21 Pelagia's First Patient
Mandras' mother was one of those perplexing creatures as ugly as the mythical wife of Antiphates, of whom the poet wrote that she was `a monstrous woman whose ill-aspect struck men with horror', and yet she had married a fine man, borne a child, and become widely loved. Some said that she had prospered through witchcraft, but the truth was that she was an amiable and good-natured woman whom fate had deprived of a pretext for becoming vain in her youth, and consequently she had not become embittered as her girth and her hairiness increased. Kyria Drosoula was descended from a family of `ghiaourtovaptismenoi', the `baptised in yoghurt', which is to say that her family had been expelled from Turkish territory with nothing to carry away except sacks containing the bones of their ancestors.
The Lausanne settlement had seen nearly half a million Muslims translated to Turkey in return for over a million Greeks, and was an example of racial cleansing which, though necessary for the prevention of further wars, had brought with it a profound legacy of bitterness. Drosoula had known only how to speak Turkish, and she and her mother had been roundly despised by the Old Greeks at the same time as they wept with nostalgia for their life in the lost homelands. Drosoula's mother buried the bones of her father and her husband,
and for fear of being ridiculed for her Pontos accent, elected to become dumb, leaving all responsibilities to her fifteen year old daughter, who, within the space of three years, had learned to speak the Cephallonian dialect and had married a shrewd fisherman who knew a faithful wife when he saw one. Like so many of the oar-loving islanders, he had lost his life in a squall that sprang up suddenly from the east, leaving a son to take up his trade and a formidable widow who sometimes dreamed in Turkish but had forgotten how to speak it.
During Mandras' absence Pelagia had found her way down to Kyria Drosoula's house almost every day, enraptured by tales of the imperial city of Byzantium and of life on the Black Sea amongst the infidels, and in that small, fishy, but immaculate house by the quayside they had comforted each other with words that, however deeply meant, had by now become clich's in every household in Europe. As the ever-changing sea stopped on the stones outside, they had cried and hugged each other, repeating that Mandras must be all right, because they would have heard if he wasn't. They practised for the eventuality of having to hit an Italian over the head with a shovel, and they laughed behind their hands at some of the appallingly coarse jokes that Drosoula had learned in Turkey from the Muslim boys.
It was to this admirable and hirsute amazon that Pelagia ran, leaving her fiancé at the kitchen table, lost in his world-girdling oceans of fatigue and his terrible memories of comrades who had become the spoil and booty of the carrion birds. The two women returned, breathless, to find him in the same position, still absently caressing Psipsina's ears.
Intending to gather her son into her arms, Drosoula flung herself into the kitchen with a cry of joy, and then performed a double-take that in other circumstances might have been comical. She looked about the kitchen as if to see whether or not there was airy other there than that dishevelled apparition, and glanced at Pelagia questioningly.
`It is him,' said Pelagia. `I told you he was in an awful state.'
`Jesus,' she exclaimed, and without further ado she took her son by the shoulder, raised him out of his seat, and led him outside, despite Pelagia's protests and the evident wreckage of his feet. `I'm sorry,' said Drosoula, `but I'm not having my son sitting in a respectable house in that state. It is too much shame.'
Out in the courtyard Kyria Drosoula inspected Mandras as though he were an animal whose purchase she was contemplating. She peered into his ears, disgustedly lifted his locks of matted hair, made him show his teeth, and then announced, `You see, Pelagia, what a state these men get into when there are no women to look after them. It's disgraceful and there's no excuse for it, no there isn't. They're just babies who can't manage without their mothers, that's what, and I don't care if he's been to war. Go and put a big pot to boil, because I'm going to wash him from head to foot, but fast of all I'm getting rid of all this awful mop, so bring me some scissors, koritsimou, and if I catch his fleas and lice I'm going to flay him alive, I'm itching from just looking at him, I can hardly bear to be on the same island, and the stench, phew, it's worse than pigs.'
