Hansen's Children

by Ognjen Spahic

  ‘But today they’ll be back. That’ll be my last chance,’ Robert said.

  ‘Don’t worry, everything will be alright,’ I said.

  ‘Has anything in my life ever been alright?’ he laughed.

  ‘Quieten down, they might hear us and lock us both up,’ I warned.

  ‘So what?’ Robert replied. ‘What does it matter? Can’t you see it’s all over now?’

  ‘Mr Smooth came and will probably come again,’ I told him. Robert kept laughing. He teetered around the cell and fell down in a corner.

  I couldn’t bear to hear him anymore. I needed peace. Even if it only be the peace of Margareta Yosipovich’s burial.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The events that followed are engraved in my memory like a jumble of rough-cut scenes from a low-budget film. I went up into the dining room. The coffin was still on the table. The gurgle of water and the noise of pots and pans came from the kitchen. Most of the patients were outside in the sun. Spades cut the dry earth. Several lepers were digging and wiping sweat from their brows, and Mstislaw, his arms folded behind his back, supervised the work. He told those who were digging to get rid of a big stone that was in the way. They were to dig at it from all sides, remove as much earth as possible from underneath it, and then lever it out with the metal bars that had once blocked all the windows of the leprosarium and now lay rusting by the fountain. I strode out into the courtyard, stopping for a few seconds near the door so my eyes could adjust to the sun. Mstislaw beckoned amiably but without taking his eyes off the hole that grew ever deeper. He praised the diggers when they loosened the rock in the ground, heaved it out and threw it before his feet. The heap on the right-hand side of the pit gradually grew larger. After a layer of red clayey soil they hit something harder, a pebbly conglomerate. Mstislaw suggested that someone else get down into the pit and looked at me. The heat above the earth created a thick wrinkled haze that made it look as if his legs were not touching the ground but floating several centimetres above it. Sweat stung my eyes. My brain seethed, causing a strange popping in my ears. For a moment I wanted to be sitting beside Robert in the eternal shade of the leprosarium’s cellar; I would press my forehead against the smooth stone floor and enjoy the chill that crept up through my knees.

  Mstislaw picked up a spade and held it out to me with a gesture of mock begging. I could feel the heat of the pebbles through the soles of my feet, but it was equally hot wherever I trod. The moist floor of Margareta’s grave was almost enticing.

  He didn’t wait for me to come up closer but threw the spade to me. It corkscrewed in the air. The handle was hot. I would never have thought that wood could get that hot. I stood there on the edge, inhaling the smell of the earth until Cion prodded me in the back: I had to hurry. ‘We haven’t got all day,’ he said.

  I felt as if I was about to dig my own grave. Balancing on the spade, I jumped down into the pit.

  The ground at the bottom really was cool. I was in the grave to dig alone and the others came up to the edges, making it seem twice as deep. I was surprised how soft the ground was when I first thrust the spade into it. I threw out soil, trying not to look at the eyes which formed a frame around the sun. My head spun. I tried to concentrate on the digging and get the best footing. Mstislaw said something; the others listened attentively, but I did not hear his words. It was as if we were already divided into two worlds, the living and the dead. The large clumps of earth gave off vapour as I threw them into the sun. With a little fantasy, I imagined myself digging my way to hell. At some stage the membrane of the earth would become too thin to bear my weight. Flames would spout up through the cracks, I would fall down through them with a cry and the on-lookers would clap. Two words from Mstislaw returned me to this world: ‘Enough!’, and ‘Out!’

  Sodom and Gomorrah, I thought, reaching out my hand so someone would grab it and help me out. But everyone hung their heads. Mstislaw had things well under control. Everyone moved back half a metre and waited for me to clamber out like some antediluvian creature whose remains archaeologists discover deep in the rock. ‘Nice grave,’ Mstislaw said, ‘It suits you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘it’s lovely.’

