Pure (33 page)

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.

FOURTH

Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.

Antoine Lavoisier

1

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.

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.’