Soon ice covered the windows again. The revolutionary ballad began to skip and was replaced by the enraptured shrieking of women with folk instruments in the background. I imagined glowing faces framed in embroidered kerchiefs. Women like that usually have moustaches, those disgusting little brown hairs; enough to make you forget the shining eyes, firm breasts and the bundle of perfumed hair. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder, I thought, and let my eyelids fall shut.
From the distance, came the rumble of a heavy lorry, like the coughing of giants, or perhaps the destruction of the Berlin Wall or some other bastion. It seemed as if there was a loud combustion of diesel fuel right under our window or somewhere very close by. I got up and scraped at the ice that had taken hold from the inside as well. The crystal shapes glistened, lit up by the sad eyes that trembled beyond the gate. With a little fantasy I could imagine a large mechanical dog delivering the final blows to our fortress of suffering. Its jaws tore down the metal fence as if it were made of sticks. Its steel paws made the ground shake. The dry skulls of Cion Eminescu, Mstislaw Kasiewicz and Margareta Yosipovich shuddered in their graves condemned to oblivion; the anonymous bones of lepers in the nearby fields clattered in fear.
I opened the window. There was less noise than I had imagined. The years of silence had made my sense of hearing hypersensitive. The lorry sounded its horn several times, then put the pedal to the metal and moved forwards. The fence slowly bent. Metal bars whined on both sides of the gate as they were pushed to the ground. There was a moment of extreme tension and everything began to break. The large wheels pressed the iron into the snow. I woke Robert, and he woke his cough. He struggled to the window and roared even louder. His lungs were irritated by the cold air mixed with exhaust gases. The lorry stopped next to the fountain. The violet lights of the factory bit into the twilight.
The lorry door clacked and the motor fell silent. Martin jumped out into the snow. He brought a Kalashnikov and a metal fuel canister from the cabin, stopped beneath our window and laid the things in the snow.
‘Gentlemen, your passports please!’ he called out with a military salute.
Robert’s legs could not take the excitement – he sat by the stove, holding his knees and staring at a spot on the floor. I returned Martin’s salute and ran downstairs. Instead of an elegant leather jacket he was wearing an ordinary blue police uniform with several golden stars on the lapel. It seemed he had taken sides. I went up to embrace him, but he stepped back and stopped me with his hand in a rubber glove.
‘Sorry, I forgot,’ I said.
Martin called me to the back of the lorry. He raised the tarpaulin and lifted out a large sack with the emblem of the postal service. I took a second one. They were bulging and soft. We took them and put them on the table in the dining room. He asked me to get Robert and then lit a cigarette.
I had begun to feel that stupid nostalgia already. It was a conspiracy of habit, I supposed. When the last Chinese emperor was freed of the ritual fetters that he had borne until adolescence, as the laws of his dynasty prescribed, he periodically asked for them to be put back on because they had become a natural part of his world-view and his body. The legend has it that he would stroll through the spacious squares of the Forbidden City and enjoy the clatter of his heavy chains as if it were the song of the black nightingale. I felt something similar. Despite all my happiness at finally leaving, as I went up to get Robert, I ran my hand gently over the grimy walls of that accursed house. Even stranger: my eyes filled with tears and butterflies began to flutter in my stomach: those too familiar butterflies.
Robert now stood in the middle of the room. When he saw me he wiped his tears on his sleeve and beamed. We hugged each other tight, and with my arms still around him, I managed to lift him and carry him out. Yet he still went back to look at the room one last time. He took the Bible and closed the window. ‘So it won't be too cold if we return,’ he said.
I took my passport out of the drawer, grabbed several other small objects and my birthday presents, then took Robert by the arm and turned out the light. We stood in the corridor and looked into the darkness of our room. As I closed the door, I thought that if I were to take a memento that would condense all that I had been through and thought about in this room over all the long years, it would be a slice of that thick, damp darkness. I had the feeling that something had finished and something else was now beginning. The greasy light bulbs along the corridor bid us farewell us with a flicker caused by the varying voltage. I didn’t dare turn round for fear there might be more than just a section of shabby floor in the dank air and yellowish light; perhaps I would see of the faces of the former residents, disfigured by suffering and disease, or even the lost souls of dead lepers. Robert was staggering because of his cough, so I quickened my step and helped him along.
