Horses in High Heels

Win It And They Will Come

People grow mainstream when they win awards. The Nobel Prize, especially, has a knack for pulling smart and talented people out of their insular cubbyholes and showing them off to a newly interested public. Herta Müller is a prime example of this. Before she won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Müller was a semi-well-known German author, revered by her peers and critics but mostly ignored by American readers. That all changed on October 7th.

Last Christmas, a family member went to the store and bought us two of Müller’s novels. To our shame we hadn’t yet read Müller. We knew of her, sure. But we had not yet dipped into her pages. At any rate, it’s only recently that we got around to reading one of the novels, The Land of Green Plums.

The story follows a group of young people who have relocated from their villages and/or small towns to Bucharest. Bucharest, when the story takes place, is under the Communist rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose brutal and paranoid handling of social and political affairs creates an atmosphere of tension, aggression, and fear. The story is told in bursts of fable-like dream sequences that, when taken as a whole, present an intimate and unique glimpse into a weird and concrete-laden world.

Here’s a snippet:

A mother takes the train into the city every week. The child is allowed to accompany her twice a year. Once at the beginning of summer, and once at the beginning of winter. The child feels ugly in town, because she’s bundled up in so much thick clothing. The mother takes the child to the station at four in the morning. It’s cold, even in early summer it’s still cold at four in the morning. The mother wants to be in the city by eight, because that’s when the stores open.

From one store to the next, the child pulls off some of her clothes and carries them in her hand. As a result, the child loses a few items of clothing in the city. That’s why the mother doesn’t like taking the child into town. But there’s another reason: The child sees horses trotting on the asphalt. The child stops and wants her mother to stop, too, and wait for more horses to come. The mother has no time to wait and can’t go on by herself. She doesn’t want to lose the child in the city. She has to drag the child away. The child hangs back and says: Do you hear how the hooves clatter differently from at home?

From one store to the next, in the train and on the way home, and for days after, the child asks: Why do horses in the city wear high heels?

Horses in high heels. That’s nice. We visited downtown Seattle this week and heard some horses in high heels. They were big horses and made loud clacking noises. We drank our coffee and thought of Herta Müller. We looked around and wondered if anyone else was thinking about her too.

When we returned to Vashon Island that night, we found A., our lovely fiancée, reading The Appointment — the other Müller novel given to us at Christmas. We asked her what she thought of it: Demanding, she said. Each page, each sentence demands all of your attention. Interesting, we thought. Thus far, we had found The Land of Green Plums an easy — almost too easy — read. Its narrative style allowed paragraphs to speed past, like a series of subway cars where you see blurred faces and feel a rush of sound and energy and then you’re left thinking about it all in a wake of darkness and silence. Our next thought, of course, was that we had been reading too quickly. We needed to slow down the subway car, focus on the faces that emerged from Müller’s prose, let the sound and energy settle in before we moved on.

A. read us a couple lines from The Appointment:

Before I was born, my parents had a boy who turned blue in a fit of laughing. He never became a real son, since he died before he was christened. My parents had no qualms about releasing his grave plot after just two years. It wasn’t until one day when I was eight years old and a boy with grazed knees was sitting across from us on the tram that Mama whispered in my ear:

If your brother had lived, we wouldn’t have had you.

Ouch.

Not exactly sweet-dreams bedtime reading. Nevertheless, A. kept going. She was captivated — her eyes driving across the page with purpose.

We got into bed and opened The Land of Green Plums. We read a page. Another. Another. And then it hit us: This was the first time we had ever had two books by the same author open at the same time, speaking different stories to different people — at the same time. We picked up our book, began to skim the words, but this time tried to imagine what the other book was saying, what A. was thinking. The harder we tried the deeper we slipped into an imaginary world where Müller’s words were scattered all over the room, plastered to the walls and ceiling and blankets like moss.

The next day we talked more about the books, about Müller, the things we liked and didn’t like in the stories. We read each other paragraphs out loud. The way we described the books began to reflect Muller’s prose style. We were hooked, speaking Müller’s language as easily and readily as a bunch of Irish-Americans in Dublin feigning a brogue.

A. said:

Easy for him to say. But how to spend eight hours on end acting as if two mustache tips were simply floating in midair behind a desk.

We replied:

One of the books in the summerhouse was called: On Suicide. It stated that only one way of dying can fit into a given head.

Ah, how influenced a couple can become when they enjoy something together — personalities change, foreign dialogues are taken up, postures are held and reactions get sharpened. It’s fun, really. Something new. Literary role playing, if you will.

Who knows where this will end up. Most likely we’ll finish the books and simply move on, away from Müller’s influence. On to something else. After all, that’s what happened the last time we adopted new personalities — cultivated from watching The Wire together for weeks on end.

We began talking like gangstas from Baltimore.

A. would say:

“Will you please do the dishes?”

We would answer:

“Bitch, don’t make me stick this glock upside yo head!”

A. would reply:

“Boy, you better get your sorry ass here and wash these mafuckin’ knifes ‘fore I push one down on yoself.”

Nah, it wasn’t really like that.

Fact is, we weren’t good enough at acting to forget each other and say those type of things. Too bad. It could have been fun.

As for Müller, we suspect her voice will be heard in our house for a long time. Another book, The Passport, is on its way.

Video: The Wire, The Famous Fuck Scene