Текст книги "Quarantine"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace
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– smaller and paler even than its shadows. Here – viewed from the dying thermals of the day – malice was at work, irresistible and rarefied: the man, a donkey, the two raised arms; the goats that couldn’t give a damn; the stretched and brutal angles of the tent; and no one there to lay a hand on Musa’s arm or press his chest so that the devil’s air could be expressed before the pestle fell again.

Musa gave the donkey one more chance. ‘Get up,’ he said. The throat had cleared. His voice was reedy once again. He kicked her side. He jabbed his heel against her inflamed boil. No luck. He brought the pestle down on to her lower back, experimentaHy. ‘Get up,’ again. But here Musa had met his match. Her sickness was greater than his, and was defeating him. She could endure his bullying, but did not have the will or strength to stand. She closed her eyes and even dropped her ears. Do what you will to me. You are invisible.

Musa could not stop himself, of course. A merchant always sees his business through. He had to bargain with the currency at hand. He knew that donkeys were like customers. They had long memories. Camels had none. A donkey that had got its own way once would expect it every time. It would resist the tether and the switch. It would shake its panniers off and bray for better food. He told himself he had no choice but to force the donkey to her feet, to make her move a safe distance away from the tent. For what purpose? Simply so that she could tumble on to her chin again and die where Musa had commanded. This, then, would be the final lesson of her life. There is a price to pay for disobedience, he thought. There is always a reckoning. He’d make her pay for his infection, too. For his abandonment.

Musa lifted up the pestle for a second time, but less experimentally. Now there were three good reasons why the donkey should be hit, and little to mitigate her punishment. He had to satisfy his anger. Anger was like phlegm and urine – best expressed at once. It was a shame there were no witnesses, he thought, warming to his task. He would have liked to have had an audience

– Miri and his uncles. See what happens when Musa is upset, he’d say. Here’s how to put a pestle to good use. He would divorce this donkey on the spot.

It wasjust as well there were no witnesses. When Musa swung the pestle he lost his footing. Its weight circled too widely behind his shoulder. His own weight was uncentred. He almost fell on to the donkey. His temper took a shaking, too. He had to start again, and use the pestle like an axe, chopping at the mortar of her head. Big men are often clumsy when they are violent. Their venom can seem comical and soft. They are too breathless and they have too many chins. Thin men, with bloodless lips and hollow waists, appear more dangerous. But Musa’s frenzy was not comical. There was nothing jocular or soft about the way he used the pestle. Indeed, his clumsiness had made him angry with himself and that provided extra power. ^Kiling did not bother him. It was natural. He’d slaughtered goats a dozen times. He’d wrung the necks ofbirds. He’d dealt with snakes. But this was more than slaughtering. This was a settling of scores.

It took two blows to put the donkey out. Her skull was thin, and she was old. She had sufficient spirit to bare her teeth at Musa’s leg, but not enough to roll over on her side and kick at him. She only rolled when she was unconscious and had no choice. Musa did not stop when she was on her side. He wanted now to see some product for his efforts, some broken skin, some rips, some blood. He wanted to make the stubborn creature’s head fall loose. It took him ten more blows to break the ridge ofbones high on her neck, the vertebrae between her ears. They were protected by her short and springy mane. Musa had to twist the pestle as it fell so that he could strike the donkey on its uncushioned side, along the line of sinew between the cheekbone and the shoulder. Gradually her coat was rid of dust. The skin began to soften like so much grain had softened and split under the same pestle in Miri’s hands. But the blood was slow to rise. When it did it surfaced on the donkey’s skin like wine through bread, not running free but welling, blushing through the hair, thickening and darkening in curtains at her throat, as if the blood itself was so drained of energy it could not even faU.

Then Musa rested, watching while the blood-flow to the donkey’s brain was blocked by the breakages and swellings. The nerves, first in her ears and throat, then in her flank, and finaUy in her damaged leg and at the end-tuft of her tail, shook and trembled as if the donkey felt nothing more than unexpected cold. Musa hit her once again. Her face was fruit. It bruised and split and wept. Her neck had broken at the shoulder-blade. Musa had succeeded in his task: at last the donkey’s head was loose. He could not resist a final swing, although his shoulders ached andhis heartwas hammering. Was this exuberance orbrutishness? He knocked her top front teeth into her mouth. They cracked out of her gums like stones from apricots.