Martin was emptying the sacks onto the table. A cigarette smouldered in the left corner of his mouth and he squinted to avoid the smoke. It was hard to imagine what a huge pile could come out of five postal sacks. In spite of my impaired sense of smell I detected a pleasant whiff of perfume. I moved closer and took a deep breath in order to fill my lungs with the sweetish odour. A heap of clothes lay on the table: expensive Italian suits, shirts and silk waistcoats. The sleeve of a dress uniform edged with gold braid was sticking out, and a trouser leg hung down over the edge showing its red velvet hem. Martin instructed us to take whatever we liked.
Fine cotton is soothing for the skin, and the heavy trousers of triple-spun wool made me feel warmer straight away. Robert enthusiastically donned a pair of Levi Strauss denims and let out some juicy American swear words. I also threw him a polo-neck jumper which he put on over pyjamas with stylised initials. Martin watched us from the corner and looked at his watch from time to time. After we had put on as many clothes as we could, including two or three pairs of socks each, we measured each other to gauge the effect. Our crafted heads protruded from the beautiful colours and sumptuous textiles like unnatural and crooked extensions. Martin rummaged around and finally found two warm woollen caps which we pulled down over our foreheads almost to our eyes. He asked to see our passports. Robert’s was still out in the hole in the wall, so I went to retrieve it. I threw the stone into the snow and trembled with fear when I heard barking behind the fence. Then I reached in my hand and took the green booklet. I didn’t put the piece of masonry back in its place and I wondered if I would later come to think of the leprosarium as an injured patient left to bleed to death.
Back in the dining room I was met by the sharp smell of petrol; Martin was walking around with the canister, pouring fuel on the clothes on the table as well as the wooden chairs and the kitchen fittings. When the canister was empty he threw it on the floor. I handed him the passport, which he now put it in the pocket of his military blouse. He sat down and lit a cigarette, and carefully extinguished the match between his fingers. He signalled that we should go out, took a last few drags on his cigarette and then came after us. We stood in front of the main door, waiting for the moment when the whole building would become a mighty torch devouring the dark. The wooden floors and beams would catch fire quickly and the blaze would soon spread to the attic and roof, the old furniture, the mattresses and the wool-filled pillows.
Martin positioned his cigarette butt between his index finger and his thumb, then glanced at us with a smile as if he wanted our support in what he was about to do.
Flick. The glowing red point landed on the floorboards. There was a flame, first green, then changing to orange, which climbed up the table leg, engulfed the sleeve of the uniform and spread irreversibly. We withdrew towards the lorry. The heat was already radiating out into the snow. Plates broke and wood screeched. Martin went up to the door, which was being licked by long tongues of fire. He flung something into the jaws of the fire, and before I could even cry out I realised they were not birds or anything else, but our passports. They burst into flames like two feathers and became part of the inferno. ‘Jesus Fucking Christ!’ cried Robert
; I picked up the Kalashnikov out of the snow, released the safety catch and pointed it at Martin, who slowly raised his hands. If I had killed him, it would have been from pent-up rage from putting up with all the horrible humiliations of the disease. My finger trembled on the trigger, waiting for the signal to squeeze. I thought of Kasiewicz; buried, I knew now, because of a worthless wad of paper. It took me twenty seconds to empty the whole magazine. I fired at the blaze through the windows on the ground floor; I shattered several first-floor windows, as well as that of our room. Heavy pieces of tile began to fall from the roof.
Martin said I was a fool and snatched the Kalashnikov from my hands. He jumped into the cabin, started the motor, and pointed for us to get in the back. He swore in Romanian as he stepped on the gas and made three or four half-turns trying to reach the gate. The tyres screeched and showered snow. Yes, the burnt passports were worthless wads of paper, and the stamps and signatures of the former Securitate agents that authorised them were now void. If Martin had said this on time I would not have fired; and we would not now have been banging our heads against the bars, trying to catch one last glimpse of our old home through the branches of the birches. Now we had to vanish before the workers, alarmed by the shooting, came out into the factory yard and ran to the leprosarium with buckets of water. By the time we reached the main road, the flames had already broken through the roof. The beams collapsed, leaving only the thick walls illuminated with an apricot colour. The screaming skull of Europe’s last leprosarium disappeared in the embrace of a fiery medusa. Somehow I was glad I would remember it like this: a dignified old creature, majestic in its fall.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Deşteaptă-te, române, din somnul cel de moarte, / În care te-adânciră barbarii de tirani! /
Acum ori niciodată croieşte-ţi altă soarte, / La care să se-nchine şi cruzii tăi duşmani.’
