each answered by pulling back his hood. One after another they emerged; heads crafted by leprosy, skulls covered with varying textures of scarred and malformed tissue. Monsters they were, but they spoke with human voices, which created the impression that they were people wearing ghastly masks. Then I threw back my hood too.
I cannot claim to have had anything like rosy cheeks any more, but my skin was still fairly smooth with only a few rough patches caused by the beginnings of leprosy. The tendons on my neck trembled, a sign of recent health, and my hair had only just begun to fall out. All this provoked a minute of hushed envy and disbelief. Robert broke the silence by reaching for the oval dish of boiled vegetables and giving me a big helping.
We pulled our hoods back over our heads and the eating continued. The rest of the meal was seasoned with barely audible whispers further muffled by the linen hoods. The others served me food too, without missing the opportunity to look me in the eyes and inspect my hands, searching for explicit signs of the disease. They saw the beginnings of lumpy excrescences on the joints of my fingers as well as my veil-like cataract; they saw shining tears of desperation that dried and disappeared before they could roll. But my mood gradually improved and it seemed I was accepted as a fully-fledged member of the community.
Later, back in the room, Robert tried to dispel the fear generated by my first major encounter with the disease. Leprosy did not have to progress any further than it already had, he explained; we would take a regular course of Thiosemicarbazone and do all we could to lessen the effects. I did not share his optimism. One more visual encounter with the other patients at breakfast forced me to realise what an uncompromising monster dwelt within me.
I watched their faces as they chewed their fried eggs. Lumps of dead flesh shook like jelly and shone like grease. Their mutilated fingers looked like lumps of melted lead, and their sunken eyes cast reflections of the faint light that barely reached them. Some of them would interrupt their meal for a moment to remove pieces of food from their open sinuses, which elicited loud complaints from the others, so the poor noseless fellows would have to get up from the table and finish their dirty work out of sight.
The oldest denizen of Europe’s last leprosarium was Zoltán, who had lived there since it was founded in 1928. He was the only one to survive the German occupation and mass execution when forty-seven residents were taken out into a field and mowed down into a muddy pit.
He remembered the noise of the armoured vehicles on 14 December 1942, the iron gate being broken down, and the young soldiers of the ‘Prinz Eugen’ division determined to... Oh God, and were they determined! Four young soldiers in protective suits ran up and down the corridors, waking the residents and ordering them to stretch their legs and go out to the courtyard immediately. They came out one after another, rubbing their eyes. The arrival of the Germans did not provoke any great panic, Zoltán explained. The residents were more surprised than anything else because at that stage they did not quite know what was going on in the world outside. They assumed this was just another of the humiliating head-counts that the authorities conducted for fear of the patients fleeing and causing an epidemic. In fact, the German soldiers armed to the teeth standing in the courtyard were a reason to hope for the introduction of order and proper medical care to alleviate the desperate conditions at the colony. But when the officer in charge pointed towards the gate with his Schmeisser and the first in the line of lepers was jabbed in the ribs with it and told to move, Zoltán realised that something other than ordinary medical treatment or boring head-counting was in store for them. The minute of machine-gun fire confirmed his doubts. Curled up under the two-year old elm trees close to the fence, Zoltán cried big, cold tears that dripped to the ground. He wanted to pass away like his brothers, to nestle against their bodies and end this miserable lazar’s life in the backwoods of Romania.
The Germans carried out a thorough disinfection of the building by burning everything flammable out in the courtyard. Several valuable portraits of Queen Marie of Romania were destroyed in the flames together with the pieces of expensive walnut-wood furniture; they and the pictures had been given to the leprosarium as presents of the crown. Zoltán watched as the blaze swallowed up painstakingly preserved mementoes. Photographs of friends and family as well as small but cherished items kept in drawers near the patients’ bed heads all vanished amidst the red tongues of the Germans’ fire.
That morning, Zoltán told us, his last hopes went up in smoke. Be it this country or the lands beyond the mountains that hummed like a fat queen bee sending out encoded signals; never would this world become a place worthy of God’s love.
Zoltán roamed the nearby forests until the end of the war; he slept in abandoned stables and burned-down houses. The Germans created a well-guarded headquarters in the leprosarium building, and the courtyard was patrolled not only by guards but also three bloodthirsty Alsatians. Zoltán did not dare to take a closer look.
On 17 April 1944, dawn found him in the stench of a chicken coop close to the main road. He was woken by that same humming of mighty machines and the incisive sounds of German. He waited for the soldiers to pass and then headed for the leprosarium with quickening steps. Now in the courtyard a mighty blaze was devouring the belongings of the German soldiers: countless bundles of documents, epaulettes of various ranks, and large photographs of Adolf Hitler. Yet the building remained untouched. Apart from a large swastika crudely daubed in tar on the front wall before the Nazis’ withdrawal, there were no visible signs of destruction. On the contrary, the windows had been repaired, the bathrooms sanitised, and every room now had a small stone stove. Solid, functional furniture adorned the dining room which was polished to splendour, and in the kitchen the aromas of the last meal still hung in the air. Crockery bearing the mark of the Reich shone in the china closets. Zoltán touched it with his crooked fingers and looked at his reflection on the white porcelain surfaces.
In the corner of the dining room he spotted the bulging copper horn of a gramophone. He picked up one of records which lay scattered on the floor, wound up the spring and gently placed the stylus between the black grooves of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. The music resounded as he donned the last remaining overcoat that hung in the corridor and tore the epaulettes and the Iron Cross from the breast. Allegro molto moderato: Zoltán goes outside to the southern wall to see if there are still any of the daffodils that usually grow there at this time of year. Adagio: Zoltán picks daffodils, angrily tearing them out of the ground. His cold tears drip on the resilient petals. Allegro molte e marcato: he slowly lays the flowers on the round depression in the ground not far from the leprosarium. Aase’s Death: he lays himself on the warm spring earth, on the bodies of his leprous brothers that have turned to dust.
Ants feasted on the filth and sweat of Zoltán’s unwashed body, carrying away those tasty morsels to the tiny passages of their subterranean home. After he had slept for several hours, he went and had a bath, bandaged his wounds with fresh bandages and went back to the resting place of his friends. Instead of saying a prayer, above their grave he read out the fifth chapter of the Second Book of Kings, in which Elisha heals the leper Naaman of Syria and punishes Gehazi by giving him leprosy. It’s not hard to imagine who Zoltán had in mind when he spoke those Old Testament curses.
If you asked him why he decided to spend the rest of his life at the leprosarium, he would wave dismissively and say with resignation, ‘I’m waiting for Death to come. This is the only place I can wait undisturbed.’
A commemorative lunch was held every 14 December to mark the death of our former fellow-sufferers; a minute’s silence was observed and a joint prayer spoken at the mass grave. After telling the story for the umpteenth time, Zoltán would wipe away his tears with his thumb, the only healthy finger of his right hand, and go off to bed. We broke up in silence, moved and somehow proud that lepers had played a part in the Second World War, albeit through collective execution.
If Zoltán had cast off his documentarian chains for a moment and given his imagination free rein, he might have been able to spin a story about how, cowering under the elms, he had heard
