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arrived here in the month of February. The sky on that day was without color and so empty you could not believe it contained the sun, the moon and all the stars hidden somewhere within its blank immensity. The air was sharp, cutting through closed doors and bolted windows, rasping at naked skin.
    It had been a long winter and it was not yet over. Everyone was tired and hungry but they still had to wait for the warmth of the sun to soften the earth and make things grow.
    A few cabbages and tufts of curly kale stood lopsided in the fields, their outer leaves burnt by the frost. There were no more potatoes. The carrots had turned to slime in the heap of sand that was supposed to protect them. The remaining scraps of salt bacon tasted as sour as stale beer and the fishwere impossible to catch, as if they were clinging to the floor of the ocean in order to keep out of reach of the nets.
    It was the first week of Lent and I heard several people joking together in a halfhearted way, saying they would have to stop eating so much rich food and go on a fast in order to remember their sins. I had not seen hunger before; it looked very similar to sadness I thought.
    The leper had made himself a clapper out of two wooden boards bound at one side with a strip of leather. The boards had been the protective cover for a traveler’s guidebook to the Holy Land. He had taken the book with him when he went there as a young man long ago and in the years that followed his return he had only to hold it in his hands and he was back with the musty smells of that country, the whirring of cicadas, the relentless heat of the sun.
    It had been very strange to unpick the stitches holding the boards in place and put them to this new use. The pages were still bound together and he had wrapped them in a cloth. He had them now in his sack along with a few other possessions.
    I watched him walk along the road that was deeply rutted. On his left he could look out across the gray sea with no sign of a fishing boat, no waves, no birds, nothing for the eye to settle on. On his right there was a brief cluster of birch trees, an empty meadow, and then the cultivated field where the cabbages and the curly kale were growing.
    The first of the houses in the village was the one that belonged to Catherine, but now that she had gone, it hadalmost ceased to exist, standing there as insubstantial as a shadow.
    The other houses were crammed closely together like nests under the eaves of a roof. You could just make out the yellow stonework of the church at the far end of the village.
    The leper passed a steep bank of grass that would be covered with flowers when spring came, but there were no colors as yet, only the uniformity of an exhausted green.
    Just then I saw Sally stepping out of a door and standing in the road with her back turned to me. She was talking to the baby in her arms and her voice was carried easily across the stillness of the morning.
    â€œI’ll eat primroses for you,” she said. “I’ll eat a whole dish of primroses as soon as they have come. That will thicken my milk and fatten you up.”
    The baby began to cry and she hugged it with a sudden fierceness that made it cry even more.
    The sound of the clapper was growing stronger now, tentative and yet insistent.
    Clack, clack, clack
, and Sally turned towards the approaching figure.
    Clack, clack, clack
, and he was muffled in a long cloak with a hood that concealed his face.
    Clack, clack, clack
, and it was like the warning cry of a bird when the cat is out hunting.
    Clack, clack, clack
, and with a shock she realized that a leper was entering the village.
    She watched him drawing closer. The baby knocked its head against her breast, making the milk rush and tingle.
    â€œPerhaps he has no hair,” she thought to herself. “Perhaps he has a hand missing or holes in his body where the flesh has fallen away. He mustn’t touch my baby or he might kill it. He mustn’t