‘Awake, Romania, from your deathly sleep/Into which the barbaric tyrants have made you sink/Now, or never, your fate renew/And watch your enemies bow before you’.
Whenever we drove up to patrols of self-appointed militiamen and Martin showed them his documents, making them lower their hunting rifles again with an expression of respect and fraternal solidarity, this melody resounded from the lorry’s radio. It seemed to me that everything that was happening in the country originated from that one song; that it must contain secret codes directed at the brain centres that control the creation of revolutions. The patrol would hand Martin a bottle of home-made brandy or vodka, he would take a swig, give the V-for-victory sign and continue driving, humming to rouse the sleepy nation as we went.
We left the asphalt for a tangle of poor, unsealed roads which also had their share of patrols. The bumpy tracks were blocked in places by logs, and these checkpoints would usually be manned by peasants, brown up to their knees in cow-dung: supernumeraries with pitchforks and other rural props who had been given a role in the last European revolution. Martin would screech to a halt, sending a slurry of snow and mud to rain down on the curious women and sleepy children huddled around the fire. He blew the horn continuously and held the red booklet up against the windscreen until two men lifted the log and made the road passable.
Martin turned off into a cornfield to pour in some more fuel. He lifted the flap of the tarpaulin, released the metal bolt and called us to get out.
The snow cover on the ground was thin and we left black footprints wherever we trod. The plain was dark and still. A yellowish glow faintly lit up the clouds in the distance, and Martin said those were the lights of Bucharest. He finished refuelling and threw away the canister, telling us he’d like to have a cigarette here in the open, if we weren’t too cold. It wasn’t cold, I said, cotton kept you nice and warm. Martin came up and straightened my collar, which had been sticking out. He felt the material and was visibly impressed by the quality. ‘He wore only the best,’ he said.
‘Who is He?’ I asked.
‘Dra-cu-la!’ pronounced Martin and widened his eyes to conjure up the horror that belonged to that name. I knew he did not mean Vlad the Impaler but the common nickname for their dictator. I looked closely at Robert’s chest, turned down the neck of the jumper and tried to read the initials embroidered on the pyjamas. A stylised ‘C’ embraced a stylised ‘N’, and I realised that our warm new clothes came from the wardrobe of Nicolae Ceauşescu.
Martin laughed when I lifted up my arm and sniffed the armpit. There was a sweetish odour of sweat, and that sweat meant history. Robert did the same, but his nose was unable to detect any historical anomalies.
We continued on our way, sniffing the clothing from time to time. We bumped up and down along a gravel road, avoiding potholes full of slushy snow. When Robert wanted to spit out a chunk of his sickly lungs, I knocked on the glass of the cabin and Martin slowed down. Then Robert leaned out the back and gave Romania what it deserved. We stopped again just before dawn: at the horizon a long yellow line of approaching light was dividing the darkness. Between the branches we heard a slow rumble like the rolling of a gigantic wave: the voice of the Danube hidden behind a dense thicket of willows. The thought of defying that power and travelling upstream through the heart of the continent horrified me as much as the realisation that we were in fact to travel without a goal, borne by an ill-defined desire for change, movement and meaning. For a moment I was prepared to return to the smoking ruins of the leprosarium, put the missing stone back in the wall and resurrect my miserable life there.
Branches scratched my hands and face, opening half-healed wounds. I feared that Robert wouldn’t make it. I put my arm around his shoulders; he was shaking. Fever had him in its grips again. His feet sank ever deeper into the mud. With effort he lifted his shoes and shook off the thick clumps of red earth. And then finally we reached our goal: the seething surface of the water with a veil of morning mist levitating above it. The far bank was still invisible, so it was as if we were standing on the edge of a huge maelstrom. Carefully, Martin trod out onto the wooden ferry landing, glancing up and downriver on the lookout for Romanian border police. When he was satisfied that the river was deserted, he called for us to come. He was still smoking and kept looking at his watch. ‘They should be here any time now’, he said, throwing his cigarette butt into the water. We sat down on the damp boards and looked into the river, which made us dizzy. Plastic Coca-Cola bottles emptied at the Vienna docks, small gas cylinders, light bulbs and pieces of polystyrene bobbed along like shipwrecked souls caught in the current. Sunken branches snagged torn plastic bags; a technocrat’s harvest that shone in many colours. While Robert and I watched the slow dawn, Martin lit a fire on the bank. He broke off dead branches, collected bundles of reeds and made a pyramid of them on a tree stump. A flock of crows attracted by the smoke landed in the nearby thicket. I helped Robert get up. His hands were icy cold, and we went close to warm ourselves.
