Raised my eyes. Found myself on a chair placed to the right of a medium-sized table.
Here, the narrator allows himself to flow through several states that include almost simultaneously recalling events from high school and from his working life, while also entering a hallucinatory state or a timeless dream of walking forever by the sea, only to find himself back in his office, seated on a chair. Talk of confusion would indeed be justified.
In this way, as if it were science fiction (which it certainly is not), Captives exists as a world in which versions of reality melt into each other in a continuous series of visions and revisions. Entering Captives’ first section, “She,” for the first time, the reader will be surprised to find the narrator/protagonist going upstairs to the apartment of Monica Smântănescu, Professor of French and Music. He makes two approaches, and each time the apartment is different. On the first try, his visit goes like this:
. . The building’s staircase: step, riser, step, riser — chunks of ice. The final threshold, the wooden door covered in arabesques, angels sculpted from edge to edge on its wide margins. The door opens toward books heaped on heavy iron shelves, vases with slender flowers, a narrow table, a tall chair, a piano raising its oblique tail, the ceiling painted with pastel squares, the slippery parquet: everything accumulated with the serenity of a fairy tale, until chaos imposes itself, until the path from the street corner must be taken again, killing reveries, reestablishing the brutality of things, dispelling mystifications, until the street reasserts its filth. .
On the second attempt, better anchored in reality, the apartment turns out to be a pigsty. Similarly, there are to two versions of the narrator’s initial meeting with Ms. Smântănescu: they meet on a train — or is it a boat? By the third section, “I,” the reader will have to decide if a woman known only as Captain Zubcu’s daughter is either (a) a mystical avatar of the narrator’s sister Dona, long dead in Transnistria, or (b) an office girl he seduces and abandons, though given the novel’s deeper themes there’s no reason why she can’t be both.
Captives is remarkable for saying everything and nothing: there is no historical backstory. We never hear that the action takes place in Romania — the country is not named. We are not told that the protagonist’s family is Jewish. Joseph Stalin’s name is not mentioned once, although he is referenced in the subtle details: the narrator’s show trial is Stalinist; the narrator stumbles into a political meeting where we are given to understand that the attendees chant Sta-lin, Sta-lin; and the narrator attends a mass outdoor commemoration in honor of the Beloved Leader at the time of his death.
This language of omission obviously owes something to the climate of censorship in which Captives first appeared. It’s also a safe bet that Captives’ omissions wouldn’t have pulled the wool over anyone’s eyes, which more than suggests that the language of omission is a strategic, literary act.
Even though Captives was written to appear in communist Romania, even though its characters are Romanian, and even though it passed through Romanian censorship, still, Captives is not only (or primarily) a novel about Romania, or the Holocaust, or communist dictatorships. It is these things, of course, but freed of the explicit by omission, Captives creates its own world and can be read on its own terms. It demands that we experience life in a world of things unsaid, which makes silence one of the “loudest” voices in the book. Deafened by silence, we experience captivity, and silence becomes the gadfly of protest.
If silence is maddening, so are the implied and the tacit. They play games of “I dare you” and “now you see it, now you don’t.” At the level of conversation, Captives’ language is quicksand.
The office spy, Misha (who is presumably in the pay of the Securitate), plagues our protagonist with seemingly inoffensive remarks. At one point they engage in the following non-dialogue:
— I’ve been thinking, everything they’re saying about Kennedy is a bunch of shit. Robert, the brother, is hiding the photographs of the autopsy, and saying they’ll only be revealed in ’71 because they’re
horrible
?
Unobtrusive voice, fixed gaze, astonished.
— What exactly can be so horrible? If it was Oswald who shot him or the other guy, who cares? What’s so horrible?
He asks and answers, poses and resolves dilemmas meant to provoke his interlocutor.
— It’s clear that Johnson shot him. Otherwise, there’d be nothing horrible at all.
What does the informer want his interlocutor to say? Something about the Kremlin’s responsibility for the Kennedy assassination? Whatever Misha says is untrustworthy, not least because it’s incomprehensible. It’s impossible to find the core of his remarks. Silence is the only safe response.
At another point, the weakened, self-doubting narrator attempts to resign from his office job. His boss, Caba, meets this crisis with apparent cordiality, but Caba’s cordiality seems entirely suspect: “The old games of cordiality would have to be maintained at any price, along with the well-known lines of attack, defense, and encirclement. He knew how to engage the old laws of cordiality.” The most the protagonist can expect of Caba is the entrapping, famously “wooden” language of communist rhetoric: “This formerly eminent colleague should have been the light of his generation. Through what evil, unsupervised game have all those hopes and promising signs come to naught?” To answer these questions with their tacit threat of political risk (and possible prison) would amount to walking deliberately through a minefield. The only answer: silence or flight. Our narrator chooses flight. There’s more than that, though. The unwieldy, wooden question, which the narrator attributes to Caba in the first section of this novel, circumnavigates its true answer, which only becomes clear to the reader in Captives’ third section. The narrator has betrayed his potential to rise inside the system by damaging himself in the course of an initial game of rhetorical circumlocution at the show trial. His rhetorical swoops and dives rescue Caba and result in the destruction of his own mental stability, but the core of the two characters’ relationship remains painfully locked away from discussion. It hovers between them as a closed center around which they revolve.
Ordinary communications aren’t what they seem either. A bedtime story submitted to a (then real) radio program for children holds fanciful and deliberately idiotic disguised messages about disappointed love. A love letter written in connection with an ad placed in the personal columns is a tissue of lies. Our protagonist’s parents’ communication with their son about a name for his new sister are implicit denials of the Transnistrian past — they insist that the boy cannot remember his murdered sister, whom he remembers perfectly well. The real center of each discussion and interaction is seen and unseen, shut away, so that all talk and action revolve around these “closed centers.” I use this term advisedly. It comes from the novel, and it belongs to a key figure: the trope of the spiral staircase. Romanian cities abound in winding staircases, and Captives’ natives ascend and descend them constantly. Here is the narrator going up stairs:
The high iron gate strikes its latch; the narrow, serpentine, spiral staircase devours itself. Hand on the cold metal balustrade, the climber coils within himself. One flight up. Again, the steps rotate uniformly again in the shape of a fan: a point flowing at an even rate along the radius of a circle. Rotating evenly, slowly around the circumference, dizzied by the curved trajectories, the climber’s body turns in on itself toward a painfully closed center.