behind them was trampled grass and a piece of cloth torn from a shirt, bloody.

And then there are the lovers: there is little she has not seen in that way. Just this last August, under a hazy yellow moon, she watched a boy — one of the porters, from the way he was built — with a girl pretty as an elf queen and no older than herself. When he did it to her, she mewed like a cat. And they did not do it once but three or four times, only stopping to look a little at the moon and drink from the bottle they brought with them and which she found the next day leaning against the Peyron tomb they had used as their bed. There was a spit of wine still in it and she had tasted it, felt it run down her throat, then hidden the bottle in a hole under the tomb.

Sometimes — rarely — she sees the old priest in his glasses, a big wingless bat in the dusk. And sometimes the red-haired musician, who comes out to relieve himself and always waves when he sees her. She would like to look at his hands. His hands must be special because only special hands could make the sounds he makes, that music that once or twice a month seeps through the black walls of the church and makes her heart race.

Outside the house, she looks up to let the autumn sun rest its warmth on her face, then, revived, comforted by its touch, she goes inside. Grandfather is in the kitchen. She brings the bird to him, holds it up for him to put his fingers into its feathers. He makes a little grunt of approval, then tilts his chin towards the room off the kitchen, the sexton’s office, a whitewashed room with a narrow, arched window where who knows how many volumes of records with their dust, their mouse droppings, their crazy marblings of damp, are lined up on sagging shelves. A man is standing at the desk with one of the volumes open in front of him. He stares at it, turns a page, presses a cloth to his face, shuts his eyes, inhales deeply, then pushes the cloth back into the pocket of his coat. The coat is unbuttoned and beneath it she can see a line of his suit, green like the heart of a lettuce.

The hen clucks; the man turns towards the kitchen. He nods to her, and when she says nothing, he tells her his name. ‘I am looking at the records,’ he says.

‘I can see it,’ she says.