Hansen's Children

by Ognjen Spahic

  I was surprised to find I had an audience. The branches moved. I was expecting the bearded shepherd and a shot that would fell me or perhaps mutilate me further. Brushing pieces of dry leaves off his clothes, he came up to the fence: it was Mr Smooth. He had aged considerably. It was a long time since I first saw him close up. Now he jumped the fence and as he walked towards me he put on thin rubber gloves and offered me his hand. It reminded me what the handshake of a healthy body was like. Some traces of dried blood were now on the pale rubber. ‘Good job,’ Mr Smooth said, sizing up the lamb. ‘I’m sure it’ll taste good’.

  Still I said nothing. I didn’t know what I should feel towards him. The ball rolled and settled somewhere between hatred and a kind of ‘pleased-to-see-you-again- because-you’re-going-to-get-us-out-of-here’. He offered me a cigarette, then put the packet back in his jacket pocket without waiting for a reply. ‘Patience, patience, just patience,’ he said and lit up. The flame of the lighter was invisible in the bright sunlight. I asked if I should call Robert. ‘No, old boy. Why? You’re friends, aren’t you?’ I nodded. ‘You can call me Martin. Martin will do.’

  ‘Martin?’ I asked abruptly a few moments later.

  ‘Yes?’ came his friendly reply.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘Just testing.’

  He put out his cigarette. His forehead was dry, but his hand was as cold as a corpse’s. He gave the impression of being devoted to the tasks of his service. Yet I also imagined him a devoted hedonist, bachelor and lover of all manner of worldly secrets.

  ‘Irina, my wife... You don’t know her, unfortunately. Irina thinks lamb is the most delicious sort of meat.’ He patted the red thigh and drove away the flies. ‘But I don’t eat meat. I’m a vegetarian,’ he said, pointing to his breast as if he were proud of the fact. ‘Otherwise I assume you’d insist on me staying for dinner?’

  ‘Of course,’ I replied, ‘consider yourself invited.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’ve no time. I’m just passing through. Assignments, duties, business trips – there are so many obligations,’ he sighed. ‘I used to pass by this way more often, but recently things have become complicated. I’ve been promoted, though it’s doubtful I’ll be in the position for much longer – times are changing and becoming dangerous,’ he said, pulling the knife out of the lamb’s thigh. ‘I’m thinking of you. I’ll fulfil my promise even if it costs me my life,’ he avowed, and sank the knife in even deeper. ‘When I come to see you the next time we’ll leave together. I brought you here, and I’ll get you out too,’ he said, lighting another cigarette. ‘There’s now a driver, by the way: me.’

  I was curious. ‘When will you come, and how...,’ but I was cut short.

  ‘No, you must be patient for just a little longer,’ he said. It seemed he was afraid of questions. He stubbed out his cigarette and jumped the fence. ‘Remember: next time,’ he called, before disappearing in the bushes.

  ‘Next time,’ I said, perplexed, nodding and raising my hand in farewell.

  The white rubber gloves still hung on the fence, as if Martin’s appearance had been part of a magician’s trick. I thought I had better go in and tell Robert straight away, but there he was, coming towards me in a hurry. He fell to his knees and shifted his jaw; he had something to tell me. ‘Cion...’ he stuttered, ‘Cion’s killed himself’.

  I was busy gutting the sheep and did not stop: now I had the heart. As I grasped it, thick syrupy blood began to drip out. Robert sat on the ground and watched the movements of the knife. This was the second time that Martin’s visit had coincided with death. With a little fantasy, I could imagine him as one of its incarnations. I severed the lamb’s head with a swift stroke. I was never partial to that kind of mystification. If I had to imagine an earthly embodiment of death, it would always be the old Galápagos tortoise with inflamed eyes which slowly but inexorably moved towards its goal. Its meaty insides spread an indescribable stench, from which both people and animals fled. I imagined just such a giant tortoise pulling away from beneath Cion’s feet. He squirmed, and in his death rattle he repented of what he had done. I guess it’s always like that.

