Summertime in Bucharest is hot and salty and oppressive, which makes it rather easy, I discovered, to stumble into Gestapo Headquarters. This particular stumble came a few years ago while I walked alongside the Dâmbovița River—the narrow, circuitous channel which cuts through the city’s heart. It was already well past midnight, and nighttime walks in the heat always trigger a leisurely, curious pace, so there was nothing surprising about my inquisitiveness when I was welcomed past a locked gate.
This iron gate hadn’t struck me as notable on previous walks—the villa behind its bars offers the same washed stone and grand windows and general look as the rest of the street. Perhaps the villa is neoclassical, though it is a tad nondescript, with three floors and a large cornice, with a facade that is otherwise forgettable. There is a coffee shop nearby, a grocery store around the corner, and, similar to many buildings in this neighborhood, entry is forbidden. A small plaque on the gray exterior gives a convoluted warning that I can summarize: if there’s an earthquake, this isn’t the place to stand.
In my previous trips the villa looked dark, gloomy, and almost surely abandoned, which wouldn’t be a surprise, as uninhabited and blighted buildings are a recurrent, intractable problem in Bucharest. For some of the city’s most staggering architecture, in fact, the probability of abandonment is sometimes even higher: the maintenance costs and bureaucratic difficulties of owning the grandest buildings in the city aren’t negligible. And this unfortunate reality is one reason that I am surprised on this night to see both an open gate and a few people behind the villa.
A man in a tee-shirt came closer right as I passed the entrance, and the truth is that his gait and manner and smile told a little story. He didn’t own the villa, nor did he belong anywhere near it, I somehow knew. Can posture imply a lack of ownership? Is kindness spotted in a flash? Are artists visible by silhouette? This moment of coincidence met my growing curiosity and the man who didn’t own the villa—of course he didn’t—had decided to have a little pyrotechnic display of lights on the villa wall in the middle of night, which, I hope it is clear, didn’t require any explanation. Once you’ve asked why, that most tedious of questions, you’ve missed his point.
To spot a small group of painters or musicians or filmmakers in unusual locations in contemporary Bucharest isn’t exactly peculiar. Few sights, I should add, appear peculiar in Bucharest, a city that’s best understood with a wide spectrum of potential—which includes the wonderful, the mysterious, and the dreadful, and where nothing at all comes as a surprise. This is an underappreciated city, one that I find both enchanting and distinctive, with a complexity that can’t be easily encapsulated. The only time I’ve truly surprised my Romanian friends is when I express surprise: anything at all can happen, I’m reminded, with the balance in contemporary Romania unfortunately tilted toward the negative, as what’s bad can always be worse. Perhaps this is a mentality that also primes the environment for people to break what are usually considered rules.
What I discovered on this night was an independent art group, partly focused on the simple enjoyment of a midnight performance, partly focused on the historical significance of an old, forgotten villa, and utterly indifferent to regulations on trespassing. Might I have a look inside? Turns out that the group is about to leave, the doors are padlocked, nobody is supposed to enter, but there’s no real hurry tonight, or perhaps, with a shrug, on any night—an earthquake is unlikely in the next few minutes anyway.
Once we do step inside—who can refuse someone who asks twice?—I take a large, winding staircase to the second floor, where I walk through a series of cavernous rooms by the light of a mobile phone. Here is where I learn about the building’s history, of how it was once the Gestapo Headquarters in Bucharest, for a short but for still too long of a time. Here is also where I grasp that the wood molding, and the scratched, creaky wood floors, are original, with the markings of its previous inhabitants all too visible.
Later, I learned through my own research that the construction of the villa dates to the 1920s, and that it served as both Gestapo Headquarters and the German Embassy during the war. But there’s nothing ghoulish suggested by the scratched walls, nothing noteworthy about the dusty rooms, nothing at all striking about the barren, sunken hallways. Even though I can squint and instill the space with meaning, wood slats and support beams are nothing if not prosaic, despite what they’ve witnessed. I can pretend to imbue these rooms with the grotesque memory of past occupants, yet that sensation only lasts a moment, as it is the people who stomped on the floors, of course, that are more relevant. So there’s no supernatural elements or mysterious signs in the villa, even after I spot the undeniable imprint of scuffed boots on the floor.
The memory of this night, and of those poignant walls, came back to me when I read the Romanian-born Herta Müller’s 1992 novel The Fox Was Ever The Hunter. To write that a Noble Prize winner is under-read might be a stretch, though my sense is that too many readers still ignore Müller’s rather opaque prose. One reason might be her desire for the vertiginous rather than the concrete: a Müller novel doesn’t permit comfort, nor does it ever let you settle in. Don’t expect to find yourself in a room that’s explained and justified and logical. A Romanian friend once gave me a succinct description of reading Müller: “You need to be a masochist. It’s not reading. It’s just suffering.”
