“Now take my blood pressure again,” he said, and I did, a third time.
It was better, but there was still room for improvement. He nodded. “Let’s start with some light reading, then,” and he untied the red strings that held shut the folder before us. Dust rose, bitter like medicine.
“‘Man on the Moon,’” Grandpa read, taking out a newspaper clipping. “One giant leap for mankind, one tiny article in a Communist paper. ‘The Bones of Tsar Kaloyan Unearthed.’ ‘The Oldest European Gold Treasure Dug Up in Varna’ … Here, read this.”
“‘May 1988,’” I read from a page with torn edges. “‘A Fainting Epidemic in Tanzania.’” Twenty children in a school in Tabora, while taking their final-year exams, had all been stricken by a fit of mass fainting — a common occurrence for Tanzania, the article assured. There had been a great deal of crying and screaming and running while the exam unfolded, and then the fainting fits had come.
Grandpa fished out another clipping. This one from October 1983. “A Fainting Epidemic in the West Bank.”
“Creative titles,” I said, and he sneered. In March 1983, the article read, more than nine hundred Palestinian schoolgirls and a handful of women soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces had fainted in the West Bank. A subsequent Palestinian investigation had determined that while some instances could have been the result of an Israeli chemical agent, the majority of the cases had been purely psychosomatic in nature.
“Purely psychosomatic,” Grandpa said, and traced the line with his finger for emphasis.
He waved another clipping in my face and I sneezed once more in his. “‘A Laughter Epidemic in Tanganyika.’ January 1962. Mass hysteria at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha.” The fit of laughter had started with three girls and before sunset it had affected two-thirds of all students and not a single teacher. By March the school was closed down, the students shipped home and with them the epidemic. More schools, more girls, thousands of people — all laughing. And with the laughter pain, fainting, flatulence — Grandpa tapped the word with his crooked finger — respiratory problems, rashes, attacks of crying, random screaming.
“In Tanganyika?” I repeated, and — God help me, because I couldn’t — burst out laughing.
I could see he too was fighting. To no avail. Soon we laughed together, unreasonably long, and for a moment I felt as if I would burst at my seams and all the troubles that were crushing me like stones — Elif, Orhan, the sick little girl, my sick grandfather, my student loans — would roll away and I’d be free. “We’re doomed,” I cried. “To flatulence and random sneezing.”
“The sneezing plague of Klisura,” Grandpa said, and wiped the tears in his eyes. “Saint Kosta help us!”
He closed the folder and we both gasped for air.
“Now then,” he said when we had calmed down a little, and opened a book. What caught my attention right away was an illustration — or rather a reproduction of a medieval engraving — of men and women, in what I’d say was Bavarian attire, their bodies twisted in odd, unnatural positions, their faces contorted: eyes popping, tongues sticking out, and locks of hair spilling in all directions like fire.
“Like a true scholar,” Grandpa said, “he studies the picture first.”
A picture, I gave him the old cliché, was worth a thousand words.
“And what words is this one worth?”
I struggled to decipher the caption — Bulgarian in its old style, pre-1940s.
“The Dancing Plague of 1518,” I said at last, and felt a great sense of accomplishment. But he motioned me to keep on reading. And so I tried, then I pretended to be reading, moving my lips silently as I skipped over those letters whose sounds I didn’t know.
“How interesting,” I said at last. There had been a dancing plague in 1518. An epidemic.
“You think?” Grandpa said, then seemed to take mercy on my ineptness. “It started in July,” he said. A single woman danced feverishly through the streets of Strasbourg. For six days straight. Within a week her madness had infected three dozen people; within a month — four hundred. The local doctors called for bleeding of the sick. They thought it was “hot blood” that was causing the affliction. Instead, the authorities brought musicians, built a stage, encouraged the dancing any way they could. Only through dancing day and night, they said, would the sick be cured. Before the month was over, more than twenty dancers had died from fatigue, from heart attacks.
Grandpa traced a line of text in the book. “‘They danced in such fervor their ribs snapped like sticks.’” He flipped the page to reveal another illustration: two men fighting to restrain a woman, and two more men behind them, and two more men — all struggling to contain wild, dancing women.
“The town of Aachen, North Rhine — Westphalia region in Germany,” Grandpa said. “A favored residence of Charlemagne. And later…”
“… the place of coronation of the kings of Germany,” I finished.
He nodded. “And one of the earliest recorded epidemics. 1374.” He swept his palm across the crumpled page. In short, this dancing mania was quite the fashion in medieval Europe. It affected thousands, regardless of their age or nationality or gender. It was believed that the surest way to ward off the fever was to play music while the sickly danced. But the music only attracted larger crowds.
And so I asked him the most logical of questions. “What was the cause?”
He licked his lips. “Some said bewitchment. Others believed the dancing was a curse.” He fumbled through another book. “From this here holy fool.”
The drawing showed a light-haired man in a boiling cauldron. A haloed martyr, no doubt, who held a Bible in one hand. A rooster perched on the Bible. In his other hand, like a scepter, the martyr held a palm leaf, or maybe a bird feather — as large as a stork’s — I couldn’t rightly tell.
I read the caption. “Saint Vitus.”
They called the dancing mania Saint Vitus’s dance. And they crowned him patron of all dancers and epileptics Europe-wide. Each year on his feast day in June, large crowds danced before his statue to seek relief and absolution from their sins. He’d died for his faith, the poor soul. The Romans boiled him in tar.
Gently Grandpa closed the book.
“They call it chorea minor now,” he said. The rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements that affected one’s face, feet, hands. “Then there is this.”
He rummaged through a third tome, bookmarked with pieces of yellowed paper, until he found a new drawing, this time of seeds and spores and pollens and other peculiarities of the plant anatomy I couldn’t really name.
“Claviceps purpurea, or ergot fungus. It grows on rye or wheat or barley when the weather is cloudy and humid for weeks on end. So the northern climates, then. You poison your body with that stuff too long and you’ve got yourself ergotism.”
And what would such joy entail?
Spasms, mania, psychosis. Vomiting and seizures, LSD-like hallucinations. Gangrene.
LSD-like? I asked, and he said I’d heard him right. And gangrene. With great dexterity he returned to the previous book, showed me the drawing of another saint.
“They called the gangrenous symptoms of the illness Saint Anthony’s fire, because the monks of Saint Anthony’s order were very good at treating the condition. But not everyone was this compassionate and understanding.”
Another book was pulled out of the pile. Another sneeze, another story. But this one — to my surprise — I’d heard before. In fact, I’d studied it in school, in America.