A Posthumous Interview with Willy Schuster
Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 20 – ABYSS
October 2021
Earth tumbles down into the hole. Four or five people are shovelling it hurriedly, filling without ceremony, so that the effect is more like a landslide than a burial. The coffin is soon covered up, its gleaming metal fittings gone. Someone strums an acoustic guitar and sings as the camera swings around to give me, viewing this at home, the briefest glimpse of greenery, black-clad family members I may or may not have met years ago holding each other tenderly, and then it lifts towards the sky. The last image that I see is sunlight cracking through clouds.
I am watching this on the internet, Willy Schuster’s funeral, because it happened a year ago, far away, and I did not know. Last week I tried to contact him with hopes of getting an interview, and after hearing no response I reached out to his family. To my shock I learned that he had died, quite suddenly, of colon cancer in May last year, at the age of 53. ‘Apărătorul tăranului român a trecut în neființă’, read an obituary I found on a sustainable farming website: ‘The defender of the Romanian peasant has passed away.’
It’s eight years since I met the defender of the Romanian peasant, in the village of Moșna in the heart of Transylvania, a place that is sometimes called Europe’s last medieval landscape. I didn’t know him long, but he left a strong impression. We only spent a few days together, but by the end of that short time I was standing beside him blocking a road to protest the planned construction of a gold mine in a place I’d never been, and, along with my mother, committing small but systematic acts of sabotage against Romania’s biggest geological prospecting company. From what I know of him, Willy tended to have this effect. He was a large, large-hearted man, and he had a lot of friends.
He was a large, large-hearted man, and he had a lot of enemies. When I heard that he had died, my first thought was that he had been killed, like countless other peasant activists around the world, from Brazil to the Philippines, fighting to save their land from being quarried, fracked or mined. Romania might not be the front line of such violence, yet, but the greed is just as fierce and the corruption runs as deep. Willy made powerful enemies.
It started with orange cables.
That’s what I see when I think of him: thick orange cables draped around a man who stands on a green hillside, the village’s tiled roofs below. Two sturdy legs, two brawny arms, a kindly, pugnacious face. The blood is not visible, but he told me there was blood. The image is from a photograph he sent me after we had met, when I was trying to pitch his story to a paper that never published it, and in the way of photographs I remember it more clearly than I remember him in real life, when we talked outside his home with his wife and daughter sitting nearby, horses, dogs, chickens, geese, the Roma girl they had taken on to help out around the farm, rose petal jam on the table and a sturdy loaf of bread, a bowl of cherries from their trees. Was there greenish homemade wine? Probably there was wine. These are the things I remember when I try to remember him, along with meadows filled with flowers and beech woods ankle-deep in mast, along with chanting in the streets and the flashing of blue lights, because they were all part of him.
I suppose he’s part of them now.
It started with orange cables, but before the cables was the day when hundreds of plastic ribbons appeared all around his farm, attached to trees and bushes. ‘I didn’t know what they were, but I had a bad feeling. It meant that some stranger wanted to interfere with my land. So I gathered them up and threw them away. That was the first episode.’
These are words from the interview I recorded when we met. I’d hoped to hear him add to them now, to learn how the situation has developed in the past eight years and ask him questions I was too shy to think of asking at the time – questions like ‘do you feel hope?’ or ‘were you scared?’ or ‘have you won?’ – but of course it’s too late now. So these words will have to do. ‘That was the first episode.’ There was anger in his voice. His chair creaked as he shifted weight. His wife Lavinia poured tea. A chestnut mare stamped and shook her mane as he told his story.
Two months later, the orange cables appeared in his fields and orchards, snaking all around his land. They appeared overnight. ‘They were plugged into the ground every 35 metres, with discs of some ceramic material pushed into the earth about 20 centimetres deep. My family wanted to weed the fields but the horse couldn’t walk, the weeding machine didn’t work, because of the cables everywhere. Then my daughter went out riding and her horse stumbled on a cable. She almost had an accident and fell. By this time, I was very angry.’
‘I thought that anyone who trespasses on my land trespasses on other people’s land. So I pulled up the cables and took them to my barn. It was difficult work, and I had some cuts on my arms and shoulders, blood was flowing. Later I thought to myself: “I have already shed my blood for this.”’
I look at the photograph again. Actually, there are two. In the first, described above, you can see half of Willy’s face, his grey moustache and jutting nose, but in the second almost none of him is visible: he is a walking mass of tangled orange plastic wires with only two feet sticking out, entirely enwrapped. It looks like a post-industrial take on the pagan mummers’ folk costumes that do the rounds of villages in festivals from here to the Balkans, masked and horned and clanging cowbells to ward off evil spirits.
The evil spirits soon arrived, in the form of a fleet of Jeeps. The men inside were employees of Prospectiuni SA, a domestic energy prospecting company who conduct projects, according to their website, in Europe, Asia and Africa, and operate – someone feels it necessary to state up front – ‘in accordance with legal requirements.’ Their client was the oil giant Chevron. The ceramic discs, Willy soon learned, contained explosives for seismic data acquisition, a method of surveying the earth for hydrocarbons and minerals. They were here to assess the land’s viability for fracking.
