KINDERLAND

Liliana Corobca is a writer and researcher of communist censorship in Romania. She was born in the Republic of Moldova and is the author of the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for debut fiction. She is also the author of the novels The Censor’s Notebook (Seven Stories Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, A Year in Paradise (2005), Kinderland (2013), and The Old Maids’ Empire (2015). She has received grants and artists’ residencies in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland.

Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of The Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.

“In this dark fairy tale, livestock and prowling strays coexist with absent adults, rituals, and the wisdom of children. Yet Cristina’s energetic anecdotes evade bleakness, forming a captivating vision of a rural outpost in modern Moldova. Here, survival depends on clear-eyed practicality. Amid such trials, the narrow bridge between childhood and adolescence still affords momentary pleasures for which Cristina can be grateful. Kinderland is a literary novel about growing up amid economic decline; in it, a savvy girl lives according to her love for her family.” —Foreword

“With a gifted and incisive eye, Corobca ably interweaves the innocent gaze of childhood with the harsh reality of the adult world in this startling, evocative novel about those who are literally and figuratively left behind in the global economy.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

“What a paradox! Kinderland is a novel about sadness and poverty, but without it European literature would be sadder and poorer.” —Filip Florian, author of Little Fingers

“This is such a tender, searching book, that masterfully reveals the complex consciousness of childhood without ever resorting to cliche. A premise that seems dystopian–a land of virtually no adults–turns out to be harrowingly real, but real too are the triumphs and small joys of Cristina and her kin. It’s rare for a novel to be both devastating and soft at the same time, but Corobca’s astute rendering of youthful longing, along with Cure’s deft translation, deserves a special spot in the powerful subgenre I like to think of as True Childhood.” —Kristen Iskandrian, author of Motherest

“A truly lovely and needed book. Corobca’s voice, is so balanced and unmatched–tender and thrilling, quiet and funny, painful and wonderful–in an excellent translation.” —Emily Tarr, bookseller at Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

The tick was stuck to his stomach, next to his belly button, sucking the child’s blood. The girl, more terrified by her brother’s shrieks than by that black dot, had gone for help. Normally, the howls would have brought out, if not half the village, at least the entire neighborhood on the outskirts of the village, but now, no one came. She could’ve taken out the tick, but what if the head got stuck there and it grew another body that was even bigger . . . or, God forbid, it went completely inside his skin and lodged there, where no one could get it out anymore and her brother would die, sucked dry by the tick.

At first, the third child, the youngest brother, who was often hit or mistreated by the other one, looked on with a certain sense of satisfaction. He kept circling his older brother in search of what was making him cry and yell so insistently. He looked around, up, down, to see whether he didn’t also have cause to let out a wail, but he didn’t see anything. The fact that Dan’s shirt was lifted, his belly naked and exposed to the sun, didn’t impress the younger brother at all, it didn’t scare him either. The black dot his brother was hunched over so tragically didn’t interest him since he couldn’t understand how a brother so big and strong could be scared by a little black dot clinging to his belly. Then the younger little boy disappeared.

The girl went out on the street. She could’ve called the neighbors, but they weren’t home at this hour. The grandmother of a classmate lived farther down, but she probably wasn’t home either and, in any case, her eyesight wasn’t good enough to get the tick out, head and all. The girl started walking down the street, in search of the right person. She also called out to Uncle Vasile, but all the dogs in the neighborhood answered her instead. At the barking of the dogs in unison, nothing happened inside the houses, no one slammed the doors or gates, no one opened them to see who was calling and why. In general, when someone called out on their street, they all heard and at least someone would answer: The person you’re looking for isn’t home, they’ve just left for the vineyard, to visit their godfather, or somewhere else. At the end of the street, she spotted a mother washing clothes in a courtyard. She didn’t know her name. She made noise as she opened the gate and the woman looked at her questioningly.

— Hello. Would you mind taking out a tick for us?

The woman wrinkled her nose in disgust and answered:

— I don’t take out ticks.

And the woman quickly went inside the house.

The girl stopped next to the well. Maybe someone would get thirsty and come by for some water. She would stay there and wait.

Meanwhile, the youngest brother brought the other brother his favorite toy. The brother with the tick ignored him. He couldn’t care less about toys right now.

