The Leper's Companions (11 page)

As evening approached we reached a barn, and we spent the night there with the darkness immense outside and the rustling of rats in the straw. Sally was so restless that it was hard to know if she was awake or asleep. She whimpered like a little child, the noise so close and intimate it sounded like my own voice.

I
want to try to put words to the shock I experienced when we entered the first town on this journey. It was the port of Great Yarmouth, the same place from which the leper had set out when he was bound for Santiago de Compostela. There was nothing extraordinary about it; it was a town like any other, but I had no idea what to expect.

We had passed through a forest of beech trees, their bark as smooth as skin and moss green. Then we followed a raised track that took us safely across an area of marshland. The colors on that marsh were so startling: dark reds and grays and purples interspersed with patches of water glistening like liquid mercury. And the birds. I had never imagined such a quantity of birds. They were a thick restless carpet on the land and rushing clouds of movement in the sky. I can
still hear the noise of them: burbling songs, harsh screams, the creaking of wings.

The walls of the town emerged out of the mist like a monstrous face with gates for its many mouths through which people streamed in an endless flow and towers for eyes, the narrow windows staring down to judge those who approached.

We joined the crowd that was heading for one of the gates and we were swept along with them and into the town. People shouted and pushed around me and there was a savagery in their determination which allowed no time to pause, no room for mercy. I caught hold of Sally's hand when I stumbled on the uneven cobblestones and I kept it in my grip as if I would drown without it.

The houses lowered at me and the streets between them were dark and narrow. There was a beggar lying in his own filth, the corpse of a dog, a heap of rags, a jumble of bones, a piece of broken chain and then we were suddenly tipped out into the light and space of the market square.

All the shops around the square were hung with signs to explain their trade. A surgeon had a wooden arm painted with dripping stripes of blood, a barber had a long sharp knife, a tavern had a bunch of branches tied together like a broom and leaning out so low that it brushed against the top of my head.

Above the cacophony of sounds I thought I could hear someone screaming in agony, but it was only a pig being slaughtered. I saw it stretched out on a trestle table, its skin
pink and human, its throat cut so that the head lolled in a final ecstasy and the belly slit wide open and steaming into the air.

Two women were busy washing the pig's entrails in a tub of water. They laughed contentedly as they squeezed excrement out of the long tube of the intestine and one of them managed to throw a length of it around a man's neck as he walked past. It dangled from him as fresh as an umbilical cord and that made everyone roar with laughter.

People were selling things from little stalls set up on the paving stones. Chickens tied by their feet and suspended from hooks, stared at me with amazement. Tethered goats shifted and bleated uneasily. There was dark bread, a few vegetables, and lots of fish.

A stone cross marked the center of the square, and wooden stocks and a metal cage had been erected just beside it. I blundered against the side of the cage and thought at first that it contained an animal, but then I saw it was a man, shivering and naked, his body blotched with vivid colors from the cold, the dirt and the bruises which covered him. He was cowering on all fours in a corner.

“What did you do?” I asked him.

“I don't remember,” he replied.

The stocks held a woman by her wrists and ankles. She was slumped forward, her face concealed by her hair. A few young children who must have been her own, snuffled close to her, as piglets do when their sow is trapped in the farrowing pen.

The leper kept on striding ahead, while the four of us scuttled after him. I still held Sally's hand in mine. Without it I might have tried to run away, even though there was nowhere to run to.

We crossed to the other side of the market and reached the church of Saint Nicholas. The saint was standing by the door to welcome us. His cloak was bright blue, his cheeks were bright red, his hair was bright yellow. In his hands he was holding the severed heads of three children. Behind him was the painted barrel in which the children's truncated corpses were soaking in salty water. The saint was poised right on the edge of the miracle that would restore the heads to their bodies and bring the children back to life. I saw that everyone who went into the church knelt to kiss him, congratulating him for what he was about to do. His wooden cheeks and the hem of his wooden cloak were shiny from the touch of so many lips.