The men asked where their cables were. Willy said he had put them in his barn. The men demanded to have them back. Willy told them no.
The prospectors went away but almost immediately their Jeeps appeared on the hill again. ‘Then the cables were back in place. In just 15 minutes! So I went and pulled them up again. They were shouting at me, threatening me. I ignored them as if they were air. Then the local police arrived, they ordered me to give the cables back. I refused. I was determined to block the process.’ While Lavinia painted an old bedsheet with the words ‘Țărani împotriva gazelor de șist!’ – ‘Peasants against shale gas!’ – next to the symbol of a pitchfork, Willy blocked the only road to the village with his truck. ‘When local villagers wanted to pass, we moved the truck aside. But for intruders and criminals, I said “no more.”’
I would like to go back further now, because this is an old, old story. It is older than capitalism, which came to Romania in 1990, older than the hard-line state communism that preceded it, older than the empires of Austro-Hungarians, Ottomans and others who sought to control this fertile land between high mountains. I would like to go back to the Romans, though the story is older than that. In AD 101 the Emperor Trajan launched an invasion of the land that was then called Dacia, burning its capital to the ground in order to gain control over the region’s rich gold mines. He built a road called the Via Traiana to get troops in and take gold out – a kind of Keystone XL pipeline of the ancient world – and for hundreds of years the conquered province was exploited for its minerals. One of the most productive mines was at Roșia Montană, ‘Red Mountain’.
Salvați Roșia Montană, ‘Save Roșia Montană’, are the words on the T-shirt Willy wears when I interview him. The slogan seems 2,000 years too late, but the struggle goes on. Modern-day Roșia Montană, a hundred miles west of his home, is the proposed site of what would be Europe’s largest open-cast gold mine. Operated by a Canadian mining company called Gabriel Resources, the plans involve the demolition of a village – the company has been buying up houses from one ageing farmer at a time – the removal of four mountaintops, the redirection of a river, and the creation of a 45-hectare lake of cyanide, the toxic by-product of a process called ‘cyanidation’. It would also destroy, ironically, the original tunnels made by the Romans. The year in which I visited Moșna saw a wave of mass street protests against these ecocidal plans, some of the largest since the chaos that followed the fall of communism, when miners were drafted in by the government to batter protestors with pickaxe handles. That’s why I found myself in the nearby town of Sibiu, following Willy’s broad back as he roared and waved a Romanian flag, learning chants, blocking roads and hoping I wouldn’t be arrested.
I wasn’t arrested, and neither was Willy, at least not on that occasion. But he was certainly well known to the local authorities. The weekly protests he organised had quickly grown from dozens to hundreds of small-scale farmers and students, combining the local struggle against fracking with national resistance to the mine, and general fury about the corruption of the political class. The ruling party, which had been against the mine while in opposition, was now drafting extraordinary new laws to enable mining companies to expropriate private property, which Romanians saw for the land grab it so clearly was. These demonstrations made the government nervous. In the recent history of much of the former Eastern Bloc – including Romania’s neighbours Hungary and Bulgaria – there is a strong correlation between environmental activism and mass movements that have led to the fall of governments. If ordinary people can put their bodies in the path of bulldozers, they can put them in the path of tanks and riot police.
‘Protest is still a new phenomenon here,’ Willy said, pouring wine or tea, or slicing bread or adjusting his hat – I can’t remember which. ‘Communism had a big effect, and people are only just learning to stop being afraid of the government, to understand they have a voice. Since coming out against fracking I have been harassed by the police, threatened with arrest. They stop me in the street and say “Why are you behaving like this? Why do you have to cause trouble? You should keep quiet.”’
He was not a quiet man.
‘End of May he passed away among his wonderful children in a very glorious way,’ Lavinia wrote to me. ‘He sang until the end!’ It sounds like a fitting end to a life that was full of noise. In 2009 he helped establish Eco Ruralis, a small-scale farming association linked to the international peasants’ movement La Vía Campesina, connecting his small patch of Transylvania with anti-extractivist struggles in Oaxaca, Gujarat and East Timor. He travelled to the European Parliament to argue that free-market policies were destroying Romania’s small farms, and – deft at social media, despite his innocuous claims that ‘I am just a simple peasant,’ delivered with a twinkle in the eye – was a voluble defender of his people’s rights.
To many Western Europeans the word ‘peasant’ is either an insult or an anachronistic term that belongs in the feudal past. Willy, however, was not just a peasant but a Transylvanian Saxon. There are only 13,000 of them left, descendants of ethnic German settlers who arrived in the Middle Ages, building strong-walled villages with churches that were fortified – like the church in Moșna, with its steeple like a castle keep – to form a first line of defence against invaders from the east, withstanding Mongols, Tatars and Huns (many even survived the modernising ravages of Ceaușescu). After the war, the Soviets transported Saxon men of working age to labour camps, where many died, and after decades of state-sponsored persecution under communism, tens of thousands left the country when the regime fell. The ones who stayed, and the ones who returned from exile in Germany – as Willy did after the Revolution – must, I imagine, have been especially stubborn and strong-willed.