Musa’s exertions were exhausting for a man already weakened by the fever. He had to rest again. He put his hand on the donkey’s rump, and lowered himselfon to the earth. His hands and knees were splashed with blood, and they were shaking. He poured some water and washed himself. He knew he should take more care in case the blood was still contagious, but Musa held the simple view that the glanders would have died as weli beneath the pestle blows, that death can vanquish all disease. Death can heal. He dried his hands in donkey hair and shook the water off on to the animal. He flicked the waste from his hands over the donkey’s head, a blessing of a sort. Musa was feeling calmer, playful even, but he was never one for flippancy. So someone else was speaking through his lips. He was surprised to hear himself offer to the donkey the common greeting for the sick and dying. ‘So, here, be well again,’ he said. Fat chance of that!

‘So, here, be well again’? The recurrence of that phrase made Musa shiver. There was a meaning to such repetitions. There always was. Everything that’s stored will be restored, that is the chiming pattern of the world. Whose words were those, Be weli again? Who haunted him? Whose throbbing voice was that? He concentrated hard. And, yes, there was a half-remembered figure now. A face within his fever. A peasant face. A robber’s face. He could recall his eyelids being thumbed and stroked: ‘A sip, a sip. And then I’m gone.’ Not Miri’s voice, but someone soft and male; his lesser twin but with an accent from the facing north. A Galilean voice, with open lazy vowels, and consonants which shot out like seeds from a drying pod, which shed their stones like apricots, which snapped out ofthe gums like donkey’s teeth. ‘A sip, a sip, a sip.’ A healer’s voice, belonging in the tent.

Musa looked into the tent. No unexpected shadows there. He searched for someone moving in the scrub. He hoped and feared to see the man again. He’d settle any debts. He’d pay the reckoning, if it was reasonable. Together they had travelled to the long black ridge and looked beyond into the ochre plains of death. Be well again. Be well.

So that’s how Miri found him when she came. She had to stumble in the darkness for a lamp to see exactly what misfortunes had occurred. There was no body in the tent, and that was frightening. It didn’t take her long to find the donkey and her husband. The corpse’s smell was bad, and there were scrub dogs already gathered near the tent, hungry for the meat. Her husband’s head was resting on the donkey’s leg, and they were black with drying blood. At first she thought they both were dead. But no such luck. His chest was rising. He snored. His tongue was pink and healthy on his lips, not black from fever any more. It was a curse; it was a miracle. So much for death’s discrimination. It had claimed the donkey, not the man.

Musa was woken by the lamplight. He wasn’t feverish. He looked at Miri, her dirty hands, her bloody knees, her tearful eyes. ‘Hah, so you returned,’ he said. Andjust as well. He pointed at his bloody handiwork. But Musa’s anger had been squandered on the donkey. He was relieved to see his wife. It showed. How could he manage on his own? It had been the oddest day, and he was tired. He did not know if he should celebrate or grieve. He pulled her fiercely by her arms, a tender, punishing embrace, and made her tell him everything that had happened, what his uncles had prescribed, what their plans for him had been. ‘Where were you, then?’ he asked finally. ‘Look at your hair.’ What could she say? That she had run away from him? That she had dug his grave, and passed the afternoon quite comfortably inside? She couldn’t speak. She was in shock, and trembling. Her liberation had been too short. At last she said, with what he might have taken to be tears of worry and concern, that she had thought that he was going to die.

‘Well, you were wrong. A spirit came and brought me back. But not with any help from you,’ he said accusingly, though he released the hard grip on her arm and dropped his hand into her lap. ‘I saw his face.’

‘What face?’

‘Somebody’s face. The fever’s face? I don’t remember seeing yours.’

‘I couldn’t lure the fever out,’ she said. ‘I sang for you. Al night. It’s true. I did. .’ Musa tilted his heavy chin at her, to let her know he hadn’t heard her sing. ‘. . I climbed the scarp to look for roots. To make a poultice. But. .’ (she opened up her hands to show her broken nails) ‘. . I dug for nothing. The earth was hard. It’s stones. .’

She gabbled on, but did not listen to herself. God damn the spirit that has brought you back, she thought. Her wrist was still smarting from the fierceness of his grip. His hand was pressing into her and she was shrinking and retreating from his fingers. He was unsteady still. And ungainly as ever. He could not quite succeed – not yet, at least – in turning Miri on her back. But he was lucky with his lips, no longer dry and caustic. He pressed his kisses on her face. That was the trading profit of her day.

