Andrew Miller - Pure

He pauses, then stretches for something by his boots, lifts it like a living thing, something that might wake and fly. It is a length of cut wood, or the hollow stem of a plant perhaps — fennel, hogweed. He tilts back his head and blows gently at the base of it. At its tip, a glow becomes a spark becomes a flame, a tongue of flame, its light settling over the man’s upturned features, his narrowed eyes. The others sit, watch. Something is absorbed. Then words again, three or four weighty words, which his listeners repeat in voices no louder than the rain. And then it is done; it is over. They rise from the straw, file out of the tent, some of them glancing at the old church, some at the charnels. Quiet as ghosts they go into their own tents. Night, in the blue hulls of rain clouds, passes softly above them. The cemetery settles.

In the morning when he opens his eyes, there is already light around the shutters. He fumbles for his watch, flicks up its lid (the all-seeing eye) and holds it beside one of the fragile lines of daylight. A quarter past eight! He wrestles open the shutters and looks down. The tents are still there, the big fire burning briskly, figures moving between the latrines and the tents. That patch of colour crossing the wet grass is Jeanne, and the big-shouldered woman beside her surely Lisa Saget. There is Lecoeur, talking to one of the men. And there is Armand! Armand making himself useful while he, the engineer, the captain, is still in his bed!

There is not much dressing to be done; there was not much undressing the night before. He buttons his waistcoat, pulls on his boots, his hat, and clumps down the stairs three at a time, passes the cellar door, a door that always seems to find itself behind a fine curtain of shadow. .

At the cemetery, he is grinned at; grinned at particularly by Armand, but no one is so unkind as to make a remark. Everyone is busy, calmly busy. He is pleased, relieved, more grateful to them than he dares to express. Jeanne puts a bowl of coffee into his hands, and before he can thank her, she has gone out of the house to help her grandfather and Lisa Saget with the construction of a little kitchen annexe — a firebox, a grate, some irons for hanging the pots, a canvas awning to keep off the rain. He should himself have foreseen the need of it: you cannot cook for thirty-five souls in a kitchen sized like the sexton’s. What else has he failed to anticipate? He drinks the coffee, lets the heat of it almost scald his tongue and throat.

The office next to the kitchen has become Lecoeur’s quarters. Jean-Baptiste leans in, sees that the bed is already neatly made, either by Lecoeur or Jeanne. There is a bag at the end of the bed, not large, some books visible inside. The air of the room, along with the damp-plaster smell of the cemetery records, has an unmistakable whiff of brandy sweat.

He looks for Lecoeur and finds him by one of the old tombs, one of those blocks of weathered masonry eccentrically sunk into the earth like the petrified wreck of a little boat.

‘An entire noble family may be found beneath here,’ says Lecoeur, patting the damp stone, ‘but the lettering is so worn I can hardly make out the name. Can you read it?’

Jean-Baptiste looks. Rohan. Rohring. Roche. ‘No,’ he says. Then, ‘We should begin now.’

‘To dig?’

‘Yes.’

‘Our Alexander has spoken,’ says Lecoeur, who is possibly still not quite sober.

‘If you will bring the men to where the ground is marked,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘I shall meet you there.’

It is, as far as Jean-Baptiste knows — as far as Jeanne and her grandfather have been able to inform him — the oldest of the extant pits, a square some seven metres by seven that he has marked out with rope and pegs in the northwest corner near to where, beyond the wall, the rue aux Fers meets the rue de la Lingerie. The surface, pale grass, tussocky, gives nothing away. If this is the place, then there was no lasting memorial for those who went into it.

He stands by the rope, watching the men approach. He greets them, hopes they have passed a peaceful night; then, with Lecoeur’s assistance, he separates them into three groups. Those who will dig, those who will collect the bones, those who will stack them. When it is done, those marked for digging are sent across the rope.

‘Earth,’ says the engineer, ‘will be piled upon this side, here. When the pit is empty, the earth will be mixed with quicklime and returned to the pit. As for the bones, they will, in time, be carted across the city to their new resting place.’ He pauses. A few of the men move their heads. The others just look at him.

The day is very still, a wintry stillness. Jeanne and her grandfather stand together quietly a little distance from the rope. Jean-Baptiste looks over to them. He smiles at them or tries to, but his face is cold, and anyway, what would such a smile mean? He turns to the miner nearest him. Joos Slabbart or Jan Biloo. Jan Block, perhaps. He nods. The man nods back, lifts the handle of his spade. The ground is opened.

They dig for three hours before Jean-Baptiste asks Lecoeur to call the first break. There has not, in these first hours, been much to see. The dead appear to have been reduced to shards, fragments, as if the pit had churned them like dry bread in an old man’s mouth. Are they digging in the right place? Was the sexton mistaken? He and Jeanne have gone back to the house, but after the break, the pit starts to give up its treasures and every second thrust of the spade levers out some recognisable structure. A jaw with a row of teeth that look as if they might still have a bite to them. All the delicate apparatus of a foot, ribs like the staves of an old barrel. The bone mound becomes a low bone wall. There is no wood, not a splinter, nothing to suggest the men and women who went into the pit had anything more than the shelter of their own winding sheets.

The midday meal is announced by Lisa Saget beating a ladle against the base of a saucepan. Whatever discomfort the men may have felt in their work it does not appear to have affected their appetites. Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur linger by the edge of the pit. Lecoeur does not look well. He has pulled his neckcloth over his mouth and nose.

‘We will light a fire after lunch,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘It may help a little.’

Lecoeur nods.

‘Will you eat anything?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I should take something to settle my stomach first,’ says Lecoeur, the voice muffled, odd and muffled.

‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I shall ask Armand to fetch more brandy. We can all take a mouthful before we begin again.’

For the afternoon shift, three of the diggers are transferred to the bone-collectors. Almost all those inside the rope find themselves at some point standing on bones. Besides bones, other things start to be found and passed up. A deformed metal cross, greenish. A brooch, mostly destroyed, in the form of a rose. Part of a child’s toy horse cut from tin. Buttons. An antique-looking buckle. Nothing yet of any value. And if something valuable should be found? Who is the legal owner? The man who uncovered it? The sexton? The engineer? Perhaps it is the minister.

At moments, the men — all of them — seem swept by waves of disgust. Their eyes shut, they tremble, they hesitate, then one spits in his fist and a boot or clog drives more resolutely at the edge of a spade, and the rhythm is restored.

By the time the city bells sound four, the light is going and the men, whose bent heads are now below the level of the ground, look, from above, to be excavating shadows. Torches are driven into the walls of the pit. Now, truly, it is a spectacle: a gang of men in a red hole, prising bones from under their feet. The bone wall runs all the length of one side of the pit and is as high as a man’s shoulders. The last hour feels like a day in itself. Jean-Baptiste keeps the brandy bottle in the grass beside him. At intervals — intervals that grow shorter — he passes it down, watches it go between them, takes it back, the lighter bottle. At a quarter to six, he stops it. Later, he knows he will have to insist on them working at night, but not now. He could not do it himself; he cannot ask it of them.