The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

He became afraid. The fact of seeing so little made him feel as if he no longer existed. He could not bear to touch his wife or to be touched by her because that only hammered more loudly on the door of his isolation. He felt he was being punished for some terrible crime although he could not think what that crime might be, unless it was simply the hugeness of his own despair.

  Someone told his wife about a new shrine dedicated to Saint Anselm, with one of the saint’s thigh bones encased in a golden casket. She decided to take her hasband there.

  It was a journey of many hours to reach the shrine and when they arrived the shoemaker sat exhausted with his head in his hands. He had no expectation of recovery and felt that he must learn to accept the damnation of darkness that had come upon him.

  But his wife was filled with a rush of wild energy. She stood facing the shrine and began to shout at it in a loud voice, “Give him back his sight! Give my husband back his sight!”

  She wasn’t praying to the saint or begging for help, she was demanding what she felt to be hers by right. She shouted for six days and six nights. At first her voice was clear and strident but gradually it weakened until it was nothing more than a grating whisper, although the indignation within it was never diminished. She didn’t pause to eat or sleep, she didn’t even defecate. She just stood rooted to the earth and shouted, her words like waves beating against a rock.

  A crowd of people had gathered around the shrine to find out what was happening and there was a sense of growing excitement in the air.

  And then the miracle happened. The scales that had covered the shoemaker’s eyes fell away. He saw the blue of the sky, the green of the grass, the intricate dazzling beauty of leaves and trees. But he also saw the mass of staring faces gathered around him.

  All the people who had witnessed the miracle wanted to have a share of the blessing. They reached forward to touch the shoemaker, to cut off a piece of his cloak or a lock of his hair. They clung around him, asking questions and demanding his attention. He was horrified by their ugliness and their cruelty. Overwhelmed by panic, he ran stumbling into the safety of the forest.

  His wife found him there a few hours later. He was lying facedown under the shelter of some low branches. Only his feet were visible.

  She heaved him up into a sitting position. She tried to kiss him and comfort him but he struggled to be free of her as well. “Leave me alone, I want to be dead,” he said and he began to cry.

  They made their way home slowly and she had to steer his steps as if he was still blind. When they reached their house in the village he rushed into a room at the back and refused to come out. He cried continuously and would not be comforted.

  “He has gone mad,” his wife said. “First he was blind and now he is mad.”

  She waited for several weeks in the hope that the madness would lift but when nothing had changed she returned on her own to the shrine.

  She stood in front of the saint. She asked him what he thought he was doing, curing a man like that only to inflict a new pain on him. She shook her fist at the casket. She spat on it. Driven by her own desperation, she prized it open, took out the thigh bone, and threw it with all her strength into a nearby stream. Then she went home.

  Sometimes she sat beside her husband and tried to talk to him about the life they had shared together and how happy they had been, but more often than not she left him there alone in the company of his own thoughts.

  7

  The shoemaker is sitting in the almost dark of his room. “Everything is because of something,” he says to himself. “I could see. I was blind. I can see again. Everything is because of something.”

  He has grown accustomed to his own tears. He even cries when he is sleeping, the salt water flowing down the sides of his face and collecting in pools in his ears. He doesn’t know why he is crying and he has no idea of how he could ever stop himself from crying. It has become an aspect of staying alive, like breathing.

  He can see a thin strip of light shining around the edge of the closed door. “It’s as if I have been shut out of Heaven,” he says to himself, but when he tries to imagine pulling the door open and stepping through to the other side he cannot do it. “I am shut in and I am shut out!” he says, speaking aloud now and startled by the sound of his own voice.

  His mouth is dry. He runs his tongue sticky and slow around the edge of his lips and that makes a noise too, a crackling sound like the flames of a little fire.

  He leans back against the wall and listens to the movements of the house. There is a rustling in the roof which is either rats or pigeons, the creaking of a floorboard from the weight of someone walking on it and a soft thumping sound which he cannot identify. It might be his wife in the kitchen making bread. Or it might be that she is making love with another man and what he hears is the beating of flesh on flesh.

  A child is laughing. It is probably one of his own children but he cannot guess which one. Their identities have become blurred. They are strangers who laugh and cry in other rooms and who sometimes come and hover at his side, hoping for a sign or a kind word.

  Everything is because of something. The church bell starts to count the hours but he misses the first echoing reverberation of metal against metal and so he has no idea of the time. A dog barks a warning and then yelps, as if someone has kicked it into silence. A calf is led past the front of the house, bellowing with despair.

  He often wonders if animals could learn to talk. He once had a dog which seemed to be about to say something; it would stare at him with its mouth open and the words just out of reach. And the old woman who had made the ointment for his eyes kept a pig which could say “Goodbye, God bless you,” but it died before he was born. His mother had heard it.

