When Kali leaves the village, the house, the man who beats her and doesn’t allow her any money of her own, she can’t take much with her. Bread, bacon, a little plum jam “and my linen that I wove”. The Second World War was not long ago, the Széker Land from which she comes belongs, like all of Transylvania, to the still young People’s Republic of Romania.
With the linen, Kali took her language with her, Hungarian. For her, the city where she wants to work in the domestic market is Kolozsvár, Cluj in Romanian, Klausenburg in German. She’ll get there on foot, past castles with smashed windows, provincial train stations that still show signs of bombing. She will find work with the rose grower Vilmos. The childlessness of a nearly forty-year-old woman, which she brought with her from her unhappy marriage, will come to an end. She will not be the rose grower’s only lover.
Kali is the portal character in the great novel “Omertà. Book of Silence” by Andrea Tompa, who was born in Cluj in 1971, as a member of the Hungarian minority in Romania, like most of her characters. In her family there was a Jewish and a Catholic grandmother, representatives of the Transylvanian bourgeoisie and political activists. She has 1989, shortly before the end of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, started studying Hungarian and Russian in her hometown, went to Budapest at the beginning of the 1990s and continued her studies there, was in 1996/97 on a scholarship in St. Petersburg.
Tell without judging: the writer Andrea Tompa.
(Photo: Stefan Klüter/Suhrkamp Verlag.)
She wrote her dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov, she worked at the Hungarian Institute for Theater History and was a theater critic for several years before she published her debut novel “The Executioner’s House” in 2010, with the sarcastic subtitle “Tales from the Golden Age” and a protagonist , who, like her author, grew up in Ceaușescu’s Romania in the 1970s and 1980s. This book has been translated into English, but not yet into German. Andrea Tompa has now written a total of four novels, “Omertà”, originally published in 2018, is the third. With it, the Suhrkamp publishing house introduces this author to the German public.
On well over 900 pages, he brings the silence that he carries in the title into language, with four protagonists, three women and one man, who are given the floor one after the other. Vilmos, the rose grower, who is making a career in the initial phase of the party dictatorship, follows Kali, who has been wounded by life, then the young Annuschka, in whom country and suburbs intertwine, and finally her older sister Rózsi, who has converted to the Catholic faith, with whom “Rosary Group” to which she belongs, was put on trial and returns from prison badly bruised. In the report, which she writes at the request of her sister, the hard core of the word “omertà” emerges, the vow of silence that the authorities imposed on her when she was released from custody. But the omertà does not have the last word in this novel.
He cannot be understood through the plot. The lasting impression it leaves stems from its idiosyncratic form. It is set in a remote European province, but Andrea Tompa has rejected the models of the provincial novel. As the reading progresses, it becomes clear that this polyphonic novel consists not only of four voices, but above all of the silence of a fifth voice, the narrator’s voice of a contemporary historical novel. They don’t exist here, there are only the voices of the first-person narrators, who illuminate each other but are alone with themselves while they tell the story. There is no such thing as an instance of elegant transitions, of commentary, of evaluation, of looking back from a present to the errors of the characters locked in their world.
“I have to tell myself so I don’t forget. How nice everything was.”
The great art of Andrea Tompa is that these characters reveal much more about themselves and their world than they want or know. It is the art of modeling language, of characterizing characters through the pitch of their narration. Kali, for example, not only speaks of the unhappiness of her marriage, but also of fairy tales, proverbs, and idioms from her world of origin. Pleasure in bed has been destroyed in her marriage, but her view of men has become sharper. For her it is a law of creation “that the man, when he has come over the woman, always turns to his side and sleeps, and the woman just then wants to tell him beautiful things about her life”. Sometimes the rose grower listens to her. But most of the time she is alone with her life story, a pinch of self-defense mixed into her storyteller’s voice, which resembles the strong linen she has woven herself: “I have to tell myself so that I don’t forget it. How beautiful everything was. Beautiful, how the devil’s hole.”
The narrative thread of Vilmos Décsi, the rose grower who lives in his own house, set up his garden business before the war and is called to the university as a self-taught man from the common people, is more loosely woven, occasionally jumping up casually, then purposefully smoothed out again. He owes the land on which he is supposed to promote rose cultivation on the industrial scale to the glory of the People’s Republic of Romania to the expropriations of the “Hóstáter”, farmers who farm on the outskirts of the city.