The Fox Was Ever The Hunter, for instance, takes place in Bucharest, but it demands a sharp eye and nearly two hundred pages to learn that fact. There’s a sole reference to Romania the country, and only a few to Romanians. Your best bet for a solid footing is to notice her many oblique references to the Danube and the Dâmbovița. There are also four consistent characters to track in the novel—Adina and Clara, Paul and Pavel–but you should accept that Müller wants you unsteady, garbled, a tad disjointed, but that’s only because you’re in the same absurd prison as those characters.
The woman sits, the shadow stops. The shadow doesn’t belong to the woman, just as the shadow of the wall doesn’t belong to the wall. The shadows have abandoned the things they belong to. They belong only to the late afternoon, which is now past.
In Müller we combine the mundane with the absurd. And to read this Romanian-born author who writes in German, forget your usual reasoning, though she does at least impart the rules of her sentences in the opening pages: we are somewhere different now. In this peculiar world, we meet Adina, a schoolteacher, and Clara, who works at a wire factory. Rather than any narrative trajectory, or a storyline with an objective, we read descriptions of their day-to-day existence. Do they have goals? Clear motives? A mystery to solve? Those wants seem better suited for characters inhabiting fully-formed bodies and with access to traits that we might call human. In Müller’s landscape, however, nothing so grand should be assumed, expected, or desired. Instead, if you simply must predict what’s coming, prepare for discomfort.
His teeth were like gravel, the blackened half teeth and the smooth white ones. The age in his face couldn’t stand his childish voice.
Because we have characters with faces that don’t like their voices, this means that we are in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, where the prose is flat and lifeless, and where every object is personified. We are in a dreamworld of shapeless, ethereal objects, with the objects experiencing the same sensations as Adina and Clara. In this world there is little distance between what’s alive and what’s clearly not. If you can’t quite grip Müller’s prose, if you’re struggling for a foundation, try to imagine how her characters’ feel. They are trapped in this prison: a world that’s shadowy, barren, nameless. You can’t quite comprehend what you read because they can’t quite name what they see, think, or feel.
Romania has about twenty million people today, and it is situated in a rather troublesome spot. Nearly every major empire decided at some point to trudge past its ever-moving borders. From its more recent history with Soviet influence all the way back to the Ottoman and Mongol and Roman invasions—it might be easier to list who hasn’t invaded this land. The Carpathian Mountains are gorgeous, the Black Sea is a beautiful and strategic coastline, the entire landmass forms an ideal crossroads to control Europe, and pretty much every power in history, unfortunately, seemed to agree. And this consequential heritage has left its footprints, with each group that blundered through spilling a little culture, leaving some customs, jettisoning a bit of its population—it is a legacy of amalgamation that has redounded onto contemporary Romanian culture, in a way that the visitor can find both enchanting in its beauty and maddening in its complexity. For the events in The Fox Was Ever The Hunter, however, Müller selects just one spot along this long timeline.
Our clue for that assumption is the sole consistent fact that’s underneath all of Müller’s elusive descriptions: the opaque but unmistakable references to Nicolae Ceaușescu. This is the Ceaușescu who was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989; who was President from 1974 until December 22, 1989; who guided the surveillance, repression, and plunder of the country; and who was tried and executed on Christmas Day in 1989—in a violent culmination to a violent rule. Incidentally, it is worth remembering whenever anybody mentions the bloodless revolutions of 1989 what they happen to be forgetting. In Müller’s prose, the characters do attempt, at times, a description of Ceaușescu—with a result that is often distant, clouded, ambiguous.
She looks straight into the void, and swallows her own breath. The black inside the dictator’s eye mirrors the shape and size of Adina’s thumbnails, if she crooks her thumbs just slightly. The black inside the eye stares out of the newspaper every day, peering into the country.
This reminds me of an often repeated story about a man in the Soviet Union who runs to the news agent each morning, buys a paper, looks at the cover, and then tosses it down in a huff. After a few days, the news agent finally asks the man what he’s looking for:
An obituary.
But the obituaries aren’t even on the front page?
This one will be.
For the first half of the novel, the dictator isn’t named, yet he is a pair of eyes watching from above, an eerie but unnamed presence in every room. You also start to perceive that there’s little to differentiate any of Müller’s descriptions in her narrative, a characters’s face resembles a neighbor’s chair and a public sidewalk is interchangeable with a bathroom door. The sole commonality is that every sight and thought and emotion has the same unnamed owner. Müller doesn’t provide an exact timeline, yet we are still aware, as contemporary readers, that the days of this dictator are finite.
