Hansen's Children Read online

  When the curious and vindictive inhabitants of Sensotregiore looked out at the battlefield in the morning light, they were horrified to see a well-ordered army of lepers holding up the heads of their enemies. Now the maddened horde yelled in fury as it converged on the city’s fragile gates. Within two hours Sensotregiore had become a Sodom at the mercy of the hungry and disfigured. The humiliated ones now indulged in all the worldly pleasures that had been denied them for years and gave their brutal impulses free rein. A frenzy of rape, plunder, loathsome orgies and cruel murders descended on the city, turning it into a hellhole. The inhabitants, mad with fear of the disease, fled towards the northern gates and out into the hills.

  The lepers soon imposed their rule and took over the comfortable homes of the dignitaries. At noon, four members of the city council were hanged on the main square; a mayor was elected, and Sensotregiore became a Lepropolis, a powerful community that functioned well thanks to the financial resources extracted from the hidden niches, mattresses and safes located in the houses of the rich. Naturally, no army existed that was prepared to attack a city in which leprosy reigned, but leper colonies throughout Europe were punished in revenge for Sensotregiore. Their wooden huts were burned down without mercy, and every soldier had tacit permission to kill or spare lepers as he saw fit. Not until a decade after the establishment of Lepropolis, by which time over two thirds of its inhabitants had succumbed to the disease, did this change: a host of three hundred cavalrymen and an equal number of well-armed infantry arrived at the city gates determined to put an end to Sodom and restore divine order. Among the soldiers were many former inhabitants of Sensotregiore imbued with righteous rage and a burning hatred. Alerted by the fanfares and the rattle of weapons, the lepers left the city without a fight and made off into the mountains with the sabres of the victors close behind them.

  This was Robert’s favourite tale, and he was often requested by the others to tell it as we sat around the fireside After a final dramatic pause, he never failed to mention that if you passed by the half-ruined citadel of that small Italian city today you could still hear the cries of our profligate brothers who had fallen into sin.

  The doctor shook me awake when we arrived at the gate of the leprosarium. I was given a personal hygiene kit and the driver offered me a cigarette. If I had accepted, I suppose he would have flicked it to me through the gap of the slightly opened window. Old Zoltán and Robert W. Duncan waited on the other side of the fence and were the first people in several months to offer me their hands. We strode through thick layers of fallen leaves and stepped around frozen puddles. The leprosarium was a three-storey building with high ceilings. I saw dark silhouettes standing at several dimly lit windows. The third storey had small ventilation openings only and was used for storage.

  The room was well heated, and several loads of finely chopped firewood lay stacked by the stone stove in the corner. There were flowers on the bedside table, a reproduction of the Raft of the Medusa above the bed and a crucifix at the head of the bed. Robert was visibly gladdened by my good English and chattered happily as he showed me around the building that was to be my only home for years to come. After pointing out the location of the bathroom, he left me to unpack. Dinner was at eight thirty and the dining room was on the ground floor. I looked out the window and tried to catch a glimpse of the surroundings through the darkness, but all I saw were the flickering violet lights of the nearby fertiliser factory.

  The corridors of the building were curved like crescents. Standing in the middle of a floor you couldn’t see either of the ends. This confused me at first, and I often went the wrong way and ended up at the locked door of the stairway that led up to the attic.

  My first look into the dining room revealed a round table of enormous size set with simple plates and cutlery; patients in their dark-hooded robes sat at their places. When I entered I heard a friendly murmur of different languages and dialects, but no one stood up to greet me. Old Zoltán pointed to a vacant chair next to his, and at the same time Robert began introducing the other patients with whom I would ‘share the good and the bad’, as he put it. When their names were called out, each answered by pulling back his hood. One after another they emerged; heads crafted by leprosy, skulls covered with varying textures of scarred and malformed tissue. Monsters they were, but they spoke with human voices, which created the impression that they were people wearing ghastly masks. Then I threw back my hood too.

