The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  “How do I look?” said the old woman.

  “You look lovely,” said the girl, stroking the mottled patterns of damp and mold on the white linen, feeling the intricacy of lace between her fingers.

  “You must do my hair,” said the old woman. “And you can see if I have many lice. I felt them moving about all last night, muddling my thoughts. Perhaps there are more of them now that the weather has turned warm.”

  The girl fetched a comb and a bowl of water. She climbed onto the bed and squatting beside her grandmother she began combing and parting, combing and parting, disentangling the pale sleepy bodies from their nesting places and setting them to sail like little boats in the water, their legs waving feebly.

  “You can catch them with a piece of bread spread with bird lime,” said the old woman. “You leave it out on the pillow at night. And a rag dipped in honey is good for flies but the honey drips. How many have we got?”

  “Ten” said the girl, counting the floating bodies to the highest number she knew.

  “So are we ready then?” said the old woman, her gray hair spreading like steam around her tired face and across her shoulders.

  “Yes,” said the girl, absentmindedly holding one of her grandmother’s hands in her own, examining the thin skin stretched over the pulsing blue veins. “Where do you want to begin?” she asked, turning the limp hand over and looking at the mass of lines on the palm.

  “As a young girl,” said the old woman rather smugly, “with your red hair and your face, only it was mine then.”

  “Were you young for a long time?” asked the girl.

  “Yes,” said her grandmother, “for a very long time.” And as she spoke the solemn procession of her childhood walked through the room. There were people she knew and people who were strangers but whose faces had lodged themselves in her mind. There were also animals, birds, and even fish which had impressed her in some way or another. Noises and smells drifted through her head while the darkness of the night and the brightness of the day repeated itself over and over again as the years slipped from one into the next.

  She watched them all marching past her bed and when something in particular caught hold of her attention she made it pause so that she could look at it more closely.

  There was a painting of Saint Christopher on the end wall of the church in the village where she had lived when she was a child. She gazed now with infinite leisure at the tight curls on his head, the waves and fishes swirling around his big pink legs, the Christ child clinging so tenaciously to his neck. She could feel the movement of his body as he strode forward, the sunlight on his hair, the warmth of his skin, the booming resonance of his voice that could chase away every fear.

  When Saint Christopher had gone the acrobats arrived. They announced themselves with the sound of drums and tambourines and tin whistles. There was a girl no older than herself with gold rings in her ears who could walk like a spider across a tightrope while her lizard body could turn and bend and wriggle as if it had no bones to hold it in place. The old woman had always longed to wear those glittering gold rings, to move with that same slippery grace.

  The red-haired girl sat patiently beside her grandmother and watched her as she watched, although she could not see what she was seeing.

  By mistake the old woman allowed herself to pause in front of the image of a horse in the rain. She felt a sense of dread well up inside her but she could not remember what was going to happen next. Then once more she felt the shock of terror when the horse toppled over and collapsed into the mud, staring at her with empty dead eyes. She gripped tightly at her granddaughter’s hand until the beast had been dragged away and was gone.

  Suddenly she saw her father, so thin and frail, sitting by the fire, the red light from the flames dancing on his skin. Her mother was there with him, peeling potatoes, but they ignored each other. “My mother was a big woman like me,” she said and her granddaughter nodded in agreement because she had been told this before.

  It was then that the Bad Winter began. She turned her head away but she could not escape from the icebound soil or from the hungry people drifting across the landscape, searching for anything that might serve as food. The houses that had been filled with life were now empty and their windows and open doors stared at her in their desolation.

  “That was when I left my village,” she said. “I was the only one who did not die. A man who was like Saint Christopher found me. He lifted me onto his back and brought me here. I was afraid of the cries of the seagulls until I got used to them. I had never seen the sea before.”

  “I am sometimes afraid of the seagulls,” said the red-haired girl. “They can be very fierce. I think they pulled the mermaid to pieces and only left a scrap of her hair, but Sally says she escaped and came back later.”

  “So then I was here,” said the old woman emphatically, not interested in other people’s stories.

  The procession was different now. There were fewer strangers, fewer animals, no birds or fish. The distinction between day and night was less clearly defined. People from the past came lumbering noisily into the room and sat themselves down at the end of the bed, demanding attention. The red-haired girl still could not see them or hear what they said but she watched her grandmother’s response to each new arrival.

  The old woman’s husband came in and she shouted out his name and ducked her head to avoid a blow from his fist. But then he had gone. “He’s dead now,” she said, with relief and an edge of surprise in her voice.

  “Oh good,” said the girl, who had never met him but knew all about his foul temper.

  The past was drawing closer and closer to the present now and the old woman’s face was becoming luminous and transparent from the effort of remembrance.

  “I am getting there,” she said softly, and her granddaughter was startled because the familiar voice had never before sounded so gentle and submissive.

  “I am an old woman in bed,” she said at last, grinning rather foolishly, as if she had done something wrong and hoped to escape punishment.