It seemed like Dan would never stop crying. In the past, he had killed insects like that, which his dad had taken out of the sheep’s wool. His father had said that if you don’t take them out, ticks suck all the blood out of an animal until there’s nothing left of it. Dan imagined how the hungry tick would suck up all his blood until it became a kind of big balloon and he, small and withered, a bag of bones, would helplessly flutter his arms and legs, while the tick would start floating until it was high up in the sky. Hundreds of ticks, inflated with the blood of children, floated in the clear, smiling sky, while the scrawny, dried-out kids stuck to the ruthless bugs cried. Dan looked at his tick which, to be honest, was no bigger than half a pinky fingernail, in fact, it wasn’t even as big as a bean, but all the same he felt as if he didn’t have a drop of blood left in him.

Marcel had remembered about the beautiful apple, which he had found the day before yesterday and hidden so that he could eat it by himself, without sharing with his brother and sister. The neighbor’s apple tree had produced fruit this year and sometimes an apple would fall into their garden. Summer apples, sweet and with pink flesh. Dan, when he saw the apple, made a gesture as if to say: What’s your apple to me when I’m in pain! Then Marcel, out of brotherly solidarity, started to whimper as well.

A horse-drawn cart stopped next to the well. A man drew out a bucket of water, drank some, and then wet his horse’s nose. He looked back at the girl staring at him. Tall, skinny, ugly, almost toothless, thin and graying hair, big floppy ears, he could’ve played the part of the grim reaper if he had kept a scythe in his cart. The horse was also skinny, it had once been gray but now, dirty, it was an earthy greenish color, with long yellow teeth, as if to make up for its master.

— Would you mind taking out a tick?

— Not at all. Where is it?

— There, said Cristina as she pointed toward the gate.

— Whose daughter are you?

— My dad’s Victor Dumitrache.

— Well, well, you’re Vichiuşa’s daughter? I used to give you cart rides when you were little. Back then I had a strong, sleek stallion . . . And your pa’s gone off to make long money. The girl nodded. And he left you at the mercy of the ticks. The girl nodded again.

When they saw the man come in, the two brothers went silent, forgetting to cry.

— Where are you, tick?

Then he looked at the apple.

— What, you don’t want your apple? Let’s give it to the pony, he’ll gobble it right up!

The smaller boy again handed the apple to the bigger one, who, given the choice between him or the horse eating it, decided to take the apple without saying a word. When it came down to it, the man was scarier to him than the tick.

— What, you call that a tick, boy, it’s as small as an ant! Lemme at it!

Then he said to the girl:

— Do you have brandy or odikolon?

She did, and she went to get the alcohol. She thought to herself: He wants to drink it, get drunk, and toss my brothers over the fence.

The man approached the afflicted child. He fiercely gritted his few teeth at the tick, a gesture which made the littlest one run behind the house. He poked his head out from behind a corner after a moment because he didn’t hear anything and he was curious.

In the blink of an eye, the man squeezed the swollen tick between his blackened fingernails and threw it onto the ground, looking carefully at the boy’s belly.

— I got it out, head and all, he said with satisfaction. Now step on it.

Because the boy didn’t move, he called over the little one:

— Hey, come here, little snot-nose, come look at your brother’s tick. But the little one didn’t accept the invitation either. The girl approached with a small bottle, out of which the man poured some brandy into his palm and then rubbed it onto the boy’s belly.

— Okay, you step on it, he said to the girl.

The girl conscientiously put her foot down on the bug and jumped on it a few times.

— And you say your pa’s not home.

The children nodded their heads.

— So he’s off working. Three kids are no laughing matter. And your ma—she’s working too. They had you and then scattered every which way, said the man as he headed to the gate. My woman’s gone too, so are my kids. I’m all by my lonesome, lucky I got my horse. Come on, filly, let’s go home.

The noise of the wheels could be heard for a little while, and then silence.

The girl, too, poured a little bit of alcohol from the bottle into her palm and rubbed the belly of the child, who was sitting gravely, without moving a muscle, looking somewhere off into the distance. Of course, if Dad had been home, no tick would’ve stuck to him, it wouldn’t have gone under his skin. He felt a kind of dissatisfaction that everything had ended so simply and quickly, when he had had an excuse to be unhappy, coddled, and important.