It had been an afternoon of hope, at least. She’d raised her hands into the unresisting air. The sky was soft for her. But now the sky became a hard and bruising dish again. Miri was reduced to one of scrubland’s night-time residents, its seven people and its goats, its caves, its tent, its partial hospitality beneath the thinnest moon of spring. She was unwidowed and unfreed, the mistress of unwelcome lips, the keeper of a wasted grave.

8

The four newcomers to the valley caves did not sleep weH. They were bruised and battered. Their feet were sore. Their legs were stiff. They had been punished by the journey and should have dropped to sleep as readily as dogs. But the lodgings were too cold for sleep. Their scrubland host had celebrated the new moon and the onset of spring by calling up for them a wind which was old and wintry and mean. At first it was too quick and muscular to idle in the contours of the scarp or nose into the creases and the dens. It hurried past. But later in the night – just when they thought that they might sleep – the wind became invasive. A watery haze, distilled from the daytime’s rising valley heat and turned gelid in the dark, had made the wind heavier and more sinuous. It came into the caves, shouldered out the skulking pockets of warm air, and put an end to everybody’s sleep.

So there was at least a unity of damp and sleeplessness inside the caves, for these four travellers. What could they do, except slap out the cold? Or hug their knees? Or stamp their feet? Or blow into their hands, and wonder if they had the fortitude – or foolishness – to last for thirty-nine more nights like this? A fire would help, of course. But the old man’s roots and branches had not caught alight. He’d evidently lost his adolescent luck with flint and kindling. His luck was creaky like his bones. So he and his unseen companions had to spend the night as cold and stiff and unignited as the fire.

They al knew darkness weli enough. Who hasn’t lain awake at night with nothing brighter than a cloud-hung star to add its feeble touch of light to looming shapes inside the room? Who hasn’t cried out for a lamp? But this was darkness unrelieved – for starlight, no matter ifit’s moistened by the air, is never sinuous, unlike the wind. It will not curve and bend its way in to a cave. There was a blinding lack oflight inside. They could not even see a hand held up before their faces. They could not see the demons and the serpents and the dancing bones. But they could hear them al too well. What better way to pass the time, and put the worry of the cold to one side, than by contemplating something worse than cold: sounds without shapes?

If someone coughed in their damp comer, then for the other three that was the certain presence ofhyenas. If another – fearful of hyenas – whispered to himself for comfort, then his voice for al the rest became the soft conspiracy of thieves. A yawn became a stifled cry for help. A sneeze, the whooping of a ghost. The wind set bushes rattling: an owl browsed in the scrub: cave beetles, amplified by their raised wings, rehearsed their murders and their rapes.

The woman was not as sleepless as the other three, perhaps because she was protected from the wind by the few bushes outside the cave. Her name was Marta. She’d been married for nine years to Thaniel, the landowner of Sawiya by Jerusalem. His second wife. She was – a phrase she’d heard too often in the song -

The Mother of a threadbare womb,

Her warp hung weftless on the loom.

Though she was over thirty years of age, she had no children yet, despite her husband’s nightly efforts, and her experiments with all the recommended charms and herbs to aid fertility. She’d sacrificed a dozen pigeons with the local priest. She’d rubbed honey on a marrow, sent money to Jerusalem, worn copper body charms, endured – she could not see how this would help

– her husband’s semen in her mouth. She’d worn balsam leaves underneath her clothes for weeks on end until she rustled like parchment. She’d eaten only green fruit (and paid the price). She’d starved herself. She’d gorged. Now she was plump and getting plumper, not to satisfy her husband, but because a flat stomach was intolerable. A larger one and bigger breasts might bring good luck, she thought. Provide the dovecote, and the doves wil come.

None ofithad worked, ofcourse. Her warp remained without its weft. A hundred times and more, she’d done her best to fend off with prayers and lies the monthly rebuff of her periods. Now she only had till harvest to conceive. Then, her husband said, he would divorce her. The law aUowed him to. The law demanded that he should, in fact. After ten years of barrenness a man could take another wife. ‘You don’t cast seed on sour land, ’ he said. He had a right to heirs. It was a woman’s religious duty to provide and bring up children. He’d had to divorce his first wife, because she’d failed to conceive. Marta had failed as well. So Thaniel would have to turn her out and look elsewhere. Of course it was regrettable and harsh, he said, but he could hardly blame himself. Not twice. He’d marry ’Lisha’s daughter. She was young. Her father owned some land adjacent to his own. The prospect was a cheerful one. And sensible.

