Hansen's Children. Ognjen Spahic
for a moment and threw back several Romanian swear words. We continued and turned right, into a forest of birch trees and I was lulled to sleep by the monotony of their white trunks bent by the northern wind. As Robert later told me, Mr. Smooth was an officer of the infamous Securitate who had recently been put in charge of all the lepers in the country. He saw to it that they reached their designated destination and, equally important, that they stay there.
The procedure for dealing with leprosy had not changed significantly throughout the several millennia of its known existence. Two simple conditions had to be fulfilled to prevent a drastic spread of the disease: Firstly, lepers’ freedom of movement had to be severely restricted; secondly, they had to be prevented from coming into contact with the healthy. It was the same under Ramses II, Charles V or Ivan the Terrible. In the Middle Ages, lepers sometimes made the acquaintance of the stake. Just tell common people about the ungodliness of the contagion and its carriers.
Since the church was not bound by compassion, lepers were forced to establish communities on the peripheries of settlements, seeking their salvation in refuse, medicinal herbs and sour wild fruits. With time, these colonies would become restless and hordes of lepers would plunder nearby villages and rob people travelling to the city. This state of affairs would last several weeks or months depending on the resolve of the city dignitaries to saddle the guard’s horses, light torches and go on a small crusade against the sons and daughters of the devil.
The events in Sensotregiore, a city of eight thousand souls one hundred kilometres from Florence, contributed significantly to changing the relationship towards lepers in the sixteenth century. A colony of lepers located just a stone’s throw from the city walls had been established in the late fifteenth century at the time of Pope Innocent VIII. The mild and above all dry climate made the area popular with the lepers of southern Europe, and it was not unusual for lepers to arrive from distant parts of Scandinavia, Spain or the British isles. A good supply of herbs, abandoned military stables and a network of roads which allowed gangs of lepers to extort money and food helped the colony grow to a population of two or three thousand by the beginning of the sixteenth century. When a group of colonists brutally raped three under-aged girls (tales speak of them being butchered and eaten at the bacchanalias held that same evening) the city fathers, with the pope’s blessing, gathered two hundred heavily armed mercenaries: a force intended to expel this perverted rabble and exact bloody punishment. A battle ensued, and blood-curdling cries were heard until the early hours.
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