The Leper's Companions (10 page)

I became very ill. A sense of utter exhaustion had invaded me and I could feel it spreading through my body, coursing with the blood in my veins. I could not fight what was happening because I had no energy with which to fight. It was not that I wanted to die, but I would have welcomed the chance of ceasing to be, at least for a while.

And then I suppose I could have died. The days and nights became merged into one endless babble of time. Until at last I was taken to the hospital for an operation.

I lay in a strange trance waiting for the anesthetic to take effect. Everything around me was white: white curtains, white walls, white sheets; even the garment I had been given to wear was a stiff bright white cotton.

The anesthetic was drifting through me like smoke, and then it became heavy like water, pulling me down into itself and the secret of its own oblivion.

But as I sank and surfaced and sank again within the whiteness that surrounded me, I turned to the leper. I saw him with Sally and all the others from the village. He was telling them the story of what had happened since he left and how it was that he had come back again. His voice rose and fell in a rolling monotone and behind it I could hear the muffled drip of melting ice, the soft thud of heaps of snow falling to the ground.

I was there in a dark room lit by the dancing flames of a log fire. I could smell the salted herrings that hung in a bunch from a hook on the ceiling. I could smell the sweet resonance of hay, the cloying sweetness of excrement and rotting vegetables, the sharp stink of urine and the pervasive musty odor of damp and slow decay.

The room in which we were assembled was breathing and shaking like a living thing because of the battering of the wind outside. I knew that these walls were made from a mixture of cow dung, horsehair and lime. There was a cat skeleton
hidden within the blackened tower of the chimney and next to it a pair of leather shoes, small ones for a child. Rushes cut from the reedbed were spread out on the floor and they felt slippery under my feet.

I could hear the restless activity of rats and cockroaches and two thin cats going about their business and I could just distinguish the outline of a broody hen sitting blank-eyed on a pile of old rags in a corner. A little boy sidled up to me and climbed onto my lap. He fell asleep as abruptly as a door closing. I saw lice moving through the tangles of his hair.

The people around me shifted and changed like fleeting shadows when I tried to see them all together in a group, but if I concentrated on them one by one their faces slid into focus and I could recognize them individually and remember everything I knew about them. The whole village seemed to be gathered here, even those who I had thought were dead and gone.

The leper was telling his story and his words were becoming more clear to me now that I was growing accustomed to the sound of his voice. He had reached the port of Great Yarmouth and he had just persuaded the captain of a ship to take him on board in return for a large sum of money. He agreed to keep himself hidden throughout the journey, because the other passengers must not see him. I suppose a member of the crew would bring him food under the cover of darkness.

The ship was carrying pilgrims to Finisterre, on the north coast of Spain, from where they would walk to Santiago de
Compostela. But it never reached its destination; there was a storm which swept it against a rock and shattered the hull.

Everyone was drowned except for the leper who was carried miraculously ashore and washed up on a sandy beach. He lay there facedown, stripped of his clothes, his body twisted into a loose curl.

“I was found by an old man and an old woman,” he said. “They thought I was some sort of sea monster because my skin had turned white and ragged from being soaked so long in the water, making me appear more like a fish than a man.

“The woman took hold of my shoulders and rolled me over onto my back. She saw a flicker of life in my eyes, and even though they were afraid of me, she and her husband fetched a handcart and brought me to their house.

“I was weak and helpless and they looked after me as if I was a baby. They fed me on goat's milk and dressed me in loose clothes that wouldn't hurt my skin.

“Every day they would strip me naked and rub my body all over with oil and then they would carry me into the sunshine and leave me with a cloth tied over my eyes so that the brightness would not hurt me. I lay in a sort of trance, the sun, as it felt to me, munching into my skin like a caterpillar on a leaf.

“At first I resented being found and cared for in this way. I felt it would have been better if I had drowned with the others, or if I had died alone on the shore like a stranded fish.

