Hansen's Children

by Ognjen Spahic

  I took Robert by the arm and we went back to the room. We met no one on the way except for the putrid smell of Margareta’s corpse. ‘They’re frightened, the shits. And so they should be,’ Robert snarled. ‘Now you know who’s boss around here,’ he yelled.

  ‘Who is the boss?’ I asked him.

  ‘We’re the boss,’ he said, patting me on the back. He felt much better. He was in a good mood again, and as we walked down the corridor he whistled his favourite tune.

  Yet when I looked out the window and saw Cion dragging himself towards the door, I was overcome with pity. I was glad the old bugger was still alive.

  ‘Robert, why did you have to beat hit him up like that?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said, ‘I only had it out for Mstislaw, honest. Women, children and invalids? Never!’ he swore. ‘I met Cion in the corridor and asked him where Mstislaw was. The fool scratched his balls, or at least the place where they used to be. He wanted to know if I had had a pleasant night, and he asked it in that horrible whisper which is probably what has given me these streaks of grey hair. I suspect it was him who was shuffling around by the cell,’ Robert said. ‘I chased him around the room and caught up with him in the dining room. I dragged him out into the courtyard and... you know the rest.’

  Robert straightened up his bed and said he would look for Mstislaw later. ‘He’s probably gone to hide in the chapel. But we’ve got more than enough time. He won’t get away,’ he menaced, smacking his fist against his palm.

  ‘Mstislaw is gone,’ I said, but Robert did not turn around to look; he thought I was just airing a threat. ‘He’s dead,’ I restated. ‘I killed him. With a spade. He’s buried next to Zoltán.’

  My friend smiled with incredulity. His doubt annoyed me. It also emphasised that he had not really wanted Kasiewicz to be killed: a dangerous step beyond the safe circle of permissible acts.

  From then on I began to see myself as the motor force behind all these horrors; a little latch on the gates of evil. Robert had imposed the idea of leaving, and I had turned it into a rogue elephant which we needed to mount and leave this Atlantis of pain, without being heard. How can you re-tame an enraged monster?

  Robert went to the window. He looked towards Zoltán’s grave. ‘There?’ he asked. ‘Next to the old man’s?’

  I nodded.

  For a few moments my friend stared at me as if I was a brutal killer. Which in truth I was; at least in those few minutes when I broke Mstislaw’s skull and buried him without even the usual futile rituals. I left Robert by himself and went back down to the cellar for the spade. The stench of the decomposing corpse now filled the corridors on our floor too: I had to bury her as soon as possible. I realised that I perceived the old woman as a kind of collaborator in Mstislaw’s disturbances, and that was why I was not particularly gentle when I took the coffin down off the table and dragged it to the spot by the chapel. I dug an irregular pit one metre deep to swallow up the last memories of Margareta Yosipovich while Robert sat pensively in the shade of the chapel. From time to time he looked up. It seemed he had remembered something or wanted to say something, but soon he would be looking back at the ground again, tracing paths with his eyes that he alone could follow.

  It was getting dark when I put down the tools. Big, red blisters filled with pus and blood had appeared on the palms of my hands. I slapped the dust from my clothes as if to free myself of this day. Nothing was the same any more, I thought, and invited Robert to come and join me in the dining room. I made a big pot of tea and sipping the hot drink returned the lost peace for a little while. We poured ourselves some more, and the gurgle of the tea was suddenly joined by the sad melody of the Romanian national anthem from the factory’s loudspeakers: the workers of the second shift were lowering the flag they all hated.

