Riario at the bedside was nothing like Riario with someone who did not need him. He felt Helen’s forehead, murmured, “Oh, very good,” and reached for her wrist to take her pulse. “Very good,” he repeated, his eyes on her face.
She smiled again, then made an apologetic gesture and scratched at her cheek. The doctor did not seem to notice. “You’ll be up and about before long,” he said. “Now I’m just going to check to see that your baby’s doing well too. Does he look like you, or is he homely like his father?”
She giggled.
Riario snorted. “You come with me, sirrah, and leave your lady at peace,” he said to Argyros. When they were in the hall, out of earshot of the bedroom, he let out the sigh he had been holding back. The magistrianos seized his arm. “She’s better, not so?” he demanded, remembering barely in time to keep his voice down.
“It often seems that way,” Riario said, “just before the pocks come. You saw that rash she was picking at on her face? That’s how it begins.”
Argyros heard him as though from very far away. Young, bright Helen’s cheery face pitted and slagged with scars like this old doctor’s? It was not that he could not love her afterward. He knew he could; he cherished her for much more than the outward seeming of her body. But he feared she could not love herself disfigured, and her sorrow would take the summer from his year. Riario might have read his mind. “Don’t fret over her looks,” he said bluntly. “Fret over whether she lives. The pocks are the crisis of the disease. If they begin to scab over and heal, she’s won. Otherwise—”
“Is there nothing you can do?” The magistrianos knew he was pleading and did not care.
“If there were, don’t you think I’d’ve done it for myself?” Riario’s laugh was harsh. “I hate smallpox, and even more I hate being helpless against it. If it’s God’s curse as they say, why, I curse God back for it.”
Argyros crossed himself at the blasphemy, but the physician answered with a two-fingered obscene gesture Italians often used. Riario grated, “If you’d watched as many men—aye, and women like your wife, and babes like your babe—as I have die in pain, and all you could do was close their eyes when they’d gone, you’d understand. When God smote Egypt, Pharaoh got off lucky, for He didn’t send him smallpox.”
I le shook his head and seemed to come back to himself. “Show me your son, as long as I’m here.” The bitter edge returned for a moment: “Not that I’ll be able to do any good if he does have it.”
But Riario’s interest revived when he saw the jar of milk and the syringe by Sergios’s cradle. “What have we here?” he asked. Argyros explained. The doctor rubbed his chin and nodded. “Clever. A trick I’ll have to remember.”
He picked up the baby, felt Sergios’s forehead with his hand and then, as if not sure what it told him, with his lips. “A touch of something there, maybe,” he said at last, “but who know s what? These little ones take all sorts of fevers. If it’s bad, you’ll find out soon enough.”
Again, he was gentle with his patient, cuddling Sergios and making him smile before he put him down. To Argyros he said, “I’m sorry I can’t offer more hope. No doubt you’d rather have a doctor who tells you sweet-sounding lies.”
“No, I prefer an honest man,” the magistrianos said, which startled Riario but also seemed to satisfy him. The physician gave a jerky nod and headed for the street. “Another mission of mercy,” he said, rolling his eyes to show-how much mercy he expected to bring. “Good fortune to you, Argyros; I’ll call again in a few days, or when I have the chance.” He nodded again and was gone. Over the next week, Argyros learned why Riario hated smallpox so much. He watched helplessly as the disease’s characteristic rash spread over Helen’s face, arms, legs, and even onto her belly and back. At first the marks were red and raised. They must have itched ferociously, for Helen scratched them till they bled. Her fever was back full force and left her wits wandering. Argyros finally had to use rags to tie her hands to the bedposts to keep her from clawing herself in her delirium.
In the moments when her w its partly cleared, she wept all the time, moaning, “I’ll be ugly, Basil, ugly. How will you be able to want me anymore?” Nothing he said could get through to her to convince her she was wrong. That wounded him almost as much as being there hour by hour, day by day, watching the ravages of the disease grow ever worse. Sometimes he wondered if he was going mad. Sometimes he wished he could.
Most agonizing for him was how little he could do even to make her comfortable. He sponged off her sores several times a day. The coolness might have helped her fever a little, but none of the ointments of grease and honey and other less easily named ingredients that he bought did the least thing to help her itching.
Argyros could not make her eat much, and the days of fever wasted her. She grew very thin. The only times he left the house were his daily trips to buy milk for Sergios. The baby was growing as used to his makeshift feedings with the syringe as he had been to his mother’s breast. That saddened Argyros too, although he was relieved his son’s fever had grown no worse. He got to know Peter Skleros and his large family welclass="underline" they were the only healthy people he was seeing. Once or twice he caught himself resenting them for escaping the smallpox and immediately felt ashamed for his meanness.
I le could not help being glad to get out of the house, though, and it was only natural that sometimes he invented small delays to keep from going straight back with his milk. He would help Skleros’s children keep the dairy buildings clean, lead the cows to and from their grazing at the park. Once he even did his own milking.
“Here, Sergios,” he said with foolish pride when he gave the boy some of that jar. “Your father drew this with his own hands. Doesn’t it taste especially good?”
Sergios was not impressed.
Helen got worse. The red patches on her skin turned to blisters, tilled at first with a clear liquid and then with pus. When they broke, as they sometimes did in her thrashing, the smell was foul. She would not eat at all after that, and drank only a little water. She had no more control over her bodily functions than Sergios had.
Her breathing grew harsh and labored. Along with the pox, her skin began to look bruised. Though she was still delirious, she moved less and less. All these signs terrified Argyros, who ran to the church of the Holy Apostles for a priest to give her the last rites.
Though that church was second only to Hagia Sophia, it had but few ecclesiastics to serve it. Some were dead; others fled. Only one would go back to his house with him when he told them Helen had smallpox. He cursed the rest for cowards. The priest, whose name was Ioasaph, set a hand on his arm. “They are no more than men, my son. Do not ask for what is beyond their strength.”
“I low do you dare come, then?”
loasaph shrugged; his thick brown beard bounced on his chest, “God will do with me as He wills. Whether I stay or come, I am in His hands.”
The magistrianos wondered what Riario would say to that.
Then all such small thoughts crumbled to ashes within him, for when he and the priest returned to his home they found Helen dead. loasaph prayed over her body, then turned to Argyros. “She is at peace at last and out of pain.”
“Yes,” Argyros said dully. He was surprised he did not feel more. It was like a sword cut: the damage was done, but the pain would come later.
loasaph said, “You must understand, this is God’s will. She has gained eternal life, against which this world and its suffering are but a moment.”
“Yes,” Argyros said again, but he could not share the priest’s calm confidence. Having been with Helen all the while, he found he could not see why heaven had to be purchased with a week of hell. After a while, loasaph left. Argyros hardly noticed. I le sat staring at Helen’s body. Even in death she had no repose, but lay contorted.