20 The Wild Man of the Ice
Pelagia returned from the well with a jar upon her shoulder, set it down in the yard, and came through the door, singing. The bad news that had set the island buzzing had only served to increase her appreciation of momentary beauties, and she had just seen her first butterfly of the year. She was feeling strong and whole, and had been enjoying having the house to herself whilst her father was up on the mountain checking both Alekos and his herd of goats; nothing was ever wrong with either of them, the advantage to Alekos being that he could catch up with the news, enjoy some human company, hear words whose use had vanished from his interior monologue, and to the doctor that he would return with a plentiful supply of dried meat that made scratching and crackling noises in his haversack as he walked. Additionally the doctor believed that the pleasure of homecoming was more than recompense for the pains of setting out, and that therefore it was always worth departing.
When Pelagia entered the kitchen she stopped singing abruptly, and was seized with consternation. There was a stranger seated at the kitchen table, a most horrible and wild stranger who looked worse than the brigands of childhood tales. The man was quite motionless except for the rhythmic fluttering and trembling of his hands. His head was utterly concealed beneath a cascade of matted hair that seemed to have no form nor colour. In places it stuck out in twisted corkscrews, and in others it lay in congealed pads like felt; it was the hair of a Nazarene or of a hermit demented by the glory and solitude of God. Beneath it Pelagia could see nothing but an enormous and disorderly beard surmounted by two tiny bright eyes that would not look at her. There was a nose in there, stripped of its skin, reddened and flaked, and glimpses of darkened, streaked and grimy flesh.
The stranger wore the unidentifiable and ragged remains of a shirt and trousers, and a kind of surcoat cut out of animal skins that had been tacked together with thongs of sinew. Pelagia saw, beneath the table, that in place of shoes his feet were bound with bandages that were both caked with old, congealed blood, and the bright stains of fresh. He was breathing stertorously, and the smell was inconceivably foul; it was the reek of rotting flesh, of suppurating wounds, of dung and urine, of ancient perspiration, and of fear. She looked at the hands that were clasped together in the effort to prevent their quivering, and was overcome both with fright and pity. What was she to do? `My father's out,' she said. `He should be back tomorrow.'
`You're happy, anyway. Singing,' said the man in a cracked and phlegmy voice that Pelagia recognised as that of someone whose damaged lungs were filling with mucus; it could be tuberculosis, the onset of pneumonia, or perhaps it was the voice of a man whose throat had filled with polyps or contracted in the grip of cancer.
`Ice,' said the stranger, as though he had not heard her, `I'll never be warm again. The obscenity of ice.'
His voice cracked, and she realised that his shoulders were heaving. `O God, the ice,' he repeated. He held his hands before his face and accused them: `Bastards, bastards, leave me alone, for the love of God, be still.'
He wrapped his fingers together, and his whole body seemed to be fighting to suppress a succession of spasms.
`You can come back tomorrow,' said Pelagia, appalled by this gibbering apparition, and completely at a loss.
`No crampons, you see. The snow is whipped away by the wind, and the ice is in ridges, sharper than knives, and when you fall you are cut. Look at my hands.'
He held them up to her, palm outwards in the gesture that would normally be an insult, and she saw the horrendous cross-tracking of hard white scars that had obliterated every natural line, scored away the pads and calluses, and left seeping cracks across the joints. There were no nails and no trace of cuticles.
`And the ice screams. It shrieks. And voices call to you out of it. And you look into it and you see people. Mating like dogs. They beckon and wave, and they mock, and you shoot into the ice but they don't shut up, and then the ice squeaks. It squeaks all night, all night.'
`Look, you can't stay,' said Pelagia, adding, as though to excuse herself, `I'm on my own.'
The wild man ignored her. `I saw my father, my father who died, and he was stuck under the ice, and his eyes were staring at me, and his mouth was open, and I hacked with my bayonet. To get him out. And when I got him out it was someone else. I don't know who it was, the ice deceived me, you see. I know I'll never be warm, never.'
He hugged himself with both arms and began to shiver violently. `Pathemata mathemata, pathemata mathemata; so sufferings are lessons, are they? Don't go out in the cold, don't go out in the cold.'
Pelagia's perplexity was growing into an acute anxiety as she wondered what on earth she was supposed to do on her own with a mad vagrant ranting in her
kitchen. She thought of leaving him there and running out to fetch Stamatis or Kokolios, but was paralysed by the thought of what he might do or steal in her absence. `Please leave,' she pleaded, `my father will be back tomorrow, and he can . . .'
she paused, torn between the naming of any number of medical procedures that would be necessary, `. . . see to your feet.'
The man responded to her for the first time, `I can't walk. I walked from Epirus. No boots.'
Psipsina entered the room and sniffed the air, her whiskers put her hands on his shoulders, which she kneaded with her fingers. There was bone where once there had been perfect, longed-for, pristine flesh, and she saw that indeed he did have lice.