  His mother was haunted by her memory of the Great Pestilence. When he was a child she would sometimes cry out because she could see a pile of corpses heaped up in the corner of the room in which they were standing. Then he would hold her legs as tight as he could until her terror had passed and the room was empty again. He remembers the smell of her as he buried his face against her skirts: as salt and sweet as a fish. Later he discovered that other women smelled the same. Different, but always the same.

  Everything is because of something and now that a silence has returned he becomes aware of the noises inside his own head. There is a distant roar like the wind among the trees, but there is also a plaintive high-pitched whistling sound, as if a solitary bird was singing within its cage of bone.

  The shoemaker lies very still on his back. He takes a breath of air and pulls it up through the soles of his feet, along the rippling length of his spine and out at the top of his head. Then he pulls the breath down again, from head to foot. He can see the air like a silver thread running through the length of his body. He is stitching himself together with silver threads.

  He places a little fish within the hollow cavity of his skull. It is a single glittering fish; no, it is a shoal of fishes and each one is no bigger than his thumb. He drops them skittering with life into a clear stream that is so cold it makes his bones ache when he holds his hand in it. The water is racing over pebbles that are speckled like plovers’ eggs. The fish are moving in perfect unison together; when one turns they all turn, when one holds itself steady they all hold themselves steady. The shoemaker watches them for a long time.

  He hears footsteps on the stairs, a hesitation, the lifting of the latch and the door swings open. Instinctively he closes his eyes against the intrusion of the daylight.

  “Who is there?” he asks, his voice querulous through the tears.

  He can feel the presence of someone drawing closer and squatting down beside him. He can smell his wife. He suddenly remembers the slippery softness of her belly and her thighs.

  She traces the outline of his face with the tips of her fingers. She leans forward so that her breath flows over him like warm water. Her hair trails across his lips. Slowly and methodically she begins to lick the tears away, her tongue running across the
closed seam of his eyes.

  She clambers on top of him, heavy, salt and sweet, and she rides him just as she used to do in the past. He had forgotten the intense familiarity of her body. Now that he is caught up in it again the sadness leaves him, and he realizes that he has stopped crying.

  8

  The sea along this part of the coast always looks very quiet. Even when the moon is full and the tide at its greatest strength, with a storm blowing in from the east, it appears strangely calm and untroubled.

  But it is quick. I have watched it rushing over the expanse of mud and pale sand as fast as it takes for you to turn your back and when you look around again you might find that you are cut off, with the safety of the real shoreline at a far distance. Then it can be very difficult to retrace your steps because in between the shallow lapping waters there are deep channels formed by the meanderings of the river and if you slip into one of them the mud is so oily-soft that you can never be sure of getting a foothold and clambering out again.

  I was standing where the river joins the sea, a little way around the curve of the coastline but still in view of the village. The tide was coming in and as it did so it disturbed the many birds that were busy feeding. It was a storm of birds, something I could imagine from a dream but which I have never seen in my waking life. White clouds of avocets and oyster catchers spun before my eyes. Tern and dunlin flew and settled and flew again like gusts of autumn leaves. The air was filled with the noisy complaint of ducks and geese and swans, the creaking of wings, sudden screams and cries.

  The sheet of water pulling in towards me and spreading over the sand was as calm as a lake, without even a ripple of waves. Rising out of it I could see a smooth mound of land which was turned into an island with every high tide. Its surface was covered with a scattering of coarse grass and a few seals were basking there, knowing that they could easily roll back into the safety of the open sea if there was any sudden danger. The people of the village always referred to it as Catherine’s Island because this was where the woman called Catherine came to live, once she had decided to leave her home.

  I have often seen Catherine. She has heavy-lidded eyes and when she walks it is with the jerky mechanical movements of a wading bird. She is more solitary and remote than anyone I have ever known.

  Catherine was married once, but her husband vanished years ago and she never mentioned him after he had gone. She had no children of her own but she was fond of children in the way that someone else might be fond of stray cats. A huddled group of them would often come to her door, hoping to be invited in to eat honey cakes. Her house was the largest in the village, set slightly apart from the others and constructed around a framework of strong wooden beams.

  This house was filled with treasures. There was a painted wooden chest on which two knights on horseback charged towards each other with their lances aimed for the heart, while a lady dressed in green waited patiently for the outcome of their fight. There was a rug from the Holy Land, woven in intricate patterns of blue and crimson and a china pot with a blue dragon crawling around it, his whiskers twirling.

  But it was the tapestry that the children loved most. It showed a forest of slender trees surrounding a pretty stone tower. Birds were nesting in the trees and rabbits skittering among the flowers in the grass, but there were no people. It seemed as if they must have been there once, a whole crowd of them talking and laughing together, but then for some reason they had vanished and now all that was left was their absence reverberating among the trees like an echo.

  An area about the size of a chessboard in the center of the tapestry had been cut out and replaced with a piece taken from a different tapestry, presumably because the original had been damaged. The repair was done so well and the colors were so closely matched that you hardly noticed it at first, but when you looked again you saw that instead of the trunks of trees there was a little group of human figures huddled together with their mouths wide open as if they were surprised by something or were singing together in one voice. There was no way of knowing how many others were there with them or what else was happening in their world.

