I shuffled the cards and looked towards the mountains in the west. Beyond the rim of the Transylvanian Alps lay Europe, sinking into another night. I felt it humming like a huge queen bee sending out series of encoded signals. When Robert stole up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder, the cards flew up from my frightened hands and out the window. They fell slowly, it seemed, much too slowly, gliding through the thick spring air. I knew something was about to change.
Robert laughed at my jittery hands. He calmly opened two tins of pineapple rings, one for each of us, and I felt as if he was opening two Pandora’s boxes. The next morning you could have seen me walking down the stairs carefully carrying a tin full of water to fetch flowers, those splendid daffodils along the southern wall of the leprosarium.
But that was not the only reason I got up before the others on 16 April 1989.
CHAPTER TWO
It hurt when I swallowed the pineapple, but Robert said that was just a passing phase, after which my oesophagus would become totally numb. That is why lepers in the past often became performers who swallowed live coals or ate glass for money. He said I would get used to it over time, though I would miss the pleasant burning sensation of hot tea. What he missed most of all was the heart-warming burn of the Jim Beam Black he so adored. Robert was American. The only American on the planet infected with this ancient disease, I imagined. He wrote to a few friends and some old aunt in Georgia that he had AIDS and would be spending the rest of his life on the Old Continent. He wanted them to remember him as he had been, as a non-commissioned officer of the US Army, not an enfeebled shadow of his former self. He told me he had picked up leprosy in the brothels of Amsterdam in 1982 and then quickly went on to tell me episodes of his training in Arizona. I did not ask him any more questions, constrained by my good manners, though I knew that none of Hansen’s children can explain how they contracted the disease in just one sentence. Their account is extensive and always precisely structured. Lepers talk nineteen to the dozen, at least at a superficial level, whenever they are asked how they arrived at their fate. Robert only told me the whole truth, encouraged by our friendship, after I had been at the leprosarium for many years.
The daffodils were always an unpleasant reminder of the topic of beauty and its reflection. I would not have been surprised if those magnificent flowers suddenly wilted at the sight of my disfigured face. Although I am not missing any vital parts, my nose, cheeks and forehead are covered with large warts, as if peas were growing under the skin. Leontiasis developed, with the result that my eyebrows, eyelashes, hair and beard growth have long since disappeared. But the cartilage of my nose is still in fairly good condition, thanks to regular doses of Thiosemicarbazone and antimony, drugs which were once delivered in abundance. You could do your injections whenever you wanted: before lunch, after breakfast, at dawn or in the middle of the night. The majority of residents adopted a loose regimen like this, not knowing what a double-edged sword it was. Mycobacterium Leprae soon became immune to the medicines so that mammoth doses were needed to stop the progress of the bacillus even for only a short time. With Robert’s help, I worked out exactly the right doses of medication to knock out Hansen in the long term. In 1984, the last ampoules of the precious substances ran out. We then switched to therapies with medicinal herbs which we were able to gather in the vicinity of the leprosarium. Several Russian books on herbal medicine helped us quickly work out the most effective infusions for reducing the swelling and painful lumps. Compresses of wild pansy leaves soothed the unbearable itch which came on rainy days and sometimes drove the lepers to claw their already disfigured bodies, producing volcanoes of pus and blood.
Thirty grams of peeled and chopped bittersweet nightshade steeped in a litre of boiling water gave an inconceivably bitter infusion which was good for relieving symptoms in the throat and oesophagus. We gathered the bark of young elm trees all year round in the nearby forest. This was the only plant mentioned in the recipes for alleviating the consequences and symptoms of leprosy, which made it the most popular with the patients. We peeled bark off the stems of two-year-old elms, dried it in an airy place or in the sun, and chopped it up finely. Then we boiled thirteen hundred grams in twenty litres of water until half the liquid had evaporated. Every morning we needed to drink two hundred and fifty millilitres as tea and use the same amount for compresses. We made the infusion in two large cauldrons in the middle of the courtyard and sat around the fire. Old Zoltán had some culinary experience, and his skill in preparing the bark made the work a smooth operation. We would put the speaker on the windowsill and stock the fire well, everyone would bring out a stool or drag up a block of wood, and the fun began. Night after night the White Album revolved, making feet tap in spite of stiff knees. The lepers’ dull eyes followed the sparks as they flew up to the heavens.
Robert sometimes took a piece of wood as a microphone and pretended to be performing the magnificent Happiness is a Warm Gun. He enticed sentimental smiles, which our disfigured faces transformed into grotesque portraits of our grief. When our conversation became louder, the music was turned down. Rasping voices would come from under the linen hoods; stories were told of past lives: the vitae of wretches who like witch doctors conjured up lost images and words from the dark limbos of time. No one ever questioned what was said. You could tell your story undisturbed by comments and doubts because everyone knew they would be in a similar situation too.
Whether these biographies were true was not ascertainable. When you arrived at the leprosarium, all documents, personal belongings and clothes were rudely taken off you, and in return you were given a few items of underwear, two white shirts, an army jumper and a quality linen robe with a large hood. New clothes were supplied at regular intervals, so no one could complain about poor hygiene. While three overly amiable doctors accompanied by a Romanian army soldier prepared me for my stay at the leprosarium, I expected they would hang a bell around my neck; an essential accessory of lepers in earlier centuries which warned travellers that one of those deprived of the love of God, was coming along the road. Fortunately that did not happen, but there was something frighteningly decisive about their well-coordinated procedure. I realised that I was not being sent for treatment but being prepared for a different journey to somewhere outside the rules of this world, which could more appropriately be termed ‘illness in isolation’ than a medical treatment. I wanted to keep my watch, passport and little golden Sagittarius pendant. When I raised this possibility, one of the doctors replied with a gentle sneer, saying that the things would be safer if they were looked after until my treatment was over.
At the same time one of his colleagues threw them into a large metal container while the other, with a mask on his face, rained a white powder over them. Two large needles sank into my thigh, releasing a strong antidepressant and my first dose of Thiosemicarbazone. The doctor dialled zero on the black disk and whispered into the receiver: ‘He’s ready’, then they bundled me into a dilapidated ambulance. I tried to speak, but the injection had silenced my words into gentle arm movements and a wrinkling of my forehead. My tongue rolled lamely in my mouth, making saliva run in strands down my chin and straight on to the floor. I leaned my face against the glass of the back door which had fine wire running through it. The small first-aid station on the outskirts of Bucharest would soon become blurred into a white and red blot on the wall. A man who had not been around during the examination appeared out in front and leant against the wall, waving casually as we left. Wide-lapelled black clothing, a dishevelled jacket, a narrow, neatly shaven moustache above neat rows of teeth: it was this person, whom I later came to know as Mr. Smooth, who had heard the doctor’s ‘ready’ several minutes earlier and with satisfaction lit his cigarette. It hung in his left hand as we left.
As the ambulance rattled along the pockmarked roads on the way to the leprosarium, I sat on the wooden bench at the side, my back against the metal. The wire glass the size of a television screen displayed a pale sfumato of a winter landscape without snow. The villagers in their muddy fields rested their hands on the handles of their tools and watched the ambulance go past. An unnaturally ugly child ran up to the road and threw a stone that clanged against the metal.