  I cannot claim to have had anything like rosy cheeks any more, but my skin was still fairly smooth with only a few rough patches caused by the beginnings of leprosy. The tendons on my neck trembled, a sign of recent health, and my hair had only just begun to fall out. All this provoked a minute of hushed envy and disbelief. Robert broke the silence by reaching for the oval dish of boiled vegetables and giving me a big helping.

  We pulled our hoods back over our heads and the eating continued. The rest of the meal was seasoned with barely audible whispers further muffled by the linen hoods. The others served me food too, without missing the opportunity to look me in the eyes and inspect my hands, searching for explicit signs of the disease. They saw the beginnings of lumpy excrescences on the joints of my fingers as well as my veil-like cataract; they saw shining tears of desperation that dried and disappeared before they could roll. But my mood gradually improved and it seemed I was accepted as a fully-fledged member of the community.

  Later, back in the room, Robert tried to dispel the fear generated by my first major encounter with the disease. Leprosy did not have to progress any further than it already had, he explained; we would take a regular course of Thiosemicarbazone and do all we could to lessen the effects. I did not share his optimism. One more visual encounter with the other patients at breakfast forced me to realise what an uncompromising monster dwelt within me.

  I watched their faces as they chewed their fried eggs. Lumps of dead flesh shook like jelly and shone like grease. Their mutilated fingers looked like lumps of melted lead, and their sunken eyes cast reflections of the faint light that barely reached them. Some of them would interrupt their meal for a moment to remove pieces of food from their open sinuses, which elicited loud complaints from the others, so the poor noseless fellows would have to get up from the table and finish their dirty work out of sight.

  The oldest denizen of Europe’s last leprosarium was Zoltán, who had lived there since it was founded in 1928. He was the only one to survive the German occupation and mass execution when forty-seven residents were taken out into a field and mowed down into a muddy pit.

  He remembered the noise of the armoured vehicles on 14 December 1942, the iron gate being broken down, and the young soldiers of the ‘Prinz Eugen’ division determined to... Oh God, and were they determined! Four young soldiers in protective suits ran up and down the corridors, waking the residents and ordering them to stretch their legs and go out to the courtyard immediately. They came out one after another, rubbing their eyes. The arrival of the Germans did not provoke any great panic, Zoltán explained. The residents were more surprised than anything else because at that stage they did not quite know what was going on in the world outside. They assumed this was just another of the humiliating head-counts that the authorities conducted for fear of the patients fleeing and causing an epidemic. In fact, the German soldiers armed to the teeth standing in the courtyard were a reason to hope for the introduction of order and proper medical care to alleviate the desperate conditions at the colony. But when the officer in charge pointed towards the gate with his Schmeisser and the first in the line of lepers was jabbed in the ribs with it and told to move, Zoltán realised that something other than ordinary medical treatment or boring head-counting was in store for them. The minute of machine-gun fire confirmed his doubts. Curled up under the two-year old elm trees close to the fence, Zoltán cried big, cold tears that dripped to the ground. He wanted to pass away like his brothers, to nestle against their bodies and end this miserable lazar’s life in the backwoods of R
omania.

  The Germans carried out a thorough disinfection of the building by burning everything flammable out in the courtyard. Several valuable portraits of Queen Marie of Romania were destroyed in the flames together with the pieces of expensive walnut-wood furniture; they and the pictures had been given to the leprosarium as presents of the crown. Zoltán watched as the blaze swallowed up painstakingly preserved mementoes. Photographs of friends and family as well as small but cherished items kept in drawers near the patients’ bed heads all vanished amidst the red tongues of the Germans’ fire.

  That morning, Zoltán told us, his last hopes went up in smoke. Be it this country or the lands beyond the mountains that hummed like a fat queen bee sending out encoded signals; never would this world become a place worthy of God’s love.

  Zoltán roamed the nearby forests until the end of the war; he slept in abandoned stables and burned-down houses. The Germans created a well-guarded headquarters in the leprosarium building, and the courtyard was patrolled not only by guards but also three bloodthirsty Alsatians. Zoltán did not dare to take a closer look.