Obviously this fact isn’t known by Adina, the schoolteacher, who begins to sense that the security services are suspecting her—whether they are justified in those suspicions is irrelevant. There are changes in her apartment, evidence of previous visitors, physical manifestations of tangible objects that leave intangible psychological marks in her mind. The storyline is blurred, disorienting, but we eventually learn that Clara, Adina’s friend, has been seeing someone in the security services: so there’s little to distinguish what can and what can’t be trusted. At least there is one character, Paul, who plays guitar and sings a revolutionary song in public. He might be the sole character with a bit of insouciance, though of course the state considers his band’s lyrics unacceptable.
Face without face / Forehead of sand / Voice without voice / Nothing is left / Except for time.
Too many revisionist accounts portray all Eastern Block regimes as interchangeable, leaving no separation between the government in Poland, for instance, and the government in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. This is a picture that washes away the distinctions between very different systems and the nuances of how culture and language and history shape a country. Nevertheless, you can fashion a reasonable shorthand for Ceaușescu’s Romania during the Communist period by focusing on the usual totalitarian checklist—there’s a security state, there’s a cult of personality, there’s a system where everything not forbidden is compulsory—with an emphasis on severity and harshness and cruelty. There’s a reason Americans can name more Czech dissidents than Romanian dissidents, a Romanian friend once told me, and that’s not because they didn’t exist.
The woman sits, the shadow stops. The shadow doesn’t belong to the woman, just as the shadow of the wall doesn’t belong to the wall. The shadows have abandoned the things they belong to. They belong only to the late afternoon, which is now past.
There’s an eeriness to these words, and you soon begin to notice a pattern: every crisp description is somehow still flat, it is an inescapable sensation that arrives with every paragraph—inside all of the lifeless buildings, along the barren streets, within all the lost characters. Part of the difficulty in Müller’s project is to tell the story of a world with a degraded and broken language—even though language is the novelist’s sole tool. The lack of hierarchy between objects and people and the utter flatness of absorbing every single description as equivalent gives the novel a constricted, vacuous feeling, so that the reader discovers nothing more than a world of objects: the chairs are objects, people are objects, emotions are objects, until nothing is left to distinguish the dullness of an empty chair from the dullness of an empty person.
Müller, who lived in Romania during the Ceaușescu regime, experienced the consequences of refusing to comply with government mandates, and there are echoes of her life in this novel. Yet she doesn’t stray into telling a superficial, timeworn story of political and social repression. What we read, instead, is a more complicated and diabolical narrative about the arbitrary and nonsensical and indiscriminate application of power. Although some people have the false belief—almost laughable in the grandness of its error—that totalitarian states are more stable, that strong central control reduces the chance of convulsion, history is clear about how this stability is illusory. It is not incidental that Müller ensures that not one of her characters, regardless of their status, is sure of their footing. If the law changes without warning and without justification, if the law is imposed inconsistently and irregularly, then you’re inside something that approaches the totalitarian.
If a person sits long enough in the café, the fear settles down and waits. And the next day it’s already right there at the same table. It’s an aphid inside your head that won’t crawl away. If a person sits too long the fear just plays dead.
For Adian and Clara, one repetitive subject is a gateman—a person who stays watch at one of life’s barriers, a force of dominance when you want to cross, who just might be depressed, violent, indifferent, vindictive, cruel, spiteful, or simply unfair, on any particular day. It is, after all, in the routines of daily life where most people encounter injustice. These are the hospital doors that only open for officials, the bread shelves that lack bread, or, for these characters, a gateman who makes capricious decisions—with capricious decisions one essential feature of the totalitarian. In this world of flatness and supposed equality, the smallest of distinctions creates the most rigid hierarchies. Although the facade does begin to crumble in a particularly notable way once the characters gain the ability to describe their frustrations.
Most people who believe in something, said Clara, are high party officials, and they have no need for the gateman or his respect.
And we first see hints of this shifting dynamic through subtle, laborious shifts in the language, because language is the facility that permits the characters to understand their perceptions. Clara and Adian begin to broaden their expressions, we pick up hints of a chronology, the narrative gains focus, and we sense the potential for a cataclysmic outcome—especially once the nameless dictator abruptly becomes the named dictator.
The morning smells of gasoline and dust and worn-out shoes. And when someone passes by carrying bread, the sidewalk smells of hunger. Hunger sharpens elbows for shoving and teeth for screaming. The shop has fresh bread. The elbows inside the shop are countless, but the bread is counted.
Once you reach the halfway point of The Fox is Ever the Hunter you realize that it is worth adding to the list of important novels about totalitarian regimes. We have a distressing catalogue of suffering, a hellish world that’s lifeless, and characters as prisoners. Yet this is where most dystopian novels stop. Müller’s novel would still be worthwhile had she done the same, but it becomes unforgettable because she takes an additional step: what happens to a mind after it acclimates to walls that listen? What happens to people after they see themselves as objects? What happens to a society after it deems people equal to chairs? Having characters who lack the language to even address these questions is a vital part of Müller’s project, and one chilling answer comes from a character named Ilie, who, in an offhand comment, reveals how repression combined with caprice leads to numbness.