  The children would sit on the floor eating cake and staring at the tapestry, their gaze returning repeatedly to the patch within it that seemed to contain another layer of existence. Later, when they walked through the forest or along the coastal path, they imagined cutting a hole into the quiet landscape that surrounded them to reveal a fragment of what lay hidden beneath it. Or they would frighten each other by saying they could hear voices singing within the stillness of the day.

  One morning when a group of them were in the house, Catherine suddenly let out a little cry and fell to the ground as if she had been shot. She lay on the rug from the Holy Land, her eyes closed and all the color gone from her cheeks. The children ran out into the road, calling for help.

  People came quickly from the fields, from the boats by the sea, from their houses. They gathered around the prostrate body and wondered whether Catherine was dead or alive.

  When the priest arrived he said there were three signs by which death could be recognized: paleness, coldness and stiffness. He felt the woman’s skin and it was cold. He looked at her and she was pale, but when he raised one of her arms it was not stiff. The priest told the others to lift her up carefully and place her on the bed.

  She lay there very quiet. Her breathing was so faint it could hardly be detected when a feather was held in front of her lips. Her body was so still it seemed to merge with the thin blankets that covered it. Her face was empty and calm, she looked like the figure of a saint carved in stone.

  The priest was convinced she was about to die at any moment and so he came with the oil of Extreme Unction and recited the final prayers for the dead over her. Although she managed to swallow a fragment of the wafer and a sip of the wine, she made no response.

  People began to make preparations for the funeral. A shroud was placed neatly folded on the floor beside the bed and the length of the body was measured with a piece of string so that the carpenter could make a coffin. The more curious of the onlookers took this opportunity to explore the house and examine the treasures it contained.

  But after three days of flickering on the edge, Catherine slept peacefully, and when she woke she was fully recovered. The priest was very shocked by the mistake he had made. He explained to her that she was now, as it were, dead to the world because of the prayers that he had said over her. She must never again wear shoes or eat meat or be intimate with a man. She laughed when he told her this and didn’t seem at all upset.

  The priest was eager to know if she had any experience of dying that she could share with him, since people were always asking him what they might expect.

  She could not remember much but said she had seen a huge army of men and women walking across the world. “I think they were on their way to the Holy Land,” she said. “They swept past me, wave upon wave of them, as if they were everyone who had ever lived and died since the beginning of time and I was able to join them. It was a vision.”

  Soon afterwards Catherine gathered up all her possessions and distributed them among the people of the village. One of the children received the tapestry. The shoemaker’s wife got the pot with the dragon on it and the woman who saw devils suddenly had a rug to place over the rushes on her bedroom floor.

  Catherine had quite a lot of money in a leather purse and she took it to the priest. She asked him to use it to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He could take two or three others from the village, there was no hurry. When he got there she wanted him to say a prayer for her in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and to bring back a flask of water from the river Jordan. “I think that is what is expected of me,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice.

  She arranged to have a little house built on the mound of land they called The Island. It was just a circular hut made of mud and wood with an open fire on the earth floor and a box bed filled with straw.

  From that time on people refe
rred to her as The Dead Woman. They gave her food and firewood and clothing when she needed it because they were sure it would bring them luck when it was their turn to die, but they never spoke to her and she never asked them to.

  Quite often when the tide was out she could be seen threading her way with awkward halting steps towards the village, following the slippery paths on bare feet, a storm of birds flying around her head where she had disturbed them. And when the tide was racing in she would be there in front of her hut, watching the water spreading across the land and separating her from the shore.

  9

  I entered a room in a house in the village and there was an old lady sitting very upright in her bed. She wasn’t ill or in pain and she wasn’t even particularly tired. She had decided to stay in bed because she needed to think about her life.

  She said everything had happened much too fast, the years racing ahead of her while she ran after them, calling for them to wait. Now she was going to sit still and let the past walk before her eyes like dancers on a stage, obedient to her command.

  She had made the decision early one morning, waking out of a vague dream and urgent with the need to begin. Her granddaughter the red-haired girl was sleeping in the bed beside her and she shook her roughly awake.

  “I need to get ready,” she said, as if that was explanation enough. “Fetch me the white shift from the chest, the one with the lace around the sleeves and neck. I wore it on the night of my marriage and I haven’t worn it since. Get it now and hurry!”

  The red-haired girl lived alone with her grandmother and she was accustomed to doing what she was told. She went obediently to the chest on bare feet and struggled with the weight of the lid.

  “Be quick!” said the old woman, rising to a sitting position with her naked flesh heaped on itself in soft folds and creases. “Dress me!” and she held her arms above her head while the girl stood beside her and pulled on the shift, careful not to damage the fragile cloth.