my Europe – and tremble.
Nick Thorpe, Tbilisi, Georgia, April 2012
Nick Thorpe is the BBC’s East and Central European Correspondent and has reported from the region since 1986.
‘With the slow snow the lepers descend’
René Char, in his poem ‘Victory Lightning’
Europe’s last home for lepers, or leprosarium, is located in south-eastern Romania amidst the leprous landscapes of dark, barren soil, scarred by the smokestacks of power stations and the remnants of once mighty forests. Long have the fertile clods disappeared that recalled the heavy footsteps of Burebista and Decebalus, the Dacian princes ever ready to sink iron into the glistening flanks of Roman horses and the bellies of Trajan’s strapping, well-fed legionaries. Later Vlad III, the Impaler, Prince Mircea the Old, Stephen the Great of Moldavia, the ‘Athlete of Christ’, and Michael the Brave (all devoted apostles of the word of God) were like stars in the black night that Christendom looked up to with hope when Ottoman scimitars spilt rivers of young blood.
Throughout history, as people like to recall, this country has been torn apart by the claws of evil old lions, their grizzled manes spattered with the gore of subjugated millions.
But Romania has not forgotten the glory of the brave. Rivers flow past, but rocks remain, as a Romanian saying goes, and even today tales are told of the exploits of Prince Vlad’s heroic legions that devoted their last ounce of strength to their native land.
My dear room-mate, Robert W. Duncan, has a habit of saying that history is the third eye of humanity and that it allows us to perceive more clearly the pitfalls of our melancholic age. I always reply by citing Emil Cioran who wrote, ‘if there were no such thing as melancholy, people would roast and eat nightingales’. Robert says he is horrified by the very thought of plucked nightingale garnished with mint and garlic, and begs me not to mention the painful notion again. I begin to chirp through my missing teeth, flap my arms and flutter around the room until Robert grabs his slippers and flings them at my head. He wants to sleep. I cannot.
I like to stand at the window on dry summer evenings and feel the tiny fragments of history, only recently turned to dust, fall on my bare head in the fresh breeze from the Carpathians or the warmer one that blows steadily down the rocky slopes of the Transylvanian Alps. I smell the forests and the whortleberry, the breath of lush fields and the flower of the dwarf lilac bush; the taste of the stones, whose particles grit between my teeth and stab at the delicate veil of my cataract. When I close my right eye, which is healthy and full of life, a curtain of mist descends on the landscape; the moon becomes squashed chewing gum and my room-mate a dozing rat. The violet lights of the nearby fertiliser factory flicker like dying stars, while the bronze bust of King Alexander John I in the middle of the leprosarium courtyard hardly seems to be there. I open my right eye and close the left. I open and close them in turn, enjoying my own private dualism of the world.
The pages that follow are written as seen through the right eye and with the involvement of all my rational, conscious being.
The people I met and got to know on my road (you will appreciate that I cannot say anything first-hand about Burebista and Decebalus, or King John) will be described as my conscience dictates. Those I did not meet but who by design or chance have become an indelible part of my life, will be transformed into words to the best of my ability, and I shall take care that not one printed letter scar the full beauty of the truth.
CHAPTER ONE
On 16 April 1989, I got up before the others. I planned to pick some of the still unopened daffodils that grew along the southern wall of the leprosarium. I wanted them to flower in my room, so I went down the two sets of stairs from the second floor with a tin brim-full of water. The evening before, the tin had been full of pineapple rings which Robert and I had savoured. The tins of pineapple regularly escaped the attention of the customs officials and hungry Romanian villagers, who would flog any foodstuffs of value when aid packages came from the International Red Cross. Only the tins of this juicy tropical fruit would be left at the bottom of the boxes, presumably due to some food-related superstition like ‘coffee from South Africa is radioactive’ or ‘New Zealand apples are artificially coloured’.
It was a pleasure to look out at the snowy slopes of the distant mountains and think of the hands of the Caribbean girls, which just a few months earlier had caressed the coarse skin of the fruit we were relishing the heart of. As we devoured our pineapple, in our thoughts we licked the palms of those tender hands, and I am not ashamed to say that I often ended up with a slight erection.
Rays of the early sun were tenderly piercing the tall plume of smoke from the fertiliser factory. Daffodils are best picked before the sun rises: that way you catch them asleep, petals closed, and can shift them to a different bed. The cold water makes them stay fresh for several weeks and they open every morning. I picked them by breaking the stems a centimetre above the ground, taking care not to damage the large bulb that held many more yellow flowers for the years to come, for the graves that would hold the leprous bones of my friends.
Since 1981 we had been confined to the leprosarium so as to reduce the costs of transport to the crematorium in Bucharest and avoid sending urns to families throughout Europe. This change did not prompt any great protest, I recall, because all of us lepers (now I’ve said it!) spent our days here due to those same relatives’ dread of our ancient illness. Leprosy most commonly conjures up two things in people’s minds: firstly, scenes from William Wyler’s Ben Hur, where a colony of lepers is shown roaming the earth as if punished by God, doomed to contempt and a painful death in lonely caves far from the city; and secondly, fear of a biological aberration that a fatal mistake of nature, or perhaps divine justice, had let blunder into our modern age.
They believed that our pale gnarled flesh, the bulging growths on our backs, arms, and necks, contained spores of the disease just waiting to waft out and democratically disseminate this oldest of all diseases. Dull-witted Romanian villagers, their minds decayed by irrational fears and superstitions, considered us outcasts, pariahs of humanity, and also evil. They even forbade their ugly children from playing within hundreds of metres of the leprosarium fence.
I always had the impression that our building and its immediate surroundings were seen more as a haunted graveyard teeming with evil spirits than as a medical institution. I suppose this was compounded by the long linen garments we wore: necessary protection from the sun and the gazes of other lepers. Of those who had eyes, at least.
Every leper wants to know how the bodies of the others are disfigured. This is a standard topic of private conversation among them; a morbid show-and-tell of what they lack. The most sensitive spot are the male genitals, which in some stages of the disease closely resemble dried gentian root or an old man’s crooked and impotent fingers. The health of this body part tacitly determined a person’s status in the colony.
I had the rare fortune that my masculinity remained untouched by the ‘marvels’ of Gerhard Armauer Hansen’s bacillus. Since I was endowed with quite decent dimensions before contracting the disease, soon after arrival your narrator was ascribed the status of leader - for what it was worth.
Whenever it was time to share out the alms that the Catholic community had left for us at the gate, estimate the amount of firewood needed or divide a crop of potatoes or cherries into fair parts, I was called on to preside. Usually everything went off without any problems. Either there were no complaints, or no one had the strength to complain. Protest was limited to mutterings under linen hoods or minor squabbles in the dark corridors of the building. But sometimes things got out of hand and required radical measures in agreement with the other residents. One time Cion Eminescu clobbered Mstislaw Kasiewicz on the head with a large piece of firewood, all because of a misunderstanding about the size of the tomatoes they had been given. That demanded a swift and just reaction.
Grudgingly I unlocked the door to Room 42, a cellar which by consensus could be used as a lock-up to sanction unacceptable behaviour. It was only used four times in all my years at the leprosarium. Poor Cion spent the night he deserved in there, and the next morning too: being punished had offended him and he refused to come out. When Mstislaw