Andrew Miller - Pure

‘This should wake up Colbert,’ says Armand.

‘If he’s here,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Oh, he’s here, all right.’

‘What does he live on?’

‘Wax. Liturgy. His own thumbs.’

A miner steps back, brushing something from his face. ‘Dust coming down,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Stand away a little.’

The thumping is less muffled now. There’s a pause; then it begins again, a double beat, harder to place. ‘Are they right over us?’ asks Armand.

‘No, no. By that edge there. They’ll try to come in between the rafters near the bottom of the gully.’

Something hits the flagstones. Not dust any more. More of it comes down, comes down with each strike of the hammers. Flakes of stone plaster, of rubble. Then something big, crashing down seven, eight metres ahead of them, smashing into fragments. The double beat shifts to a triple. Ba-ba-bang, ba-ba-bang, ba-ba-bang. Then half a minute of silence; then two strikes, very aimed and deliberate, as if they had discovered some unguarded place on the dragon’s head, something yielding. Another large piece comes down. The party below retreat. In the black, the stared-at black above, something winks. A small white eye, small and almost too bright to gaze at.

‘They’re through!’ says Armand. A flurry of strikes and the eye widens. A beam of swirling light cuts at a slant from roof to floor and breaks not on some gilded angel or plaster saint, but on the boot of a miner, who hops backwards as if it had burnt him.

Shyly they reach for it, the light, turn their hands in it. Another dozen blows from above and they can bathe their chests, then their whole bodies. Héloïse must see this, thinks the engineer. Héloïse, Jeanne. . they must all see it.

‘Below there!’ shouts a voice. Sagnac. His head small as a coin.

The engineer steps into the light, peers up. ‘We are here,’ he calls. It is an odd sort of conversation. It is perhaps how Adam spoke to Jehovah. ‘Any trouble?’

‘Like breaking snail shells,’ says Sagnac. (‘Snail shells. .’ sings the echo.) ‘Beams are rotten to the heart. Another twenty years it would have come down on its own!’ The head disappears.

‘I’m going to play,’ says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. ‘ A pair of these lads can pump for me.’

‘Is this a time for playing ?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. Then, ‘You are right. You have never been more so.’

A half-hour later, while Armand improvises on the organ, the engineer conducts a tour of the light. Héloïse squeezes his elbow. The sexton looks up, blinks his eyes like a prisoner trapped fifty years in some oubliette, some dank cachot like those said to exist in the fortress of the Bastille. Lisa wets her lips, opens her face like a flower.

Guillotin says softly, ‘But this is philosophy.’

Jeanne begins to cry silently. She will not at first touch the light. Jean-Baptiste — it is the moment’s permission — takes her hand. She does not flinch. He lifts it, and when the light strikes it, her skin — the skin of both their hands — seems surrounded with a fragile blue fire.

Over the following days a score of holes are punched in a line along the south wall. The air thickens with dust, but at night the dust settles or escapes. Beams of light spread out until separate shafts become a jagged fringe moving slowly north towards the rue aux Fers. By the end of the month light laps at the edge of the nave, streaks the choir, pools by the foot of the altar. How filthy everything below now appears! How much the place depended on its darkness! The pews — most so beetle-ridden they would be dangerous to sit upon — are heaped together in a great pile under the crossing. Now that the light is here, it’s obvious that anything of value — monetary value — has been taken out already, officially or otherwise. With Armand, the engineer spends an hour searching for les Innocents’ most celebrated relic, the stylite’s toe bone in its box of iron, but there is no sign of it and something, some pantomime quality in his friend’s searching, prompts Jean-Baptiste to ask him if he has, in fact, stolen it.

Armand agrees that he has. ‘It was to raise funds for the hospital,’ he says.

‘Is that true?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

Armand shrugs.

A shout from above means something big is coming down — a sprocket, a wind-brace, an oaken hammer-beam spearing into the debris below. Or stone, something dislodged, then shattering on the flags like ordinance.

Half the miners work inside the church, wrecking. They have sledgehammers and picks and iron bars and bring, it seems, a certain sectarian relish to the business. The others work on the roof or man the hoists that lower parcels of salvaged tiles and folded lead. Jean-Baptiste starts to feel like an engineer again. Stone and dust and rotten wood are more than bearable after black earth and bones. And isn’t there something addictive about destruction? Does it not satisfy some shadowy appetite, some boyish urge to swing a blunt tool at what is silently, stupidly there?

He writes to his mother: ‘I am destroying a church!’ He encloses the usual money, suggests — only half playfully — she might want to use it to visit Paris to see him, her son, sleeves rolled, face caked with dust, bringing a stone elephant to its knees. And perhaps the pastor would care to accompany her?

He scores out that last thought. Scores it out carefully.

Working in one of the side chapels, one of those made plain and secular by lightfall, he finishes the bookshelf. A free-standing structure of five shelves built with wood from the church, the backs and seats of pews mostly (those few the beetles had not visited), though at the top he fits a carved panel cut from the reredos behind the altar, little figures, apostles perhaps, or just examples of those bystanders who must always be standing at the fringes of miraculous or terrible events. Guests at the wedding in Canna, villagers watching the arrival of Herod’s soldiers. Héloïse fills three of the shelves with books she already owns. An afternoon with Ysbeau down by the river — the pair of them genteel, forgetful — fills most of the fourth, the new books all good editions, not those for fifteen sous that fall apart in your hands.

About the city, these days of high summer, black paint and fresh graffiti.

Next to the church of Sainte-Marie on the rue Saint-Antoine: ‘beche will eat a bishop and spit out his bones. a cardinal for dessert.’

On the quai de l’Horloge, below the Conciergerie. Painted from a boat? ‘m. beche will drown the rich in the sweat of the poor!’

On a wall opposite the Company of the Indies: ‘beche has seen your crimes! the bill is on its way.’

On the parapet — left side going south — of the Pont au Change: ‘blood-sucking lords! m. beche will orphan your children!’

Spying graffiti, spying it before the authorities do, authorities now much keener to efface such sentiments, becomes a type of sport. People exchange new sightings with each other, casually, good-humouredly, though also with a certain questioning seriousness. For what if he exists, this Bêche? What if one day he does what is promised?

Jean-Baptiste, informed by Armand (who continues to deny all involvement), or Dr Guillotin, or Héloïse (who has not entirely given up her old free habit of threading the city’s thoroughfares), or on one occasion by Marie, of the existence of these scrawlings, nods and shrugs. What are they to him? And yet he cannot deny a creeping interest in this Bêche, even sometimes falls into the fantasy that there is indeed, in some fetid bâtiment in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, a man with thoughts like knife blades, a philosopher assassin, the people’s murderer. Would he oppose such a man? Betray him? Or would he follow him? Become, like him, implacable. Bloody and implacable. . Then he wakes from the fantasy and turns back to his business. Stones and sweat and calling orders across the mazed air. What the world is doing, what it is readying itself for, he will attend to later. History must wait a little on les Innocents.