Hansen's Children Read online

  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 FOUR

  The morning I hid my birthday present, a Romanian passport wrapped in wax paper, then put the tin of daffodils down on the windowsill slowly and quietly so as not to wake Robert who lay facing the wall – that morning was the first time I thought about escaping. The plume of smoke from the factory curled above the plain like a giant question mark until the wind and strong spring sun turned it to a grey river that flowed away to the west.

  Robert was talking in his sleep. He pressed his face into the pillow, and when he turned over he left bright spots of blood. It’s a known fact that almost all lepers are plagued by insomnia, even in the early stages of the disease. No position is comfortable for the afflicted body. I think we would only find peace if we could sleep standing up, like sleepwalkers. On pleasant days a few of us would always be sitting on the edge of the old fountain in the leprosarium’s courtyard, exhausted by lack of sleep. We would bask in the spring sunshine and levitate on the border of consciousness. Such problems were foreign to Robert, who was now sleeping soundly and snoring like an elephant.

  I drew a chair up to the window. From there I could see the spot in the wall where the birthday present from Robert was hidden. I had the feeling that the outlines of the stone were clearly visible and that it was moving all by itself. I feared it would fall out at any minute and the passport would flutter off into the sky like a black bird. My friend stretched and made extended waking-up noises. He leaned against the wall and told me that Paul McCartney had killed John Lennon with one slash of a knife. He laughed and drew his index finger across his throat. ‘Can’t buy me love’, he said, and went on humming the melody.

  The first page of the passport was taken up by the photograph which the Romanian soldier took in the tiny first-aid station when I was being prepared for the leprosarium. My new name was Andrei Stanescu; beneath it was an ID number, the Romanian coat of arms and the signature of an authorised official in Bucharest. The face showed no signs of the disease, but the black and white photo radiated fear and confusion, and there was a strange shine in the pupils which were looking away to the side. Back then I still bore the stamp of that other world, of years of a relatively peaceful life which were slowly sinking into the quicksand of oblivion, entering the swamps of the future.

  Whenever I recalled the cities of my childhood, muttered vulgarisms in my mother tongue or looked at the dirty map of Europe dredged up from the fertiliser factory’s rubbish dump, I felt a pang of nostalgia that brought tears to my eyes. Wisps of colour, traces of familiar odours and voices, voices, voices. But in the last few years, memories of this kind aroused less and less emotion. They seemed too far away to pompously step onto my mind’s stage and put on their show. They simply hung around in my thoughts like the last herd of three dozen bison in the forests of northern Poland: you only saw them if you looked for them. A strong wire fence protects them; one after another they disappear into the mud, worthless heaps of sinewy meat. They are dying out.

  Yet the passport had forced me to rethink everything. When I opened it I felt I was leafing through a thick notebook full of fine print and not twenty empty pages of official blue.

  I sat down on my bed. Robert got up, wished me a good morning and sat on the chair by the window. Zoltán was milling around in the courtyard and muttering under his breath. Robert waved to him, and he replied grumpily with the three stiff fingers of his left hand. He had large red blotches on his forehead and scalp which made the hairless skin, furrowed by leprosy, look like the relief map of some forgotten continent.

  I waited for Robert to mention the passport and ask if I had hidden it, but he just sat there quietly with his elbows propped on the windowsill and watched Zoltán walking in circles on the dry ground around the fountain. He smelt the daffodils and stroked the petals with the tips of his fingers. Suddenly he put his hand to his right ear and with his other hand made a sign that I should be quiet. He was trying to concentrate on a sound which my sense of hearing had not yet detected. ‘Can you hear it?’ he asked me, putting his finger to his lips again. For a few moments I could not distinguish anything except the constant murmur of the trees and the increasingly frequent scrape of Zoltán’s steps.

  Like the sound of a distant aeroplane coming closer and closer to the runway, the air began to tremble, filled with hundreds of voices. There was singing, the rousing melody of the ‘Internationale’ mixed with workers’ chanting in Romanian, in which I recognised slogans like, ‘Down with the dictator!’, Freedom!’, ‘We want our rights!’, ‘Equality!’ Zoltán stopped his pacing and shambled to the fence as fast as his body would carry him. From our window we made out banners attached to long poles, Romanian tricolour flags with a hole where the state emblem used to be and a river of blue overalls which cast up a cloud of dust. Several farmers who were out in the fields joined the column together with two loud tractors; dozens of protestors climbed up onto them like ants. This improvised army now headed for the fortress that was the factory. It was all like a modern adaptation of Robert’s tale about Sensotregiore and the bloody battle beneath its walls.

  The whole demonstration stopped for a moment to cheer the reporter’s car that arrived from the Romanian national television station, though it parked at a safe distance. The cameraman climbed up onto the roof of the beat-up vehicle and from there filmed the events that were to follow.

