Hansen's Children Read online

  That chain no longer hung in its place, and the peace of the Baptist chapel was disturbed by the panicky whispers of the two fugitives, whose pupils dilated in fear whenever the wail of the siren filled the air. They assumed the police were hunting for them and were determined not to give up easily. Sitting on the edge of the fountain, Robert was the first to notice the distinct creaking of the old floorboards, a sound that couldn’t have been caused by the wind. It came from inside, from the heart of the decennial darkness that preserved the cherished souvenirs of Margareta’s unshakeable faith in God. He pressed The Bible against his breast and at that moment wanted to kneel before the altar and feel that special cold that only churches possess.

  But the doors began to open before he even touched them. My friend looked on in wonder, prepared to believe that they had actually been moved by a divine force. Two heads with mops of black hair stuck out, one above the other, their eyes red and puffy from the tear gas. The Second Book of Kings: ‘And the sons of the prophets said unto Elisha, Behold now, the place where we dwell with thee is too strait for us. Let us go, we pray thee, unto Jordan, and take thence every man a beam, and let us make us a place there, where we may dwell. And he answered, Go ye.’ Shoulders with blue overalls also appeared.

  I peered from among the daffodils on the windowsill and saw their hands fearfully signal for Robert to come up, and then not to come any closer. They gesticulated with their bodies, clenched their fists and contorted their faces, all so as to explain that they wanted to stay there in the dark. Robert nodded to show them he understood. He offered them the Bible to read, to alleviate their fear and the painful wait, but they did not want to take it. They needed only the dilapidated roof of the Baptist chapel; for they believed the police would not search for them in this accursed place.

  Early in the evening a patrol car with flashing lights arrived at the gate. Robert and I were sitting on our beds, once again discussing the events of the morning. He accused the police of unseen brutality, but also thought that the workers had been rather primitive in expressing their discontent. I maintained that mass protest was the only way to gain attention and stand up against suffering, but he replied that it only reflected a questionable type of collective bravery that was incapable of articulating any rational goal, let alone attain it. A police officer called out from the gate, not daring to pass beyond the fence. He demanded that someone come out and only stopped his hullabaloo when the two of us appeared at the entrance. He made no effort to hide his large pistol but kept it stuck in his trousers. Its handle poked into his protruding belly.

  Did we know what had happened? A group of criminals had tried to destroy the factory. Almost all of them had been caught, but several were still at large. Had we seen them here near the building? Or in the building? This hole seemed like an ideal hiding place. It was much more dangerous now that the fugitives were on the loose. We would be at grave risk. And the disease, it was contagious...

  He spoke without letting his eyes meet ours as if we were evil gorgons who would turn him to stone, or even worse: into a leper. Huh! His colleague was sitting in the car polishing his revolver on his sleeve. I thought of the wretches in the chapel behind us who were trembling like hunted rabbits. They were probably cowering beneath the damp floorboards, imagining what would happen if they were arrested. Their whole life long they had heard tales about the infamous catacombs of the Securitate headquarters in the capital; about torture methods that left the victims shitting blood for the rest of their days. That was not the destiny they wished for.

  Robert made a jerky move towards the fence and the police officer jumped back in fear, reaching for his pistol. When I casually spat a large lump of phlegm on the ground, the fellow took another step back. His fear encouraged us. We realised he was not going to come anywhere near us. It was the disease that held him back. He looked at the lights up in the windows for a few seconds and then returned to the car, growling ‘Damn lepers’, or something to that effect. Robert flung back some juicy abuse in American slang full of ‘fucking’ and incomprehensible expletives. The wheels screeched, splattering us with mud, and the blue flashing light disappeared down the road, illuminating the fresh foliage of the bushes.

