Andrew Miller - Pure

One dead now with a ball in his head. One hanging from a pole above a pool of his own sewage.

When it is done, he tears pages out of L’Homme Machine , cleans himself as best he can, drops the pages and then the book into the hole, draws up his breeches.

In the sexton’s house, he scrubs his hands with vinegar. The fire is burning low. He prods it, lays on more wood. He looks for brandy but for once cannot find any. Overhead, the boards creak, but no one comes down. He goes outside again, peers towards the tents, then goes back into the kitchen, lights a lantern and carries it to the doctors’ workshop. He puts the lantern on Charlotte’s coffin, then takes hold of the lapels of Lecoeur’s coat, tries to raise him to a sitting posture, but Lecoeur, dead some eighteen hours, is stiff as a clay pipe. He stands back and tries to think it through as a problem , then goes to Lecoeur’s feet (where one stocking has unravelled to a cold white ankle), swings the feet out and lets the body cantilever against the edge of the table. It works, more or less. Lecoeur rises, though he seems not so much a clay pipe any more as a rolled carpet, a heavy rolled carpet, sodden. There is a thud onto the earth between them. The pistol? He will come back for it later. In three movements, he turns the body about, clasps it under the arms, adjusts his grip and is shuffling backwards to the workshop entrance when he hears the canvas flap being drawn.

‘You might have trusted me to help you,’ says Armand. ‘Or did you think I was squeamish?’

‘Get the lantern,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘And the pistol. It’s on the ground.’

‘There’s moon enough for us to see our way,’ says Armand, coming round to take hold of Lecoeur’s feet. ‘And he will not miss his pistol.’

They go without speaking, carry the body side-on to the edge of the pit, set it down beside the pulley. The engineer returns to the house for Lecoeur’s bag. Manetti is in the kitchen now, sitting in his chair.

‘I am taking some of his things,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

The sexton nods, solemnly. Who knows what he understands.

Out of the door, Jean-Baptiste reaches again for the convenient spade. At the pit, he drops the bag to the bottom. It lands discreetly enough. They lift Lecoeur into the sling, the cradle. Armand wraps a loop of chain round his waist, leans back his weight, takes up the slack, while Jean-Baptiste pushes both sling and body out over the pit. Then the pair of them play out the chain, the pulley wheel complaining like a mechanical goose.

‘How deep is this damned pit?’ hisses Armand.

‘Sixteen metres,’ says Jean-Baptiste. Then, ‘He’s there!’

‘You wish me to come down?’ asks Armand.

‘I would prefer to know there is somebody above. Someone I can trust.’

He drops the spade into the pit, goes to the ladder, swings himself onto it. Armand was right: now the clouds have scattered, there’s moon enough for what they need. Darkness enough too. He looks over to the rue de la Lingerie, the backs of the houses, the windows, sees in one high window — conceivably his own former room — a light move from left to right as though signalling. He climbs down to the ledge, goes cautiously to the second ladder and reaches the bottom of the pit. It takes a long minute to find the spade (a minute in which all manner of lunacy threatens to erupt in his head); then he goes to the sling, pulls Lecoeur free of it and hauls him towards a pool of moonlight in a corner of the pit. He starts to dig there, the spade’s edge sinking easily enough into the spring-softened earth. The men, perhaps, would find it instructive to see him labouring like this, the engineer, the chief-of-works, hatless and bent to his task, starting to sweat.

He digs long enough for the moon-pool to shift a little, then steps back. It’s hard to see what exactly he’s done — moonlight is not a true light — but suddenly he cannot bear to continue with it. He leans the spade, stoops, takes hold of Lecoeur, lies him beside the hole and rolls him in. The bag goes by his feet. Neither bag nor body is deeply laid, but neither needs to be. Tomorrow, he will have the whole pit filled with earth and lime. Sixteen metres of it: deep enough for anyone. He kneels a moment by the hole, catches his breath, and in a gesture secret almost from himself he reaches down to touch the dead man’s shoulder. Then he stands, takes up the spade again and begins quickly to cover him. The legs first, then the body. Finally the face.

They dig — dig and fill like men who lack the invention to do anything else. Pit fourteen gets its sixteen metres of earth and lime. In the next pit, the very centre of the cemetery, the bones are piled so thickly they can be handed up like bundles of brushwood. The dead are no longer surprised to see us, thinks the engineer, standing at the edge of the pit in spring drizzle. Where once even the barest bones seemed affronted, cowed, like some man or woman pushed naked into the street, now they lie passive as brides waiting for the hands of the miners to lift them into the Paris light. The Last Trump! The gone-ahead, the passed-over, reassembled by bearded angels smoking clay pipes. It is enough — nearly enough — to make him grin. Poor, credulous skulls imagining their wait in the dark is over!

By the end of the month they have nineteen pits — almost half those Jeanne identified the previous autumn. Pit twenty is begun in the first week of May, and it is while they are at work on this, eight metres down on a warm morning (a pair of blackbirds picking worms from the soil beside the pit), that Jeanne comes out of the house, her first outing since the assault. She has an arm looped through one of Lisa Saget’s. She looks half blinded by the sunshine. A few steps behind them is Héloïse, apron on, meat cleaver in one hand, the other raised to shade her eyes. The men on the surface stop work. Jan Block at his post by the bone wall looks moonstruck, and for the first time it occurs to Jean-Baptiste that the miner is in love, truly in love. And would he, given all that has passed, be the worst match Jeanne could make? He would need no explanations, knows all he needs to know. Does she like him? Or is the thought of any man touching her again repellent, impossible? The engineer lifts a hand to salute her. She waves back, wearily.

On the streets, in the little squares, among the stalls in the market packed tight as the combs in a bee skep, rumours about what happened that night in March are still plentiful and freely traded. Some of the miners, despite express orders to the contrary, must have been talking to their whores, for within a week of Lecoeur’s death everyone knew of it, knew he had been shot, knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the grey-eyed engineer — an example of whose rages some of them had witnessed that evening on the rue Saint-Denis — must have been the one who pulled the trigger. It stood to reason; they were not fools. Why he had done it, that was less certain. The miners, it seems, had kept their lips more tightly pressed when it came to mentioning Jeanne’s name. As a result, the favoured explanation was that the engineer shot the overseer in an argument about the engineer’s woman, the Austrian. The overseer had perhaps called her what she was and paid for it with his life. It was monstrous, of course, savage, and yet the women of the quarter — whose judgement would be the final one — were not entirely opposed to one man killing another in such an affair. Everywhere women were insulted with impunity, insulted by men. If a few of them suffered for their insolence as the overseer had, it might be no more than they deserved.