Paradise of the Doomed

It seemed this place was cursed by God. In the winter months almost nobody came here; the highway lay quite far away; scheduled buses didn’t run, and random cars only sometimes dared to turn off the main road to reach this small settlement with such a funny and slightly strange name—Um b aks. It was the only leper colony in the south of the country where people with leprosy lived and died. Or, in other words, the lepers—those very ones whom God marked by sending them such a cursed disease. No one knew why it arose or how it took root in the human body. Doctors and nurses who worked here for decades didn’t fear it, as if it were bewitched. It didn’t spread by any route: neither through the patients’ clothing nor through contact with them. It didn’t spread even through the accidental encounters that sometimes happened between the sick and the people working here. It didn’t spread at all. But not everyone…