Growing Mould During the Rise of Fascism by Raluca David

In Raluca David's life writing piece, colonies of mould settle into her family's various apartments – from the UK to Germany – mirroring a growingly hostile, anti-immigrant atmosphere.

This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

‘This one is dead already.’ 

I stare at my husband and feel the weight of my toddler pulling down on me. It’s late in the evening, and we have just arrived to live in Berlin with two nursery-aged children and two suitcases.  

‘You too, you too!’ my toddler asks to be lifted to see better. She still calls herself ‘you’.  

The patch of black blossoms – dead, in my husband’s opinion – is right above the bed in the only bedroom in this flat. Since there is no toddler bed and we are, yet again, in transit, the toddler and I will share this bed while my husband and son will occupy the extensible couch. The mould is right above where my head and my daughter’s head will lie, for us both to inhale its spores every night as we face and seek each other.  

‘It won’t harm us,’ my husband says, and I feel the panic rising in my chest. I want to believe him but I suspect the contrary. I don’t check who is right until much later, after we eventually leave this place.  

But this night, we have just arrived; the flat is unheated and uncarpeted, we have few clothes with us, and the landlord’s son, who lives in the flat opposite, has warned us against letting moisture rise above 65%. We exchange a look, my husband and I. It does not sound promising.  

I have lived as an immigrant in Britain for fifteen years. Many things changed during this time: Britain became warmer in climate, colder towards immigrants. My country and Britain stopped sharing the same Union. I stopped having only one ‘home country’ and started having two. In tandem, my relationship changed with one British housemate in particular: the mould.   

When I arrived aged nineteen to Britain from Romania to get a better education, I knew only one word for mould: mucegai. I associated mucegai with grandparents’ basements and with a poem Romanian Tudor Arghezi wrote in 1931 in response to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. The poem, 'Flori de mucigai', speaks of mould that became words.

I wrote them with my nail on the plaster, 

On a wall of empty cracks, 

In the darkness, in solitude. 

Yet mucegai was contemporary in Britain. I found it growing in humans’ living quarters. It became a joking matter between me and my three all-female, all-German labmates in the neuroscience lab at Oxford where I was doing my DPhil. 

‘British people don’t know how to build properly,’ one commented.   

We’d laugh at the expense of our adoptive country and our British supervisor would join the banter: ‘I know, right?’ He’d explain: a country covered in Victorian houses had trouble renewing its living standards.  

We took for granted how British self-deprecating humour made space for us to speak our minds, to feel welcome. Eventually, one of my labmates bought one of these Victorian terraced two-up two-downs.  

‘Won’t you return to Germany?’  

‘I feel freer here,’ she said.  

My other German labmate nodded: ‘I don’t think I’d adapt back to Germany either.’ I put it down to intellectual immigrants’ appetite for adventure. But I would remember their words ten years later in Berlin.   

In Oxford, mould was relatively respectful. It only ever came close to our stored luggage inside the cupboard under the stairs, in the ground floor flat my husband’s college housed us in when our first child was born.   

Things escalated slightly when we moved to Scotland. We were in disbelief to see pinprick dots appearing on windows. How could I raise my son in such conditions? I had been allergic to dust as a child and did not want allergies returning. We bulk ordered a six pack of mould removal sprays and used them monthly, yet didn’t get through more than two in our time there. I complained to my best Scottish friend. 

She laughed: ‘But there’s always a bit of mould, isn’t there?’  

Eventually, our unwanted pinprick housemates moved into our car and took over. Our boy always snacked on the way from nursery and, when we once left the car unused for two weeks, we returned to find it completely colonised. It was on the boy’s seat, on the front seats, the car floor, in the trunk.  

Looking back, it’s fantastically funny. But then we had a newborn daughter, and when we had to drive her to the hospital screaming with an ear infection caused by a respiratory virus, we drove with the windows fully open and me raging.   

When the cost-of-living crisis came, and when I was accepted back into Oxford for a Masters in Creative Writing, I urged my husband to relocate us to Europe so I could afford to study. The University of Vienna made him an offer. Before our grand move to Vienna, we packed up for a six-month research visit to Oslo. We were in Oslo when Vienna postponed the start date by half a year. It meant our whole family would be without a home or an income. We hastily decided he’d take up another Visiting Professorship in Berlin to fill the gap. It proved to be the worst decision we’d ever made.  

For us, Britain had sometimes felt awkward, but never hostile. I knew we were lucky: Brexit passed by our ear in the Oxford bubble. We were white Europeans on academic incomes, part of a still solid middle class. The torching of Romanians’ houses in Northern Ireland was far into the future. 

We encountered more hostility in Germany before we even set foot there than in our fifteen years in Britain. It started with the refusal by HR personnel to issue my husband’s contract. They would tell his employer they were working on it. Then, the day before he was due to fly to London for his visa, they’d say they never heard of it. This repeated three times; three visa appointments were missed until the Dean of Science personally intervened. Even then, the contract was issued for a Russian citizen — my husband, born in Russia, had provided a British passport.  

A Romanian friend living in Berlin told me Germany had been boycotting Russian academics since the war. Yet I could not square that with our life: my husband had spent a total of three months in Russia in the past thirty years. We decided to give HR the benefit of the doubt.  

Now, the night we reach Berlin, we offer the ‘dead’ mould the same benefit of the doubt, as if it is a living host we should be polite towards. After we put our children to sleep, I cry, folding my body onto the lukewarm radiator. It’s been several hours since I’ve set it on maximum, but the radiators have blockers that control how far ‘maximum’ can reach.  

