Toujours Puro

Nihil Puro, proud Ravenclawian 1939-1946 found himself, at the age of 23, to be immensely popular with the opposite sex. This would seem a desirable state to be in for most men that age, but the circumstance of his desirability was a tragic one. His wife had just died in childbirth. I shall return to the prior in time, but first, there is death.

-

It was early in the morning (barely 5 AM), and it was 1951. There was so much tension in the air that it filled the small delivery room in St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries to the brim. The name of the hospital was, of course, a little misleading in this sense. Though most witches did deliver at home, there were also those who went to St Mungo's when their water broke. And in this particular case, there had obviously been additional complications demanding the care of attending nurses and Healers.

Nihil had for some minutes been embracing his wife's dead body with the air of one about to crack and fall together in a heap on the floor. His daughter had survived, and was well and crying. Nihil let go of his wife, rose and went back to the baby girl in the cot by the bedside. And felt his whole life beginning to depend entirely on her. If she, too, disappeared from him, he would crack. He would fall to the floor in a heap. But for now, she was his salvation; his life raft. There was no room for bitterness, for an all-consuming love surged through him in the moment he picked her up and held her to him as gently as if she were made of glass. Gradually, her crying stilled. He held her small, thin form to his chest, her head resting just below his chin, and the beating of her heart vibrating through his white healer's coat and sending tiny quivers into his own skin. He gently placed his hand on the back of her head, and hummed throatily the melody of "Loch Lomond".

His colleagues at the hospital, who had been trying to help save his wife while she was still breathing, now stood rigidly still around the bed and watched the scene. One of the nurses gave a quiet sob. Nihil suddenly looked around at them, his back to the bed.

"Could you," he croaked, indicating the dead body behind him, "could you take care of her, please? Could you get her away from here and... and clean her and... all that? And I need a proper bed for my daughter."

-

In the years to follow, he would remember conversations they had had, and occasionally make up new ones that they had never had. After a while, it became difficult to distinguish between those that had been real and those he had made up himself. But one of the real conversations stuck precisely and evocatively to his mind - though it didn't appear on command. It always came back to him when he was sleepy from a whisky and soda or more, or was finding himself sleepless and close to subconsciousness in the night. Her voice was embarrassed and unconfident, and she said she was sorry she hadn't told him this earlier, or even at once after they first met, but there had been reasons for that, good reasons. For one thing, it wasn't something she could share with just anybody, and though he had never been just "anybody" to her, she had to know that she knew him profoundly and utterly before she was entitled to let him in on it. Impatiently, he kissed her lips and said: "Well? I am ready. Have you killed somebody? Do you like it when I open doors for you, though you say otherwise? Are you really a man?"

"Oh," she exclaimed, laughing. "I forgot. There are two things."

"Even better," he said.

"I'm pregnant."

He took her hand in his and kissed it, speechless with happiness. They had been trying to get pregnant ever since they got married a year and a half ago. It had been problematic. She had wondered if maybe she wasn't fertile.

"And I am also," she said, turning serious and taking his other hand, "and this is the crux of it all: the last living descendant of Rowena Ravenclaw, the Hogwarts founder." He stared at her, blankly. "Silly, isn't it; saying it like that?" she continued. "Pregnant; that's... it's so mundane and real. But the other thing: it sounds so pompous and important, and I'm not even sure what it means, just that... well, that I'm actually no longer the last living descendant of Rowena Ravenclaw."

The scope of time between his wife and her ancestor unfolded itself before Nihil's eyes, and he glanced at it eagerly. Later in life, after his wife's death, he used to say (or joke) that there was something very important of Vera in his daughter Rachel, and that something was "ra". For a long time, he was the only person who knew the true significance of this statement.

-

One such night when that conversation was remembered was during a family holiday in Hogsmeade, 1970. A young Frenchman had just been killed by a werewolf in his arms, and Nihil was anxious for his daughter to the very core of his being. He wanted to be with his wife, who was sleeping alone in the next room. He wanted to let her comfort him, kiss him and tell him all was going to be all right and that he worried too much ("You are just spoiling her. You always have, and you worry too much. I am not her mother, so I can see it with unbiased eyes."). But even more powerful than this childish desire to be comforted, was the desire not to leave Rachel. She and her brother were sleeping next to him, breathing calmly inside their sleeping bags, but something was off.

Nihil felt a growing darkness gnawing at the borders of his knowledge; getting closer to the core of it without his being able to stop it. Something was off. Rachel wasn't safe, there was a plot somewhere.

He couldn't sleep.

There were still only two people alive who knew the true nature of the blood that flowed through his daughter's veins. No, three, including their faceless enemy - faceless, but not nameless; rather much too nameful.

If he had only been able to save that Frenchman, Nihil thought, then it would have been proved that one's actions really could grip destiny by the tail and swing it round; make it point in another direction.

He thought of Vera and mustered all his rationality to take the place of courage he didn't possess. I will give my fate to reason, he thought. I will surrender my grief to empirical explanation. I will stare magic in the face and play tricks on it.

-

But this is all so far rather gloomy. And the impression that Nihil's life as a whole was gloomy, would be a mistaken one.

In most lives, the humorous and the tragic are distributed in more or less equal proportions, and as has been indicated, the effect of being widowed equalled, in the case of Nihil, an inappropriate surge of female interest, which might serve as a nice humorous interlude for the next chapter.