The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  Finally after nine days of waiting there was a change. The people on the land began to wave and beckon excitedly. The governor and the prior from the Monastery of Saint George had arrived. A table had been set up on the beach and the pilgrims could go ashore.

  As soon as they landed the Saracens surged around them, snatching at the hem of a cloak, reaching out to touch hair or skin, grasping at sacks and staffs and bodies. A man tugged at the leper’s sleeve with a look of desperate entreaty on his face. A young boy thumped the shoemaker’s wife on the back with the palms of both his hands, but when she turned to shout at him he offered her the gentlest of smiles, as if the attack had been intended as nothing more than a form of greeting.

  The pilgrims were herded together to stand like sheep in front of the governor, the prior, and a scribe who was seated between them. The prior nodded his head wearily and made the sign of the cross over each man or woman who was presented to him. The scribe was fluent in many languages. “What is your name and your country?” he asked, first in Italian and then trying German, French, English, and Dutch, spitting the words out like the accusation of a crime. The governor hardly bothered to look up, but signed the documents that were set before him with an expression of utter despair on his face.

  And then they were driven stumbling forward into the caves of Saint Peter, where the stink of stagnant water, human excrement and rotting meat was so overwhelming that some of the pilgrims tried to escape back into the fresh air. But their way was blocked by men with swords.

  After a little while flaming torches were brought in to illuminate the rough walls, the high ceiling, the pools of dirty water, and the carcasses of two sheep. But before the pilgrims had lost all hope a crowd of noisy strangers burst in bearing a whole market of goods for sale. There was brushwood to lie on, and rushes to cover the filth on the floor. The scent of aromatic gums and sweet spices filled the stagnant air. One man had a roll of white muslin cloth, which he sold in lengths that could be hung in drifting folds around a bed. Another had a box of sparkling jewels. Two women carried trays of bread and cakes, fried eggs and fresh dates. A donkey bore the weight of a metal urn filled with a warm honey drink.

  At night a man with a club stationed himself at the entrance to the cave and anyone wanting to go outside had to be polite to him and pay him a fee. But during the day the pilgrims could go wherever they wished.

  So there they were, helpless and passive, unable to continue on their way until some new order was given. The leper passed the time by going walking on his own along the shore. He examined the dragon’s bones. He picked up the black oyster shells that were scattered everywhere on the sand, their thick-lipped bodies buckled and twisted with age and the battering of the waves. He found a freshwater spring that bubbled into a pool only a few yards from the reach of the sea, but it was only when he put his hand into the water and it was so icy-cold it made his bones ache, that he suddenly found himself remembering how the first signs of his sickness had crept up on him, all those years ago.

  Then, just as now, he had been staying with the other pilgrims in the caves. From the moment of arriving at Jaffa he had been strangely elated with a sense of having escaped from the net of his own sadness, a new life lying ahead of him and the door of the past banged firmly shut. But then one night he had become aware of a sensation like fear itself rushing with the blood in his veins and beating with the pumping of his heart, and in the morning he saw that red swellings were appearing on his body, starting with the left side of his neck and spreading down across the shoulder and up into his jaw, making his tongue bloated and slurring any attempt at speech. He felt then as if he was metamorphosing into some other creature, his skin so tight and hot it must burst open to reveal whatever monster lay beneath its surface.

  For three days the swellings and the fear that went with them moved over his body, but at the last they began to subside and he presumed the danger was gone. He went walking along the coast. He stopped to look at the dragon’s bones and picked up the black oyster shells. He reached the spring and put his hand into its icy-cold water. And that was when he noticed how his hands were covered in scaly patches, the skin breaking off into silvery fragments like fish scales. Even as he watched he could see this transformation taking effect and could feel the sickness tightening and shrinking over the entire surface of his body. His scalp became bumpy and rough to the touch. An exhausting, aching pain was devouring his flesh and hammering at his bones.

  “The sadness that I carried inside me is eating through my skin and it has turned me into a leper,” he thought to himself. “It has cut me off from the world and the people who inhabit it.”

  With the protection of the night he returned to the caves and hid himself, cowering like an animal in a dark corner. And when it was time for everyone to leave and make their way toward Jerusalem, he did not join them. He stayed in hiding and might have died of thirst and starvation had not a man called Caiphos found him there and brought him into the glare of the daylight.

  Caiphos examined the leper’s blistered damaged skin and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “It will pass.” He gave him food and water and a different cloak with a big hood that enveloped him completely and concealed his face. He helped him to make a clapper from the wooden boards that bound his book of travels, and then showed him the road that he must take.

  He sat there remembering this huge sweep of time with his hand still immersed in the pool of biting cold water. And when finally he removed his hand it was so numb that it hardly seemed to belong to him and he could not command the fingers to move. But it was smooth and clean and uncontaminated by the marks of sickness.

  29

  They were in the caves for about a week before a man came and told them that everything was ready and they could leave. He led them to a place among the rocks where donkeys and their drivers were assembled and waiting.