Martin rubbed his hands and jumped up and down. It was one of those moments when reality resembles a damaged record that skips and repeats the same sequence without end. I shifted the needle and asked him what had happened to the group that left the leprosarium earlier. ‘Sis mortuus mundo, vivus iterum Deo,’ (Dead be thou to the world, but living anew to God), he replied, still hopping up and down. ‘They wandered off westwards. The cold decimated them. Those that survived made it to an old railway line that leads to a coal mine in the foothills. There they found an abandoned house by the track. They’ll die of hunger, the fools. The country is in anarchy, and every revolution, unfortunately, separates the wheat from the chaff. There’s no hope for them, I'm afraid.’
‘Dead to the world, but living anew to God,’ I echoed. ‘Won’t it be the same with us?’
Martin was silent, and added some more dry branches to the fire without making a reply. What could he have said anyway? Robert crossed himself and stared into the flames.
Unlike today, the excommunication of lepers in the past was at least rich in ritual. The quarantined leper would be taken to the church
, laid like a corpse on a wooden stretcher and covered with a black sheet. The priest would sing the responsorial Libera Me. The black mass would be said, and the unfortunate individual taken away to the leprosarium. If such an institution did not exist, a hut with four black-locust posts would be built twenty feet from the road. The leper survived thanks to the alms that kind-hearted travellers threw to the hovel. When the leper died, the hut was cremated together with the corpse. In a different version, the leper was borne out of the House of God and to the graveyard. To symbolically illustrate the exclusion from the world of the healthy, they lowered the leper into a freshly dug grave. The priest would lay a clod of earth on their head and say: ‘My friend, this is a sign that you are dead to the world, but that you are living in God.’ Then they would be taken away to the leprosarium on a stretcher with iron hooks. The leper died a slow death, awaiting the call to the place where there is no illness, where all are clean and white, without stench or stain – more radiant than the sun.
The birds took flight without warning, leaving several grey feathers in the air to waft down to the snow. Quickly, Martin scooped together a pile of wet soil and dumped it on the fire. We withdrew into the bushes, while he cocked his Kalashnikov and kneeled by the landing. We heard questions shouted on board a boat and the muffled answers of the mechanic. Martin signalled for us to keep quiet. He waddled to a nearby bush and positioned his gun between its forked branches.
I did not know what language they were speaking. The fog softened the vowels, and despite the volume of the voices all we heard was a cottony echo. The first thing we saw was a large Soviet flag painted beneath the bow, then after it came a black hull with the red letters LENINGRAD.
Martin gradually got up. He put down his gun, ran out onto the landing and yelled the code word which sounded like the name of some slimy Russian dish. The answer from the deck was in the same tone. This was our boat then – a long flat barge that rose just two or three metres out of the water. When it was quite close, I saw two black figures unwinding ropes at the bow. One swung his arm and a long soggy snake began to squirm on the foot boards. Our guide grabbed the end and fastened the rope to the pier. The turning of a heavy toothed wheel could be heard. An iron gangway lowered itself from the deck onto the boards like the arm of a dying colossus. The crash almost threw Martin off balance. He grabbed the thick rope just in time and jumped onto the rungs of the gangway that led straight to the black hull and the flag. His unsteady feet tested every step. A call of encouragement came through the fog: everything was made of steel, it said – Russian steel. They met half way: a formal handshake and short conversation. The captain pointed to the barge and Martin towards us. Robert began to cough as if he wanted to draw attention to our existence. Mr Smooth reached his hand into his inside pocket. The Russian took off his beret, put it under his arm and accepted a bundle of banknotes. He licked the tips of his fingers, counted the money twice, then returned the beret to his bald head and walked back on deck. Mr Smooth looked to the left and then to the right, downriver. He walked back down to the wooden landing and called for us to come. I felt cold sweat on my neck. Robert stared at the thin streaks of smoke rising from the extinguished fire. ‘Are we going?’ I asked, but he still gazed at the glowing willow embers.
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