Andrew Miller - Pure

Behind him, soft footsteps. He turns, sees Jeanne, a shawl round her shoulders, coming from the house to join him. She smiles at him, prettily as ever, but does not today have quite her usual good colour, her usual bounce .

‘It is strange he has not come,’ she says.

‘It might be he took more than was good for him last night,’ says Lecoeur.

‘I do not think that is right,’ she says, smartly.

‘No, no,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Probably he is engaged upon some unexpected business matter. A meeting with that man Lafosse, perhaps. The minister’s man.’

She nods. ‘Will you go out today also?’

‘I believe I will,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Monsieur Saint-Méard has invited me to join him and a few of his friends on something of an excursion. He did not say exactly what he intended.’

‘It will be pleasant, I am sure,’ she says. ‘You have the key?’

He shows it to her, an old key in his hand.

‘I think Monsieur Baratte would wish you to let them go,’ she says.

‘You think?’

‘Do you not?’

‘You are probably right.’ He looks at the men, bares his teeth a moment, then looks down at the girl. ‘Shall we do it together?’ he asks.

Stone steps, a long flight of them, leading steeply down. The cellar. The knowledge of what is below, what must be.

At first it is too dark to see or understand anything of his surroundings. There is only the descent, the feel of the steps beneath his feet. Then a soft pinkish light, a narrow hall, a table with a tin on it, a little bell. There is a woman sitting behind the table. She keeps her face averted but knows he is there. She rings the bell and though it makes no discernible sound the curtain at the end of the hall is immediately drawn back. A man smiles at him, beckons him with a little gesture of his head. .

They are in a corridor. On either side of it, swagged drapes conceal what are, presumably, the entrances to rooms. One of these — where the drape has been imperfectly closed — he stops to look into, though perhaps it is not really a room at all. The walls seem to be made of packed black earth. The dimensions are uncertain, so too the number of people in there, the men and women and children sitting, crouching, lying. They look back at him. There is something ardent in their gazes. Ardent, wide-eyed, blank. He turns away. He is afraid that one of them will start to speak, will address him, will know his name. .

The guide is waiting at the end of the corridor. Another set of curtains. Pretty gestures of invitation. He goes in, the guide close behind him. Whatever is going to happen it is going to happen now and here. They are, it seems, in his room at the Monnards’ or something like his room, for there is no window and the walls are bare. Light comes from a single large candle on the table. On the bed is a man. He wears only a shirt, the tails reaching to his knees. His eyes are open, but his lips have been clumsily stitched with black thread.

The guide lifts the candle from the table and steps to the bed. It only takes a moment, he says. We must release the phlogiston. It is the agent of transformation. The destroyer of impurities.

He leans, and as though pouring something precious into the ear of the man on the bed, he touches the candle’s wick to his hair. It takes instantly, burns like dried grass. Then flames slide over the man’s face, wrap his throat, race over the skin of his chest, his belly. How can a body burn like this? A man should not burn like rolled paper! What has been done? What method is this?

In its wrap of flames the body begins to move. An arm, a leg. The torso lifts — floats! — from the burning sheets. The thread between the lips is sundered. The mouth springs open. Roars, roars. .

‘Keep him still,’ says Guillotin. He is leaning over the bed. A line of black thread lies over the patient’s face like a fine crack. Marie presses down on the kicking legs. She’s a good strong girl for the holding-down business. The doctor gets to work.

For the first forty-eight hours there is danger, a very grave danger. If the brain is bleeding, well, something might be done — there’s a surgeon on the rue Saint-Honoré with an elegant drill, but could he be fetched in time? The patient is watched continuously. Marie, Jeanne, Lisa Saget, Armand, Lecoeur. Guillotin calls every morning and again in the early evening. He stands over his patient, weighs the odds, then looks out at the church of les Innocents, thinks large thoughts about men, their heads, their hearts, the way of the world. The old world and the world that is, perhaps, coming.

In spite of the succession of watchers, when the engineer finally opens his eyes he would swear that the room is empty. On the bolster, his head is a dead weight, a fist of living gristle sown onto the stump of his neck. The pain is not on the surface but buried in the white depths of his brain. Its rhythm is the rhythm of his blood. At each heartbeat he winces. The door moves. Madame Monnard peeps in. When she sees that his eyes are open, that he is, apparently, looking at her, she flees.

‘Who am I?’

‘You? You are the doctor.’

‘And my name?’

‘Guillotin.’

‘Good. And you?’

‘Baratte.’

‘And the name of our king?’

‘Louis.’

‘You remember what happened to you?’

‘Some of it.’

‘Some?’

‘Enough.’

‘Monsieur Lafosse has visited us,’ says Lecoeur. (How many hours have passed? How many days?) ‘I believe Dr Guillotin informed him of your. . misfortune. He has instructed me to press on with the work. Says it would not do to keep the men idle. That time is money.’

‘Ziguette?’ murmurs Jean-Baptiste, but too quietly.

‘And look,’ says Lecoeur, ‘Jeanne has sent you a remedy. Herbs of some kind, I think.’ He holds out the bottle for inspection. On his hands, there is a stubborn speckling of black stains, black paint.

‘Probably a love potion,’ says Armand, who is also in the room, though out of the engineer’s field of vision.

‘What day is it?’ asks the patient.

‘Day?’ says Lecoeur. ‘It is Wednesday. Wednesday morning.’

Marie is on a chair by the bed doing something to the fire. He does not wish to move his head to see. Any quick movement of his head sends the world jittering and juddering. ‘Ziguette?’ he asks.

‘Why?’ she says. ‘Afraid she’s going to visit you again?’ Then, when he does not answer her, she says, ‘It was me what saved you.’

Light is a white sheet at his window, a dull white sheet that is folded each evening and hung out again the next dawn. They no longer watch him all the time. Unwatched, he steals out of bed, sits ten minutes on the chair, clinging to the seat. The following day, he sits for half an hour. Sitting becomes his practice. Sometimes, when swept by squalls of pity — for himself, his bullying father, the haunted lives of strangers, the cold bones in the cemetery — he makes odd shapes with his mouth, a type of dry weeping. Other times he is blank, calm and perfectly blank, until the world’s rawness, his own breath, the edges of the air, rouse him again. He studies his hands, looks at the fire, peers quizzically at the picture of the bridge. He lifts his eyes to the window: the clouds are coloured like the sea at Dieppe. Who are you? asked the doctor. He is Adam alone in the garden. He is Lazarus rousted out of his tomb, one life separated from another by a slack of darkness.