  She never spoke again. In the morning the red-haired girl woke to find that the body lying beside her was cold and still.

  She got dressed and moved around the room, arranging things and putting them in their place before going to fetch the priest. She saw a little horn button on the floor and picked it up and dropped it into her pocket. Later she sewed it onto one of her own dresses that had a button missing. It was another way of remembering.

  10

  The leper arrived here in the month of February. The sky on that day was without color and so empty you could not believe it contained the sun, the moon and all the stars hidden somewhere within its blank immensity. The air was sharp, cutting through closed doors and bolted windows, rasping at naked skin.

  It had been a long winter and it was not yet over. Everyone was tired and hungry but they still had to wait for the warmth of the sun to soften the earth and make things grow.

  A few cabbages and tufts of curly kale stood lopsided in the fields, their outer leaves burnt by the frost. There were no more potatoes. The carrots had turned to slime in the heap of sand that was supposed to protect them. The remaining scraps of salt bacon tasted as sour as stale beer and the fish were impossible to catch, as if they were clinging to the floor of the ocean in order to keep out of reach of the nets.

  It was the first week of Lent and I heard several people joking together in a halfhearted way, saying they would have to stop eating so much rich food and go on a fast in order to remember their sins. I had not seen hunger before; it looked very similar to sadness I thought.

  The leper had made himself a clapper out of two wooden boards bound at one side with a strip of leather. The boards had been the protective cover for a traveler’s guidebook to the Holy Land. He had taken the book with him when he went there as a young man long ago and in the years that followed his return he had only to hold it in his hands and he was back with the musty smells of that country, th
e whirring of cicadas, the relentless heat of the sun.

  It had been very strange to unpick the stitches holding the boards in place and put them to this new use. The pages were still bound together and he had wrapped them in a cloth. He had them now in his sack along with a few other possessions.

  I watched him walk along the road that was deeply rutted. On his left he could look out across the gray sea with no sign of a fishing boat, no waves, no birds, nothing for the eye to settle on. On his right there was a brief cluster of birch trees, an empty meadow, and then the cultivated field where the cabbages and the curly kale were growing.

  The first of the houses in the village was the one that belonged to Catherine, but now that she had gone, it had almost ceased to exist, standing there as insubstantial as a shadow.

  The other houses were crammed closely together like nests under the eaves of a roof. You could just make out the yellow stonework of the church at the far end of the village.

  The leper passed a steep bank of grass that would be covered with flowers when spring came, but there were no colors as yet, only the uniformity of an exhausted green.

  Just then I saw Sally stepping out of a door and standing in the road with her back turned to me. She was talking to the baby in her arms and her voice was carried easily across the stillness of the morning.

  “I’ll eat primroses for you,” she said. “I’ll eat a whole dish of primroses as soon as they have come. That will thicken my milk and fatten you up.”

  The baby began to cry and she hugged it with a sudden fierceness that made it cry even more.

  The sound of the clapper was growing stronger now, tentative and yet insistent.

  Clack, clack, clack, and Sally turned towards the approaching figure.

  Clack, clack, clack, and he was muffled in a long cloak with a hood that concealed his face.

  Clack, clack, clack, and it was like the warning cry of a bird when the cat is out hunting.

  Clack, clack, clack, and with a shock she realized that a leper was entering the village.

  She watched him drawing closer. The baby knocked its head against her breast, making the milk rush and tingle.

  “Perhaps he has no hair,” she thought to herself. “Perhaps he has a hand missing or holes in his body where the flesh has fallen away. He mustn’t touch my baby or he might kill it. He mustn’t speak to me except with the wind blowing against him. He mustn’t look at me because the sickness can jump out from a person’s eyes and catch hold of you.”

  The leper was close now, but he didn’t stop or even slow down. As he passed he said, “I am going to sit by the wall of the churchyard. Ask the priest to find me there.”

  His voice was soft and clear but the accent was very strange, and Sally had to run his words several times through her mind before she understood what he was saying. The fact that he came from somewhere far away made her suddenly ashamed of how little she knew of anything beyond the village where she lived.

  She went at once to the priest, rushing in on him where he sat at his desk, copying a prayer onto a piece of vellum.

  “There is a leper,” she said, aware of her own awkwardness, her hands chapped by the cold, the weight of the baby pulling at her.

  “He has a clapper and he clacks as he walks. That was why I went out. To see what it was. He spoke to me. You must go to him. I’ll take you.”

  The priest had kept his head bent forward as she spoke and only now did he raise it to look at her. He placed the goose quill and the sharpening knife side by side on his desk and got up slowly. He was not old, but he moved like an old man.

  Sally led him to the churchyard where the leper was waiting close to the wall, as crouched and quiet as a hare. She knew there was no need for her to come but she wanted to hear the voice again.