  I took the meat down from the wire. Robert took the other end and we carried it into the dining room. That’s the lamb done, I thought. Then we went to get Cion. We took him down from the wire to carry him to the dining room. The metal had cut deep into his throat. He had gone to the trouble of binding his feet together; just to make sure, I suppose. He had fastened the wire to the central beam, wrapped the other end around his neck and jumped from a chair. Swinging from left to right, he realised that it was the first time in his life that his feet weren’t touching the ground.

  Robert took the torso, while I freed the neck. The body slipped from his grasp a little. He staggered as he tried to hold it upright, and then fell onto the bed and ended up in Cion’s arms. ‘Why does everyone have to die with their eyes open?’ Robert asked. He passed his hand over Cion’s face to close the swollen eyelids, but they opened again by themselves. I told him it was normal. ‘What’s normal? You call that normal? Come on, damn it!’ Robert said, pacing from wall to wall. I wrapped Cion in a sheet and held him under his arms, and after walking up and down for a minute Robert cooperated and grabbed his heels. No one dared to come out into the corridor, though some timidly held their doors ajar and peered out.

  After we had put him down on the table (the meat lay on a chair), Robert took a wet rag back up to the room to erase Cion’s last words, written with charcoal on the wall above his bed: ‘I’VE LEFT BEFORE YOU AFTER ALL!’ The large letters placed the blame for this further death squarely on our shoulders. After that came the digging, just next to Mstislaw’s grave. At that moment, the weather changed abruptly: clouds came in from the west, bringing a steady cold rain, like a gift from the mountains. We wrapped Cion in yet another sheet and laid him in ten centimetres of water at the bottom of the pit. A burial in mud. We stood above the grave, and our silence signified our last respects. I looked up into the sky and it began to thunder. Large raindrops lashed my face; thousands of drops. The warm earth began to steam, and curtains of mist rose slowly above the plain. The three-storey, stone building was like a ship lost in the fog.

  There was a blackout. Robert went to get a few candles from the kitchen storeroom and we sat on our beds in the flickering candlelight, listening to the rain. Situations like this often reminded Robert of his early childhood, his mother and the snakebite he was proud of. We nibbled pieces of mouldy toast, which we washed down with cold tea. I interrupted Robert while he was describing how he used to get a Coke from the vending machine at the petrol station by inserting fifty cents for two cans of beer so he could stand on them and reach the Coke button. I told him that Mr Smooth had come. He was not surprised. He leafed around in the Bible indifferently, then he walked to the window and looked out into the darkness. ‘Next time,’ I went, briefly imitating Martin’s voice. ‘He said that when he comes to see us again we’ll definitely be leaving with him. He’ll drive,’ I added. Instead of an answer there came the harsh sound of paper tearing. Robert was gingerly pulling out pages and releasing them to fly off into the night like doves. Sometimes one would return with a gust of wind and end up on the floor or on my bed. ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’ Robert asked what we would do with the meat. He was still tearing out pages. I wanted to reply with some biblical wisdoms involving lamb, as there are hundreds of them. I perused the torn-out pages: dog, fish, dove... but no mention of lamb. Robert stepped back, took a run-up and flung what was left of the Bible into the thick veil of darkness and rain.

  The candles went out. Robert closed the window and sat on his bed again. Now we could hear the sounds coming from within the leprosarium more clearly and heard something more than just the whistle of the wind through the gap beneath the door and the creak of water in the rusty pipes. R
obert looked for the matches. A ruddy flash lit up his swollen face.

  ‘Dogs,’ he said, ‘it’s dogs.

  A sudden, piercing bark made us start. A rival whined in pain and chairs were being knocked over in the dining room. Hungry jaws pulled the meat apart. They tore off and gulped down large mouthfuls, driven to a frenzy by the taste of the stale lamb’s blood. We waited for the menagerie to calm down a little and lit another candle. The sticky sweat on my skin smelt of instinctive fear. It’s a different smell from when you sweat from exertion or from the heat – then you smell the dried salt and get the almost pleasant tension on the surface of your skin. Now I licked my right palm, and it was bitter, sour. It was wrinkled, wretched and frightened. Like my life, I thought, and Robert’s too. The candles burned down and went out. The rain was easing and we could hear the scrape of dogs’ claws on the stone surface of the corridor. I imagined a red tongue dangling. The stench of half-digested meat cascaded over it. An insidious growling approached our door. Dirty canine claws scraped against the old wood. Dogs panted and beat rhythmically with their paws as if they were digging a pit and knew for sure that they would soon be eating two old lepers. We did not budge from our beds but stared in the direction of our would-be killers. I picked up a wrinkled page from the floor and, holding it up to the candle, on my knees, began to read: ‘And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.’ I was interrupted by a bark. A long tongue was thrust under the door. The snout beat against the door furiously.