  The grave came up to my chest. I set the spade in the ground behind me, pushed against the handle and swung my legs up to ground level. The siren from the factory sounded, calling the workers to lunch. I stood in front of Mstislaw, clenching the spade. The horrible noise stretched out the time like chewing gum. Something had to happen when the music stopped, I thought, and gripped the spade tighter. The wail gave way to silence, and slowly Mstislaw walked to the edge of the hole. He reached into the folds of his robe and withdrew my passport. Raising it high above his head like a trophy seized from the enemy, he threw it into the grave. At that instant a large magpie alighted on the roof of the chapel and chattered several harsh strophes. Mstislaw stooped, took a fistful of dry earth that trickled between his fingers and threw it into the pit, covering the red passport at the bottom.

  Had it not been for Cion’s sarcastic laughter at that point, I probably would have reacted differently. But that brought things to a head, and I will dream the next few scenes for the rest of my life: I bent over to see where my passport had ended up. Its corners were sticking out from under the little heap of earth, like a little grave at the bottom of the big grave. Cion’s squeaky voice grated at my eardrums. The sun was at its zenith and hopped round the top of my head. I firmly gripped the wooden handle of the spade, opened my eyes wide so as to see Mstislaw better, and then abruptly raised the oval blade. It hung in the air for several seconds. Everyone looked at it. Everyone watched as it swung down towards Mstislaw’s head and sliced into his face across the middle of the nose and down his cheek. Blood only began to flow when I withdrew it. There was a crunch of bone as I pulled it out. First Mstislaw’s arms went limp, frozen in motion. He blinked several times and slumped to the ground in a sitting position, as if to take a rest. He was still breathing. Shiny bubbles of blood rolled from his nose. The red crescent on the flat metal revealed the fatal depth of the wound. Now blood filled his mouth and poured out down his chin, dripping onto the ground between his legs. His eyes followed the spots on the earth, which slowly merged into one dark stain. He let out a muffled cry, his left arm twitched, and that was Mstislaw Kasiewicz’s last sign of life.

  I only called this event by its proper name once I had retrieved my passport from the pit using the same spade, cleaned off the soil and put it deep in my pocket. Murder, I thought for the first time, looking numbly at the others, who all withdrew before my gaze as if pushed by some physical force. No one came near me: this bloody corrida was all mine. They took another step back when I picked up the spade again and began pushing the lifeless body. Several energetic shoves and it tumbled into Margareta’s grave. I looked down and wiped the sweat from my forehead, took a deep breath and then shovelled the first spadeful of soil onto Mstislaw’s stomach. After that it was easy. A little more and his legs disappeared. Then the torso. Now soil came right up to his chin. I realised I was putting off the moment when I would have to shovel the dry dust and clumps of earth onto his marred face, but it could not wait forever. Just a light swing and a heaped spadeful became a reddish cloud flying towards his head; it covered his open eyes.

  No one ever found out why I suddenly stopped and threw down the spade. Not even those witnesses standing nearest knew, because of course the only witness was me. I soothed my conscience by concluding that there was no going back in all this and that Mstislaw’s eyes just blinked due to some late, after-death spasm. There was no better way to explain away the movements of those believed dead. I tried to forget the rolling of his eyes, the shining reflection of the sun in them and the horror that filled them as the spadeful of soil sailed towards his face. I thought I would feel relief when he was all covered up. Now there were only contours in the soil instead of the body, like the rough-hewn beginnings of a sculpture of a reclining figure: my work of art. Yet it w
as unfinished, because the pebbly soil over the mouth began to move and then fall into the little hole. Mstislaw’s mouth was opening, taking its last mouthful. I threw myself onto the heap and pressed down the hot earth with my body. No one was watching in the courtyard any more. Only Cion sat on the stone rim of the fountain and wiped away his tears with his sleeve. Several other patients peeped from the windows but hid in the darkness whenever I looked up. Soon the grave was level with the ground. The only sign of the digging was a damp stain that the strong sun soon dried to the same colour as the rest of the earth. This unsullied earth, I thought. I sat alongside, waiting for a wave of repentance to befall me; that dull pain in the stomach, possibly tears, dizziness, a headache... whatever. But there was nothing, only the thought that I had to free Robert as soon as possible, and then dig another grave; this time for Margareta Yosipovich.