  Robert and I exchanged glances and rejoiced in our victory. It had not been spiteful resistance to the arrogant force of the law as much as the desire to be part of something that existed beyond the fence. I don’t think our quarrelsome impulses and gestures of rebellion against a small representative of Ceauşescu’s regime were essentially any different to Zoltán’s running out to meet the protesters. We all wanted human contact, even if it be conflict, so as to break down that fence that was much taller than the one around the leprosarium. If only for a moment. But everything foundered on the iron curtain that Hansen, like a devoted tradesman, had been erecting around our vile name for thousands of years. I could cope with a fat truncheon on my nose better than the habitual, ‘Damn lepers’. I would have preferred the fat cop to pull his pistol and give me one big humane slug of lead.

  In the eyes of our leper community we were heroes. When Cion ladled out the soup for dinner he adorned our plates with the largest pieces of boiled potato, and as a prize we were given two tins of pineapple from the kitchen storeroom. But no one mentioned the Baptist chapel and the fugitives. And why should they? Their silence was a way of telling us that it was our business and that they did not want the men inside the leprosarium. Using my authority, I decided I would allow the workers to sleep the night in the building, though I feared it might disquiet those sensitive leprous souls. The presence of healthy people offended them and put them in a bad mood, and I did not want to offend anyone, especially the freaks I had come to love over time, or even those I had learned to hate and similarly forgot to offend.

  We waited for the night to take hold and then approached the rickety door. When we entered, Robert lit a candle which made our coarse and mutilated faces seem even more terrible. The two unfortunates lay huddled up against each another. They slept with their mouths open, making an odd chirping sound. The chapel stank of their sweat and the bad smell of the long gumboots left next to the altar. Above their sleeping heads rose the immaculate figure of the Mother of God; the dampness was making her paint peel. What gentle eyes, I thought, and held up the candle. All along the smiling mouth I noticed patches of greenish mould, giving her face a grimace like an expression of revulsion. I followed her shoulders and arms down to where they should meet as she held her child. But in place of the blessed body of Christ I now saw two Romanian heads. They opened their eyes and glimpsed the last thing they wanted to see: ghostly visages of Hansen’s children lit up by the ruddy glow of the flickering candle. They cried out, making Robert stumble in his fright. The candle fell from my hands to become part of the heavy darkness and, for a moment, there was only silence.

  Tripping over each other, the workers knocked over the altar in their rush to get out. They bumped into me and Robert too. Every bit of body contact increased their fear, and when they finally reached the door and kicked it open, they sat down on the ground and started taking off their clothes. Their eyes were full of fear as they looked around them, and their naked behinds now rolled in the sand. With every step we took they moved back two, crab-like; then they jumped up and started to run. We followed them as far as the fence which they cleared in one bound and then continued leaping over small bushes and puddles. We watched the gleam of moonlight on their sweaty backs for quite some time until it was lost amongst the thin tree trunks of the young forest. I was filled with a kind of disappointment paired with envy. I had really thought that those fools would condescend to talk with us and make an effort to conceal the revulsion and fear our illness provoked in them. That they would laugh with relief when they saw through the rickety door of the chapel that it was just us coming, and not the police. As I watched them stumble and fall, get up again and run even faster, I wished it was me who was fleeing from bloodthirsty police dogs through the bogs and ma
rshes of this dreary country, hiding among the birches and breathing the damp odour of peat.

  Before I went off to bed and fell into horrible nightmares filled with images from my childhood, I went to see Zoltán again. He was sleeping facing the wall, his arms pressed firmly against his chest. The creased and dog-eared photograph peeked out from between his fingers. His drawer was open; it held the dark emptiness of a life that was fading together with its memories.