  ‘Keep on reading,’ Robert said

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘The grace of God has left this place,’ he said.

  ‘No!’ I replied, ‘It’s you and me who should have left this place – long ago.’

  Robert grabbed the page angrily, clapping it between his hands to smooth it out, skipped several lines and began to read the passage where God intervenes and crushes the seven-headed beast. He read together with a choir of dogs who, like giant rats, had taken the whole building by storm. There must have been dozens of them. I imagined them nestling up together and warming their shit-soiled bodies. They licked their snouts and enjoyed the safety of the pack. The males were active, and mangy bitches whined as they surrendered to the stabs of thin, red penises. Yellow sperm splashed their insides. Several successful conceptions occurred that evil night.

  The rain stopped. There was thunder away in the plain to the east of the leprosarium. The barking had died down and Robert got up and knocked loudly on the door. No answer from the other side: they had probably gone. I said he should go out and check, but he took off his linen robe and crept under the blanket. He needed sleep. He turned over two or three times to find the most comfortable position, gave a deep sigh and wished me good night. His ability to turn off was another of his basic traits conditioned by the years spent in this place. After two or three minutes, I heard the steady breathing and hissing sound of the air passing through his deformed nostrils. The candles were burning the last of their wax and the flames were tall and black at the tips. One went out, leaving a bluish streak of smoke, and then the other died too. A sweetish stench filled the air, intoxicating. I was safe as long as the door was shut, I thought, laying my head on the pillow. Nothing could operate the simple mechanism of the latch, nothing but a human. The animals were hungry, and nature was honed to perfection. Romania was here, and Europe was there, in the direction of my feet. Fear was useful, and the Bible was re-experiencing the Flood in a muddy puddle in the courtyard. I longed to dream of a high-flying flock of pigeons.

  I dreamt of Martin. I was riding a green horse, a steed with neatly cut lawn instead of hair. Robert and I were playing golf on that green – we were as small as fleas. The horse’s gallop prevented me from taking a proper shot. I aimed at the ball, swung and missed. Everything shook. It was Robert’s hand shaking my shoulder. I woke up with the big green horse in my head: a big green headache. Robert had dark rings under his eyes. The window was bathed in light. Several pages of the Bible still stuck to the glass from the outside, like a testament to the preceding night. The tiny letters divided into two columns resembled a huge army as seen from the heavens. The divisions were being arrayed for battle. The page number at the bottom was a mighty general. Robert opened the window and took off the soggy pages. He gave them a shake, laid them out on his bed and tried to read them. Probably he regretted what he had done.

  ‘There are still more under my bed,’ I said, looking up at the sky. The sun was smothered by big clouds, dark grey at the edges. Two crows cut across the window. I thought of the green horse again. Nature would soon be getting new colours; the brown hues of the forest and the yellow decay of the useless fields.

  When we went down to the dining room and were met by the remains of the bloody feast and the stench of dog excrement. Beside what was left of the lamb’s bones there also lay the half-eaten carcass of a dog. Robert said they had perhaps left it in exchange. He reminded me that the Chinese eat dogs. I looked at the spilt entrails and prodded the meat with the tip of my shoe.

  ‘Fresh?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s just a lamb with long teeth and short wool. Slightly thinner in the thigh and with an angular jaw. The differences are negligible,’ Robert said.

  For a moment I thought he was being serious and that he would dig into the meat without thinking twice. He watched in silence as I wrapped up the carcass in a large tablecloth. I jabbed the fugitive organs with a fork and returned them to the ragged hole in the belly.

