The Walled Orchard Read Online Free PDF Page A

him his account of the symptoms is at least recognisable. Mind you, he also gives you the impression that he was there on the spot when all the famous and significant speeches were being made, and since some of these took place simultaneously in opposite corners of Greece, I doubt very much whether he was sitting there with his wax tablets on his knees taking down every word as it cleared the speaker’s teeth. I do know for a fact that I did have the plague, and that only the intervention of the Gods saved my life.
    The plague arrived in Athens on a grain boat, and was soon making its presence felt in the Corn-Chandlers’ Quarter. At first nobody took much notice, since most corn-chandlers are resident foreigners and one more or less makes no great difference to anyone. But soon it began infecting citizens, and then we all realised that we had a major problem on our hands.
    My own experience of the plague was this. I had been on a visit to my aunt Nausimache, and there was gossip going around the City that she was having an affair with a rich corn-chandler called Zeuxis, who came from somewhere near Mytilene. In fact, if you have a copy of Cratinus’ Ants (I don’t; I lent it to someone years ago, like a fool) I think you’ll find there’s a reference to that affair in it. Anyway, the plague was one of those diseases which you can catch from other people, and my guess is that she caught it from Zeuxis and I caught it from her; I distinctly remember her giving me an auntly kiss when we arrived, and wiping it off with the back of my hand when she wasn’t looking.
    A day or so after this visit, I started getting these quite unbearable pains in the front and sides of my head, as if some idiot had knocked over a brazier inside my brains and they had caught fire. Then my eyes started to itch, just as though I had been peeling onions, and something horrible happened to the inside of my mouth. Even I could tell that my breath smelt like rotten meat, and my tongue was swollen and tender.
    My grandfather, who I had gone to live with after my father died — I think I was about twelve at the time — took one look at me, diagnosed plague, and had me locked up in the stable with the goats and donkeys. The last thing he needed, I remember him saying as he put up the bar on the door, was a house full of plague, and if that was the Gods’ way of rewarding him for taking in orphans he was going to have to think very seriously about his theological position. Luckily we had a Libyan housemaid at the time, and she had got it into her head that her black skin would protect her from the disease. She reckoned that if she fed me and looked after me and I got well again, my grandfather would be so pleased that he would set her free and let her marry his understeward, and so she brought me out the scraps from the table and a jug of fresh water every day.
    So there I was once again, entirely surrounded by goats, and the disease went into its next stage. For about a day I could not stop sneezing and coughing, and I vomited up bile of every imaginable colour; there was one peculiar shade of yellow that I have never seen since, except in some rather expensive Persian tapestries that someone was selling in the market. Then my skin broke out in little blisters which itched unendurably; but I think some God whispered in my ear not to scratch, and I managed not to, somehow. The worst part of it was the thirst, which I simply cannot describe, and here I think my grandfather’s treatment of me saved my life. You see, I had only a few cupfuls of water each day, and sometimes nothing at all when the maid forgot or couldn’t get away, whereas I have heard since that the people who were able to drink as much as they liked invariably died. In fact, my belief is that once the God saved me from the disease itself, this lack of water stopped me from catching the murderous diarrhoea which killed more people than the plague did, and which inevitably follows the