The Leper's Companions (5 page)

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 referred 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.

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.

“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.

T
he 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, the 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.