You have it good, says Ilie, you can still feel fear, my head is dark, I haven’t had any dreams for a long time.
We mostly follow four characters in Müller’s narrative. Adina is the schoolteacher, Clara works at the wire factory, Paul is a doctor, and Pavel works for the security services. In each character we watch how broken institutions strip away anything that resembles the vibrancy of life. The reader is left to wonder how abuse, struggle, and failure redound into a permanent state. If the world is, to be blunt, deranged, what happens when you encounter the sane?
Paul sits alone in the kitchen, talking to himself but loud enough so the others can hear. Tonight, he says, a couple came to the hospital. The man had a small hatchet stuck in his head. The handle was on top and looked like it was growing out of his hair. There wasn’t a drop of blood to be seen. The doctors gathered around the man. The woman said it happened a week ago. The man laughed and said he felt good. One female doctor said all we can do is cut off the handle, the blade can’t be removed because the brain has gotten used to it. The doctors went ahead and removed the blade. And the man died.
What comes next? After the collapse? With the opening of borders and eyes? The Romanian Revolution came at the height of winter, with the city frozen and the new year just days away—a timeline matched by the novel. Published in 1992, Müller saw the first hints of contemporary Romania while she wrote these pages, with its portentous signs about how decades of repression would leave a legacy.
A city winter in which the water refuses to turn into ice, in which old people wear their past lives like coats. A winter in which young people hate one another like poison whenever they detect the slightest hint of happiness. And who nonetheless keep their eyes peeled while they go on searching for their lives. A winter walking along the river, where laughter freezes instead of the water. Where stuttering passes for speech and half-uttered words for loud shouts. Where every question dies away in the throat while silent tongues keep beating against clenched teeth.
Contemporary Romania is now more than three decades past the fall of the Ceaușescu regime. How does the legacy of Ceaușescu affect the atmosphere? What did decades of repression do to the social dynamics of society? Where are all those scars of subjugation and hardship and injustice? A facile answer might even mention the city’s architecture, as walking around Bucharest does, in fact, present you with the residue of those power structures. The grandest of all is the Palace of the Parliament—one of the largest administrative buildings in the world, visible from across the city, a Ceaușescu vanity project that was part-home, part-office, part-fanaticism, part-idol, and fully a pillaging of the Romanian treasury.
Because structures of power like the Palace of the Parliament are frequently the structures of power today, it is possible to end up imbuing these structures with too much meaning. In the wide boulevards and ripped-up neighborhoods that transformed into soulless bureaucratic offices there’s the potential for the cruelty of the past to cloud the vision of the present. It is a physical manifestation of a psychological legacy. And all of these structures come with a weight, a heaviness, a burden—all those physical words that are used to describe trauma. These are the same words that you might also use to describe, for instance, a building with a past from a much earlier time, such as the former Gestapo Headquarters. And these are the words that Adina, in a moment of despair, stumbles toward, when she “asks herself how the room, the table, the bed can allow this to happen.”
Yet, with a closer inspection, and if you consider Müller’s novel with the care that it demands, you’ll see that there’s something missing from what must be labeled a superstitious view, where objects are personified, where tyranny inhabits a location, where the legacy of a building affects a building. To reach a more vibrant and just place requires actual discernment: the naming of difference, a distinction between values. A man shouldn’t reach over a hanged man’s head and loosen a noose, as happens at one point, only because it is a “pity to waste such a good piece of rope.”
Failing to distinguish between a noose and a man isn’t to value everything—it is how you begin to value nothing. And it is worth remembering that the first hint of the totalitarian instinct comes in this flattening of value and in the inability to draw any distinctions. If you, however, have a lightness of step, and a slight irreverence toward the remnants of a totalitarian past, you might be headed in the right direction. This is the instinct that propels at least a few people to venture out and begin a nighttime show, for no real purpose whatsoever, at the villa of such previous horrors. Of course there’s always the commonplace urge to imbue ancient objects with mysterious power, as the place of unspeakable horror, of injustice, and to ignore every impulse toward discernment. But once you start looking closely at the world around you again—perceiving, describing, valuing—you realize that nothing could be more human.
Charles! You make me want to read more. You make me want to learn to structure my writing and storytelling in the intriguing way you do, peripatetic and almost feeling wonderfully aimless until you deposit us gently back where we began but oh so much more broadened. Also I have a feeling I’d glean much more from novels if you wrote an annotated historical and cultural companion for all the novels on my list.
This was wonderful. I love that a group of artists decided to show films in the old Geatapo building. Light to drown out the shadows of the past. And Muller’s writing is splendid, although you’re no slouch yourself!