‘I’ll have a son within ten months,’ he told his wife. ‘And, Marta, wipe your face and show some dignity. What use are tears? You’d better pray for miracles. . Come on. You will have had ten years to prove yourself, and that is fair. .’

‘I’ll pray,’ she said.

‘Pray all you want.’

Marta took him at his word. She would do everything she could. So, despite the priest’s objections that her plans were wilful and unbecoming, she had walked into the wilderness to fast by day and pray for miracles by night.

Now she was sitting upright inside the cave, her back pressed against the least damp wall, and watching the entrance for dawn’s first smudge of grey. She was more tired than scared-and though she, like her neighbours, turned the clatter of each tumbling stone, displaced by nothing more ominous than dew, into a devil or a snake, she could not stop her chin from dropping on her chest from time to time. Her sleeping dreams were less alarming than her waking ones, and so it felt to her that she did not fall asleep but rather fell awake into the nightmare of the cave, alone. She woke inside a womb, a grave, a catacomb. But she was calm. These forty days could not be worse than the alternative – a life without a child, a husband or a home.

She despised the man, of course, and had taken hardly any pleasure in the marriage for at least eight of their nine or so years together. In that she was the same as many of the women in Sawiya. Marriage was a bumpy ride for them, though ‘Better ride than walk,’ they said, ‘even if the ride is on a donkey.’ Their husbands were an irritation, of course. But husbands were amusing, too. At least, they were amusing when they were out of sight. Their vanities and tempers could bejoked about among women friends at the ovens or the well. Grumbling and laughing at their curdy husbands made the bread rise and the yoghurt set. But Marta could not find the comedy in Thaniel. He’d made her and his first wife barren, she was sure, with his dry heart and sparking tongue. They were like millstones without oil. But – Marta was an optimist – she still believed that everything would be a joy if she could have his child. She pressed her eyes shut with her forefinger and her thumb, her little finger resting on the corner of her lips, and she prayed that she could leave her infertility behind in this dark, barren place, where it belonged. She prayed for forty days and nights of ripening, that she’d be fruitful, that she’d multiply. Then she prayed that dawn would break the habits ofeternity: Let it arrive early for once, and drive the night away.

Pray as she might, however, she could not entirely shut the noises out. She was certain when she stopped and listened hard that there was something, or someone, in the bushes just below her cave. She heard the small sounds that someone makes when he – of course, it had to be a he – is standing still and breathing through his nose. The snuffles, rustling ofclothes, the lubrications ofthe tongue and mouth ofsomeone waiting for her in the dark. One ofher three new neighbours, perhaps? She had not thought of them as dangerous, though no man was trustworthy when a woman was alone, no matter who he was. She stopped her praying, and tried to breathe as gently as she could. There was more rustling, and then the someone seemed to shake a piece ofcloth. It sounded like her husband flapping out the dust when he was taking off his clothes. The old man, then? The blond? The badu with the hennaed hair? Which one was naked at her cave?

Marta’s measured breathing and her stillness made her drowsy. She tried to stay awake by concentrating on the sounds outside but, finally, she could not stop herself Her chin went down on to her chest. She fell asleep.

Thank heavens for the charity of dreams. When Marta woke and heard again the scurrying below her cave, the naked man had been dismissed from her mind’s eye. She listened to the noises more critically. They were too light and birdlike to be threatening. A man would make more weighty sounds. He wouldn’t have the patience to stay so quiet and still. A woman then? A bird? Gazelles? The answer was obvious: it had to be the little straw-boned woman with the untied hair who’d evidently dug and taken up residence in a grave-like pit amongst the poppies; the peeping, rodent face, half-buried in the ground, and looking out across the scrub with moist and fearful eyes. Marta could have clapped her hands with pleasure and relief. She had forgotten that there was a fourth companion for the night. Might she still be hiding in her grave?

