Hansen's Children. Ognjen Spahic
of the juicy red orbs, Cion came out sobbing; the former enemies fell into each other’s arms and everything returned to normal.
Mstislaw’s and Cion’s warm embraces were later exchanged in the intimacy of high-ceilinged rooms, on mattresses filled with mouldy wool, in the bathrooms and dead-end corridors of the leprosarium. I never understood how they overcame the disfigurement of their disease-riddled bodies. Cion had no nose; instead there was a gaping hole, dark and mucousy, into which you could stick at least two fingers. Nor was the rest of him particularly attractive. His right leg, without the foot, dragged on the ground behind him like a corpse, while exceptionally large lumps of hardened flesh lifted the linen robe off his back.
Mstislaw suffered from a different form of mutilation. His facial features were all intact, but the disease affected the joints of every limb. This gave him a gait reminiscent of the movements of a monstrous marionette from a child’s darkest nightmares. Whatever the sexual relationship of these two unfortunates was like, I am sure Mstislaw was never on his knees.
The first complaints about their affair began for reasons that were exceedingly pragmatic and equally ridiculous. Issue 36 of the Medical Gazette (January 1984), published in Bucharest under the auspices of the United Nations, pompously announced ‘a new disease that would change the face of the earth’. In the next few days everyone read the pages about ‘Autoimmune Deficiency Syndrome’, some with a sneer, others with calm incomprehension. The advent of this new pestilence also instilled a degree of envy, I noted. You could tell that leprosy was held in strange awe by its victims. Bitter debates ensued in the courtyard, senseless statements were made, full of scorn and hatred; some claimed that AIDS was a medical farce designed to detract from the acknowledged scourges of humanity: the plague, cancer, syphilis, and of course leprosy. They loved their disease and respected it as a worthy opponent.
‘AIDS primarily affects intravenous drug-users, haemophiliacs and homosexuals’, Ingemar Zoltán read out, while the others nodded with an air of importance and exchanged whispers in which, not surprisingly, the names Cion and Mstislaw were heard. With this new knowledge, attitudes to the two lovers changed considerably. The nature of the new disease was misunderstood and homosexual acts per se were seen as spawning the new evil. Mstislaw and Cion were shunned... like lepers. It was kind of understandable.
Those who are not familiar with the subtle moods of the deformed leprous body and mind will find it hard to understand lepers’ seemingly irrational behaviour. These are often rooted in motivations foreign to those of you from that other world – the world of non-lepers. It was the same mechanism that caused the excommunication of Cion and Mstislaw, but this was obscured by the commotion about ‘the new disease’ and its alleged apostles: the homosexuals.
Over the years the reality of leprosy gave rise to the rule that emotions were impossible and forbidden in the leprosarium: we were all one body that lived the disease, slept the disease, and died of it. This practical arrangement, if I may be so bold, could be considered part of the natural equilibrium that aims to preserve the fragile physical and mental health of the human race.
Degeneration of the penis did away with reproductive instincts and the possibility of pregnancies within the community of lepers.
In the leprosarium, together with eleven men, there was almost one woman. I phrase it in that way because the only woman, the elderly Russian Margareta Yosipovich, vegetated in a state of semi-hibernation from as early as I can remember. She did not leave her room for years on end, but Death did not yet want to call for her. I was the only one who visited; knocking on her door once a week, I waited patiently for her vocal chords to utter a barely audible mumble, before I would go in to take her pulse and spoon some soup into her mouth. Margareta would reply with stories, memories that went back to the last days of tsarist Russia and the cruel gulags of the Siberian tundra, but also to the early history of the leprosarium shortly after it was founded.
Her rasping voice came from deep inside, its low frequencies filling the room. After ten minutes I felt it was coming from all around. She spoke fluently and in a steady tone reminiscent of an old gramophone record.
Her Russian sometimes drove me crazy. She would speak about the tsarist period using an assortment of archaic terms and exotic adjectives, which completely undermined my high-school Russian. When she spoke of Red Russia it was like a parade of presumptuous names of different committees and titles of minor Stalinist officials. It was thanks to them, if I got it right, that she and her husband froze their butts off in Siberia for years on end. And it was there, in Gulag 32-A, that Margareta contracted Hansen’s bacillus in return for her labours. Broken by the heavy burden of leprosy, this courageous woman managed to stay healthy in mind up until the very end. Margareta had abandoned her body, consciously discharging it and hoping for the compassion of her fellow lepers. She had spent the last ten years afloat on a black sea of memories, constantly complaining of the cold, the Siberian cold, that dwelt evermore in her skull.
My torment, and that of the others, began at daybreak. A line of blue workers’ aprons filed off to work, and you were faced with a day full of pain of varying intensity. Your communication with the rest of the world usually began with looking to see if there were any new changes to your body. Depending on what you saw, your resulting mood would range from suicidal depression to mild happiness.
The mirrors in the rooms of the leprosarium saw scenes that could have been from hell. Every room had a mirror, and from the early morning hours you could hear expletives or howls of pain; proof that Hansen had been busy during the night. Fear drove many to imagine that the lump on their back had grown overnight, that part of their nose had been pushed to the left, or that the skin on the back of their hand had become unnaturally rough. Just imagine what the disease was doing to the back of our eyes: a common headache led to all sorts of thoughts!
So it was that Mycobacterium leprae sculpted away at us, not only bodily but also mentally, sometimes deforming our state of mind in a similar way to the gaping wounds on lepers’ backs and shoulders. You could not expect these circumstances to be conducive to the human race’s characteristic kindness and optimism, but these traits undeniably existed in the leprosarium too. Perhaps physical ugliness made it easier for that other, more deeply ingrained side of human nature to come out.
I had no cause at all to complain about my room-mate, Robert W. Duncan. He maintained his cheerful nature despite the disease, ignoring its traps and pitfalls. He was also fortunate that the illness progressed very slowly and only drew attention to itself, directed by some inscrutable biological or divine clock, when he thought he was perhaps cured of it.
Robert made my years spent at the leprosarium seem shorter. He never forgot my birthday and he always gave me presents perfectly tailored to my tastes and needs. The most precious of them, the Jugoton pressing of the Beatles’ White Album, will stay ingrained in my memory forever as the sound of kindness and undiminished friendship. I remember old Ingemar Zoltán listening to ‘Back in the USSR’ beside the speaker and whooping with joy because he believed it was a propaganda piece, a march conveying an ultimatum to the Soviet tanks in the streets of Budapest. Every day he marched up and down the corridors wanting more, joyfully shouting out a hybridised refrain full of anti-Soviet slogans.
Robert’s presents had a mysterious aura of depth and intimacy about them. I would turn them fondly in my hands and had the strange feeling that I had owned them long ago and they had now returned to me, bringing back old memories too. A deck of old Piatnik playing cards, a pocket knife with a rosewood handle, a small ebony-framed Chinese watercolour, a Turkish pipe: each of these gifts had its own special place on my bedside table.
Yet Robert stubbornly refused to say how he came by them, and after badgering him a few times I gave up. It was probably some special ability of his, like a literary or musical talent. Several days before my birthday I followed his movements closely, but Robert was never out of my sight for more than half an hour; not long enough to go to the nearest village or the fertiliser factory. Sometimes he would be walking in the courtyard and cast enigmatic smiles up at me, knowing that I was bursting to ask him one more time: how?
The present he gave me for my forty-second birthday on April 2nd 1989 was kept not on my bedside table but deep inside the woollen filling of the mattress. Robert put it next to