  My eyes, scorched by the midday sun, could hardly adjust to the dark interior of the building. Silhouettes fled before me in the corridors and I heard rapid steps and the creaking of closing doors. Death had intruded and disturbed the peace of Europe’s last leprosarium.

  With the spade in one hand I groped my way along the damp wall leading to the cellar. I peered through the bars of Room 42 but my friend was not to be seen. I assumed he had fallen asleep down by the door. I stepped back a metre or two and gave a mighty blow to the padlock. The wooden door-handle burst asunder and a screech of metal resounded in the high-ceilinged space, and only then did I hear a squirming and a sleepy muttering from within. I removed the broken padlock and drew back the bolt. The opening door brought the stench of human excrement; Robert was sitting in the corner to the right of the door. He was shivering like a wet cat. I tried to take his hand and pull him to his feet, but that proved impossible. He refused all contact. I sat down beside him and let his head lean against my chest. He seemed to have lost a lot of weight. His cheekbones stood out several centimetres from his face, and on his neck I could have picked up the loose skin between my fingers. When I lifted him up and carried him out, the dim light of the ground floor revealed streaks of grey at his temples that had not been there the day before. It was easy to imagine Room 42 as a hole in time where my friend had spent the night writhing under the truncheons and harsh commands of the Nazis who had been here decades before. In fact, I would have preferred that, because Robert’s account far surpassed the fairy-tale quaintness of my imagination.

  I put him to bed and drew the blanket up to his chin. Cion was still sitting by the fountain counting his fingers. No one went near Mstislaw’s grave, not even the black dog that had wanted to feast on Zoltán’s remains. There was no sign of life in the leprosarium. Margareta’s grave needed digging, but I was afraid to leave Robert alone. I could not help but feel we were still in a little boat caught in the tentacles of a huge sea-monster. He could easily be suffocated with a pillow in the state he was in, I thought, sitting down on his bed. To judge by the abrupt shudders of his head and the way his eyes were rolling, he was having a bad dream. He moved his parched lips, and whenever I tried to moisten them with a handkerchief he turned his head away and withdrew under the blanket.

  He awoke abruptly, at the very moment when yellow fangs were lunging at his throat, going for the jugular. He was tied to the bed and could not flee. From whom? From what? He could not remember. ‘The fangs are all that are left of the dream,’ he sighed. He drank a little water and a mouthful of elm tea at my insistence, and then began to tell me about the events of the night before. I was not sure whether he was discovering another dream or telling me what had really happened. He was not sure himself. The only thing that was certain was the fright he had received, and the grey hair, and the several kilos of bodyweight lost as a result of his ordeal.

  ‘I stared through the bars and felt the swelling on my face. Those fools sure beat the heck out of me,’ Robert said with a sniffle. He rubbed his temples as if he could feel the white streaks with his fingertips. Sitting on the floor of Room 42 he had concluded that his life was one big misfortune. That had led him to reflect of his childhood, but only briefly. He would have blown his brains out if only he had had a pistol. The bullet would bore through his skull and make a dent in the wall whose surface he was fingering. His fingers felt carved letters in the stone. He could not read them, it was too dark. He fondled those words, perhaps a whole sentence of them, and wondered what had happened to the person who wrote them. Through the bars of the door a draught picked up. An open window or a door ajar could easily stir the air in the leprosarium. He pressed his face against the bars and let it be caressed by the air flowing in from the dark. Oxygen is good for leprous skin.