Like the fortified church at Moșna, built to withstand sieges.
The standoff with Prospectiuni SA lasted for several days. More Jeeps arrived, labelled SECURITY, and Willy and others on the farm were threatened and insulted. His farmworker, another young Roma from the village, didn’t dare to help, fearing that it would end in violence. ‘This is in the national interest,’ he was told. ‘Relax, don’t oppose progress.’ He reported the men to the police for trespass, calling 112 repeatedly, but rather than assisting him the police said he had stolen the cables and demanded that he give them back. Eventually he did.
‘But only after the company signed a document admitting they trespassed on my land, so I had proof in court,’ he told me. (‘I am just a simple peasant…’) ‘Now they don’t put cables on my land anymore, but they put them around my land, on my neighbours’ property. That’s just as bad. I’m surrounded.’
I saw the evidence of this when I walked near Moșna. I was with my mother, who I had brought to Romania because I knew she would love it there, and we followed a path from Willy’s farm past fields of lucerne, maize and wheat, through meadows bright with wildflowers, and climbed into the steep, wooded hills that lay beyond. I had never – still have never – seen beech woods quite so beautiful. We wandered that afternoon in a kind of reverence. Deep drifts of fallen leaves lay in cool, secluded dells. The forest smelled of earth and loam. We gathered beechnuts in our hands. And then we saw the ribbons.
They were just as he’d described, attached to branches, bushes, trees, laying the route for the orange cables and their seismic detonators. They fluttered gently in the breeze like slender prayer flags. If the men found shale gas down there, as they clearly expected to, roads would be bulldozed through these hills, the trees around us would be felled, drills would bore into the earth and water from some local river injected at extreme pressure to violently fracture seams of rock. The earth beneath our feet would shake. The woodpeckers would fall silent. When I think about this now, I see an image from the home page of Prospectiuni SA’s website, which – as I try to piece together what I knew of Willy’s life – I have become morbidly fascinated with: a computer-generated graphic that shows a man in a hard hat and high-vis jacket literally peeling back the earth to reveal, beneath the topsoil, textbook layers of minerals just waiting to be exploited. The valley behind him is forested, like the woods through which we walked, but white prospecting vehicles – the Jeeps that came to Willy’s farm – are positioned here and there, the scouts of an incoming army. I think about the vanished Dacians and the Roman hunger for their gold. I think about lakes of cyanide.
The ribbon snapped easily.
I can’t remember whether it was me or my mother who took the first, but it was swiftly done, and after that came the second, and the third, and the fourth. Soon we had collected scores, with thousands more to go. For a couple of hours, we crisscrossed the woods, gathering them one by one, stuffing them into our pockets, and, when those were full, inside our clothes. We can’t have got them all, but we took all we could see. And as we walked back through the village we passed a Prospectiuni SA Jeep parked outside the little shop, where brawny men smoked cigarettes and sipped from bottles of Ursus beer, watching us go by lazily. They did not see the ribbons.
Willy was in the farmyard and we said we had a present for him. We heaped the plastic in a pile.
I can still see his grin.
Eight years on, and the Saxon village of Moșna has not been fracked. In 2015, Chevron suspended its plans for shale gas extraction in Romania, though it still holds licences to prospect in the country. From what I can tell, these licences are for areas in the south and east, along the Black Sea coast, far from the green heartland of Willy’s Transylvania, so perhaps his truculence, his bullishness, his strength of heart – wrapped from head to toe in orange cables he had torn from the earth – succeeded in driving the evil spirits beyond his borders.
Perhaps, in our own tiny way, we also helped to break the siege.
As for Roșia Montană, with its tumbling rivers and forested peaks and the ancient tunnels the Romans dug, it exists in a state of limbo. But limbo is better than cyanide. Limbo means life. The building of Europe’s largest gold mine and all the death that it entails has, for now, been stalled as a political liability. In 2015, when its plans were delayed, the mining company announced its intention to take Romania to court, suing one of Europe’s poorest countries for $4.4 billion in damages. Governments have come and gone, each failing to resolve things. But, over the past few years, new families – veterans of the protests of 2013 – have started moving to the village and doing up houses there, so the area is becoming home to a young, determined population. It is hard not to see hope in that.
Willy Schuster, though, has died. He sang until the end.
‘If people like me keep quiet,’ he told me all those years ago, ‘the peasants will have no voice. I have a responsibility to shout. The issue is not just about my land, it’s about everybody’s land.’
I don’t remember saying goodbye to him. I only remember his daughter passing by in a horse-drawn trap, sitting backwards facing me, smiling and raising her hand in farewell as she went.