Mandras sat passively as his mother ardently and disapprovingly cut away the ropes and pads of his head and beard. She tutted and grimaced at every glimpse of a louse, and carried away the rank locks in the blades of the scissors so that they and their cargo of nits could burn foully in the charcoal of the brazier, shrivelling and spitting, releasing a thick and stinking smoke vile enough to banish demons and disturb the dead.
Pelagia grimaced as much as her future mother-in-law as she witnessed the scurrying of the grey-bodied parasites and as the septic excoriations and the eczema were revealed; the scalp was pitted with inflamed scratches that glistened with fluid, and, most worrying of all, the glands of the neck were finally revealed to be enlarged and suppurating. She felt sickened where she knew that she should feel compassion, and she hurried indoors to look for the oil of sassafras. As she reached for it she realised for the first time, and with a small shock, that she had learned enough from her father over the years to become a doctor herself. If there was such a thing as a doctor who was also a woman. She toyed with the idea, and then went to look for a paintbrush, as though this action could cancel the uncomfortable sensation of having been born into the wrong world.
When she emerged into the spring sunlight with the jar of aromatic and pungent oil, she found Mandras completely shorn, and she offered the jar to Drosoula. `You paint it on quite thick, and it even kills ringworm if he's got that too. Then you cover his head with a cloth and tie it round with string. I'm afraid it's an irritant, and you have to rub olive oil in when the lice have gone, but oil of paraffin takes about two weeks to work, so I thought we'd better use this.'
Kyria Drosoula looked at her admiringly, sniffed the liquid, said, `Pooh,' and began to slop it about on her son's head. `I hope you know what I'm doing,' she commented. Mandras spoke for the first time: `It stings,' whereupon his mother said, `O, you're in there, are you?' and continued to paint.
When the head was bound up in linen, the two women stepped back and admired their work. Mandras' face was as emaciated as that of the saint in his sarcophagus, and looked as hollow-eyed and pale as that of someone recently dead but already cold.
`Is it really him?' asked Drosoula, with genuine doubt in her mind, and then she asked why it was that the scratches on the head became infected. `It's because the excrement of the lice is rubbed into the scratches,' said Pelagia, `it's not actually the lice that cause it.'
`I always told him not to scratch,' said Drosoula, `but until now I didn't know why. Shall we do the rest of him?'
The two women exchanged glances, and Pelagia flushed. `I don't think . . . ' she began, and Drosoula winked and grinned broadly. 'Don't you want to see what you're getting? Most girls would kill for the chance. I won't tell anyone, I promise, and as for him,' she nodded in her son's direction, `he's so far gone he won't even know.'
Pelagia thought three things all at once: `I don't want to marry him. I've already seen him, but I can't say so, and it was a time when he was beautiful. Not like now. And I can't say anything because I've got so fond of Drosoula.'
`No, really, I can't.'
`Well, you help me with everything else, and you'll have to tell me what to do with the other bits from the other side of the door. Is the water hot? I'll tell you confidentially, I can't wait to see what kind of a man I've produced; do you think I'm terrible?'
Pelagia smiled, 'Everyone thinks you're terrible, but no one thinks any the worse of you for it. They just say "O, there's Kyria Drosoula for you."
With his clothes removed Mandras shivered no more than he had done with them on. He was so pathetically reduced that Pelagia felt no shame in remaining with him even when he was naked, and she did not have to resort to delivering instructions from the far side of a door. His muscle was gone, and the skin hung about his bones in flaccid sheets. His stomach bulged, either from starvation or parasites, and his ribs protruded as sharply as the bones of his spine. The shoulders and back seemed to have bent and crumpled, and the thighs and calves had shrunk so disproportionately that the knees seemed hugely swollen. The worst of it was what they beheld when they peeled off the encrusted bandages upon the feet; Pelagia was reminded of the story of Philoctetes, erstwhile Argonaut and suitor to Helen, abandoned by Odysseus upon the island of Lemnos because of the insupportable decay of his foot, with only his great bow and the arrows of Hercules for company. Pelagia would later recall that the conclusion to this story was that he was cured by Aesculapius and had helped to bring down the Trojans, and would reflect that she herself had been the healer, whilst the Italians had aptly supplied the place of their own forebears.
