The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  She breaks off a bean stalk that leans over the path and picks one of the flowers to suck the drop of nectar it contains, the sweetness tugging a thin line through the inside of her mouth. She examines the two tiny bunches of beans just beginning to take shape, the shriveled remnant of a flower clinging to each green tip like the umbilical cord of a newborn infant. She eats them and they taste as pale and delicate as their own color.

  She gets up and continues walking, her head throbbing now with the rhythm of her heartbeat. She walks over the smooth brow of the hill and down towards the village, following a track hedged with cow parsley that leads directly to the church.

  When she reaches the gate into the cemetery she pauses under the shadow of a huge yew tree. It was said to be the first tree to grow in this area after the waters of the Flood had receded. There is a solemnity about it which must come from the things it has witnessed over the succession of years, beginning on the day when the land for miles around was covered with the stinking drowned corpses of those killed by the anger of God, through plagues and wars, harsh winters and long summers, up until this present moment when a red-haired girl is gazing into the clustered darkness of its branches.

  The girl enters the cemetery and pauses by the fresh earth of her grandmother’s grave. Once again she can see her grandmother lying in a coffin on the floor in the house, her mass of gray hair still somehow alive even though her face was empty of the person who had once inhabited it.

  Some people linger after they are dead. You can feel them peering in at a window, sitting quietly in a chair, moving through a deserted garden. Others are impatient to be gone and they leave no trace behind. The girl’s grandmother had been like that; it was as if there was nothing to hold her, nothing in the world she wanted and so she had quickly turned her back on it all and walked away.

  The girl continued to sleep in the big bed she had shared with her grandmother, but every morning she would wake up before the lifting of the dawn with a sense of utter desolation that leapt out from the ambush of the night in the moment when she remembered how alone she was.

  She had grown accustomed to looking at the old woman’s face and seeing something of herself reflected there; listening to the old woman’s labored breathing and being reassured that she was herself alive. Now she was out off from this sense of her own existence, floating in a space with no visible boundaries, no recognizable landmarks.

  She stares down at the grave and wonders if her grandmother could even be persuaded to return to the village on the Day of Judgment. Was it possible to be so preoccupied with other things that you failed to hear the sounding of the trumpet? And even if she did come back along with all the others, a great bustling crowd of them shoulder to shoulder, bursting out of the earth, then would the girl be able to recognize her? The priest had explained that on The Day they would all be thirty-one years of age, even little babies and the very old. They would all be fit and healthy, even the ones who had been torn apart by an accident or some terrible illness. The girl could suddenly see herself moving desperately through that crowd, going from face to face in search of a face that was familiar to her.

  People change so much with death. When Sally found her husband washed up on the sand close to where the mermaid was buried, the sea water had turned him into a different person, his body white and soft. Sally had not been convinced it was him until she saw the ring on his finger. She had insisted on putting shoes on his swollen feet before shutting the lid of his coffin. She said he might be confused after all that buffeting in the waves and if he was wearing shoes then at least he would be ready to step forward as soon as the angel called out his name. The swelling would have gone down by then so his feet would not cause him any pain in the tight shoes. “He will be as he was,” said Sally and the priest had nodded his head in agreement.

  Now the red-haired girl remembers that young man’s feet and how helpless and fragile they looked; quite different from her grandmother’s, which were as hard and dry as firewood and seemed closer to a tree than a person.

  She pauses as she walks into the church by the east door. The man with leaves in his hair hangs from the corner of the roof and stares down at her. His big hands tug the sides of his mouth wide open and his crouching body seems ready to leap forward like a huge frog.

  And there is the mermaid, her fat fish legs spread wide above the arch of the door and a look of lechery on her face as she smiles to reveal a row of pointed teeth.

  The red-haired girl is in the church and the dim underwater light is all around her. The air smells of stale urine because in the winter the children like to piss against the big stone pillar over by the bell tower; grown men do as well sometimes, but not the women. You can see the crystals of dried piss glinting on the floor when all the candles are lit.

  The girl looks at the picture in the stained-glass window. An angel covered in feathers is telling the Virgin Mary that she will soon bear a child. The angel’s face is filled with compassion and the girl feels his eyes meet hers across the immense distance that separates them and she is strangely comforted.

  Someone puts a hand on her shoulder, gripping tightly at the bones beneath the skin. She turns to be confronted by a man she has never seen before. Instead of speaking he sticks out his tongue, which is very pointed and wet.

  He wraps her into his arms and she lets him take possession of her body, as if it belongs to him by right. She doesn’t even cry out or protest when she feels a brief stab of pain in the pit of her belly, but lies quiet and limp on the floor with the weight of the man pressing down on top of her and the cold stone eating into her back.

  After the man has gone she remains there, drifting through something which is neither waking nor sleeping. She seems to be buried under a deep layer of earth and she can see the white threads of the roots of plants all around her.