  I turned the lights on. Robert said it was nicer in the dark, so I turned them off again. He put down his cup. He still remembered that smell, he told me. Italian perfume in a surprisingly large bottle; reminiscent of expensive French cognac. Martha had liked to rub it in straight after her shower: a thick drop lay in the little valley of her palm. She spread it carefully and then ran her fingers sensuously all over her body. She once let Robert do it. Now I thought of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 6 and the loud laughter of a beautiful woman whose breasts trembled; fingers glided over her moist skin. I tried to imagine her lying on the dining-room table and me touching her magnificent body. I saw her breasts, the muscles and curves of her belly, but instead of full lips and rose-tinged cheeks my mind’s eye saw only the horrible grin of Margareta Yosipovich, and that forced me to turn the light on again. Robert, surprised, wiped away tears and then kept on crying with his face in his hands. I realised there was no point trying to comfort him, and that made tears come to my eyes too. I left my friend and went off to our room. Several hours later, staring at the ceiling, he told me that he had been crying because of Martha. These were not banal memories of something beautiful that was gone. On the contrary: that night Robert had uncovered the bare bones of reality, hard and heavy, that had oppressed him for years. Now he wanted to share that burden.

  Again the story about his brief but fateful confinement in Berlin, the event that had ruined his life, he recalled the malodorous cells, the shaven strong arms that dragged him down the long corridor and then up a flight of stairs. Until now he had never mentioned a door left ajar and a band of light that stabbed down obliquely to the floor. He had heard the conversation, he said. A satisfied bass male voice spoke politely with a woman. It seems the man told a joke involving a play on words. Robert did not understand the words, but he remembered that the young woman replied with a loud laugh; throaty rhythms well known to Robert and ending with a soft flicker of the voice. Robert hummed Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 6, and I imagined six Martha Golbergs dancing and raising their legs high, can-can style. I imagined betrayal.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A certain Professor Horatius Portos Tercino, a prominent scientist and specialist in infectious diseases (he sounds more like a local football trainer in the Argentine Pampas to me and does not inspire much trust), claims that the oldest traces of leprosy have been found among the Australopithecus. Porous cavities in the cervical vertebrae of fossilised remains apparently prove the presence of Hansen’s bacillus. With my right hand I rubbed my neck, with my left I turned the pages of the Medical Gazette (April 1985). The last passages presented interesting details from medical history. They said that over three thousand years ago the Chinese synthesised a kind of antibiotic from the leaves of a species of oak, since extinct, which they used to fight bacteria. Nonsense: I believe that reports like that are thought up by governments to maintain the human race’s confidence in civilisation. Stories about wise, old civilisations are a mental crutch to help fill the septic tanks of primitive history, I thought as I pulled up my underpants.

  A piece of blood-covered excrement lay in the toilet. Robert was still straining in the next cubicle, but the groaning I heard was not that associated with successful bowel movements that send a tingle of relief up your spine. Robert only emptied his bowels once a week, at best. His stomach was ruined, his digestion slow, and the muscles that supported the large intestine had atrophied, which was a common problem. I advised him to follow my example and eat large quantities of steamed nettles and dandelion leaves, but after he had eaten a few spoonfuls of the green mixture he would curse and spit out every little bit. That was one of the traits that I always admired in him. Unlike me, Robert never accepted even the most banal of compromises when it came to treating his disease. He consistently rejected the ampoules of a fairly effective digestive remedy which had to be injected into the buttocks and refused to treat the lesions on his face with his own urine. He bore the cross of leprosy with dignity, refusing to be a disease in human form, like so many others, and insisting on being a human infected with Hansen’s bacillus.

  He was pale and exhausted when he returned from the bathroom. He was still holdin
g his belly and making a pained face: he had obviously been unsuccessful. This significantly influenced Robert’s mood because it is not easy to carry around a sack of shit inside your body. We were imprisoned here, and he had to carry another prisoner inside him. He went out for a walk in the courtyard but avoided the graves by the chapel. Everyone avoided them, as if they housed the accursed victims of Vlad the Impaler, and not three worm-eaten corpses. I wondered to myself which was worse.