“I tried to fight my despair by remembering how I had been before the sickness disfigured me, so that I needed to
hide my face and warn people of my approach. But all I could see was a tiny distant figure lost in the landscape, a stranger who would not come close.

“Then I let my despair sweep over me and I drifted, passive and inconsolable, while the old man and the old woman moved me from sunlight to shadow and back into sunlight again.

“As the days passed I began to be aware that the outer surface of my body was changing. My skin was becoming tighter and tighter. It gripped me and held me like a metal casing, and I thought it would kill me, but then it began to split and tear and fall away in thin, ragged patches.

“I could only see what was happening to my hands, because I was always dressed in loose robes when I was brought in from the sun and the blindfold was removed. But my hands, which had been pockmarked and covered with a white mildew of sickness, were now pink and smooth. It looked as though they had been burnt by the flames of a fire, but they were healthy.

“I decided that if I was completely healed, then I would go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I had once been as far as the gates of the city and I had seen something of the desert that lay beyond it. I wanted to return, to tread in my own footsteps for a second time.

“And because the change in me had begun in this village, I thought to come back here as soon as I could. I felt sure that the priest and Sally would come with me and perhaps others
as well. I knew that this was the place from which I must set out.

“Slowly my entire body grew smooth, until I no longer needed to be rubbed with oil and laid under the sharp gaze of the sun. I began to go walking in the mountains. It was a beautiful land, harsh but beautiful.

“The old man and the old woman had been watching over me as I grew from childhood into manhood all within the space of a few weeks. When they saw that I was cured, they knew that they must lose me. They wept and embraced me but made no attempt to persuade me to stay.

“Before we parted we set out to Compostela, where the body of the Apostle James was brought after he was washed up on those shores in a stone boat.

“The three of us walked up the steps of the cathedral and knelt to kiss the bare feet of the statue of the saint and the heads of the two lions on whose backs he was standing. We went inside and sat by the tomb where he was buried. I put my hand through a hole in the stone of the tomb so that I could feel the hard flesh of the body of the saint. Then we parted and I made my way here.”

The leper was silent and there was no sound of breath or movement in the room.

With my heart beating like heavy wings inside my body and my mouth so dry that I could hardly move my tongue to form the words, I spoke to the leper. My voice wavered and fluttered in the air and I doubted if he would hear it.

“I would like to see how you have been healed,” I said.

Without a moment's hesitation, he pulled back the hood which still covered his head and concealed his face.

“Here I am,” he said.

I walked through the thick crowd of people and stood in front of him. By the light of the fire I saw that his face was covered with a swirling pattern of scars, but there was no sign of any sickness on it.

I said, “If you are going on a journey then I would like to go with you. I would like to see Jerusalem and the deserts that lie beyond it. I would like to be one of your companions.”

A
s I finished speaking I felt the weight of the anesthetic pulling me down and down until I had lost the leper and the people who were with him and there was nothing left to see or hear or hold on to. Even the dizzy whiteness of walls and sheets had dissolved and disappeared.

Time passed and there was no way of measuring it. When I finally floated back to the surface of the world, I knew that the threads which had been holding me were cut. I was ready to leave the village.

Everything I had grown accustomed to would soon be changing. I was going away and once I had gone I could probably never return even if I wanted to. In the silence I could hear the methodical thump of my heartbeat and the gentle inhalation and exhalation of my breath.

And so, over the days of convalescence while I lay in bed and drifted in and out of sleep and wakefulness, I began to say goodbye to the place which had been like a home to me for over a year. I walked as slow as old age along a road that was imprinted in my mind. I stood and gazed with a lingering tenderness at the line of crooked houses which had offered me shelter when I needed to escape. I peered wistfully through windows and open doors.

A few of the rooms were occupied by men and women and children, but most of them were already empty, with broken ceilings and rubble on the floor. Nevertheless they were all still redolent of the stories they held and in each contained space I could see the memory of the people who had been here and the lives they had lived.