  He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. But conscious efforts like that usually have the opposite effect, and soon his head was crowded with people, lips, the long-forgotten landscapes of his native Gainesville, Berlin streets, the taste of coffee and a few remembered words of German. He did not know what made him abruptly open his eyes; like a woman who has just dreamed that strangers have abducted her children. He heard a noise close at hand which, he now knew, meant the presence of some other being and not the movement of air. That person stood at the bars on the other side. He was sure he had never seen him before, but the person reacted with an expression of familiarity. Robert was frightened like a child that has just dreamed it is being kidnapped. He recoiled, slipped and lost contact with the floor. The back of his head smashed against the wall. His was afraid to open his eyes again. Every brain cell pulsated with pain. Millions of minuscule pulsars turned his cranial cavity into a galaxy of unbearable suffering. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The face was still at the bars: its grimace widened slowly to a spiteful smile. Harsh tittering and a salvo of unknown words filled the room. Robert didn’t know how long that lasted, nor how it ended. He remembered putting his hands over his ears but was not able to stop the ghastly noise. He ran about the room, from wall to wall, until he fell again and lost consciousness. The next thing he heard was a blow on the door, the scrape of metal and my voice calling his name.

  When he finished his story he leaned back against the wall and took Zoltán’s Bible down off the shelf. He didn’t read but simply turned the pages.

  ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’ I replied.

  ‘Thirty milch camels with their colts, forty kine, and ten bulls, twenty she-asses, and ten foals,’ Robert said, running his finger along the lines in the Book of Genesis. ‘You know who - the faggots. I’m going to get them.’ He wanted revenge. He would not calm down until he had beaten them bloody, both of them. ‘They wanted to flee instead of us, they asked me about my contacts outside. But I’ll send them where they deserve. They’ll both rot in the cellar,’ he menaced.

  I hesitated to tell him about Mstislaw. I would have loved to tell him that the rat was dead and gone thanks to me. I would have told him that straight off, if only I didn’t have to tell him about the brutality of it, for which, there was no real justification. Had my life been at risk? Hardly. That was what made me feel uneasy. In the end Mstislaw was butchered like an animal rather than slain in righteous rage.

  The heat of the late-summer day was soporific. Robert’s hands rhythmically leafed through the thin pages. Here we were again, back in the cosy cocoon of everyday life: the alluring simplicity of inconsequential days and the peace of this big grave were things I rather enjoyed. I struggled to keep my eyes open. But the little spider slowly spun its thread down the length of the wall. I fell into a dreamless sleep. When I awoke I was alone in the room. Robert was gone. The book stood opened and upright at the head of the bed.

  A shrill voice came from the courtyard. At first it hardly sounded human. It made me think of an ugly, unnaturally large bird that was flapping around and burning. Who would harm such a bird?

  I leaped to the window. Cion was crawling along on the ground with Robert prancing around him. Robert would kick him and bend down to say something, and Cion would whine and call for help. He
wiped blood from his face, but Robert did not stop. He sought the most painful places: series of kicks in the ribs, then in head, then in the ribs again. I ran down the stairs and pushed my way through the crowd of onlookers at the door; stepping in front of Robert with my arms spread wide to hold off his attacks. He told me to move aside, he had a score to settle, he said. Cion grabbed my leg and pressed his head against my calf. I tried to step away, but ended up dragging Cion along with me. I told him to get off me, I yelled at him, but in his fear he would not let go. Robert was no longer trying to get at him but stood watching to see how my little drama would end. I pushed against Cion’s head with my hand, trying to pry him off, but that made him cling on even tighter. Pain: for a moment I did not know where it was coming from and what actually hurt; I took one more step before I finally realised that the brute had bitten me and was clinging on with his teeth. If I did not remove him soon he would bite a chunk out of my leg. Punching him in the head was not the only solution, but it was the only one I could think of at the time. Whack, whack. But he just clenched his teeth tighter. I bent down and hit him with both hands. The parasite finally let go. I saw that he was giggling to himself in malicious glee. I turned to hit him again, but Robert was quicker: he came running up with a sharp-ended pole that made a kind of crackling sound. The bugger stopped laughing then. Blood flowed from a new wound. He turned his face towards the sun and squinted. I imagined that the star in his eyes had a splendid purple colour. I picked up Cion’s limp hand and took his pulse. He whined as if he had been trampled underfoot, but he was still alive, the rat. His false foot had come off and lay several metres away. I fitted it back on his stump, and Robert laughed because I had put it on back to front by mistake.