Andrew Miller - Pure

At the end of the room the door to the minister’s office is shut (symmetry in that too). In a while, if no yellow-eyed servant comes out to admit him, he will go and knock on it or scratch on it and deliver his report, the thirty neat, ribbon-bound pages he has on his lap detailing — with many necessary omissions — the destruction of the church and cemetery of les Saints-Innocents.

He smooths the cover of the report with the edge of his hand, brushes from it some imagined imperfection, a dust of ashes perhaps. Instructive how much can be enclosed in a document as cool, as innocuous-seeming as a folded napkin! A year of bones, grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year unlike any other he has lived. Will ever live? A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love. .

As for the fire that brought it to an end, that was matter for the report’s last five pages and not, when he came to it, as hard to write as he had feared. A scatter of lies about how and when he discovered the fire, some spurious suppositions as to how it might have started. After that, a brief description of the fire itself, how it burned until daylight the following day, how it destroyed the church in the most complete way imaginable, destroyed the sexton’s house, burnt down the charnels (with the exception of the west charnel), damaged two houses on the rue Saint-Denis and one on the rue de la Ferronnerie, though none of these beyond repair. There was — for what could it matter to the minister? — no need to recount how the grass the next day was like stems of black glass, shattering under their boots, how the preaching cross stretched like a blackened arm out of the wreckage, how the smoke hung over the quarter for two days before a great burst of rain dispersed it, or how the old priest was certified insane by Dr Guillotin and taken in a cab by the doctor himself to the Salpêtrière asylum.

About the miners, it was sufficient to record that their vigilance and courage had saved many properties from the flames, and that after the fire they worked admirably to clear the ground. Five weeks of knocking down what still stubbornly stood, of separating, where it was possible, bones from the tangle of burnt things that resembled them. . Another nineteen convoys were sent to the quarry before he, the chief-of-works, declared that what was left could stay and become part of the hardcore under the new cobbles Mason Sagnac would be laying, the mason having been given formal charge of the site for its final transformation into the Marché des Innocents. .

For that was what had been decided, decreed. A new market on the old man-eating earth of the cemetery! The hustle of small trade, the crying of wares where once there was only the priest’s bell, the thud of the sexton’s spade. And Jeanne will have a stall there. She has said she wishes to. Flowers, dried flowers and herbs, though first she must be delivered of what she carries in that big neat swelling that lifts her skirts from the ground. Guillotin still promises to be her accoucheur. He visits her often and recounts witty, fond stories of the domestic life at the apartment on the rue Aubri Boucher, the dreaming girl, the old gravedigger, the miner. In his last instalment he told them — Jean-Baptiste, Héloïse, Armand, Lisa — of the crib Jan Block had built, a little bed on half-moon rockers, the whole thing, according to the doctor, exquisitely done, a rose carved at the foot end, a little bird like a sparrow at the other.

Of the rest of them — Block’s brethren — they have been gone some two weeks now, though where is uncertain. There was a last interview between Jean-Baptiste and the violet-eyed miner in the gardens behind Saint-Sepulcre, where the men had re-established their camp after the fire. It was dusk, a fine mist over the last of the summer flowers, the dahlias and geraniums. Jean-Baptiste had come with the men’s money. The money was accepted — the pouch briefly weighed in the palm of the miner’s hand — and then, with a slight softening of his habitual formality, the miner informed the engineer that they would be gone by the following morning.

To Valenciennes?

Not there.

But you will remain together?

We will.

Then I wish you. . I am grateful to you. To you all.

A nod.

You are Hoornweder?

Lampsins.

Lampsins, then.

Moemus.

Moemus?

Sack, Tant, Oste, Slabbart. .

The next morning, the gardens were empty. Nothing but some flattened grass to say anyone had been there at all. An odd, unsettling feeling not to have them there any more, there or anywhere. Héloïse accuses him of missing them, and though he laughs at her — how can one miss such people! — there is truth in what she says. He depended on them, depended heavily. Without their specific mix of steadiness and riot, would les Innocents not still be throwing its shadow over the rue Saint-Denis?

And who did he not depend upon? Who did he not burden in that way? The very report could not have been written without Héloïse sitting beside him, page by page, at the table in his old room. When a word he needed was a word still lost, she found it for him and, if necessary, wrote it out for him to copy (her hand taught to her by a lascivious cleric, his thrashed into him by the brothers of the Oratorian Order). Three days it took them, late September heat rolling through the open window, dry thunder over the city. Then, when it was done, they separated and packed their possessions. His own took a bare hour to put into his trunk. Héloïse, with her books and hats, her pins, slippers and ribbons, took an hour longer, though she might have done it more quickly if Marie had not been sitting on the bed in tears and needing every quarter-hour to be soothed with the prospect of Ziguette’s return.

He does not intend to see Ziguette Monnard, not if it can be avoided. Unlikely, of course, she will want to see him — what could they possibly say to each other? — but she is not expected at the house until the end of the month and by then he will be with Héloïse in Bellême, and after that at their new apartment on the rue des Ecouffes.

And after that? What? The cemetery has stolen something out of him, some vitality he will need to restore before he is ready to go on. He should imitate the dead a while; or better still those seeds that lay so long asleep and undisturbed in the earth of the cemetery. Then, when he is ready — and when those ministerial livres and golden louis he has tucked away run dry — he might visit his old teacher, Perronet, ask for something decent, something small, something that does not place him at the disposal of men he does not respect, who do not respect him. .

He looks at the door of the minister’s office. Odd thing how all shut doors are not alike, how in their way they are expressive as human backs. This one tells him that were he to sit there until the end of time, it will not be opened, not unless he does it himself. He gets to his feet, pushes a lock of hair behind an ear, puts his hat under one arm, the report under the other, goes to the door, knocks twice, listens, then reaches for the cold, curved brass of the handles. The room is empty. Of course it is empty. The desk is there, the great desk, but there are no papers on it, no macaroon crumbs, no minister. Has anyone been here in weeks? Months? He lays the report, tidily, at the centre of the desk, shuts the door, goes through the anteroom into the corridor, turns, goes down a flight of stairs, walks the length of a second corridor, descends more stairs, and is stepping into the mouth of yet another broad, door-lined and feebly lit passage when he realises he is following the exact route he took the previous autumn, that he has retraced all his former confusions, has in some manner remembered how to be lost in precisely the same way. Behind this door the Polish gentlemen were playing at cards. Through this he saw the woman carried as if she were a type of boat. And here are the tightly winding service stairs down to where, a year ago, he found soldiers and laundry girls and boys in blue uniforms. Today, apart from a pair of small dogs asleep on a bench, he is alone.