Now Marta had a reason to go outside. There was a friend at hand, a mad one possibly, but one that was too smaH to do her any harm. Women should seek each other out. She made her way towards the entrance, steadying herself with both hands against the cave wall, and stepped into the damp earth and the bushes at the foot of the cliff. She was surprised how sombre it was, and how blustery the wind had become. Surprised because she’d always thought that country skies at night would be much brighter than the smothered skies of villages. But the night was beautiful, nevertheless, more beautiful than any night that she had known at Sawiya, possibly because Sawiya was in the basement of the hills. This scrubland was the roof. From where she stood, the moon was level with her eyes. It was the thinnest melon slice, hardbacked, translucent, colourless. Its rind was resting on the black horizon, hardly bright enough to tinge the sky. But to her left, beyond the valley and its sea, the peaks and shoulders of Moab were boasting rosy epaulettes of light. The morning was approaching.

Marta walked towards the grave. She could hear the new friend scrabbling inside. There were flapping gasps of breath, like landed fish in nets.

‘It’s all right,’ she called, a reassurance for them both. ‘It’s me. The woman yesterday.’

But of course there was no other woman in the grave. There hadn’t been since dusk. Miri was with Musa in their tent, and reunited by the blanket on their bed, her narrow, knuckled backbone pressed against his hip. Instead there was a shuffling and contented darkness in the hole. Here were the small, wet sounds that Marta had heard before. She couldn’t place the sounds – they were too moist and feathery to be a woman, no matter how tiny.

She stepped too close. She knocked a loose stone in. That’s all it took. There was a startled screech and then a gust offl.apping, muscled wind as the pit made instant shapes from shadows and flung its contents in the air. It sounded like a hundred husbands shaking out their clothes. Damp bodies hurtled from the grave into the night, as headlong and as vengeful as demons hurled out of a nightmare and driven forwards by the seven winds of hell.

Marta screamed loudly enough for her new neighbours to hear, and to hear the echo, too. She dropped heavily on to her knees. Her face was wetly, fi^ly struck a dozen times. Her chest and shoulders took six or seven blows. She was assaulted by wings and beaks and smells. Then – almost before her scream had ended – they were gone, crying curses at her as they fled. She did not know what birds they were at first. She was too shaken. Her heart was beating faster than their wings. One of the birds had snagged its claws inside the loose weave of her cloak, and was hanging at her thigh, upside down, thrashing and spiralling. Marta, her panic equalling the bird’s, beat at it but could not knock it away. Once she had caught her breath again and steadied herself, she held its wings and feet and pulled it free. Her hands were shaking. It was a heavy, barrel-breasted bird, with a mottled throat and muddy-coloured underwings. A scrub fowl of some kind. She knelt on the cold ground for a few moments, panting, warming her hands in the bird’s breast feathers. She would not let it go. This was a gift. The evening meal, to mark the end of her first day of fasting. She held its feathers to her cheeks and lips for a few moments. It was softer than any cloth. But she understood this was no time or place for childishness. She broke its wings to stop it struggling. She ought, she knew, to slaughter it according to the rules by draining out the blood. But there wasn’t any knife – or priest – to hand. Instead, she put her thumb against its neck and snapped its vertebrae.

There was a second unearned gift as well. Once the morning light had lifted high enough for her to see inside the grave, she found what the birds had gathered for. When Miri had dug the grave for Musa, she’d gone beyond the biscuit and the stones, and cut across the underground water-seep which drained what little moisture sank into the scarp. During the night, the grave had formed a perfect cistern; cool, straight-sided, and impossible for antelope or goats to raid and empty. The water was dark brown and little more than ankle-deep, but it made the forty days ahead seem almost comfortable.

Marta was not thirsty but she knew she ought to drink before the sun appeared and her quarantine began in earnest. She lay down on the ground, with her chin resting on the outer rim of the grave, and reached down to the water. Luckily, she was a tall woman and her arms were long enough to touch the bottom. At once a few black ticks alighted on her wrists. The water tasted rich and soupy, earth-wa^, not appetizing but cruelly beneficial like herbal medicine. It tasted fertile. What would Thaniel think if he could see her spread out across earth, immodest as a girl?

