Nr. 3 (32) anul IX / iulie-septembrie 2011 - ROMDIDAC

drown herself. Her body, that part of ourselves seen as most private, personal,
and intimate, has been violated by the imprint of aggression and intimidation.
Similar instances occur in The Appointment, whose young protagonist has to
face regularly another Securitate officer, Major Albu, with his signet ring that
squeezes into the flesh of the hands he shakes and whose wet kisses slobber
all over the protagonist’s hand forcing her to wipe it against her clothes.
In Muller’s novels, women are traumatized first within their homes and
communities through patriarchal discourse and misogynist practices. Voicing
the consensus among all men, the village barber in Passport declares that
“educated women are no better than spittle.” In the same novel, the girl Amalie
is only seven years old when the boy’s neighbor Rudy bites her nipples into
“small, brown knots” and puts dry burs in her hair to mimic “a crown of thorns,”
because, as he tells her, “I love. You must suffer.” Further, as Amalie’s mother
washes her swollen nipples with chamomile tea, the girl’s father shakes his
head and mourns that “Amalie will bring disgrace down on us.” The same father
sends Amalie both to the militia man and the local priest, hoping that through
illicit sexual encounters they can be bribed into securing his passport.
Beyond the Swab village community, intimidation and violence are again
practiced on women by the state officials of all social conditions and types.
The Romanian Securitate agent /soldiers guarding the entry to the German
Embassy in the street of Bucharet for instance, are collectively portrayed in
The Land of Green Plums a grotesque individuals who spit out the pits of
green plums during their service hours and violate women through unsightly
attitudes: “When a woman passed, they would stare at her legs. The decision
to grab her or let her go was always made at the last minute. They wanted to
make it obvious that legs like that didn ‘t need a reason - just a whim.”
As Muller knew well, in Ceausescu’s Romania women’s bodies are
subjected to particular objectification by being reduced in law to their ability to
bear children. In 1986, Ceausescu himself declared the fetus to be the “socialist
property of the whole society,” a significant formulation which suggests that the
objectification of the individual began even before birth. Childbirth became thus
a national identity; women were raw materials sustaining population growth,
necessary for industrialization - or later for producing orphans who could be
sold to the West for hard currency. Laws outlawing abortion and birth control led
to the self-induced abortions and deaths, as well as countless suicides among
the young women. After becoming pregnant, Lola, the narrator’s roommate in
The Land of Green Plums, hangs herself with the narrator’s belt in the closet
of their student dorm. Two days after her death, Lola is expelled from the Party
and ex-matriculated from the University as a bad moral example whose suicide
is perceived as deviation from the Communist Party line. In the presence of
hundreds of people gathered in the hall of the university, a Party official takes
the podium and proclaims: “She [Lola] deceived us all, she doesn’t deserve
to be a student in our country or a member of our Party.” In the description of
the grotesque scene, we are told that “everybody applauded. Everyone felt
like crying, but couldn‘t, so they applauded too long instead. Everybody looked
at each other’s hands while they were clapping. A few people stopped for a
moment, then were so frightened that they started clapping all over again.”
Through Lola’s death, which is associated with violence and the suppression
of identity, the other female students experience the horror of the state and
Party practices that the narrator’s traumatized recollections project onto the
outside world in the fictional form of a shocking reality.
Ex Ponto nr. 3, 2011
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