This process of valediction was sometimes joyful and sometimes painfully sad, but there was nothing I could do to stop it from following its course. Although the thaw, which had started while the leper was telling his story, had by now melted most of the snow, the weather was cold. The sky was a clear, transparent blue and there was no wind.

I made my way past the church and the yew tree and down to the rickety hut by the shore where I had sat with my back to the wall on the first day I came here. Once again I felt the crunch of shells breaking under my feet and when I looked out towards the horizon, where the air and water merged together in a shifting haze, I was brought as near as I could ever be to a sense of eternity.

Farther along the coast I could just distinguish the wavering
line of the sand dunes where the shoemaker and his wife had sat together among the whirring of dragonflies. In the other direction there was the flat expanse of muddy sand and a black stone marking the place where the mermaid's hair was buried. The little boat in which the old fisherman had set out across the North Sea was pulled up on the shingle, tilted to one side, its nets spread out to dry.

I knew that whales, porpoises, mermaids and sea monsters were to be found in these gray waters that I would soon be crossing. Unicorns, wolves, hermits and wild men covered with hair were in the woods, the mountains, and the uncultivated waste lands. An angel could be recognized from the way it glittered, a devil from its stench and the sound of grinding teeth. Death was out roaming at his leisure through all the three elements and a person must fall down like mown grass as soon as they heard him call them by name.

A clump of samphire was growing among the pebbles beside the hut and I bent down to break off a stalk that was as tight as a drum, the thin skin tinged pink and orange. I bit into it and the salty liquid it contained tasted like my own tears.

There was nothing more to be done. I had arranged to meet my companions at the boundary stone and as I approached I saw that they were already there: Sally and the shoemaker's wife, the priest and the leper, standing in a huddled group and waiting for me.

We all looked curiously alike, enveloped in gray pilgrim cloaks, the hoods decorated with the red cross of Jerusalem.
We each carried a strong walking stick, a purse of money hidden close to the body, a bag for food, a bottle for fresh water, and a sack with a few simple possessions.

Only a handful of people from the village had come to witness our departure. The red-haired girl was there with Sally's child perched on her hip, his head almost lost within the mass of her hair. The woman who saw devils was peering at us from behind a tree, her face distorted by a mad smile that kept breaking out into laughter. The shoemaker appeared out of nowhere just in front of me and stared fixedly over my shoulder and towards his wife. I knew they were a throng of ghosts, but I would miss them all.

No one spoke or waved as we set off, but the dog with pale eyes followed us from a distance, his tail between his legs and his movements furtive from the habit of avoiding sudden blows. A thin rain had begun to fall and I heard the
dip dip dip
cry of a woodpecker, answered by the fierce shriek of a jay.

We were walking together in silence, busy with the realization of departure. We passed a field where the tiny spikes of young wheat were just breaking through the earth and then a meadow where three brindled cows stood under the shelter of a huge oak. A weasel raced out in front of us and for a few seconds it forgot its size and vulnerability and reared up on its hind legs to threaten us, swaying to and fro like a snake. Then with a flick of energy it was gone into the long grass beside the track.

I was next to Sally, our steps swinging with the same
rhythm. She had never left the confines of the village before and now she walked like a bullock being led to slaughter, her head bowed and her mind closed to anything beyond the thudding contact of her feet with the ground, the swishing of her cloak, the weight of the long staff in her hand.

When we stopped at midday to share a meal of hard-boiled eggs, hard cheese, hard bread and stale beer, she ate what she was given but refused the beer, preferring to drink from a nearby pool. The water was sweet and brackish and it coated the inside of her mouth with the taste of mud and rotting leaves. The monotonous cry of a bird sounded like someone calling out for help: her child perhaps, or was it her father or her husband? It was only now, that she was leaving the village that she was able to understand how much she had lost during the last year and how sad she had been.