  ‘We’ll have to do some more digging,’ I told Robert. ‘We mustn’t leave it out, unburied. The smell will attract even more animals. Who knows what sort,’ I said, imagining an Egyptian sphinx stalking the Romanian plain with giant steps.

  The dogs kept coming back, but now we firmly closed the ground-floor windows and doors. They ran round and round the building, looking for scraps, and disappeared again before dawn. Robert devoted himself to restoring the Bible. He collected the torn pages, left them to dry and straightened them between layers of cardboard weighed down with bricks. I would go into our room and be met by a mosaic of the First Book of Kings.

  ‘A few more days and the Holy Writ will be one again,’ he said, as if wanting to atone for all the sins he had committed and also those that lay ahead. As if he had re-written the book himself. This devotion soothed his conscience. Before going to bed he reviewed the day’s work; holding the pages up to the candlelight as if he were searching for hidden meanings inscribed in invisible ink between the lines. He then put the book, buckled like a handful of cabbage leaves, up on the shelf above the bed head and closed his eyes.

  Silence descended. Rain drenched the ground day after day, and one day was just like another. The puddles down in the courtyard took on particular shapes and reflected muddy cuttings of the Romanian sky. The factory spewed mouthfuls of black smoke that travelled over the plain like sentinels.

  Ceauşescu’s portrait now wore a somewhat different smile. As if the corners of his mouth had slipped downwards ever so slightly into sorrow and his overly ruddy cheeks developed a hue of green.

  The upshot of the fruitless demonstrations was that five policemen now patrolled the roof of the main factory building day and night, armed to the teeth and shivering with cold. I was not sure whose side I was on. When I thought of the workers I remembered the stones flung at Ingemar Zoltán; at his good intentions and smiling face. The police provoked a different kind of disgust.

  One November afternoon I put plastic bags on my feet instead of socks, laced up my shoes very tight, and jumped the fence to go to the rubbish dump. My feet sank into the soggy ground together with the dead grass, and I had to watch carefully where I trod. That is why I didn’t notice that one of the five policemen was training his sights on me. When the shot rang out I immediately thought it was the shepherd. I looked all around me, but there were no sheep to
be seen. The second shot was accompanied by a sound like a flat stone being flung into soft mud. The bullet hit the ground a few metres in front of me, and its little entry hole smoked and slowly drowned in mud. The policeman was standing at the very corner, facing the plain. He could see me clearly as I took my unsteady steps and raised my arms abruptly to keep my balance on the islands in the boggy ground. When I looked at him he did not take his face away from the sights but waved with the hand that until then had been on the trigger, and then returned it. The small hill of the rubbish dump was now twice as close as the leprosarium behind me, but I decided that if the fool fired again I would run back. If I got pinned down behind the rubbish dump I would have to wait till nightfall to stick my head out again.

  The sniper now had an audience. The policemen on the roof gathered round him, and my supporters, the workers, were standing beneath the giant Ceauşescu portrait. Now they were waving too. I felt like an obstinate calf that does not want to move despite all the juicy heads of cabbage being offered to it. In reality it was only my head that was on offer: take it or leave it. If he killed me he would have a simple alibi: a leper stole from the factory, and the policeman diligently discharged his duty.

  Slowly I pulled my feet out of the mud. The plastic bags had burst and my toes felt little stones and ooze. I stepped further to the right to try and get to somewhat drier ground. Bang! A whistle above my head. I bent down as if to avoid something else that came with the bullet. I didn’t know how fast I could run. I was able to do several hard physical jobs, but running involved continual strain on all muscles, especially those in my legs, which I didn’t have faith in. My first step was greeted by ovations from the workers; the second was accompanied by a shot. I wanted the factory’s chimney to be the belfry of a cathedral and its clouds of smoke to compose the face of God as I ran with all my might. My knees ached. My lungs became a wrinkled apple and my heart a worm that was burrowing into it. I ran a semicircle around a large puddle topped with the whitish scum of nitrogenous waste. The leprosarium bobbed up and down like a mad thing. Two more shots: one after another. The skin on my face trembled unnaturally whenever my feet touched the ground; I almost felt it would come off.