The Passport

After reading and writing about Herta Müller’s 1997 novel The Appointment, I immediately picked up two more of her books, The Passport and The Land of Green Plums.  First published in German in 1986, The Passport was translated into English in 1989, a full twenty years before she was awarded the 2009 Novel Prize for Literature.

The Romanian village where Windisch and his wife live exists in a pre-information age isolation that envelops its inhabitants in a reassuring fog of superstition, tradition, and ignorance.  On the surface lies a veneer of beliefs and tall tales that lends the villagers the quaint aura of magic realism – like the widely held belief that the apple tree in front of the church eats its own fruit at night.  But the flip side of this is a perpetual undertow of violence, nearly all of which is directed at women and children, including child abuse, rape, and incest.  Müller writes in simple declarative sentences that equalize everything, giving every statement the same weight.  Although it’s not quite true, it feels as if Müller abolished the word “and” in this book.  Her brief staccato sentences come at the reader in a kind of jerky, not-quite linear sequence, like an oddly edited piece of film.

The cupboard is a white rectangle, the beds are white frames.  The walls in between are black patches.  The floor slopes.  The floor rises.  It rises high against the wall.  And stops at the door.  The skinner is counting the second bundle of money.  The floor will cover him.  The skinner’s wife blows the dust from the grey fur cap.  The floor will lift her to the ceiling.  By the tiled stove, the clock has struck a long white patch against the wall.  Windisch closes his eyes.  “Time is at an end,” he thinks.  He hears the white patch of the clock on the wall ticking and sees a clock-face of black spots.  Time has no clock hand.  Only the black spots are turning.  They crowd together.  They push themselves out of the white patch.  Fall along the floor.  They are the floor.  The black spots are the floor in the other room.

The ultimate dream for many of the residents of the village is a passport and a ticket out of Romania.  For these residents, Germany and the other destination countries beyond the border seem to exist as an unexamined fantasy that remains untarnished even when they hear from others who have left that the outside world is expensive and harsh.  Nicolae Ceaușescu’s intolerable regime, so dominant in the urban story of The Appointment, is only beginning to trickle down to Windisch’s rural village in the form of occasional government officials who show up in a “white, closed car” to impose new regulations or confiscate the property of the locals, before driving back to the big city.  But to obtain a passport and effect an escape, one must curry favor with local bigwigs, submit to endless demands for bribes, and keep one’s nose clean.  In the case of poor Windisch and his wife, the price is their daughter, Amalie, who they must send to sleep with the local priest so that he will produce their baptismal certificates, which is required for their passports.

Windisch’s wife hangs a red dress across the back of the chair.  She places a pair of white sandals with high heels and narrow straps under the chair.  Amalie opens her handbag.  She dabs on eye shadow with her fingertip.  “Not too much,” says Windisch’s wife, “otherwise people will talk.”  Her ear is in the mirror.  It is large and grey.  Amalie’s eyelids are pale blue.  Amalie’s mascara is made of soot.  Amalie pushes her face very close to the mirror.  Her upward glance is made of glass.

A strip of tinfoil falls out of Amalie’s handbag onto the carpet.  It is full of round white warts.  “What’s that you’ve got?” asks Windisch’s wife.  Amalie bends down and puts the strip back in her bag.  “The pill,” she says.  She twists the lipstick out of its black holder. 

Windisch’s wife puts her cheekbone in the mirror.  “What do you need pills for?” she asks.  “You’re not sick.”

The narrator of The Appointment was obsessed with numbers and compulsively counted things as a way of futilely trying to control the world.  In The Passport, Müller uses colors to much the same effect.

The cupboard is a white rectangle, the beds are white frames.  The walls in between are black patches.  The floor slopes.  The floor rises.  It rises high against the wall.  And stops at the door.  The skinner is counting the second bundle of money.  The floor will cover him.  The skinner’s wife blows the dust from the grey fur cap.  The floor will lift her to the ceiling.  By the tiled stove, the clock has struck a long white patch against the wall.

Herta Müller, The Passport.  Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers.  London: Serpent’s Tail.

The Appointment

…Paul and I talked and talked till the sun was at high noon.  I was amazed at all the mothers and fathers we had to bring in just to explain where we were each coming from on our way to meeting the other.  Handkerchiefs, strollers, baby carriages, peach trees, cuff links, ants – even dust and wind carried weight.  It’s easy to talk about bad years if they are past.  But when you have to say who you are right at this very moment, it’s hard to get more out than an uneasy silence.

Tender and frightening at the same time, Herta Müller’s The Appointment is an intimate novel about life under a regime much like that of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania and the violence that such regimes do to the human spirit.  The narrator has been called for yet another appointment with her interrogator at the offices of the secret police and as she makes her way across the city by bus her thoughts traverse the landscape of her life – her husbands (one has committed suicide), her family, her girl friends, her secrets, her interrogator.   Her appointments with the secret police are frightening mind games, but they are predictable in their own cruel way.  Daily life, however, is dangerous and unpredictable.  The regime uses poverty and pervasive suspicion to induce the populace to do much of their dirty work for them.  Every interaction throughout the day becomes a power transaction with a winner and a loser. Every relationship is tested and perverted – especially, it seems, those among family.  As the narrator says in the book’s final sentence, “The trick is to not go mad.”

But there are moments when something like madness provides the narrator with a moment of quiet escape, of grace.  Most of the time the narrator is obsessively observant, even to the point of counting seemingly innocuous things.  It’s a compulsion that serves multiple functions: keeping track of things, passing the time, grasping for a hard and fixed calculus in a world where nothing it as it seems.  On occasions, however, the narrator’s mind becomes slightly untethered and flits from one thing to another to another.  It’s partly a defensive move, as if it were uncomfortable or dangerous to stay on one thought too long.  But this retreat into the imagination is also a critical respite, a moment of dignity, a mental leap into momentary freedom.  Here’s just one example:

On my way to the tram stop, I again pass the shrubs with the white berries dangling through the fences.  Like buttons made of mother-of-pearl and sewn from underneath, or stitched right down into the earth, or else like bread pellets.  They remind me of a flock of little white-tufted birds turning away their beaks, but they’re really too small for birds.  It’s enough to make you giddy.  I’d rather think of snow sprinkled on the grass, but that leaves you feeling lost, and the thought of chalk makes you sleepy.

“And the thought of chalk makes you sleepy.”  And where, precisely, does that come from?   The brutal logic of regimes seems to manifest itself in an extreme illogic.  The narrator’s instinctively brilliant solution is to counter institutionalized illogic with with a liberating, poetic illogic.  The Appointment is a wise and painfully beautiful book about one woman’s attempt to survive the absurdly cruel world of totalitarian society.

Since then I’ve used the notebook to record whatever Albu [her interrogator] says to me while kissing my hand, or how many paving stones, fence slats, telegraph poles, or windows there are between one spot and another.  I don’t like writing, because something that’s written down can be discovered, but I have to do it.  Often the same things, in the same place, change their number from one day to the next.  At first glance everything looks exactly the same, but not when you count it.