  The leprosarium came alive too. Everyone gathered around the second-floor windows to get a better view of things. The road to the factory wound past fields of corn, through a birch wood, traced a broad semicircle around some power-line poles, coming within a few hundred metres of the leprosarium fence, and then turned away again towards the factory, passing the rubbish dump on the way. On top of the large storehouse several police helmets shone; an officer pointed with his truncheon and deployed policemen armed with rifles at the corners.

  Zoltán held on to the fence and jumped up and down. He cursed Ceauşescu and joined in the hubbub, singing several verses of the ‘Internationale’. As the blue river came closer to the leprosarium, Zoltán’s cries became louder and more excited. When the workers were at the closest point to the leprosarium and Robert’s eagle eyes could make out their dirty, unshave
n faces, we all watched as Zoltán jumped the fence, tripped over the wire, then straightened his linen robe, pulled on his hood and strode towards the workers with open arms to join in their chanting and singing. When the crowd came close to him it went a little quieter. Curious eyes stared at our castle of contagion, a house of the accursed that shimmered like a mirage among all their social problems.

  They saw Zoltán, and absolute silence fell. But the old man was not put off by the mass of gaping eyes, nor the ill-tempered agitation and ever more frequent cries. He was convinced of the friendly disposition of the tormented people who were rising up against the tyrant.

  The first stone flew from the midst of the crowd and fell several metres in front of Zoltán. Robert and I had already jumped the fence and were hastening towards him; while he happily waved his arms and droned the same song. He still did not want to believe that the ‘prisoners of starvation and wretched of the earth’ needed no leprous ally wrapped in linen rags; that for them he was an abomination from another world. More stones whistled through the air. At first subdued, then louder and louder, there came shouts of, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ I was stunned to hear this ancient cry, now directed at us, as we grabbed Zoltán by the arms and dragged him back. Soon we were out of the range of the stones.

  Zoltán cried. He wept loudly and through his tears he muttered, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’, as he looked at me and Robert in turn. He gazed at the leprosarium, the trees and the old wooden cross on the front of the building. We sat him down by the fountain. Mstislaw came with a jug of water, put it down on the ground and disappeared back into the black hole that was the main entrance. No one, apart from him, came out to check what was going on. I imagined that everyone had seen from above what had happened and was now sitting in the loneliness of their shady rooms, plucking those words out of their hearts, those words that stabbed like sabres. It was all just another confirmation that we did not belong, a testimony to the vast desert of disease, fear, ugliness and disfigurement that divided us – Hansen’s children – from the rest of the world; whoever tried to cross that waste would be stopped. Yet Robert was becoming convinced that it was worth a try.

  The workers’ singing moved away. We took Zoltán up to his room and laid him on his bed. The protesters had now stopped at the giant portrait of Ceauşescu and were hurling red paint and lumps of earth at it. From a distance it looked as if the portrait on the rough wall was being riddled with bullets and blood was streaming from it. Cheers came after every hit, and soon the face was covered with a mess of red and black blemishes. With the lumps of clayey soil sticking to it, it was reminiscent of a leper’s face in the advanced stages of the disease.

  I must say that Robert, ever the pragmatic American, viewed the events with considerably less emotion and associations. His version of the episode with Zoltán and the protesters would turn out to be more rational; closer to reality, perhaps, but less interesting. I guess that is how the world works, and literature too: stories are always written and remembered by people like me, not by the Roberts, Zoltáns and Mstislaws of the world.

  We were still sitting in Zoltán’s room when we heard the first shot from the direction of the factory. That instant the chanting turned into incoherent shouting. A column of police vans galloped towards the factory amid a cloud of dust. The foot of the chimney and the factory yard was shrouded in a downy haze of tear gas, from which bewildered workers emerged like ants. The wounded face of the dictator leered amidst the swirling smoke. A burst of fire from the top of the storehouse brought down two workers in overalls, who had hurled stones at the riflemen. The vans came to a halt a few hundred metres from the factory and riot police sprang out armed to the teeth and equipped with gas masks. With steady steps they approached the remnants of the discontented proletariat, and a gunshot resounded for every stone that hit their iron shields.

  The bravest of the protesters hurled themselves against the battle-ready police cordon with cries of hatred. An iron door would open briefly and the charging worker would disappear beneath the truncheons and boots before he could even let out a scream. Most of the workers fled across the large field of young wheat south of the factory, but we could see from the leprosarium windows they were heading straight towards uniforms deployed around the long granaries at the end of the property.