  When I entered our room I thought at first that Robert was kneeling and praying. He did not turn around but only waved; holding a sharpened lead pencil in his hand. The old map of Europe was billowing across the floor. He traced roads and rivers, marked towns, skirted mountains and big cities as if he were drawing in the route of a huge army. I asked him what he was doing, and in reply he drew two stick figures two or three centimetres north-west of Bucharest. Everything seemed so close. If I put my heel on the broad Transylvanian plain and pointed my foot towards the west, the tips of my toes would be somewhere between Bonn and Frankfurt. But if I took another step or two forwards, my feet would again be standing firmly on the rickety floorboards. Was it worth taking a step? What would a journey to other places bring? Robert rolled up the map without speaking, and the rustle of its precisely marked paper drowned out all the questions I wanted to ask.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It’s impossible to gauge the damage caused to lepers by superficial translations of the Old and New Testaments from Hebrew. Today it seems absurd to explain that the word tsara’th did not denote the disease caused by Hansen’s bacillus, and that the Bible does not even give an adequate description of the symptoms of our misfortune. The Second Book of Kings (5:27), where Elisha heals the leper, Naaman of Syria, and punishes Gehazi by giving him the disease, says, ‘The leprosy therefore of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto thy seed forever. And he [Gehazi] went out from his presence, a leper as white as snow.’

  What snow? What rubbish. Obviously this was a disease that caused a lack of pigment – leukoderma or vitiligo, whereas my fellow sufferers and I can bear witness that our skin sometimes shows the opposite tendency.

  In centuries past we were blasted by all manner of Christian anathemas, which overlooked the fact that Christianity itself was the main culprit for us rotting away in agony. It was none other than the crusaders, returning from their campaigns at the beginning of the second millennium, who introduced the disease to Europe. The continent was seized by the first great epidemic, which led the Third Lateran Council of 1179 to classify us as ‘dead among the living’ and to drive us away to wretched leprosariums. If you loved the Bible, you threw stones at lepers and hung bells around their necks: amusement for millions. We wore large yellow crosses sewn onto our left breast, and in some regions it was obligatory to shout, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’, whenever we went amongst other people.

  Lepers who dragged themselves from market to market trying to elicit alms had to invest a lot of effort in making a stranger’s hand reach into his pocket. The more skilful ones, often well-educated people abandoned by their family and friends, used their storytelling skills and sometimes managed to gather several dozen listeners. Considering that they never stayed in one city for more than a few days, their repertoire consisted of four or five stories, usually descriptions of famous battles or miracles which they had allegedly witnessed. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the nobility recognised the recitation of these tales as a significant means of propaganda, and in some cases city dignitaries, and even members of the court, paid lepers to go from town to town and city to city spreading a particular story and enhancing it with embellishments and superlatives. Sometimes I feel I am doing the same thing, unravelling the tangled web which Europe’s last leprosarium had spun over the many years of its existence. I do not know for sure what is hidden behind these sad palimpsests written by leprosy, nor what I will get when the essence of the matter comes to light. Perhaps just the compassion of the reader, or maybe the same expressions of disgust that have pursued us for centuries. Not that it matters: the past is crafted by a mighty erosion of time. New workers came to the fertiliser factory, Ceauşescu’s face was freshened up with bright colours, and crows made a nest on the roof of the chapel. From the window I watched the dictator’s vernal facelift which beautifully complemented the green landscape.

  Red Cross packages arrived with considerable amounts of new medicines: clofazimine, which we used intravenously, and ethionamide in tablet form. At least one year of regular therapy was required for them to have any noteworthy effect. If we divided up the delivery into equal parts, it would last until late summer. Margareta renounced her share and Zoltán did too. He spoke less frequently and increasingly walked around near the fence, staring into the distance as if he knew exactly what he was looking at. Robert observed that his favourite place was a little marshmallow bush which he would stand by, fondling its broad leaves. He would devotedly pull out weeds around the bush, remove stones and look into the sky as if praying for rain. He too had become a vegetable. His meals consisted of several boiled potatoes and a small piece of rye bread which he ground with his rotten teeth. He stopped coming to the fireside gatherings and drinking the bitter elm-bark tea, and wiped his face with a dirty rag stiff from blood, pus and sweat. His nerve endings began to die off faster and you could see him kick a rusty piece of iron with his bare foot and laugh hysterically because he felt no pain, even though his foot was still bleeding. Robert and I caught him while he slept, and Cion cleaned and bandaged the wound, demonstrating the medical skills he had acquired in the Romanian army. We held Zoltán’s hands until he went back to sleep, and then left the room without a sound.

