Mowa chleba

This novel takes place in Crăiești, a Transylvanian village whose former barracks have been transformed into an orphanage. The facility is staffed by village women who come down the road every day and cross a moat to reach the nest of evil, as they describe it. To avoid being infected with evil, they must never make eye contact with the orphans, its permanent residents. Children here are fed on pig’s milk and human blood, and no one crosses the gates of the orphanage except the employees. The book revolves around the women’s lot and daily struggles – with work, with their bodies and the bodies of others. Their portrayal gives us a complete image of the grim determinism of a world where the divide between the enclave of evil and normalised everyday village life turns out to be false, a fact skilfully problematised by the author. Life outside the facility is a real-life fantasy of collectivist social engineering: authoritarian Romania in the 1980s, where the fundamental task was to prop up the birth rate, and as a result orphanages were opened on a mass scale. Here there are no easy differences of landscape, nor unambiguous and rapidly judged characters who might demand a reader’s empathy. Suspending the dictates of realism, Łapczyńska disturbs our stereotype of children, women and animals as victims of male perpetrators. In this book, each person experiences and commits some form of violence, fundamentally borne by bodies that are exploited based on the situation, but in keeping with how society categorises them.