  The smoke soon dissipated. Ceauşescu could now observe the situation unhindered. Seven or eight bodies lay scattered about the factory yard. Those who had not managed to flee were now kneeling with rifle barrels trained at their heads. The police officer stood on the bonnet of a jeep and announced through a megaphone that all those who had been captured were to be considered criminals who had attempted to threaten the integrity and constitutional order of the Socialist Republic of Romania. They had also impugned the image and achievements of the President. Several workers tried to get up and speak, but the butts of the semi-automatic rifles were faster.

  Robert also saw two policemen take the cameraman from the national television station behind the building. They slapped the poor fellow in the face several times, took out the video cassette and smashed it against the wall. One of the policemen patted him on the shoulder, and the cameraman inserted another tape. Everything went quiet again. The workers were probably able to hear the humming of the camera, the slow unwinding of the celluloid which now captured their frightened faces. With his truncheon, the officer pointed out to the cameraman who he was now supposed to film. The objective obediently followed and the large glass eye was held up to the bent heads of the offenders. Robert later commented on the bitter irony of the word for a glass camera lens, ‘objective’, being the same as the adjective describing a real situation or events. He was amazed at such a crass disparity and mentioned several similar examples which I no longer remember.

  Zoltán finally fell asleep. Thick clumps of blood dripped from the fingers of his hand which hung by the bed. In his drawer we found a Bible, two ampoules of thiosemicarbazone and a syringe, and Robert injected the medicine into Zoltán’s swollen artery. As he leaned over the old body, he smelt the awful stench which bore witness that Hansen was delivering its final blows. The disease was now rampaging in the disintegrating tissues of the old body. Zoltán had managed to hide its progress with his linen robe, silently bearing the pain. Next to his syringes there lay a faded photograph; the tiny child in the bottom left-hand corner with neatly combed hair, a cheesy grin and the lights of Budapest in the background was identified as Ingemar Zoltán on 13 May 1911. We looked at the child’s slender arms. A wooden toy hung from one hand, while the fingers of the other seemed contorted; perhaps the boy was preoccupied with his fingernails. Even given the state of this ‘child’ today, there were evident similarities: the broad forehead, big dark eyes, long legs and prominent cheekbones were the same as the leper Zoltán’s. We put the photograph back and tiptoed out of the room, both thinking of the child that lay like a ghost near its dying, adult reincarnation.

  A group led by Mstislaw waited outside the door. They asked us how Zoltán was. After convincing them that the old boy would be alright, we all went off to lunch. They slurped their broth without speaking. They were waiting for Robert and me to explain the tumultuous events of the morning. The cutlery rang quietly to honour the workers who were killed. Police sirens passed the leprosarium on the road. Our glasses trembled from the rumble of lorries full of arrested protesters, so we did not hear the steps in the courtyard, the breaking open of the door of the ruined Baptist chapel, its loud closing and the frightened conversation of two unfortunates who had escaped the truncheons.

  We split up and went off to our rooms after a lunch seasoned with Robert’s reflections on the global crisis of humanity, the evil that affected all and the deformation of communist ideas in the countries of Eastern Europe. Each went off absorbed in thought, admiring Robert’s eloquence. Some of his long sentences actually made sense. Like his claim that the fate of civilisation was inseparably tied up with the five percent of people gifted with the desir
e and the drive to use their lives to resist the temptations put before them by the dark side of the ‘totality of our existence’, as Robert called it.

  I lay and stared at the ceiling. Robert was down in the courtyard reading. All the events had mussed up my mind like the wind tangles a girl’s long hair, and I could not go to sleep. A day that began with the yellow daffodils was becoming a spiral of anxiety that intruded into the peaceful everyday life of Europe’s last leprosarium. Although a mild spring sun was shining and sweet smells of verdure filled the air, no one else went outside. The only sounds from the courtyard were Robert turning his pages and the rustling of blackbirds in the bushes by the fence. Occasionally, the sirens of a police car would come from afar like the howling of the wind and then soon turn into thousands of glassy whispers.

  The dilapidated Baptist chapel stood on a foundation of old reused bricks, so the ravages of time had easy work to turn it into a slumped mass of building materials susceptible to spontaneous collapse. I looked at it on mornings after windy winter nights, expecting to see it turn to dust before my eyes. Yet it survived. It was as if the rusty, iron cross which came out of the altar and up through the boards of the roof were a spine keeping it upright. Margareta Yosipovich had taken care of the building before she withdrew into her hibernation without return. Zoltán remembered the splendid pale-red roses and the little lilac bush, the clear and impeccably clean panes of glass in the small round windows and the smell of incense which Margareta received in Red Cross parcels. She knew several chapters of the Bible from memory, and if you walked in the courtyard you could hear a gentle muttering of holy words that filled you with peace. With her last strength she chained the doors together and virtually crawled back to her room, from which she was never to emerge alive again.