  Without any particular sense of surprise, she becomes aware that she has turned into a bean: a smooth kidney-shaped bean. From far away she can feel the strength of the sun pulling at her through the earth. With a great effort she moves towards it, bunching her bent knees under her chin and clasping her arms tightly around them. A white root grows out of her belly and lodges itself into the earth beneath her while a green shoot wavers up towards the light and the air and the sunshine.

  And then the sensation has passed and she is once again nothing more than a young girl with red hair lying on the stone floor of a church. There is a smell of piss in the air and the colors coming in through the stained-glass window are dappled like flowers all around her.

  She gets up and leans against the pillar before going out with cautious steps into a day that is still hot and bright. A thin line of blood is trickling down the inside of her leg and she rubs it away with a handful of grass.

  She wanders into the village, pausing in front of a house from which comes the sound of a baby crying. She walks in and there is Sally sitting in a corner gutting fish. Her baby is gripping her skirts, trying to steady himself and crying with the frustration of the effort, but when he sees the red-haired girl he lurches towards her on bowlegs, crowing with delight. She catches him in her arms before he falls and kisses him, breathing in the smell of skin and hair. And in that moment she decides that she will live here, with Sally and the baby.

  12

  Every night Sally dreamed the same dream in which she found her husband swept up onto the sand, his hair matted with seaweed. And as she crouched beside him trying to find the courage to touch him, he would open his eyes in a lazy intimate way as if he was lying close beside her in bed. He would stretch out his hand towards her and explain in a languorous voice that he was not really dead.

  “I held my breath,” he would say. “I held my breath while the waves turned me over and over and tried to pull me down. And I floated and floated until I was able to come back to you. I am sorry I was gone so long.”

  Then with a sigh he would release his held breath so that a fountain of water erupted from his mouth. And Sally
would wake, filled with relief because he was after all alive, only to realize once again that he was after all dead and cold and buried in the churchyard. She had put shoes on his swollen feet. She had wrapped him in a shroud. She had sat beside him through the night, singing to him as if he was a restless child, and she had gone with the priest and the people from the village to bury him after he had lain in his coffin for three days.

  Now the red-haired girl slept with her in the bed. The baby slept between them. The moonlight shone silver through the window, covering them both with a pool of shallow water. Sally searched for something of her husband in her baby’s sleeping face, but she could find no trace of him there.

  The red-haired girl always lay on her belly, the flames of her hair spreading out across her back and shoulders. She had begun to look after the baby as if he was her own.

  Sally was indifferent to this change. Her one emotion was her sense of loss, which made her feel like a stranger in her own life and her own body. She longed to escape from this present time but she could not see a way.

  On this particular night when she woke from her dream, she clambered from the bed, careful not to disturb either of the sleepers.

  She picked up the book the leper had given her and stepped outside. It was dark, but the darkness was made visible because everything—the houses, the trees, the road, even the line of the horizon—was covered with a thick colorless layer of moonlight.

  She was startled by a noise that sounded like someone muttering curses close to her feet, but it was only a hedgehog grumbling to itself and busy with the search for food. It disappeared under the shelter of a bush on stiff legs, rustling last year’s leaves as it went.

  “I must go and see the priest,” thought Sally. “He won’t mind that it’s late. He told me he often works through the night. He could talk to me, comfort me, read my book to me.”

  And so she walked through the silent village until she reached the priest’s house. It was a small building, more like a hermit’s cell, built onto the wall of the churchyard.

  The door was open and Sally could see a glimmer of candlelight inside. She entered as quiet as a cat and settled herself into a shadow in the corner.

  The priest was sitting at his writing desk, the candle flickering in front of him. His back was turned but Sally could see the side of his face when he bent forward over his work.

  There was the scratching of the goose quill on the sheet of vellum and every so often he spoke softly to himself. “There now,” he kept saying. “There now. There now,” as if this was a part of the process of putting the words down and fixing them in their place.

  He paused to rub his cheek with his hand, and Sally watching him could feel the roughness of the stubble on the palm of her own hand. He sighed and bent forward again, holding the quill poised above the page so that Sally licked her lips and tensed her whole body from the effort of concentration she shared with him.

  She stood in the shadow for some time until she grew tired and then she left as silently as she had come. The priest turned to glance over his shoulder when she was no longer there. Although he had not been aware of her presence, he sensed her absence.

  However, he did see her when she came the next night. She was bolder now, hypnotized by the process in which words were being hatched by a moving hand in the stillness of the night.

  She was standing right beside him. When he first saw her, he thought she was an angel dressed in a white shift and staring at him with an intensity that was like hunger. Then he recognized Sally.

  “What do you want?” he asked. “What have you come here for?”

  “I am so sad I don’t know what to do,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. “I would like to go away from here, but I am not able to. I thought if you read to me from my book, it might help. But what are you writing now?”

  “I am copying the Book of Revelation,” said the priest. “The Book of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. I have just reached the pale horse with Death riding on his back. There now,” and he withdrew the hand that had been shielding the page.

  “Where is the horse?” said Sally. “Will you show him to me?”