  The August heat continued on throughout September. The bronze bust of King Alexander John I was an infallible thermometer. If you were able to hold your hand on the hot metal face for longer than thirty seconds, it meant that the sun was relenting. Whatever the outside temperature, the rays of the autumn sun were unable to heat up the old Romanian king to the same extent. But like I said, this September was an exception. Swarms of flies travelled restlessly in search of food. It was impossible to drive them out of the dining room and bathrooms. Every day clouds of the tiny kamikazes descended on your forehead in search of a mouthful of sweat. The northern wind, usual for this time of year, brought clouds of nitric compounds which caused a gentle burning sensation in the lungs. We had to wash the elm bark in cold water to get rid of the chemicals. There were no longer meals together in the dining room, nor fireside gatherings and the ritual drinking of tea. The residents came for their meagre daily rations and took them back to the solitude of their rooms. Only Cion went and ate by the grave of his dead friend and lover. He passed me and Robert as if he did not see us; until one afternoon he knocked on the door and said: ‘I want to come with you.’

  He said nothing to Robert’s, ‘Piss off, you pig’; only ducked to avoid the shoe, and then calmly repeated himself, closed the door and left.

  There was no sign of Mr Smooth. I noticed that Robert went out to the fence every morning to look in the shrubbery and out at the foggy plain. There was a kind of tacit agreement between us: I would not ask about us leaving, and he would not mention Mstislaw’s murder and the events that accompanied it. We were increasingly preoccupied with obtaining food because deliveries from the International Red Cross no longer came regularly. I assumed that the drivers gave the packets to the peasants in exchange for a chicken or a few kilograms of grain. The withered wheat and broken corn in the fields portended a hungry winter. All this led us to look with different eyes at the flocks of scraggy sheep that descended from the mountains. They were heading towards the cities to be milked some more, or else to be slaughtered. At first I didn’t understand why Robert wasted several hours sharpening two large kitchen knives in the courtyard, but Cion skipped his meal by Mstislaw’s grave that day, evidently frightened by my friend’s possible intentions.

  He woke me before first light, threw a knife onto the bed and waved to me from the door. Still groggy with sleep and confused, I thought my friend was going from room to room cutting the throats of our fellow lepers as they slept. I imagined purple stains spreading over the white sheets. A few managed to scream, but most were only able to open their eyes, woken by the warmth of blood and the sudden difficulty in breathing.

  I was relieved when I saw Robert passing a number of the doors on the first floor, before continuing to the ground floor to sit down breathless and wait for me. Yet it still wasn’t clear to me why he had to drag me out of bed so early in the morning. I shrugged and spread my arms, hoping for an explanation. Instead of using words, Robert held up the knife, pretended to draw it across his throat, bleated and pointed to the door. The flock was munching at the low vegetation and self-sown corn close to the fence: ewes with their lambs clustered around two big, horned rams, which were industriously searching for shoots of birch.

  Robert pointed towards them and told me to pick some of the mint that grew in the shade of the chapel. I stuck my knife into the ground and started to gather some stems, when Robert came up to me and told me his plan. It sounded simple enough. You hid the knife in the bunch of fragrant leaves, lured the lamb, and as it nibbled at the aromatic herbs you slashed the knife back across its throat.

  We jumped the fence. The sheep were evidently fairly tame; they kept munching the succulent green and hardly took notice of us. The sun had now risen and their wool looked blindingly white. Robert approached a lamb that had become separated from its mother. He cooed to it and waved his bunch of mint as if trying to hypnotise it. He checked to make sure that the knife was well hidden and then moved up close. When the unfortunate animal decided to take a first bite and greedily chomped on the leaves, extending its thick neck, Robert cut with a powerful movement at exactly the right spot. A spurt of blood splattered the fleece. The lamb made a different sound now; it began to run, and several seconds later Robert started off after it with his knife raised. The animal tried to hide under the grazing body of its mother, but she pushed it away with her nose as if she scented the presence of death and realised it simply had to be accepted. This Gandhian stance disappointed me. Instinctively I ran towards this sheep, grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and was just positioning the blade when a shot rang out. Robert grabbed the lamb, which was still dripping with blood, and started to run. The man was far away in the field. He fired another shot and several curses in Romanian. It was important to jump the fence; an imaginary border between two worlds, whose encounters always left ugly memories, or worse. That truism was confirmed this time, too. The smallish man with an unkempt beard went up to his herd, patted several of the ewes, and then grabbed the one that bleated the loudest by the scruff of its neck and dragged it away from the others. We understood it was the one that had lost its lamb. He cocked his rifle, put the barrel up to the sheep’s head and pulled the trigger. The large-calibre bullet blew the animal’s skull apart. Its legs twitched and it collapsed. We watched the man through a hole in the wall of the chapel. He came up to the fence and, without aiming, fired several shots at the building. The bullets struck the bare wall and left noticeable holes. He cursed the lepers and said he would kill every single one of us if we ever went near his sheep again. He walked away grumbling under his breath, and I had to restrain Robert from going up and sorting things out with him. ‘Let him kill me straight away if he wants, the stupid arsehole,’ he said, ‘just like a sheep.’