After joining the communist party, he climbed the career ladder with the hidden reserve of an individualist. He disguises his opportunism as realism. But he has a foundation of fantastic proportions: his obsessive passion for roses. Not only is it tinged with eroticism, it is linked to his obsession with women. As a breeder he is the producer of the objects of his obsession, as a lover of the unfortunate Kali, the young Annuschka and the sophisticated, bourgeois Madame M. he is an unrestrained consumer. Realizing that his affair with Kali is jeopardizing his career, he dumps her and the son she has borne him (as they say in his world) into a house he bought on the spur of the moment in a nearby village.
After the Hungarian uprising in 1956, a Soviet tank stands in a square in Budapest. This event is the core of contemporary history in Andrea Tompa’s novel.
(Photo: DB/picture-alliance/ dpa)
Andrea Tompa lets the rose grower tell all of this himself, without ever interrupting him or pointing out what he is hiding: that his life’s lies are the tribute he pays to the ruling power and its apparatus of violence. It is amazing how she manages not to let this character disappear in her opportunism. Vilmos has by far the largest part in this novel. Because unlike women, he has the opportunity to link rootedness in the world of origin with promotion to the nomenklatura and the international world. He travels to Trieste and Paris for rose-growing competitions, and he is also the somewhat hazy piece of glass through which the novel’s readers are presented with the story of the descent of Hungarians in Cluj and Transylvania during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Andrea Tompa: Omerta. Book of Silence. Novel. Translated from the Hungarian by Terézia Mora. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022. 954 pages, 34 euros.
(Photo: Suhrkamp Verlag)
At first they were still the majority in the city, but their rights at the university and in everyday life were increasingly being restricted. They are not mere victims because many of them join in, like Vilmos. The soothing rhetoric with which he describes the vice-like attachment of the power apparatus in the era of party leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej cannot hide the hardships of forced collectivization, the imprisonment or liquidation of dissidents. Among them is one of the rose grower’s closest friends, Lali, who, unlike himself, is a staunch socialist and a Jew like many of his fellow sufferers who have been thrown into prison. Vilmos will fail the test this friendship represents for him.
This exam is closely related to the Hungarian revolution in autumn 1956 connected. She is the novel’s historic core of embers, radiating to all the protagonists.
Terezia Mora has made it possible for the four voices of this idiosyncratic, exemplary novel about the establishment of a repressive regime in the European provinces to be heard in German. She grew up in a multilingual world herself. As a translator of “Harmonia Caelestis” by Peter Esterházy she is familiar with the challenges of polyphonic novels. She added an index to the German text with the terms and place names of the original, which she occasionally left as they are. The distance of the portrayed world remains, but at the same time the translation brings the tones of the protagonists into German, including the older layers of language, which include fairy tales, chronicles and pious rosaries and a sometimes provocative humility.
Is there a utopia in this novel? Yes, but their redemption is already missed when it begins. It is neither socialism nor the past or future of Hungarians in Transylvania. It is a rose called “Peace” for which, like the rose breeder himself, there is a historical model. She haunts the obsessions of Vilmos Décsi, who carefully studies the catalogs of his colleagues in France, Germany and England. The rose “Peace” fascinates him even before he knows why it bears its name. He has received an offshoot, it should flourish in his world. Through his sophisticated, bourgeois lover, Ms. M., he learns that at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, every participant was presented with the “Peace” rose bred by the Frenchman Francis Meilland. Now his obsession is complete, at the end of his notes she is “the biggest rose in the world” for him, the world-historical glorification of his life as a breeder. The fact that Andrea Tompa has a sense of humor is expressed in many places in the novel. This is his most sarcastic punchline.
Andrea Tompa and Terézia Mora as translators have been nominated with “Omertà” for the International Literature Prize of the House of World Cultures, the most interesting German literary prize. There are six novels on the shortlist, including Can Xue’s “Love in the New Millennium” and Adania Shibli’s “A Minority”. The award will be presented in Berlin on Wednesday, June 22nd.