  They set off in a slow cavalcade, traveling through rolling hills in a southeasterly direction. The land was like a carcass stripped of its skin to reveal the sharp bones and desiccated flesh. There was nowhere to hide; no protection from the cruelty of the sun by day, the cold emptiness of the moon and the stars by night. The howling of hyenas, the braying of the donkeys, shiny black scorpions that hid under stones and were quick to attack although their sting was not dangerous. A small-bodied hare racing towards them like an arrow and passing close enough to brush against the donkeys’ legs, but no sign of the enemy it was escaping from.

  Sometimes they came across evidence of a patch of land having been cultivated quite recently and then deserted for no apparent reason. Walls enclosed barren fields. Broken wells gave shelter to a few snakes. Exhausted fruit trees leaned against each other, their branches withered from neglect.

  They entered the town of Gath where the giant Goliath had been born, but nothing remained of it except for the foundations on which houses had stood and fragments of pottery and broken glass mixed up with the dust on the road.

  However in the next town of Ram which was also called Ramleh, they were inundated with human activity. Wave upon wave of noisy strangers surged around them and somehow managed to be both hostile and welcoming at the same time. The men shouted what sounded like threats from doorways and windows and jostled against the pilgrims with such a violent intimacy that they were often in danger of being toppled from their donkeys. Children threw stones and then stared with blank defiant faces as if that proved their innocence. Women hid everything but their darting eyes. But within this delicate balance of emotions everyone was quick to smile, to offer goods for sale or the gift of food and drink, to try to understand what the pilgrims wanted and to lead them this way and that.

  The leper and the priest remained quiet and preoccupied in spite of the hubbub and they hardly noticed their surroundings; but for the shoemaker’s wife it was very different. She was overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity, a sense of coming home after a long absence. She felt she already knew these streets and the life they cont
ained and she searched among the sea of faces for the ones she would recognize and who would acknowledge her. She laughed when the children raised their hands to throw stones and confronted with the authority of her laughter they let their stones drop to the ground. She greeted the furtive glances of the women and she was not afraid of the violence of the men.

  She was impatient to explore the town. She would have gone alone, but the leper and the priest went with her as she led them through a maze of streets. They entered a covered market where she bought herself a poppyseed cake and a bowl of sticky rice pudding cooked in milk and sweetened with honey. She was shocked when she could not remember the name of this dish. “It will come back to me,” she said to herself.

  The leper stopped to examine some wooden casket boxes. “What is this?” he asked the man who was selling them, using a phrase taken from the book of travels. “It is the earth from which Adam was made,” said the shoemaker’s wife as she carefully opened the lid of one of the caskets to show him a powdery red soil as fine as wood ash.

  A woman dressed in a robe of faded green silk with blue-green tattoos covering her chin like crawling insects, was squatting beside a wall and holding a single bunch of mint for sale. Her arm was stretched out as patiently as the branch of a tree with the froth of green leaves at its tip. Her body seemed rooted and still as if it could never be made to move again.

  The shoemaker’s wife bought the mint, her hand settling for a moment in the woman’s as she gave her the money. She would have walked away, but just then the strap of her shoe snapped and so she bent down to take it off and examine it.

  The woman in green made a clicking sound with her tongue. She rose ponderously to her feet and beckoned to the shoemaker’s wife to come with her, the priest and leper following obediently behind. She led them to a tiny shop. She gestured that the two men must wait outside, but she ushered the shoemaker’s wife in.

  The shop was like a tent, the walls and the ceiling hung with folds of brightly colored cloth. A man was sitting at a bench and working on a pair of shoes. He looked up as his visitors entered and the shoemaker’s wife knew him at once. He was quite small with gray eyes and gray hair and the skin of his face was stretched so tight over the bones of his skull that you didn’t at first see the tracery of lines showing his age.

  He finished some detail on the shoes and when they were ready he gave them to the shoemaker’s wife. They fitted her perfectly. She offered him money, but he shook his head and came to stand directly in front of her, their breath intermingling, their bodies almost touching. He took her hand in his and led her through a doorway in the back of his shop. And that was it. She went to another life with him. She was happy to be gone.

  The leper and the priest waited patiently outside. After a while the woman in green appeared, but she pushed past them without any sign that she had seen them before. They entered the shop but it was dark and empty. They went searching distractedly through the streets of the town, looking behind bales of silk, sacks of spices and big earthenware pots, as if the shoemaker’s wife might be hiding there, waiting for them to find her. They called out her name, their voices small and plaintive among so many other sounds. The priest practiced the words he had learned from the book of travels. “I want a woman,” he said to whoever would listen. “I have lost a woman.” People shrugged their shoulders in perplexity and a little boy led them to the open door of a brothel.

  They returned to the place where they were staying. Only two of them left now, the other two gone. The leper had a sense of the finality of destiny, as if the loss of Sally and the shoemaker’s wife had been inevitable from the beginning of the journey, something that was written in a book as it were and all that the passage of time did was to turn the pages forward.

