Andrew Miller - Pure

‘ “Beware the Lord will empty the earth and turn it upside down and scatter its inhabitants. .” ’

No infants? No stables? No shepherds or journeying kings?

‘ “The earth dries up and withers, the whole world withers and grows sick, the earth’s high places sicken, and the earth itself is desecrated by the feet of those who live in it. .” ’

Ezekiel? Isaiah? The others will know.

‘ “Desolation alone is left in the city and the gate is broken into pieces. . If a man runs from the rattle of the snare, he will fall into the pit; if he climbs out of the pit, he will be caught in the trap. .” ’

He does not spare them. He would not consider it kind to spare them. At length — great length — he shuts the book and the little congregation is left to pick through their consciences in silence, while Jean-Baptiste, hat in hand but head unbowed, looks out at the sky and is lost for a time in the beauty and mystery of what is most ordinary. When it is over, the company embrace one another, stiffly, solemnly, then quit the house in pairs, melt into the brightening day.

At the farm, the kitchen is already strewn with relatives. Children — a boy and girl Jean-Baptiste only vaguely recognises — clamber onto his back the moment he sits down. Cousin André is there, of course, looking prosperous, masonic, entertaining the women with tales of small-town scandal. And there too the poorest of the relatives, old Dudo and his wife — pure Baratte peasantry — their eyes untellable from those of the beasts they husband on their scrap of Norman mud. They speak only old Norman, understand no French, and sit at the end of the table smuggling slices of white sausage under their smocks. A plate of it is always left near them for this purpose. Even the children know better than to notice what they do.

In the midst of this, this amiable hubbub, Jean-Baptiste works at his cider. The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes? Having longed to escape Paris, he is anxious now to return. Whatever his life will be, whatever fate it is he is pressed against, it will be lived out somewhere else, not here among the still-loved fields and woods of his boyhood. He drains his mug, chews at something in the bottom of it, and stretches for the jug. His sister settles on the bench beside him. When they were younger they used to fight, and she had seemed to him spiteful, proud, yet now — plain and twenty-three — she is all kindness, and with a wisdom she has pulled down from who knows where, an enviable wisdom. She asks him more questions about Paris, about the fashions, about those Monnards he lives with. He knows she knows he has not told her the half of it. She asks more particularly if he has been in good health. A little fatigued, he says, shrugging. He has not been sleeping as he used to. And then it occurs to him what she might be referring to.

‘You mean I do not smell as sweet as I did?’

‘We wondered if it was the air in Paris, Jean. That it is not as good as here.’

‘It is not,’ he says. ‘Not at all.’

‘Then when you return here, you will recover,’ she says. ‘Already I think it is somewhat improved.’

He thanks her, drolly.

‘When do you go back?’ she asks.

Armand and his mistress must have been busy, Jeanne too perhaps. When Jean-Baptiste returns to Paris he is pointed out in the street, or simply stared at as if he might reveal a fringe of angel wing above the collar of his coat, or a nub of horn on his brow. In the marketplace, the morning before the Feast of Epiphany, an old man, one of the ragged, grimacing sort who haunt any public space, waves a withered arm at him and warns him to leave alone ‘the field of our fathers lest the wrath of the Almighty. .’ Two days later, a stall-holder on the rue de la Fromagerie makes him a gift of honeycomb, wishes him luck. He starts to hear a new word at his back. ‘Engineer.’ He wonders how many of them have any clear notion of what an engineer is.

But of all the reactions he encounters in the first cold days of the New Year, none is more perplexing than that of the Monnards. Coming back to the house, he had felt almost pleased to see them, had been most particular in his thanks to Monsieur Monnard for the loan of his suit, assiduous in his enquiries as to how Madame and Mademoiselle Monnard had enjoyed the festivities, but by dinner on the second evening, it was clear that all was not well with them. It was Madame Monnard (having first ejected a piece of gristle from her mouth to the top of her fist) who raised the matter that was evidently the source of their disquiet.

‘Monsieur,’ she began, ‘is it the case what we hear about the cemetery?’

‘Madame?’

‘That it is. . to go?’

He set down his knife and fork. ‘In a manner of speaking, madame, yes. It is to be removed, the land made clean. The church too, in time, will be removed.’

‘It comes as a shock to us,’ said Monsieur Monnard. ‘We had not suspected it.’

‘I am sorry for it, monsieur. But the church and cemetery have been closed these last five years. They could not be left to. .’

‘It is hard for us to think of it,’ said Madame, a strange shrill voice.

‘I hope it is for the public good, madame,’ said Jean-Baptiste. ‘And this house will no longer overlook a place of public interment. Will no longer have to suffer the consequences of that.’

‘What consequences?’ asked Monsieur Monnard.

Jean-Baptiste glanced down at his plate, where, in the coolness of the room, his food was already starting to congeal. ‘Can it be entirely healthy, monsieur?’

‘Do we seem unhealthy to you?’

‘No. Of course. I did not mean to suggest. .’

‘Well then?’

And Ziguette began to cry. A thin whining followed by a gulp, then a sob rising out of her bosom, all of it accompanied by a vigorous working of her face so that she looked to Jean-Baptiste like someone he had never seen before. She fled the room. Madame and Monsieur exchanged glances.

‘If I have. .’ began Jean-Baptiste, half rising from his chair.

‘Poor Ziggi so dislikes any commotion,’ said Madame, and then made certain remarks, incomprehensible at first, but which Jean-Baptiste finally understood to mean that Ziguette had started her monthly bleeding and was, as a result, unusually sensitive.

The sequel to this uneasy scene took place later the same night. Jean-Baptiste was in his room, wrapped in the red damask of his banyan. He was reading a few lines out of Buffon, something about the manner in which certain non-poisonous creatures mimic the markings of their poisonous cousins, when he heard the familiar scratching at the door and, opening it, expected to greet the muscular Ragoût but found instead Ziguette, white as death, and dressed in her nightclothes. That she was uncorseted was apparent each time she sighed.

She wanted to explain, or to apologise or both or neither. After some whispering at the door, he invited her inside, and as there was only one chair, he offered it to her and sat on the bed. She did not seem startled by the banyan, did not comment on it. He put another stick on the fire. He tried to reassure her.

‘When it is done, think how nice it will be. In place of what you have now, a pleasant square. Gardens perhaps.’

She nodded. She seemed to be attempting to follow his reasoning, but her eyes had filled with tears again. ‘It is,’ she said, after a pause, ‘as though you wished to dig up my childhood.’

‘Childhood?’

‘Innocent, girlish days.’

‘I shall be digging only the cemetery. Earth and old bones. Many old bones.’