29 What does it mean to be Romanian, in your opinion?
Knut Hamsun called Hitler a fatherly type. Igor Stravinsky called W. H. Auden the dirtiest man he’d ever liked. Lenin said Dostoevsky was trash. “The difference between epics and novels is the presence of toilets,” said D. H. Lawrence. The plaza in Beijing where students were shot by their own government is called the Square of Heavenly Peace.
I’d rather let Nobel Prize-winning novelist Herta Muller answer your question. In an interview with her translator, Philip Boehm, Muller talked about her life under Ceaușescu, and her role in the village with respect to the cows:
Not all the cows in Romania were like what people saw on TV. Most of them were pretty scrawny, but Ceaușescu had this herd of fattened cattle they would ship in advance to some village in the countryside. Then the TV would come and take pictures of him with the fat cows grazing in the background. But I had to be very careful that the ones I was watching didn’t get into the field or else my parents would have had to pay a fine they couldn’t afford. And then in the evening I would lead the cows back to the village. [. . .]
I needed to watch the cows, but the cows didn’t need me at all. They had their everyday life and grazed away and weren’t interested in me in the least. They knew exactly who they were—but what about me? I’d look at my hands and feet and wonder what I really was. What material was I made of? Obviously something different than the cows or the plants. And being so different was hard for me. I’d look at the plants and animals and think to myself, They have a good life, they know how to live. So I tried to get closer. I talked to the plants, I would taste them and I knew what each one tasted like. I ate every weed I could find, thinking that once I’d tasted the plant I would be a little closer to it and that I could change into something else, that I could change my flesh, my skin into something that was more like the plant so that it would accept me. Of course, that was really just my loneliness, which was compounded by the worries I had with looking after the cows. So I studied the plants, I picked the flowers and paired them up so they could get married. Whatever I knew people did, I thought the plants did, too. I was convinced that they had eyes and that they moved at night and that the linden tree near our house visited the linden tree in the village.[1]
- Herta Müller, "The Art of Fiction No. 225." Interviewed by Philip Boehm. Paris Review, Issue 2010, Fall 2014. ↵