The Leper's Companions (7 page)

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.

E
very 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.

O
n 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 stranger. 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.

Two brothers were shackled together with a chain around their necks, having come from a distant city to do penance for some terrible crime. They had covered the last stretch of the journey on their knees and now they sat side by side, nursing their torn skin and their bruises and muttering a stream of urgent prayer.

A woman whose menstrual blood had not stopped pouring from her for more than a year was standing waist-deep in the river, her skirts pulled up and the water around her stained red.

A man who was said to be as violent as he was mad, had been strapped to a plank of wood and carried to the shrine in a bullock cart. Now he and the plank that held him were propped against a tree and he was staring open-mouthed at the casket as if he saw within it the possibility of reason and escape.

But it was the hermit whom the priest was seeking and he found him easily enough. His home was a hole cut into the riverbank and he was sitting beside it, basking in the sunshine.

The hermit was filthy. His cloak was stiff with dirt and so was his long beard and his straggling hair. His skin was cracked and broken and he had rotten teeth. He was talking
to himself in a nasal, high-pitched voice while scratching and twitching and searching his body for vermin. He smelt of excrement.