She did not feel very much like a healer when she saw those feet, however; they were unrecognisable as such. They were a necrotic, mufti-hued pulp. A shell of pus and scab lay upon the inner windings of the abandoned bandages, and yellow maggots writhed and squirmed in flesh that was all but dead. `Gerasimos!' exclaimed Drosoula, clutching her son's withered shoulders for support as she tried not to faint away. The stench was inconceivably stupefying, and at last Pelagia felt herself flood with the sacred compassion whose absence had previously so appalled her. `Wash him all over,' she said to Drosoula, `and I'll do the feet.'
She looked up at Mandras with tears brimming in her eyes and said, `Agapeton, I'm going to have to hurt you. I'm so sorry.'
He returned her gaze, and spoke for the second time: `It's the war. We beat them hollow, we had them running. We beat the wops. You can hurt me if you want, but we couldn't fight the Germans. It was the tanks, that's all.'
Pelagia forced herself to look at the feet until in her own mind they had become a problem to be solved rather than ghastly suffering to be abhorred. Gently she plucked out the maggots, throwing them over the wall, and then gathered her wits together to decide whether or not the rot had spread into the bones. If it had, it was a case of amputation, and she knew that things would have to be left to others; probably her own father would not be willing to do it. What worse could any physician do to a fellow being? She shuddered, she wiped her hands on her apron, she closed her eyes, and she picked up the right foot. She turned it this way and that, felt its textures and decided to her own surprise that there was no granulation and that no bone had died away and separated itself. `There's no sequestrum,' she said; thinking, `But I've only ever done this on a dog,' and Drosoula replied, `There's plenty of dirt, though.'
Pelagia found the flesh of the foot dry, and sighed as if a burden had been lifted away; it was the moist gangrene that was worse. She saw that there was no red line of demarcation between healthy and inferred areas, and concluded that it wasn't gangrene at all. She inspected the other foot and came to the same conclusions. She fetched a bowl of clean water, salted it heavily, and as gently as she could she washed the terrible mess. Mandras flinched as he stung, but said nothing. Pelagia found that the most gruesome patches fell away as she washed them, and that there was living flesh beneath.
She felt a sense of elation and triumph as she stood in the kitchen and pounded five fat heads of garlic in the mortar. The powerful domestic smell comforted her, and she smiled as Drosoula's voice wafted in from the yard. She was scolding her son as though he had not spent months in the snow, as though he was not a hero who had, like all his comrades, carried hardship far beyond the call of duty and beaten off a superior force that had been defeated by those same hardships. With a knife she spread the garlic onto two long bandages; and she carried them outside. She said to Mandras, `Agapeton, this will sting even worse than the salt.'
He winced as she wound the poultice about his feet, and took in his breath sharply, but he did not complain. Pelagia wondered at his fortitude, and remarked, `I'm not surprised we won.'
`We haven't, have we?' retorted Drosoula. `The wogs couldn't do it, so Attila did it instead.'
`Hitler. But it doesn't matter, because the British Empire is on our side.'
`The British have gone home. We're in God's hands now.'
`I don't believe it,' said Pelagia resolutely. `Think of Lord Napier, Lord Byron. They'll come back.'
