Читать онлайн «Quarantine»

Jim Crace

Quarantine

An ordinary man of average weight and fitness embarking on a total fast — that is, a fast during which he refuses both his food and drink — could not expect to live for more than thirty days, nor to be conscious for more than twenty-five. For him, the forty days of fasting described in religious texts would not be achievable — except with divine help, of course. History, however, does not record an intervention of that kind, and medicine opposes it.

Ellis Winward and Professor Michael Soule, The Limits of Mortality, Ecco Press, New Jersey (1993)

1

Miri’s husband was shouting in his sleep, not words that she could recognize but simple, blurting fanfares of distress. When, at last, she lit a lamp to discover what was tomienting him, she saw his tongue was black — scorched and sooty. Miri smeUed the devil’s eggy dinner roasting on his breath; she heard the snapping of the devil’s kindling in his cough. She put her hand on to his chest; it was soft, damp and hot, like fresh bread. Her husband, Musa, was being baked alive. Good news.

Miri was as dutiful as she could be. She sat cross-legged inside their tent with Musa’s neck resting on the piUow of her swollen ankles, his head pushed up against the new distension of her stomach, and tried to lure the fever out with incense and songs. He received the treatment that she — five months pregnant, and in some discomfort — deserved for herself. She wiped her husband’s forehead with a dampened cloth. She rubbed his eyelids and his lips with honey water. She kept the flies away. She sang her litanies al night. But the fever was deaf. Or, perhaps, its hearing was so sharp that it had eavesdropped on Miri’s deepest prayers and knew that Musa’s death would not be unbearable. His death would rescue her.

In the morning Musa was as numb and dry as leather, but — cussed to the last — was gripping thinly on to life. His family and the other, older men from the caravan came in to kiss his forehead and mumble their regrets that they had not treated him with greater patience while he was healthy. When they had smeUed and tasted the sourness ofhis skin and seen the ashy blackness of his mouth, they shook their heads and dabbed their eyes and calculated the extra profits they would make from selling Musa’s merchandise on the sly.

Musa was paying a heavy price, his uncles said, for sleeping on his back without a cloth across his face. An idiotic way to die. A devil had slipped into his open mouth at night and built a fire beneath the rafters of his ribs. Devils were like anybody else; they had to find what warmth they could or perish in the desert cold. Now Musa had provided lodging for the devil’s fever. He wouldn’t last more than a day or two — ifhe did, then it would be a miracle. And not a welcome one.

It was Miri’s duty to Musa, everybody said, to let the caravan go on throughJericho towards the markets ofthe north without her. It couldn’t travel with fever in its cargo. It couldn’t wait while Musa died. Nor could it spare the forty days of mourning which would follow. That would be madness. Musa himself wouldn’t expect such waste. He had been a merchant too, and would agree, ifonly he were conscious, God forbid, that business should not wait for funerals. Or pregnancies. Fortunes would be lost ifmerchants could not hurry on. Besides, the camels wouldn’t last. They needed grazing and watering, and there was no standing water in this wilderness and hardly any hope of rain. No, it was a crippling sadness for them too, make no mistake, the uncles said, but Miri had to stay behind, continue with her singing till the end, and bury Musa on her own.