We were not inside the church for long, but I did see the big ship which dangled from chains fixed to the dome of the ceiling and the spiderweb of wires which I was told were used every year when the Star of Bethlehem was made to whiz across the vaulted space until it hung, shaking with the effort, above the altar.

Then we were threading our way through more streets until again there was a sudden opening into space and light. But this time we had reached the limits of the land, with a view of a wide estuary and a river racing to meet the sea.

A pair of gallows stood on a wooden platform overlooking
the water. Between them these two awkward structures were carrying the weight of twelve dead men. They hung together in an exhausted clump. There was something vaguely convivial about their companionship and something terrible about their isolation. They were so close to each other, and yet so utterly distant from each other. They all had their heads facing the sea, staring with empty eyes into a far distance. The image hooked itself into my mind and often came back to me later.

T
he sun was already setting as we approached a three-masted ship in the harbor. The leper spoke to some sailors and within moments we were ushered up the gangplank and onto the deck. I went to sit on my own because of the shock of the town and the dead men.

A pile of gutted herrings had been heaped up on the wooden boards and now that it was dark their bodies began to shine with a natural luminosity. I stroked one with my finger which took on the same pale gleam.

That night I slept alongside the others under a canvas awning and among bales of oily wool with a stink so strong it rasped at the back of my throat. While the ship rocked and groaned across the waves, I dreamed that I found Sally's husband washed up naked on the shore. He was wrapped in the
mermaid's arms and she had two tails like soft legs which were snaked tightly around his waist. In the dream I sat beside their fused bodies and stroked the skin that was as rough as a cat's tongue and the skin that was smooth.

I was aching all over when I woke and I could not begin to imagine where I was or why the ground beneath me was heaving with so much movement. I thought the sickness must have returned, bringing with it the nausea and the dizziness and the sense of being marooned on a raft, salt on my cracked lips. It was only then that I remembered what was happening, how I was leaving one place and going to another.

I clambered out from under the shelter of the canvas. It was broad daylight. The leper and the shoemaker's wife were nowhere to be seen, but Sally was with the priest and he was reading to her from the book of travels to the Holy Land. I wondered about the map which Sally had swallowed and whether we would be able to find our way without it. I could imagine it floating in the darkness of her belly: roads and rivers and oceans, mountains and valleys all jumbled up together and the red line marking the direction we must take, broken into little pieces.

The priest turned a page of the book and the thin vellum rustled as if it still belonged to a living animal. I could just distinguish the pinprick marks where the hair had once grown and the delicate ridge where the skin had stretched tight across the line of the vertebrae.

“Where are we?” I asked Sally, but although she looked
towards me she didn't hear me. She was trapped in some quiet labyrinth of the past, searching there for what she had lost. And so it was the priest who answered.

“We have crossed the North Sea,” he said, “and we will soon be entering the port of Zierikzee in Holland,” and with that he pointed towards the outline of a tower standing guard at the harbor entrance.

The people who were gathered on the quay to watch us had square-tipped fingers and big-boned faces. Their voices were thick and rough, angry in their strangeness, although there was no anger intended. They led us to an inn and we sat around a table in a low-ceilinged room. A plate of smoked eels was set before us. They writhed together in a motionless heap, their mouths gaping.

I was next to the priest and I could feel how the rolling of the waves had not left his body. He had a slight fever and that made the eels smile at him, twitching their slippery tails. He felt as exhausted as someone who is recovering from a long illness and without eating he excused himself and made his way to the sleeping room.

This room was lit by the embers of a fire glinting in the hearth. It contained twenty or more beds and many of them were already occupied. The priest moved between them, feeling for the outline of bodies with his hand. When he found a bed that was flat and empty he pulled back the rough covers and lay down. Insects bit at his naked legs and his belly but he was too tired to notice them.

Somewhere quite close to him there was the sound of a
man and a woman lying together, the wood of the bed creaking with the rhythm of their bodies. The priest remembered the warning in the leper's book. “Beware of inns,” it said. “Beware of inns and of women who try to persuade you to enter them. Such women are all common prostitutes and they will rob you or even kill you.”