`What's all this?' enquired Drosoula, indicating the generality of scars, inflamed pits, and scarlet patterns on the body of her son. Pelagia scrutinised the sorry body, freshly washed, and diagnosed every parasite she had ever encountered in the company of her father. `On the shoulder it's favus. You see, it smells of mice. You need sulphur and salicylic acid for that. It's a kind of honeycomb ringworm. It's lucky it didn't get into the hair, because he would have lost it. These red punctures are body lice. We've got to burn all his clothes, and we've got to shave him all over - you can do that - to get the eggs off his hairs. Or we can wash him in vinegar. And we cover him with eucalyptus oil and paraffin emulsion. The rashes on his legs and arms are betel rouges, and we can get rid of them with ammonia and zinc ointment. They go away on their own anyway. This patch is pityriasis, you see, it's coffee-coloured. The things we use for the other troubles will cure that too. If you shave him, you know, down there, it'll get rid of any crab lice. I won't look if you don't mind. And he's got terrible eczema on his arms and calves. We'll have to paint the cracks with iodine, if I can find any, and they'll heal up, and then we just cover him with calamine lotion, if we can find any of that, and we keep covering him with it until it's cured. It might take weeks. We could use olive oil, I suppose, but not in the groin. You shouldn't put anything greasy in the groin. And these maroon prickmarks are flea bites.'
Pelagia paused, looked up, and saw that Drosoula was smiling down at her in amazement. `Koritsimou,' said the gigantic creature, `you are astonishing. You are the first woman I have ever known who knows anything. Give me a hug.'
Pelagia blushed with pleasure, and, to distract attention from herself, she embraced Drosoula and told her, `I know you're wondering about all the horrible red lumps on his belly and his . . . equipment. They're in between his fingers as well, but don't worry, it's only scabies. The other treatments will treat that too, especially the zinc and sulphur. At least, that's what I think, but we'd better ask my father,' she concluded modestly.
Drosoula gestured towards her much-diminished son, `He's not much of a bargain is he?'
Pelagia cursed herself inwardly and said, `You fall in love with the person, not the body.'
Drosoula laughed: `Romantic claptrap. Love enters by the eyes and also leaves by the eyes, and in case you're wondering why my husband fell for me, ugly as I am, it was because he had strange tastes, thank God and the saint. Otherwise I would still be a maid.'
`I don't believe it for a moment,' said Pelagia, who, like everyone else, had always wondered how Drosoula had succeeded in finding a husband.
The following morning Dr Iannis returned exhausted from the mountain (via the kapheneion), and not only found a corpselike man asleep in his daughter's bed, but found the latter and a craggy and repulsive woman asleep in his own. The house stank of garlic, soap, ammonia, iodine, sulphur, sick flesh, vinegar, burned hair; in short, it smelled of a busy medical practice. He shook his daughter awake and demanded, `Daughter, who is that old man in your bed?'
`It's Mandras, Papakis, and this is his mother, Kyria Drosoula. You've met her before.'
`Not in my bed,' he retorted, `and that isn't Mandras. It's some terrible old man with scabies and bandaged feet. I've already looked.'
Later that morning Dr Iannis listened to Pelagia's account of everything that she had done, snorting and sucking on his pipe at every tentative diagnosis and prognostication. When she had finished she blushed, construing her father's attitude as indicating strong reproof for her presumptuousness. Then he went and examined the patient scrupulously, paying particular attention to the feet.
He said nothing until he reached for his battered hat to go out. Pelagia nervously kneaded her duster and awaited his fury. `If I could cook,' he said, to her astonishment, `I would exchange jobs with you. In fact, I might retire. Well done, koritsimou, I have never been so prodigiously proud.'
He kissed her on the forehead and swept out dramatically, scrutinising the skies for the anticipated invasion. He had a meeting of the Defence Committee to attend, in the kapheneion.
Drosoula smiled down at Pelagia, who was so overwhelmed with relief and gratification that her hands were shaking. `I always wanted a daughter,' said Drosoula. `You know what men are, they only want sons. You're lucky to have a father like that. Mine was a complete dog as far as I can remember, always drunk on raki. I pray to the saint that Mandras gets well, and then you will be a daughter.'
`As soon as we can,' said Pelagia, taking her arm, `we should get him into the sunlight and down to the sea. In cases like this it's the mind that makes a difference.'
Drosoula noted that Pelagia had judiciously ignored her remarks, but forgave her for it. It was enough to see the young woman blooming with that peculiar beauty that derives from a sudden sense of vocation.