  On 17 April 1944, dawn found him in the stench of a chicken coop close to the main road. He was woken by that same humming of mighty machines and the incisive sounds of German. He waited for the soldiers to pass and then headed for the leprosarium with quickening steps. Now in the courtyard a mighty blaze was devouring the belongings of the German soldiers: countless bundles of documents, epaulettes of various ranks, and large photographs of Adolf Hitler. Yet the building remained untouched. Apart from a large swastika crudely daubed in tar on the front wall before the Nazis’ withdrawal, there were no visible signs of destruction. On the contrary, the windows had been repaired, the bathrooms sanitised, and every room now had a small stone stove. Solid, functional furniture adorned the dining room which was polished to splendour, and in the kitchen the aromas of the last meal still hung in the air. Crockery bearing the mark of the Reich shone in the china closets. Zoltán touched it with his crooked fingers and looked at his reflection on the white porcelain surfaces.

  In the corner of the dining room he spotted the bulging copper horn of a gramophone. He picked up one of records which lay scattered on the floor, wound up the spring and gently placed the stylus between the black grooves of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. The music resounded as he donned the last remaining overcoat that hung in the corridor and tore the epaulettes and the Iron Cross from the breast. Allegro molto moderato: Zoltán goes outside to the southern wall to see if there are still any of the daffodils that usually grow there at this time of year. Adagio: Zoltán picks daffodils, angrily tearing them out of the ground. His cold tears drip on the resilient petals. Allegro molte e marcato: he slowly lays the flowers on the round depression in the ground not far from the leprosarium. Aase’s Death: he lays himself on the warm spring earth, on the bodies of his leprous brothers that have turned to dust.

  Ants feasted on the filth and sweat of Zoltán’s unwashed body, carrying away those tasty morsels to the tiny passages of their subterranean home. After he had slept for several hours, he went and had a bath, bandaged his wounds with fresh bandages and went back to the resting place of his friends. Instead of saying a prayer, above their grave he read out the fifth chapter of the Second Book of Kings, in which Elisha heals the leper Naaman of Syria and punishes Gehazi by giving him leprosy. It’s not hard to imagine who Zoltán had in mind when he spoke those Old Testament curses.

  If you asked him why he decided to spend the rest of his life at the leprosarium, he would wave dismissively and say with resignation, ‘I’m waiting for Death to come. This is the only place I can wait undisturbed.’

  A commemorative lunch was held every 14 December to mark the death of our former fellow-sufferers; a minute’s silence was observed and a joint prayer spoken at the mass grave. After telling the story for the umpteenth time, Zoltán would wipe away his tears with his thumb, the only healthy finger of his right hand, and go off to bed. We broke up in silence, moved and somehow proud that lepers had played a part in the Second World War, albeit through collective execution.

  If Zoltán had cast off his documentarian chains for a moment and given his imagination free rein, he might have been able to spin a story about how, cowering under the elms, he had heard the defiant shouts of those prepared to die; he might have said that they started singing the ‘Internationale’ in unison in different languages until this was cut short by a burst of fire in the middle of the second stanza, for example. Since he was the sole survivor, and the post-war Communist authorities were eager to present myths of heroism, they would have embraced his far-fetched tale with open arms. A charming memorial centre would have been built nearby and the leprosarium would have been given central heating.