  “Here,” and the priest took hold of her finger and steered it to a mark that hardly looked any different from all the other marks.

  Sally stroked the horse. “Will he stay there for a long time?” she asked, as if it might be swallowed into oblivion by the same magic that had created it.

  “Oh yes,” said the priest, “it will stay. I make my own ink. Oak apples from Aleppo. Iron salts from Spain. Gum Arabic from Egypt. It will stay.”

  He took the goose quill, dipped it into the ink horn and gave it to her, showing her how to hold it with the two middle fingers and the thumb.

  With a shaking hand Sally made a tiny insect mark on a scrap of vellum. The ink turned from blue to black as it dried.

  “What have I written?” she asked.

  “Nothing as yet,” said the priest, “but I could teach you. We could use your book. We could begin with the map. We could look at the pictures on the map and the words that go with the places and in that way you would learn to recognize the sound of the letters.”

  “But I have eaten the map!” said Sally and she could feel her face hot with shame. “I wanted to be able to go to Jerusalem, and I thought if I had the map inside me then I could find the way!”

  The priest could see this girl with her gazing moon face eating the image of a mermaid, a castle, a river, a boat. He could see her eating cities and countries and entire continents, as well as the ocean which lapped against their shores.

  “Maybe you will be able to find your way now,” he said.

  After that Sally often went to the priest’s house during the hours of darkness when her dreams had woken her. She sat and listened to him reading from the book and slowly the images of faraway places took shape within her mind and she traveled with the priest’s voice farther and farther from her home and everything that was familiar to her.

  The priest taught her how to write her own name, and the name of the holy city of Jerusalem. When she put these two words together side by side she felt she had written the story of a long journey.

  13

  On one occasion after Sally had gone, I stayed there in the room with the priest, watching the concentration on his quiet, serious face and the poised movement of his hand as it formed new letters and words on the page before him.

  After a while, he rose to his feet and went over to a bowl filled with water standing in a corner of the room. He bent his head to gaze at the wavering reflection that confronted him. He saw a very tired face, haunted by doubt and anxiety. He had not understood until this moment how old he had become with the passing of the years. He let out a yelping cry, as if the teeth of a trap had caught hold of him, and he slapped the palm of his hand hard against the surface of the water, shattering the fragile image.

  He was suddenly aware of how little experience he had of the world. He had witnessed love and desire, pain and fear, as it swept through the lives of others, but nothing had ever touched him directly. He wondered if he had decided to join the priesthood because it enabled him to listen to the confession of sins he would not know how to commit, to speak to the sick and dying with words that to him offered no comfort. People thanked him for the prayers he wrote out for them but he doubted if they ever worked in the way they were meant to; the mermaid had returned to fetch Sally’s husband and he blamed himself for that. He longed to hear the voice of God whispering in his ear, or to be accorded some vision of eternity that would alleviate his feeling of desolation, but although others had told him of what they had heard or seen, he feared that for himself even in the hour of death he would be alone in a silent place.

  And now he had agreed to go on a journey for which he was totally unprepared. He had never considered leaving this village where he had been born; he was afraid of making a sea crossing and he dreaded entering countries where he would be a complete s
tranger. His one scrap of comfort was the thought that Sally would want to go with him; after all, the idea had planted itself in her mind when she ate the torn pieces of the map.

  But before he could go he wanted to know what lay ahead of him. He decided to visit the hermit who lived in a cave somewhere close to the shrine of Saint Anselm. The hermit had been to Jerusalem. He had crossed the Great Desert and had lived there with the heat, the silence and the solitude. Surely he would be able to tell the priest what to expect from such a journey.

  And so the priest set out for the shrine, following a path that went through the forest and ran close to the meanderings of the river. I was there with him, now at his heels, now at his side, now lingering, now waiting as he approached. The may trees were already in flower, their mass of tiny petals falling like snow on the ground and floating in drifts on the flowing water. There was the voice of the cuckoo. Toads were mating in the soft mud of a ditch, each pair clamped together like a single, two-headed creature.

  Sometimes the priest was startled by the sound of his own footsteps, the rustle of long grass or the gentle crack of a twig, but although he glanced furtively over his shoulder, he knew that he was on his own and far from other people.

  The smooth trunks of the birch trees were like the torsos of naked bodies and their branches were arms locked in a tight embrace. The passion of the trees unnerved him.

  He approached a tree with a single overhanging branch that served the purpose of a gallows. The body of a young man was dangling from it, stirring in the breeze and giving the impression of awakening life although the sweet stench of putrefaction surrounded it like a high wall. The priest looked up and saw a man as young as he had once been himself and he stumbled and almost fell in his haste to pass by.

  When we reached the shrine of Saint Anselm a number of people were gathered there, waiting for a miracle of one sort or another. A man whose legs had been broken in an accident had been brought in a wheelbarrow and laid out on the ground with his twisted swollen limbs close to the golden casket that contained the saint’s thigh bone.