Andrew Miller - Pure

As for the Monnards, though they were not immune to rumour and would have observed the unusual comings and goings at the cemetery, their imaginations were, perhaps, less excitable, less succulent, than those of their neighbours, and they were distracted still by the memory of a different, earlier night, a disaster much closer to their hearts. Thus, they had not demanded to know why they were woken that night by one of the cemetery labourers beating at the door, or what was the meaning of the noise just before daylight, a noise like a tree snapping in a gale. The only moment of awkwardness was the dinner the week after Easter Sunday, when Madame Monnard — apparently in all innocence and sincerity — enquired if that charming Monsieur Lecoeur would care to visit the house again. Jean-Baptiste had been unable to do anything but stare dumbly at the dregs in his soup plate. It was left to Héloïse to say that Monsieur Lecoeur had been called home. Home? Yes, madame, quite unexpectedly. On family business? Urgent family business, madame.

Throughout the first weeks of May, with the new leaves unfurling, the first butterflies out of winter hibernation, small flowers pressing stubbornly through cracks in smoke-blackened walls, Jean-Baptiste is aware of himself waiting. He does not know what he is waiting for. The arrival of Lecoeur’s sister, perhaps, angry, frightened, confused. Or the sudden appearance of some implacable state official, someone not even the minister could shield him from. He has to remind himself, surprisingly often, that he did not kill Lecoeur, that Lecoeur killed himself. This is the truth. Should it not feel more convincing, more reassuring?

On the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of the month, he suffers a violent headache, the worst he has had since his head was cut. He lies in Ziguette’s old room, Ziguette’s old bed, a cloth folded over his eyes, clenching and unclenching his fists. On his chest, sixteen metres of earth and lime are crushing him. Then the pain resolves in the usual fit of vomiting. He rinses his mouth, drinks a little, finds his hat, reels from the room.

The city is hot now. Its stones give off a steady pulse of heat for an hour or more after sunset. In the cemetery, the men want more water with their brandy, need it. They work in their shirts. By the middle of the morning the cloth is stuck to the skin of their backs. Work slows down. Swifts and martins play in the blue above the charnels. All winter it seems they held on to something, some resolution the heat now leaches out of them. The engineer feels it as much as anyone, more so. A longing to let go, to have done with it all. To mask it, he goads the men on, restlessly paces the edge of the pits, talks more, shouts more. When the man on the pulley struggles with a cradleful of bones, the engineer lends his own weight to the rope. When they need to fit a box-crib, he clambers to the bottom of the pit to direct the operation. At night, he watches over the loading of each cart, shuttles between the street and the cemetery, speaks to the carters, even to the young priests who still look nervously at the door waiting for Colbert to appear, though Colbert has not been seen by anyone in weeks.

On what he calls to himself an impulse but which is perhaps a desire to confess something , he tells Héloïse about his word blindness. It is a Sunday afternoon, the pair of them kneeling on the bed, a little raw about the loins, the gleam of his seed on her belly, their bodies in shadow from the two-thirds-shut shutters. It is, anyway, hard to keep hiding it from her, from everybody, hard and wearying, so he explains to her how he cannot get through a page of print without stumbling, that he still finds himself suddenly dumb in the face of the most ordinary objects. He tells her about his notebook with its list of recaptured words.

She kisses his brow, drops her shift over her head, adjusts the shutters and fetches a book. It is a book by an English writer with a French name. The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner . Holding the book in front of them both, she reads a page aloud, slowly. The next page is his, the third hers again. After an hour, he asks, ‘Is this true?’

She laughs. ‘You like it?’

He nods. He does. The castaway. His loneliness and ingenuity. It speaks to him.

‘As payment,’ he says, ‘I shall build you a bookshelf. It could go by the wall there.’

She thanks him, then adds, ‘Not so big we cannot get it out of the door.’

‘The door?’

‘We will not be here always,’ she says. ‘Will we?’

An extra grog ration, a few extra coins in the men’s hands. (He has what he would have given Lecoeur to spread around.) It will not do. It cannot. It is not enough. And Guillotin warns him that digging in the heat is unhealthy, decidedly so. Vapours, contagion. The place’s sour breath excited by the sun’s heat. Already four of the men — occupants of the same tent — have been struck by some low fever that has left them listless, weak, drooping like cut flowers. The doctor recommends the work be carried on entirely at night, or better still, suspended until the cooler weather in the autumn.

‘Suspended!’

‘Might it not be the wisest course?’

‘And come the autumn,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘I would be working here on my own.’

‘You think they would not return?’

‘Are you not amazed they have stayed at all?’

They are walking together in the late afternoon while the men are being fed. Having reached the cemetery’s western limit, they turn and start back, walking by the shadow-line of the wall.

‘What about the church?’ asks the engineer.

‘Mmm?’

‘We can work in there. It will be cool.’

‘Begin the destruction of the church?’

‘I would need more men. Specialists. Not many.’

‘It looks,’ says Guillotin, pausing to regard it, the streaked black cliff of the church’s west face, ‘horribly solid.’

‘Buildings are mostly air,’ says the engineer, quoting the great Perronet. ‘Air and empty space. And there is nothing in the world that cannot be reduced to its parts. With enough men you could turn the Palace of Versailles into rubble inside of a week.’

The more he thinks of it, the more convinced he is he has been thinking of it for a long time. He tries the idea on Armand.

‘Oh, my beautiful church,’ wails Armand, grinning broadly.

‘It will mean the organ too,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Naturally.’

‘You don’t object?’

‘It is what I said to you before. The night we went painting. One does not resent the future or its agents.’

‘And the future is good whatever it brings?’

‘Yes,’ says Armand, without a moment’s hesitation.

‘I do not believe that,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Think of the light,’ says Armand.

‘The light?’

‘The church of les Innocents has been hoarding shadows for five hundred years. You will free them. You will let in light and air. You will let in the sky. That is the future!’

‘That,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘is a metaphor.’

‘A metaphor? Where did you go to school?’

‘Nogent-le-Rotrou.’

Dawn: he lies in bed frowning into the indeterminate space above him, trying to work out the best way to destroy a church. What exactly did Maître Perronet say on the subject? Did they cover demolition while Jean-Baptiste was at home in Bellême, helping to care for his father? If it stood out in a field somewhere, he would simply blow it up. God knows he could make enough black powder from all the potassium in the soil of the cemetery. But a church halfway up the rue Saint-Denis? In theory, of course, a building could be imploded : mined and brought down upon itself in a tidy cloud of dust and tumbling stone. In practice — well, he has never heard of a single successful instance. There was that case in Rome five, six years ago, some old basilica they wanted rid of in a hurry. Filled the crypts with barrels of gunpowder, laid the fuses, lit them, obliterated the basilica and most of the neighbouring tenement. Two hundred men, women and children blown to rags. Shook the windows of the Vatican. He cannot remember what became of the engineer. Does he work still? Did they hang him?