In Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992, translated as The Fox Was Ever the Hunter), Herta Müller
seems to be writing from personal experience (though not specifically dealing
with the Romanian German-speaking community) but transformed by an elliptical
style that gives a sense of times out of joint.
We have to work hard to make sense of what is going on, as the
characters too try to make sense of life in an authoritarian society. They know the regime and its proxies are
keeping a watchful eye for signs of dissent, but generally only a light touch
is needed to repress the population because they do the job themselves.
The novel is set in the period
leading up to the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a town somewhere near the
Danube. Many characters come and go but
it centres on a group of friends: Adina is a school teacher, who had been in a
relationship with Paul. Paul is a doctor
and plays in a band. Clara works in a
wire factory and has an affair with Pavel, who brings her groceries.
Unfortunately Pavel works for the
Securitate. While one might think this
would provide some protection, in Romania it actually affords more
opportunities for surveillance because loyalty is in short supply. The group is just anti-establishment enough
to warrant the attention of the security service. A concert in which Paul and Abi (Albert) are
playing is brutally broken up and Abi, one of the members, arrested and
interrogated by Pavel, dying in custody.
For Adina, the surveillance takes
a bizarre form. When she returns to her
flat one day she finds that her fox-fur rug has had its tail neatly sliced and
replaced. Over time the limbs are
sliced, like some countdown to a confrontation, then finally the head. Someone seems to be sending her a message and
intimidating her, the menace overlaying a sense of absurdism.
She pushes the fox parts back
together while trying to carry on with her life, pretending the fractures are
not there but knowing that while the menace may not be overt, it has the
ability to get inside her head. Repression
is most successful when it is oblique and internalised. Increasingly unsettled, eventually the strain
is unbearable. She becomes distressed
while vainly trying to buy a bottle of brandy before 10 am. In a sense her hysteria stands in for the
nation’s.
The novel’s strength is the
portrait of everyday existence, one characterised by a pervasive air of threat
and mutual suspicion. There is an
emphasis on dirt, depicting a material poverty matching a poverty of
spirit. Daily life is continuous joyless
drudgery, and conformity is wearing. For
a supposedly communist society there is little sense of community; when the
tinsmith hangs himself items in his workshop, including the rope, are pilfered by
his neighbours. Petty theft from the factory
is a matter of pitting wits with the gatekeepers (the gatekeepers invariably
win because tellingly they recognise the signs)
The country is the site of both
economic and sexual exploitation. The
director at the wire factory preys on the female employees, fathering who knows
how many children. All those in
authority are out for what they can get, right to the top. When not exploitative, sex is used as a
safety valve to take the edge off the misery.
A cat becomes pregnant annually always eats her litter, mourns, yet
repeatedly does it – a metaphor for the regime.
Occasionally people try to escape by swimming the Danube, but the
chances of success are small.
Pavel is the one slicing Adina’s
fox. When Adina realises who Pavel is
and that Clara’s friendship with him has put the circle of friends at risk she
confronts Clara, which breaks their friendship.
Eventually Adina and Paul escape to the country to hide out, where they
stay until they hear of the Ceaușescus’ flight from Bucharest on 22 December
1989. They open the curtains and the
light floods in. The fox fur may have
been dismembered, but as Adina says, ‘the fox is still the hunter.’ Pavel uses Abi’s passport to escape the
country, cunning to the last.