She was not scooping water on her own for long. The blond, summoned by her involuntary scream and by the hubbub of the birds, was soon lying at her side, toasting his good luck and drinking palmfuls. The older Jew had trouble kneeling, let alone lying on his chest and reaching for the water. He held his side, and frowned with pain. Marta scooped water up for him, losing most of it between her fingers before she could get her cupped hands, still shaking from the fright she’d had, up to his mouth. He shook his head, apologized. It would not do to let his lips or tongue come into contact with her skin. He gave his felt skull-cap to her. It didn’t hold much water but it absorbed enough for the old man to squeeze into his mouth. At first he tried to remove the scobs of earth from the felt before he drank, but he soon settled for the simple life by swallowing the water first and then picking the grit and sand off his lips and tongue. The badu was the last to come, evidently not alarmed by Marta’s scream. He could not easily reach the water either with his hands. He jumped into the grave and got down on his knees to drink. He had the manners and the narrow backbone of a goat.

There’s nothing like a desert water-hole for making good, brief neighbours out of animals that have nothing much in common other than a thirst. There is the story of the leopard and the deer, standing patiently in line while vipers drink. And the tradition amongst travellers that anyone who pushes at a well wil die from drowning. Their bones wiH never dry. So these four strangers, gathered round the cistern, were more careful and polite than they might have been if they had met, say, at a crowded market stall, where the sharpest elbows and the shrillest voice would get the leanest meat. Even the badu, for all his childish, knee-deep impropriety, kept to his comer and was careful to avoid the other dipping hands. There was a good deal of nervous laughter, as well. They knew they were a comic sight

– unwashed, unrested, far from home, and with the rankest water, hardly clean enough to irrigate a field, slipping through their fingers, down their chests and legs. So, once they’d filled themselves with water and were sitting on the rocks waiting for the sun to come and dry their clothes, they had no reason to behave as if they were entirely strangers. Like fellow traveHers sharing tables at an inn, and knowing they would share the same uneasy stomachs in the night, they had to talk. They’d come into the hils for privacy, perhaps. But there were customs to observe. Customs of the water-hole. Customs of the road. And for the men, the awkward and restraining customs oflanguage and demeanour forced on them by the presence of an unaccompanied woman. Who knows how these three might have spoken and behaved ifMarta, handsome and imposing, her throat and a^s and ankles close enough to study and to touch, hadn’t been there? Who was the viper? Which the leopard and the deer?

Marta knew that she was disconcerting. Men stared at her, even in Sawiya where she was no longer any novelty, as if her presence made them uncomfortable. They stopped their work to watch her walking down the alleys towards the weH. She could hang the sickle and stay the saw. The same men watched her coming back, balancing a filled pitcher of water on her shoulders. They hoped to see her arms lifted above her head. Her breasts would spread high and flat across her chest. Any man that watched would know that her stomach was stiH unburdened by a child, and – for reasons only understood by men and cockerels – that was arousing. But Marta misread their stares, and stared back at them, meeting eye for eye. Why should she feel ashamed? If they grinned or whispered amongst themselves, then she could guess exactly what they said and why they smiled. She was for them a fruitless tree. ‘Poor Thaniel,’ they must have said. ‘No sign of any crop this year. Two barren wives. Too much to bear.’

Poor Marta, though. Despite her boldness in the alleyways, she was embarrassed by herself. Her sterility. Her size, which she considered to be too manly and ungainly. Her undernourished heart. Now she was embarrassed even more, in front of strangers. Her inadvertent scream had brought them running from their caves. It was as if she’d summoned them. Now she was exposed. Her hair, uncombed inside its scarf. Her wet and dusty clothes. The earth and water on her face and chest. A marriedJewish woman ofher age was not accustomed to spending any time alone with men, apart from family or priests. Even Thaniel, her husband, did not spend much time with her on his own if he could help it. Thank god for that. So she was not comfortable to be displayed for strangers in this way. She tucked her feet out ofsight, behind the hem of her tunic, wrapped her arms and shoulders as modestly as she could inside her cloak, hunched her shoulders like a raven so that her tunic hung straight down as a curtain and hid her body, and sat a little distance from the men. She put her hands on to the edges of her tunic and found the seeds that she had stitched inside the hem some years before, a good luck charm. There were ten seeds, each one an unborn child, each one hardened by the passing months. Five daughters and five sons, a balanced set of dowries if al of them survived. She ran them through her fingers like prayer-beads on a bracelet, counting them up to forty and then back to nought again. She counted secretly. She did not move her lips. She tried to tum herself to stone. She’d have to be discrete for forty days. She’d have to keep her distance from the men. The priest was right: it had been wilful, perilous and unbecoming to flee from home into the wilderness. No one had warned her, though, how fired and animated she would feel.