  We knew that the shepherd had killed the sheep because it had been touched by a leper. Had I been in his shoes, I would probably have done the same. We watched him as he chuffed away, leaving puffs of smoke behind him from his large pipe.

  Robert’s clothes were drenched with blood. He threw the lamb on the ground and stared towards Mstislaw’s grave. A shallow hole had developed in the soil. The body, buried without a coffin, was rotting and making space underground. Robert looked at his hands and smelt his bloodied fingers. With his foot he pushed the lamb away, now coated in dust. He ran to the chapel, propped himself against the shaky wall with both hands and began to vomit. That was his real feeling about Mstislaw’s death.

  ‘I had to do it!’ I shouted at him. ‘Otherwise we’d both be rotting in the cellar.’ Robert’s stomach responded with a mighty spasm that ejected yet more green mucous.

  I picked up the lamb by its front legs. Its head twisted to the side, further opening the deep wound from which a whitish artery and a bundle of cut tendons protruded. Human or animal – it’s all the same, I thought, it’s only the methods that are different. It’s much harder to butcher a lamb, separated from its mother, than to kill an enemy at the front. It’s worse to throw a live lobster into boiling water than to accidentally run over an old man crossing the road at the wrong place. Isn’t it?

  Robert went back to the room for a well-deserved rest. The dead lamb, the sun and a swarm of flies remained behind. The animal needed to be gutted and skinned, and I had to overcome my revulsion – after all, we were hungry. I tried to act as if I was resolute: I found an old piece of wire and bound the hind legs together. But what then? Suddenly I felt thirsty and went off to the dining room to drink some water. Lots of water.

  I never asked Robert if he
’d ever killed a man. I never really had occasion to ask. Today, I thought, he had carefully selected his victim and done some efficient knife-work. Those movements spoke of experience, it seemed to me. A bit of imagination and I could see him stealing up to a sentry. He sizes up the black silhouette and locates the arms, the weapons, the throat. He feels the warmth of the body, hears the breathing, the noise of a packet of cigarettes and the sound of an ignited lighter which illuminates the forehead. He closes his eyes because he does not want to see his enemy’s face. The cigarette lighter is returned to its pocket; Robert’s hand grips the handle of the knife. Two or three more silent steps, an outstretched arm, and the blade flashes...

  I hung the lamb from the iron ring that protruded from the side wall of the leprosarium. I eyed the carcass, not knowing where to start. I could not decide whether to go for the stomach or the spine. The flies attacked, and I drove the blade into the cervical vertebrae. Drawing a line down the back, I took hold of the edges of the skin that flared outwards along the cut and pulled down. It sounded like thick paper being torn. Healthy, dark-red meat was underneath. I sliced down the legs, then stabbed into the stomach. The intestines fell out and stretched down to the ground. The liver and gall bladder hung entwined. The flies went wild, laying millions of larvae: a loud orgy of life. Breathless, I stood before the massacred carcass which had somehow stretched out and mutated. What used to be a lamb now looked like a dog. The stripped snout now had teeth, which made the creature look like it was laughing. I stuck the knife into the thigh and sat down to have a rest. But before I had even touched the ground I heard applause and a cheerful, ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ from the nearby bushes.