Pure (8 page)

‘I can see it,’ she says.

He nods again, returns to the book.

‘We can offer you wine, monsieur,’ she says. ‘And we have a little coffee too.’

He has put the cloth to his face again and shakes his head. There is a perfume in the cloth she finds almost offensively strong. Grandfather takes the hen outside.

‘Are you a foreigner?’ she asks.

‘I am from Normandy,’ he says. He is running a finger down a meticulously inked column. Seven Flaselles expired, one after the other, in the autumn of 1610. Seven in less than a month.

‘I thought so,’ she says.

‘Why?’

‘I have not seen you before.’

‘You know everyone in Paris?’

‘In the quarter,’ she says.

‘You know a family called Flaselle?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘There are no Flaselles here.’

‘There were once,’ he says. He closes the volume and walks towards her. From outside comes a frenzied clucking, an abrupt silence.

‘You are Jeanne?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ she says, grinning at the lilt of his voice.

‘Your grandfather said you would show me the cemetery. That you know where the pits are.’

‘The pits?’

‘The common graves.’

‘They are everywhere,’ she says.

‘But you can show me?’

She shrugs. ‘If you wish.’

The old man comes in, the bird’s head in one hand, the softly kicking body in the other. Drops of blood fall like seeds onto the stone of the kitchen floor.

They start with the south charnel, a gallery of blackened stone adjacent to the rue de la Ferronnerie. Of the arches into the gallery, some are barred with man-high gates of rusted iron; others are open. Above the arches – and immediately visible to anyone coming into the cemetery – are garrets where bones, some black as the stones, have been packed behind iron grilles.

After a second of hesitation, Jean-Baptiste steps through one of the arches. On the stone beneath his feet is an inscription. He crouches, touches the lettering with a fingertip. Henri something, struck down, and his son also, beloved something, wife to, late of, devout, fleeting, merciful, the flesh, eternity, 14 something.

He stands and walks a little way along the gallery. Light falls oddly, shows some things clearly, others not at all. He sees the delicate tracery of stone flowers, sees a stone woman holding a stone veil across her face. Narrow steps presumably lead up to the garrets. His shoe kicks a fragment of masonry, the sound of it followed immediately by the sudden scuttling of live things, invisible but close. He turns, hurries back into the open.

He has a notebook with him, a roll of linen tape. When he takes measurements, he asks Jeanne to hold one end of the tape; then, with a steel-tipped pen, a portable inkwell, he writes and sketches in the notebook. He has many questions. She answers them all, and he scratches her replies onto the paper. Sometimes he shuts his eyes and takes out the cloth. He asks if she can read.

‘A little,’ she says, and points to the inscription on a stone. ‘ “
Hic Jacet
,” ’ she says. ‘And there, “
Hic
Requiescit
.” And there, “
Hic est
Sepultura
.” ’

He nods, almost smiles.

She says, ‘
You
can read.’

‘I’m an engineer,’ he says. ‘You know what that is?’

‘A kind of priest?’

‘We build things. Structures.’

‘Like a wall?’

‘Like a bridge.’

He asks her the location of the most recent of the common graves. She leads him to it. He looks down, looks around. There is nothing obvious to distinguish it from the patch beside it.

‘You are sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it was closed, sealed, five years ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were a child then.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you remember?’

‘Yes.’

They go on. (He needs to keep moving.) Pit after pit.

‘And this? It is older than the last?’

‘Yes.’

‘And this one?’

‘Older still.’

He makes a map. She watches how he can make a line thinner or thicker with a little adjustment of the angle of the nib. And the figures and the little words. There’s a beauty to it.

‘What’s that?’ she asks, pointing to a squiggle, one of several she has seen him make, a shape like a half-skull.

‘A question mark,’ he says. ‘For when there is some uncertainty.’

Her face falls. ‘Then you have not believed me,’ she says.

He tells her that he has, but that what is under the ground is hidden. What is hidden cannot accurately be known.

‘Not by you,’ she says. There is no pertness in her reply. He seems to consider it a moment, then shuts the book, the inkwell, wipes the nib of the pen.

‘We are finished for today,’ he says. As they walk back to the sexton’s house, he asks, ‘Wouldn’t you like to leave here? Live somewhere else?’

‘I don’t know anywhere else,’ she says. ‘And who would look after them?’

‘Them?’

She gestures to the ground around them. ‘The dead,’ she says.

When he has parted from the girl, from the old sexton, he goes into the church. The girl has pointed out a door he can use, not the big door the corpses and the mourners must have come through, but a smaller one to the side of it, its lintel low enough to make him bow his head. For a few strides he is in a vestibule, black as Hell, then a second door lets him into the body of the church. He is at the back of the south aisle. Ahead, he can see part of the rose window above the altar. There is no sound or sign of any presence other than his own. He starts to navigate, right to left, passes behind the backs of pews, passes dreaming pillars, crosses the nave, passes a large, railed tomb on the top of which an armoured man lies beside his metal wife, their slim hands gathered in prayer. He reaches the north wall, walks down to the organ. There is no Armand Saint-Méard today. He is a little disappointed, a little relieved. It might have been reassuring to have heard the organist’s admiration of the new suit. It might also, of course, simply have been the prelude to another wasted day of drinking and rambling.