  As my coarse hands descended among the heads of the daffodils, I looked around me to make sure I was the only leper awake that morning. I snapped the young stems and put the flowers in the cold water of the pineapple tin. The birthday present Robert had given me was hidden in my inside pocket. Seven daffodils: the seventh stone from the left in the sixth row from the bottom. I prodded with a piece of wood and dislodged the stone so I could get a grip on it and pull it out. Robert advised me to ‘push in steadily’ and ‘pull back slowly’. The stone creaked like an old mill wheel, I thought, though I had never been in a mill. It was heavier than I imagined. Putting the stone down by my legs, I rolled up my right sleeve as far as it would go, and reached my hand timidly into the dark hole. I breathed in the cold of the old wall and expected something to touch me, but I did not feel anything. There was just the cold and the smell of moss. I took the present out of my pocket, laid it in the dark hole and then pushed the stone block in hard. Then I carefully picked up the tin and went back to the room. I was excited; I felt as if I had just planted a magic seed in the wall and wondered what kind of strange fruit would spring forth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It hurt when I swallowed the pineapple, but Robert said that was just a passing phase, after which my oesophagus would become totally numb. That is why lepers in the past often became performers who swallowed live coals or ate glass for money. He said I would get used to it over time, though I would miss the pleasant burning sensation of hot tea. What he missed most of all was the heart-warming burn of the Jim Beam Black he so adored. Robert was American. The only American on the planet infected with this ancient disease, I imagined. He wrote to a few friends and some old aunt in Georgia that he had AIDS and would be spending the rest of his life on the Old Continent. He wanted them to remember him as he had been, as a non-commissioned officer of the US Army, not an enfeebled shadow of his former self. He told me he had picked up leprosy in the brothels of Amsterdam in 1982 and then quickly went on to tell me episodes of his training in Arizona. I did not ask him any more questions, constrained by my good manners, though I knew that none of Hansen’s children can explain how they contracted the disease in just one sentence. Their account is extensive and always precisely structured. Lepers talk nineteen to the dozen, at least at a superficial level, whenever they are asked how they arrived at their fate. Robert only told me the whole truth, encouraged by our friendship, after I had been at the leprosarium for many years.

  The daffodils were always an unpleasant reminder of the topic of beauty and its reflection. I would not have been surprised if those magnificent flowers suddenly wilted at the sight of my disfigured face. Although I am not missing any vital parts, my nose, cheeks and forehead are covered with large warts, as if peas were growing under the skin. Leontiasis developed, with the result that my eyebrows, eyelashes, hair and beard growth have long since disappeared. But the cartilage of my nose is still in fairly good condition, thanks to regular doses of Thiosemicarbazone and antimony, drugs which were once delivered in abundance. You could do your injections whenever you wanted: before lunch, after breakfast, at dawn or in the middle of the night. The majority of residents adopted a loose regimen like this, not knowing what a double-edged sword it was.
Mycobacterium Leprae soon became immune to the medicines so that mammoth doses were needed to stop the progress of the bacillus even for only a short time. With Robert’s help, I worked out exactly the right doses of medication to knock out Hansen in the long term. In 1984, the last ampoules of the precious substances ran out. We then switched to therapies with medicinal herbs which we were able to gather in the vicinity of the leprosarium. Several Russian books on herbal medicine helped us quickly work out the most effective infusions for reducing the swelling and painful lumps. Compresses of wild pansy leaves soothed the unbearable itch which came on rainy days and sometimes drove the lepers to claw their already disfigured bodies, producing volcanoes of pus and blood.

  Thirty grams of peeled and chopped bittersweet nightshade steeped in a litre of boiling water gave an inconceivably bitter infusion which was good for relieving symptoms in the throat and oesophagus. We gathered the bark of young elm trees all year round in the nearby forest. This was the only plant mentioned in the recipes for alleviating the consequences and symptoms of leprosy, which made it the most popular with the patients. We peeled bark off the stems of two-year-old elms, dried it in an airy place or in the sun, and chopped it up finely. Then we boiled thirteen hundred grams in twenty litres of water until half the liquid had evaporated. Every morning we needed to drink two hundred and fifty millilitres as tea and use the same amount for compresses. We made the infusion in two large cauldrons in the middle of the courtyard and sat around the fire. Old Zoltán had some culinary experience, and his skill in preparing the bark made the work a smooth operation. We would put the speaker on the windowsill and stock the fire well, everyone would bring out a stool or drag up a block of wood, and the fun began. Night after night the White Album revolved, making feet tap in spite of stiff knees. The lepers’ dull eyes followed the sparks as they flew up to the heavens.