  On 13 June 1989, Zoltán did not come down for lunch. It was usual that he did not turn up before noon, so there was no fuss when the old man was an hour or two late. On the contrary, it was easier to eat without having someone at the same table picking scabs from his arms.

  On the way back to my room I knocked loudly on Zoltán’s door, but there was no reply. The bed was neatly made, his modest supply of clothes lay scattered on the floor, and the black and white photograph was missing from the drawer. Instinctively I took a look out the open window at the ground below because it all seemed more like a suicide than a planned escape.

  We searched the courtyard, the chapel and the bushes on the other side of the fence, but found nothing. But Robert noticed that the marshmallow bush had been uprooted; presumably a sign of Zoltán’s so-called ‘madness’. The night was filled with pale moonlight and the barking of wild dogs. Worry and disbelief were heavy in the air. Sitting silently by the fire, I looked up at Zoltán’s dark window, expecting any minute to glimpse the clumsy silhouette of the good-natured old man and for him to begin singing ‘Back in the USSR’ in his imitation English. No one spoke, and soon we broke up and went back to our rooms, preoccupied with thoughts about Zoltán.

  I was woken by Robert shaking me. I got up grumpily, and he dragged me to the window. He pointed towards the gate, behind which the old man’s body lay sprawled on the ground. The morning mist was drifting away to the west. It hung around the bushes and the verdant trees as if it were hiding from the sun that was about to come out any moment.

  Zoltán lay barefoot, his feet bloodied, his face pressed into the ground. His skinny arms were outstretched as if in an embrace, the palms of his hands pressed hard into the damp soil. We turned him over onto his back. His linen robe and calico pants were torn and bloody in several places. There were prominent bite-wounds, and several chunks of flesh were missing from his right thigh. I had heard the dogs barking. They were Zoltán’s dogs. Hungry midnight animals provoked by the rotten smell of his sick body. We had not paid them much attention when they hung around the fence at dusk. Someone would get up, throw a stone or firebrand, and the shining eyes would disappear into the bushes. Robert once tried to go up to them with a piece of bacon in his hand, but he was driven away by their harsh barking; they were hungry for something else. Nature has ordered
things clearly: dogs are attracted by gangrenous vapours, the suppuration that eternally oozes from the excrescences and ganglions of Hansen’s children, more than they are to a fresh piece of bacon or a veal chop. The unwritten law says that the dead have to be eaten first – the dying have to be sniffed out. And we possess all the signs that place us beneath a malignant shadow which can hardly be called life.

  Without waiting for the sun, we carried Zoltán back to his room, wrapped him in a fresh sheet and laid him in one of the tin coffins taken from the attic. Lepers are buried together with all their belongings, so before fastening the lid of the coffin with four big screws we put in the few small objects we found strewn around his room: several pairs of neatly folded socks, clean handkerchiefs, a pipe with the Austro-Hungarian coat of arms, an empty tobacco box and the stuffed falcon that was attached to the head of his bed. It was as if we were burying a pauperised pharaoh, the last of his dynasty, a witness to the dissolution of a once opulent empire.

  I had never thought that Zoltán would be the first we would bury here on the grounds of the leprosarium; there were more obvious aspirants to that dark throne.

  The rest of the leper community waited in the dining room. When we appeared the whispering stopped. I saw there had been attempts to get specially dressed for the occasion; shirts buttoned up right to the collar and sleeves rolled down neatly. ‘Our dear friend is no longer with us,’ I said, and my words were followed by loud sobbing and a high-pitched murmur. Robert and I entered the dining room and sat down. The empty seat dominated, and only when I tapped on the table did people’s glances leave the wooden chair and the flowers that had been placed on it. It was not easy to agree to the details of the burial. We argued where the grave should be. Someone suggested I should give a speech accompanied by music from the loudspeaker. Others argued about the gravestone and epitaph.