He sits on the organ bench, lets his fingers move above the keyboards. To the right and left are rows of stops, knobs of elegantly turned wood, some seemingly of ivory. He slides one out, leans to try and read what is painted there, but the script is too elaborately Gothic and is, anyway, abbreviated after the manner of chemical compounds. He slides it back in. The instrument is the only thing in the entire church he feels any interest in, any liking for. Could it be saved? Dismantled, wrapped, stored, reassembled?

He gets off the bench, steps down into the aisle and is trying, among the masonry and plaques, the substantial and insubstantial shadows, to see the door to the rue aux Fers when a voice, one that almost crushes him, falls from some impenetrable part of the darkness above.

‘
You! Who are you?
’

Horrible to be seen like this, seen but unable to see back. He stares upwards, grimacing, as if in expectation of the thudding of leathery wings.

‘
You are not the musician! I know his footfall. Who are you?
’

Echoes, black flocks of them under the vaulting. Impossible to locate the origin.

‘
Answer me, rogue!
’

He sees the door now, gets his key into it on the third attempt, finds it is the key to the Monnards’ house, fits another key, turns it, pulls at the door . . .

‘
Who are you? Who!
’

And then he is out; out on the rue aux Fers. The street is not consumed with fire. There are no abominations out of Hieronymous Bosch, no pale women consorting with demons, or stranded whales spewing tormented souls. A half-dozen laundry wives are at work by the Italian fountain. The ground about them glitters. A pair of them glance over, perhaps surprised to see anyone coming out of the church, a man, one they haven’t seen before, but soon they look back to their work, cold arms plunged into cold water. Linen will not wash itself.

8

He sits in his room, wrapped in damask, and looking through the unshuttered window to the church. The sun is setting, but the stones of les Innocents give back little of its light. The windows are briefly livid with a fire that seems more the show of some holocaust
inside
the church than anything as distant, as benign, as a red late-October sun. Then the light flares, ebbs, and the whole façade is joined in uniform darkness.

He rises from the chair to see if he can spy the glimmer of the evening’s first candle in the sexton’s house, but there is nothing, not yet. Perhaps they retire like Norman peasants, like the beasts of those peasants, as soon as it is too dark to work.

Was the girl simple-minded? He does not think so. But can he depend on her description of what, under the rough grass, he will find when he starts to dig? He supposes he must, for he has little else to guide him. The memories of an aged sexton, records that have made a dinner for generations of mice . . .

He turns the chair, sits facing the table. He fusses with his tinderbox, lights his own candle and slides it close to the edge of the book in which, in the morning, he made his notes. He studies his sketches, runs a finger by the figures, tries to see it all as a problem of pure engineering such as, at the school, Maître Perronet might have thrown among them as he passed on his way to his office. So many square metres of ground, so many cart loads of . . . of debris. So many men, so many hours. A calculation. An equation.
Voilà!
He must not forget, of course, to leave a little room for the unexpected. Perronet always insisted on it, some give, some slack in the rope for that quantum of uncertainty that bedevils every project and which the naïve practitioner always ignores until it is too late.

From the back of the notebook he carefully tears out a sheet of plain paper, opens his inkwell, dips his nib and begins to write.

My lord,

I have made an initial examination of both the church and cemetery and see no reason to delay the work that Your Lordship has entrusted to me. It will be necessary to recruit at least thirty able-bodied men for the cemetery and as many more for the church, some of whom should have experience in the art of wrecking. In addition, I shall need horses, wagons, a good supply of timber.

In the matter of the cemetery, beyond the removing of the remains from the crypts, charnels and common graves, I recommend that the entire surface of the cemetery be excavated to a depth of two metres and sent out of the city to some unpopulated place or even taken as far as the coast and cast into the sea.

May I ask if somewhere suitable has been prepared for the reception of the human material? And what in the church other than those objects of a sacred character, relics, etc., is to be preserved? There is, for example, an organ of German origin that might, if Your Lordship wished it, be dismantled in such a way as to preserve it.

I am, my lord, your obedient servant,

J-B Baratte, engineer

He has no sand to sprinkle on the wet ink. He blows on it, cleans the nib of the pen. From below there comes the flat ringing of the supper gong. More dead men’s food. He shrugs off the banyan, reaches for the pistachio coat, then, before going down, halts a moment at the window with the candle in his hand. It is just a piece of fancy, of course, an impulse entirely whimsical and one he should not much like to try and explain to anyone, but he moves the candle, side to side, as if signalling. To whom? Who or what could possibly be down in that dark field, watching? Jeanne? Armand? The priest? Some hollow-eyed watchmen of the million dead? Or some future edition of himself, standing in the time to come and seeing in a window high above him the flickering of a light? What baroques even a mind like his is capable of ! He must not give play to them. It will end with him believing in that creature the minister spoke of, the dog-wolf in the charnels.