  The leper talked with the priest. He explained that he had come a long way and was going to continue on his journey, so there was no need to be afraid that he might be a burden on the village. But before he went he wanted something to be done for him. He wanted the priest to perform the Service of the Burial of the Dead over his living body.

  “I have been told it would make this sickness of mine easier to bear,” he said in his soft voice. “I have the black cloth with me in my sack and I know the procedure. We could do it now if you are willing.”

  The priest nodded his acquiescence. He took the cloth from the sack and went into the church.

  He reappeared carrying the silver cross that was used for Saint’s Day processions. He told Sally to hold the cross and lead the way. The leper followed through the arch of the door under the smiling mermaid, and the priest came last, chanting as he walked, “Libera me, Domine. Master, set me free.”

  Two wooden trestles had been set up at a little distance from the altar and the black cloth was draped between them. The leper knelt before the cloth while the priest sprinkled holy water over him. He bowed his head and shuffled forward on his knees until he was under the cloth. The priest continued with the recitation of the Mass while Sally stood to one side and watched what was happening. Her baby did not cry.

  Once the service was completed they went out into the churchyard. The priest dug up a spadeful of loose earth and sprinkled it over the leper’s feet.

  “Now you are in the grave,” he said, “buried as well as dead, just as you wished. I hope it brings you peace.”

  Sally and the priest accompanied the leper along the road until they reached the boundary stone that marked the end of the village. There were so many questions that Sally wanted to ask and yet could not. Who was this stranger and why had the sickness chosen to fix itself on him? Where did he come from and where would he go now? Would he live alone in some wild place like the hermit who lived in the forest, or would he go to a leper house? There was one not so many miles away and if he went there then Sally could visit him. She could show him how the baby was becoming a child. She suddenly dreaded the idea of losing this man as well, so soon after finding him. But she didn’t speak, she walked in silence.

  Before leaving, the leper rummaged in his sack. He took out a bundle wrapped in silk and a few coins from his purse. He placed these gently on the ground.

  “The money can pay for prayers for my soul,” he said to the priest. “The book is for you,” and he turned towards Sally.

  For a moment Sally thought she might see the face within the hood, but she saw nothing more than the eyes which swam towards her from out of the darkness like fish.

  Already the leper had turned and was setting off down the road, his wooden boards clacking as he went.

  The priest picked up the coins and put them in the pocket of his robe. He picked up the bundle, unwrapped it and revealed the bound pages of a little book.

  He examined it carefully. “It is a guide for travelers to the Holy Land,” he said. “It describes the journey to Jerusalem and tells you where you can stay and what you can expect to see in the places you pass through.”

  Sally took the book in her hands. The pages were as smooth as silk and they rustled slightly as she turned them as if they were alive. In the corner of one page there was a delicate brown stain and she could just see the thin lines of veins that had once carried the movement of the blood on this part of the animal’s body. It was like a miniature tree or the skeleton of a leaf. The person who had written into the book had avoided touching the mark, as if it was dangerous in some way.

  Sally looked at the words that had been flattened onto the pages like squashed insects. How could it be possible that marks such as these were the description of a journey? How could they contain the way to go, the dangers to be avoided?

  She began to cry because of her ignorance, the book still open in her hands. The priest took it from her. “Look,” he said, “here is a map.”

  He unfolded a double page and spread it out for her to see.

  “Here is England,” he said, pointing at a ragged shape. “You must follow this red line over the sea, which is blue, until you reach t
he country called Holland. You go through other countries as far as the city of Venice and then the line takes you by boat around the edge of what is called the Great Sea, until you have reached the port of Jaffa. And here is Jerusalem. And that building must be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

  Sally stared in amazement at the shapes that were countries, crisscrossed with lines that were roads and lines that were rivers and surrounded by the rippling waves of the sea. In the blue water she saw that there were ships and mermaids, whales and other fishes. On the land there were churches and castles, a wild man covered with hair, a unicorn, and some other beast that she could not recognize. She hoped to find her father, somewhere close to the red line, but she could not see him.

  The priest folded the map and handed her the book. She tucked it securely under the cloth that bound her baby close to her.

  That evening, when the baby was sleeping, she placed the book tenderly on her lap. She breathed in the musty smell of it. She licked the words in case they might taste of anything she knew. Without really considering what she was doing she tore off a small corner of the map and put it into her mouth. She chewed it until the skin was quite soft and then she swallowed it.

  She ate the map entirely. It satiated her hunger for a while and it made her feel as if she now contained the knowledge of distant lands growing inside her like a new baby.

  11

  Time has passed, winter has moved into spring. The red-haired girl is walking through a beanfield.

  The sweet scent of the bean flowers makes her feel dizzy. She sits down abruptly on the side of the path. She traces circular patterns with her finger in the pale dust. She watches a line of ants moving with great purpose from one side of the path to the other. She becomes aware of the hum of bees and as she looks up at the sea of flowers all around her she realizes they are like insects too, with white petal wings surrounding a scrabble of black which could easily be mistaken for an insect’s body.