Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Gabriel I usually assigned to the remaining condemned. He moved about his responsibilities like a child resignedly attending a new school. The third head pitched from its lost shoulders. It was his turn to reach his arm down into the basket. I could not see from where I stood whether his expression as he held it up by the hair was one of fascinated horror or queasy forbearance or distracted indifference. The rain and the three men's blood made the front of the scaffold slick as soap. There was no rail.

Perseus hoisted Medusa's head. Judith, Holofernes's. David, Goliath's. The head warns of the consequences of violating the sovereign peace. Held by the hair and presented at the scaffold, it represents the government's discharge of its promise to maintain order. An executioner's reputation depends to a large extent upon his efficiency and elan with that display. Doing his best to manifest the head to as much of the crowd as he could, and failing to look where he put his feet, our Gabriel slipped and split his head open on the cobblestones. The head he'd been holding scattered the crowd. We carried him back to the house in the cart that had brought the condemned.

It's said that, losing his wife and crazed with grief, Robespierre's father abandoned his four children, the eldest being only seven, and traveled in turn through England and the German states, eventually dying in Munich. And so young Robespierre became at seven the implacable and unhappy figure he remains today. All through the early morning hours of that terrible night, Anne-Marie lay like one of the Furies on her bed and would not be consoled. I was not allowed into the room.

A week passed before she addressed me. Her misery was a well from which her spirit refused to surface. I saw only stiffness and mistrust when I got too near. All her gestures seemed devitalized, as if viewed in dim candlelight. If not for her capacity for work, she would have seemed imprisoned in a perpetual exhaustion.

It was a busy time for the executioner. She observed without comment my unimpaired predilection for order, my consistency of demeanor, and my undiminished capacities of concentration.

We both remembered a time, after the imprisonment of the King, when I'd been of a sudden possessed by an ungovernable rage with all of those in power who had brought our nation to her present catastrophe, and had resolved to leave Paris. Gabriel in particular had loved the idea. But my passion had subsided, and I'd understood just a bit of what such a decision would involve. Was everyone to abandon his post every time the country took a turn for the worse? Was it left to each servant of the state to decide which laws he would carry out, and which he would not? Did anyone but the highest ministers have sufficient information on which to base their opinions?

Yesterday there was a hard frost and we woke to discover the waste plug had burst and covered the corridor in filth. Some of it had already frozen, and we scraped and chipped at it in the early morning darkness. The smell from what hadn't frozen drove us back. It was unclear to me, working beside my wife, which in me was stronger: hatred of my profession or hatred of myself. I asked her opinion and she didn't answer until later when making her toilet, when she remarked that she found my self-contempt understandable, given the minuteness of my self-examinations.

Even with my family, she told me as she served my supper before leaving the room, I craved the advantage of invisibility. My supper turned out to be beef and cabbage and runner beans.

I eat alone. I sit alone. Without her I have no intimate friend. No affectionate relations. For three months she's remained close-buttoned and oblique, her expressions lawyers' expressions. Some nights I sleep, when Heaven has pity on me.

The night before the waste plug, she woke to my weeping. She remained on her back and addressed the ceiling. She told it she'd overheard a boy on the rue de Rennes tell his wet-nurse that he'd gone to see a guillotining, and oh, how the poor executioner had suffered. Her tone prevented any response.

She knows that the exclusion of our profession from society is not founded on prejudice alone. The law requires executions, but compels no one to become an executioner.

So now I carry an emptiness with me like the grief of a homesick child. I understood my wife's misery and, under the compulsion of duty, added to it. Each night I take a little brandy, hot lemonade, and toast. My belly is in constant ferment. I'm a pioneer in a Great New Age in which I don't believe. My profession has grown over us like a malevolent wood.

Another frost this morning. In our window box, frozen daisies.