The narrator of the novel is one of her roommates, soon herself an object of political suspicion, so that when she finally leaves the university, packing her pot of mascara, she finds an unpleasant surprise in her bed: ”When I picked up the blanket to pull off the cover, I found a pig’s ear in the middle of the sheet. Lola, unprepared for city life by her village childhood, has brutal sexual encounters, hangs herself with a belt and is posthumously expelled from the Communist Party. The saliva dried up and the soot crumbled onto their cheeks.” But an hour later gray gaps began to crack open in the eyelashes. The toothpicks scraped against their eyelids, their lashes grew black and thick. Six girls spat into the pots and stirred the soot with toothpicks until the black paste grew sticky. In a Communist country short on consumer goods, Lola and her roommates dream of ”whisper-thin” nylon stockings while making do with what they have: ”Under the pillows in the beds were six pots of mascara. “HERTA MULLER’S third novel begins in a women’s university dormitory in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, where Lola, a poor girl from the provinces, has come to study Russian.
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