The wood stopped creaking, and then it sounded as though the two people were dying, with a single exhalation of breath. The priest had never shared such a sense of intimacy before.

He wanted to pray, but instead of prayers all that he could remember was the list of strange words he had been learning from the leper's book. “
Offena, kiszones, meela, betzim, daegim, elohim, zatan, eyscha
,” he said, surprised by the authority contained in the unfamiliar sounds. And that meant: a ship, a shirt, an egg, a fish, the Lord, the Devil, and a woman, although he was not sure what country the words were from.

Sleep came to him finally, and as he slept the fever fell away. I was lying beside him. He smelled of wax and honey. His hair was soft against my lips. He did not dream.

We set out again in the morning, walking through a blanket of mist that merged with the camouflage of our cloaks so that we were hardly visible to each other. We followed the hugeness of the river Rhine: a sweep of turgid water, flooded meadows, windmills grinding their teeth into the wind and willow trees cut back so that they resembled a line of clenched fists.

I can see us now, walking along a road day after day, our feet tired and blistered and often bleeding, with rags to bind the wounds. Walking along a road like migratory birds. Moving steadily southwards, and only dimly aware of the softening of the weather, the shift from marshland to forest, from forest to mountain slopes.

I remember how in a church I saw Christ riding on a donkey and his naked feet were tipped and strained upwards so that he could keep his balance on the animal's back. You could see the tension and the effort involved from the way the bones and the sinews were revealed.

In that same church there was Saint Vitus, who cures people suffering from epilepsy, the bite of a dog or a snake or a spider, and the many other forms of madness. He was bending his neck under the sharp blade of a sword that had already drawn a few drops of red blood and the words of a prayer were escaping from his mouth like a swarm of bees. He was peering out at the world from between strips and swathes of cloth that had been draped in dirty curtains around him.

Not far from that church we heard the sound of bagpipes and drums and shrill whistles carried in the air. And then we saw a hectic crowd of people growing louder and drawing nearer. Everyone here was caught in the same net which turned them into one single lurching, reeling, dancing creature. Their faces were blank and shocked and uninhabited. I could see fear hopping among them, pecking at the glint of an eye or the glitter of a ring.

One woman at the center of the crowd was spinning with her arms stretched wide as if she was trying to spin herself out of this world and into some other. Her belly was terribly distended and bands of cloth had been tied tight into the flesh to relieve the pain it was obviously causing her.

The priest went up to the woman. He wanted to comfort her but all that he could offer was the incantation of words from the book of travel. A ship, a shirt, an egg, a fish, the Lord, the Devil, a woman.
Offena, kiszones, meela, betzim, daegim, elohim, zatan, eyscha
. It sounded like a prayer of enormous power. The woman fell quiet and the crowd fell quiet with her.

The priest led the way back to the church. He took the woman to stand exhausted in front of the saint, the bees of his prayers buzzing around his head. And as we watched we saw the madness that had inhabited her slip like snakes out of her mouth, her nostrils, her ears, to fall hissing and writhing on the floor. Then the priest slowly unwound the long cloth that had been pulled tight across the woman's belly and he hung it up, stiff with blood and dirt, alongside the others that were already hanging there.

L
ooking back now, I realize that I was moving from one of my companions to the next, shadowing them in turn and following them with the same furtive longing as that dog with pale eyes which had first brought life into the village for me.

During the early days of our journey I had hardly spoken a word to the shoemaker's wife, hardly even noticed her presence. But then, walking behind her, I became aware of the steady rhythm of her body. I could see her small feet in their worn shoes with the toes clenched and the skin of the heel cracked and broken. I could feel the weight of her breasts lolling together in a casual intimacy, the sweat trapped beneath them. Her belly had been stretched and slackened so many times by pregnancy and birth that it was marked with rows of white scars like little knife wounds.