The Leper's Companions Read Online Free Page B

their ugliness and their cruelty. Overwhelmed by panic, he ran stumbling into the safety of the forest.
    His wife found him there a few hours later. He was lying facedown under the shelter of some low branches. Only his feet were visible.
    She heaved him up into a sitting position. She tried tokiss him and comfort him but he struggled to be free of her as well. “Leave me alone, I want to be dead,” he said and he began to cry.
    They made their way home slowly and she had to steer his steps as if he was still blind. When they reached their house in the village he rushed into a room at the back and refused to come out. He cried continuously and would not be comforted.
    â€œHe has gone mad,” his wife said. “First he was blind and now he is mad.”
    She waited for several weeks in the hope that the madness would lift but when nothing had changed she returned on her own to the shrine.
    She stood in front of the saint. She asked him what he thought he was doing, curing a man like that only to inflict a new pain on him. She shook her fist at the casket. She spat on it. Driven by her own desperation, she prized it open, took out the thigh bone, and threw it with all her strength into a nearby stream. Then she went home.
    Sometimes she sat beside her husband and tried to talk to him about the life they had shared together and how happy they had been, but more often than not she left him there alone in the company of his own thoughts.

7
    T he shoemaker is sitting in the almost dark of his room. “Everything is because of something,” he says to himself. “I could see. I was blind. I can see again. Everything is because of something.”
    He has grown accustomed to his own tears. He even cries when he is sleeping, the salt water flowing down the sides of his face and collecting in pools in his ears. He doesn’t know why he is crying and he has no idea of how he could ever stop himself from crying. It has become an aspect of staying alive, like breathing.
    He can see a thin strip of light shining around the edge of the closed door. “It’s as if I have been shut out of Heaven,” he says to himself, but when he tries to imagine pulling the door open and stepping through to the other side he cannotdo it. “I am shut in and I am shut out!” he says, speaking aloud now and startled by the sound of his own voice.
    His mouth is dry. He runs his tongue sticky and slow around the edge of his lips and that makes a noise too, a crackling sound like the flames of a little fire.
    He leans back against the wall and listens to the movements of the house. There is a rustling in the roof which is either rats or pigeons, the creaking of a floorboard from the weight of someone walking on it and a soft thumping sound which he cannot identify. It might be his wife in the kitchen making bread. Or it might be that she is making love with another man and what he hears is the beating of flesh on flesh.
    A child is laughing. It is probably one of his own children but he cannot guess which one. Their identities have become blurred. They are strangers who laugh and cry in other rooms and who sometimes come and hover at his side, hoping for a sign or a kind word.
    Everything is because of something. The church bell starts to count the hours but he misses the first echoing reverberation of metal against metal and so he has no idea of the time. A dog barks a warning and then yelps, as if someone has kicked it into silence. A calf is led past the front of the house, bellowing with despair.
    He often wonders if animals could learn to talk. He once had a dog which seemed to be about to say something; it would stare at him with its mouth open and the words just out of reach. And the old woman who had made the ointmentfor his eyes kept a pig which could say “Goodbye, God bless you,” but it died before he was born. His mother had heard it.
    His mother was haunted by her memory of the Great Pestilence.