Hansen's Children. Ognjen Spahic

      Introduction

      Hansen’s children really do exist, but in a world much softened by the impact of the Romanian revolution: the small hamlet of Tichilesti in the Danube Delta. There, Vasile prunes his vines with fingers that feel almost nothing, but he remembers well what his legless father, calling to him from the edge of the vineyard, taught him when he was twelve years old. Vasile's vines and wines help the inmates of Europe's last lepers' colony stay sane – alongside the medication that doctors and nurses administer to them daily. Across the valley, Ioana is well into her 80s, and chops the grass to feed her hens with a little blunt axe gripped between the two stumps of wrists where her hands once were. She calls each of her hens by name; there is even one called Scumpa (‘the limper’). Ioana's simple pleasures, when I last visited in springtime, consisted of watching her tomato plants grow, each in its little yoghurt pot, and looking forward to nursing them to fruit in her little garden. ‘Everyone praises them,’ she told me, ‘as the sweetest in the whole colony!’

      Further down the valley, Costica is now completely blind. (Leprosy affects each of its victims in a different way.) His good eye exploded, he tells me matter-of-factly, during the 1989 revolution, and he humorously even suggests a link: so much was blowing up at that time, he seems to be saying, so why not his remaining eye as well? The radio next to his couch keeps him in touch with the outside world – more than that, it is his companion day and night, preventing him from sinking into total oblivion.

      Ognjen Spahić lifts the leprosarium – gently but firmly, and with a poet's sensitivity to ugliness as well as beauty – out of the present, placing it back in the nightmare world of Ceausescu's Romania only a few months before the Revolution that would change everything forever. In doing so, he transforms the lepers and their affliction into an allegory for the outcasts, the aliens, the afflicted throughout time. Leprosy might be AIDS, it might be the Black Death, or it might simply be what makes any minority different from – and hated by – the majority. But his is not a romantic view of an accursed group worthy of our respect. Rather, it is a nightmarish vision of the depths to which a community can sink when its members turn on one another. As such, it echoes William Golding's Lord of the Flies – but in this case, it is a grown-up world where all outside constraints are relaxed, not one of children.

      Spahić's bloodbath mirrors another: that of the Romanian revolution, and by extension, that of the French revolution or the Russian revolution. However, as a Montenegrin and a former inmate of the great leprosarium of Yugoslavia, Spahić's allegory – and his nightmare – venture much deeper. As a young author growing up in a country literally tearing itself apart limb from limb, he turns his imagination loose upon an east Balkan leprosarium to produce a Frankenstein worthy of the Kosovan war, the Macedonian or the Croatian, or (God forbid) even of the Bosnian war. But he has still not finished. The survivors of his leprosarium – all two of them – travel upriver to infect the rest of Europe in a deeply dark vision of the wickedness of both the majority and the minority. The novel is a worthy challenge for all of us to think differently about human nature.

      The real lepers of Tichilesti – the last 19 of them, from a population that once reached nearly 200 – stay there not because they have to, but because of the companionship they have come to feel for one another after a lifetime of living together. Many were born there to leper mothers and fathers, inheriting the disease (as Spahić has correctly chronicled). They grew up alongside one another; some dared to believe for a while that they were not infected. When the telltale signs emerged, however, they ended up at Tichilesti once again – and once they were trapped there, as Spahić relates, they could not leave. Yet here reality dissents from fiction. Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's demented dictator from 1965 to 1989, didn't want the outside world to know of the existence of a disease that his peculiarly national breed of Communism was unable to cure – all the more strongly because his wife Elena owed her position in the Romanian Communist Party, and her own cult of personality as First Lady, to her carefully cultivated prestige as ‘the Scientist’: a title designed to appeal, no doubt, to those who might have been offended by the status of her clumsy husband, the son of a lowly cobbler.

      Like HIV/AIDS, leprosy is not an illness that can be contracted ‘casually’ with a simple shake of the hand, in vivid contrast to the fears expressed by Spahić's glove-wearing characters. The medicines distributed by the doctors and nurses of Tichilesti – themselves absent from Spahić's portrayal – turn the illness back on itself after a very brief period of infection. The medicines prevent leprosy’s contagion, but can only slow down its effects, unable to reverse its impact on the bodies of victims. Another strange fact about leprosy is that for decades, animals remained immune to the best efforts of scientists to infect them with it, though there has been slightly more success in the past few decades with the use of nude mice and nine-banded armadillos. It is now treated – in Romania, as throughout the world – with a combination of three drugs: rifampicin, dapsone, and clofazimine.

      There is no fertiliser factory next to the real leprosarium; anyway, it would not be visible from most of the individual houses in this protected valley where the last lepers while out their final years on Earth. However, there were plenty of fertiliser factories in Ceausescu's Romania, in Milosevic's Serbia, and in Honecker's German Democratic Republic. Spahić's brutal portrayals are not figments of a diseased imagination, but of a healthy one; they share much in common with the brutalities of Srebrenica, of Stolac, of Rwanda, of Abu Ghraib, of Darfur and of Homs.

      In the second decade of the twenty-first century,

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