  On the following morning they left the town of Ram and set off towards the Holy City. The rolling hills were transformed into steep mountains and the track became very narrow as it clung to the slopes and cut its way between high escarpments of rock. The hot sky was silent and oppressive and even the sound of the donkeys’ hooves was muffled.

  They were following the dried bed of a river when suddenly there was a clatter of falling stones and with terrible cries a group of Bedouin raced upon them. They were riding bareback on moth-eaten camels and they were almost naked, their skin burnt black by the sun, their heads swathed in a swirl of indigo cloth, and leather shields slung around their necks to protect the heart and the chest. They carried raised spears and seemed determined to slaughter every one of the pilgrims.

  The odd thing was that the donkeys remained quite unperturbed. They continued to plod steadily forward with their heads bowed and hardly seemed to be aware of the lurching bodies of the camels and the screaming of their riders. The pilgrims did their best to imitate the donkeys. One man had his hat pulled off, another lost his staff and a third was knocked from his saddle so that he tumbled to the ground and lay there with his pale legs thrashing helplessly. But nothing else happened and the Bedouin disappeared as fast as they had arrived, taking the hat and the staff with them. The pilgrims saw their camp a bit farther along the track: the big skin tents clinging like limpets among the rocks, children playing in the dust, a woman carrying an earthenware jug on her head and the two trophies of war hanging incongruously from the branches of a thin tree.

  They spent the next night sleeping on the ground under the blanket of stars and the vastness of the moon. It was very cold. On the next day they were rewarded with the sight of the high walls of Jerusalem crowning a hill and they sang songs as they approached.

  At Fish Gate each pilgrim presented the certificate which had been signed by the governor of Jaffa, and having paid a sum of money they were allowed to enter the Holy City.

  When the leper reached the gate he almost expected to be told that he could go no further. He had been this far before but a man had pulled back the covering of his hood and had seen the encrustation of sickness on his face and he was turned away to wander in whatever direction he chose to take.

  But now it was different, no one stopping him or telling him to go back. He looked about him with the eyes of a child; and everything was new and untrammeled by the burden of the past. He saw the walls of high buildings decorated with geometric patterns of red, black and white brick and the buildings reminded him of nothing he had ever seen before. He heard music playing and caught sight of a woman dancing on a flat roof, her body swaying like a reed in the wind, but she was a stranger to him and brought back no memories.

  He asked the priest to lead his donkey to the Hospice of Saint John where they would be staying while they were here. “I need to be on my own for a while” he said and his voice no longer seemed to echo through the cavity of his skull with the same lonely resonance he had grown accustomed to.

  He set off towards the eastern quarter of the city, with no idea of where he was going or what he might find. He went down steep steps until he reached a narrow and deserted street that was filled with the carcasses of dead animals: camels and horses, donkeys and dogs, some of them swollen and tight with putrescence, others dry and empty. People brought them here because it was so difficult to bury them in the hard, shallow soil outside the city walls, but the leper did not know that. All he knew was what he saw. He stared around him for a while and then he turned and went back the way he had come. He was neither happy nor sad but for the first time in a long while he was empty of recollection. He had entered a place where there were no memories waiting to spring out at him and catch him by the throat and that in itself was an unfamiliar freedom.

  30

  Here in the city of Jerusalem, the leper and the priest were standing in a courtyard outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was smaller and less imposing than the leper had expected it to be, but then really he had not known what to expect. The glittering dome of a mosque was so close that the two buildings seemed to belong together, and now the muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer from a high minaret that cast its shadow acro
ss the flagstones at his feet.

  All the windows had been bricked up and all the bells had been removed from the bell tower, making it seem as if the church had been silenced and blinded. The heavy door was closed and bolted and four Saracen guards with long beards and long sad faces sat cross-legged on a bench by the wall, their swords in their laps.

  The carved lintel above the door showed Christ riding on a donkey on one side, and Lazarus being raised from the dead on the other. The people who were gathered around Lazarus were holding their noses because of the stench of his putrefaction. He was looking very frightened by what had just happened to him, and his mouth was wide open. The leper could imagine the shock of being called from a cold tomb like that. He remembered crouching under a black cloth in the church in the village, the priest’s voice pronouncing him dead to the world and the sense of relief he had felt from this stepping out of his own body.

  He went up to the church door. There was a metal grille set into it and he pressed his face against the bars and inhaled the smell of incense and darkness that lay beyond it. He could see the flickering of a few candles and a shaft of pale daylight which fell down from the ceiling and appeared as solid and luminous as a block of ice.

  One of the guards shouted at him and grabbed his shoulder to push him away from the door. It was only then that he became aware of how many people were crammed into the courtyard, while more and more of them were still arriving. There were the usual food sellers, merchants and curious onlookers, but there were many hundreds of pilgrims and as their number steadily increased you could feel their impatient energy growing stronger and more desperate. They were like a single body, sighing and swaying and longing to break through the closed door of the church.