‘Is this even legal?’ In Britain, tenants’ rights are protected, I don’t say out loud. I suspect in Germany they are too, but can we access any protection? 

A few days in, I receive the first email from the landlady. It notifies us that she and her husband have walked by the flat and noticed condensation; this is unacceptable, it may cause mould and by signing the contract we have committed to cleaning condensation away. She sends us photos of water damage caused by previous tenants and tells us how expensive it was to fix. 

There is certainly no mention of mould or condensation in the contract, but I am in an unfamiliar country with children whose kindergarten vouchers are tied to this address, as is our ‘identity’ registration in Berlin, as are our health insurance applications. I don’t find myself in the position to protest.  

The landlord comes over while I am alone. He hands me a wiper and cloth and teaches me how to clean. I nod obligingly and feel foolish when I don’t manage to ‘accept’ his number sharing invitation on my iPhone. No, like this, he explains.  

He sends me a Google link detailing what condensation is. We internalise it as our responsibility that mould should not grow here. We monitor air moisture daily.  

A week later, I notice a pain in a mole on my right foot toe. Its colour appears to have gone translucent; it has multiple shades of grey and brown. At 2 am one night, with my toddler sleeping peacefully by my side, I look up doctors who speak English. I need private doctors, since HR has told my husband we are signed up for health insurance but the health insurer has received no application.      

Two days later, I walk into the doctor’s practice with my heart up my throat, only to find the doctor vacuuming a spider off his doorframe with the gesture of a superhero. He invites me into his cabin and proceeds to talk at me in German. I sit down, if that’s what he’s said. 

‘Do you speak English by any chance?’ 

He frowns at me. ‘What if I came to your country and asked you to speak German?’  

The doctor-patient relationship is established — it is not one of trust, but then again, no relationship in Berlin has been based on trust so far. The doctor scans and scans my mole, and finally declares: 

‘All fine here. But you need to come back for a full body scan. You have so many, all over your body.’

I nod and obligingly agree to book the next appointment with his private clinic. As if rejecting it might make him change the diagnosis.   

Angst spreads through the air like spores do. I think of an authoritarian regime: in its early days, it perpetuates fear, keeps it looming.  

My toddler’s cry wakes me up one night. She falls back to sleep, but I can’t. The lukewarm has given way to freezing cold and my ovaries have turned into bundles of ice. I wrap myself in my bathrobe, which has arrived in our boxes, and inspect. All radiators are on 18°C. I turn the heating back up hastily. In the morning, it’s the first thing I ask my husband:  

‘It wasn’t you, was it?’ 

‘What do you mean?’  

‘The landlord turned our heating to 18°C in the night without our consent.’ 

I don’t have time to come up with any defence strategy. That’s how regimes work: fast, so their subjects don’t have time to gather their forces. That very morning, I receive a text from the landlord, who now has my phone number. He says our heating is set on maximum and this is against the ‘fair usage’ clause in our contract, since the short-term accommodation is bills included. He tells me fair usage is 21°C degrees during the day and 18°C at night, as he keeps his house.  

The contract does not specify any temperature. The landlord tells me that gas bills have risen sharply in Germany, as you know, after Russia invaded Ukraine.  

Shaking, I photograph the thermometer showing that the temperature is 21°C, despite the thermostat being set to 25°C. I say that under no circumstance can I sleep at so-called ‘18°C’. He tells me he will adjust the valves by 1.5° to match the real temperature. I don’t say: your maths is wrong. I have three silver medals in national Mathematics Olympiads and my husband is a Professor of Mathematics. Yet this man has found it all too easy to make us feel stupid.  

Only a few days pass until the next text. We had talked about the heating and Hardly anything has changed. I photograph the thermometer showing that the temperature is exactly 21°C, despite the thermostat being on 23°C. He announces he will come to check.   

Before his visit, I begin to suspect the ‘dead’ mould patch in the bedroom has increased in size. But can I trust my own eyes? We hadn’t photographed it at the start; our heads were filled with paperwork needed to legalise our existence. I look up the etymology of mould: 'from Proto-Germanic *(s)muk - indicating wetness, slipperiness’.  

The night before the landlord’s visit, I stay up thinking of the words that invade my family’s peace: 

Old English ‘unfægernes’: ugliness, disfigurement. The admin at the university pays my husband an astonishing 2,000 euros less than the job specifications stipulated and it takes us days to understand from the cryptic payslip that he is taxed unfairly.  

Greek 'ostracon': a broken ceramic on which citizens wrote the names of those they wished to banish from the polis. When my five-year-old rides his scooter behind our block and calls in Russian after my husband, they are shouted at. When my husband skips rope in our courtyard, wearing a hoodie and counting in Russian, an elderly lady comes out of her flat for the sole purpose of asking him, Was machst du hier? I read about our neighbourhood: Charlottenburg, a West Berlin neighbourhood I chose for its greenery, but which turns out to be a historical favourite of the Russian diaspora.  

When the landlord comes, I play with my children to avoid small talk. He places thermometers in all rooms, including our bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. He then remarks on my husband’s unexpected neutral accent in English and is surprised to hear my husband grew up in New Zealand, not Russia. He leaves for half an hour, then returns and writes down in a table the recorded temperatures against the figures his app shows. He finally believes us; yet he only adjusts the valves by one more degree. 

Soon, the fungus that was an annoying housemate in the UK is a full-blown terrorist in Berlin. Like any terrorist, it gets named, and its origins become explicit.  

First, there is an eruption of cladosporium on the bathroom walls. I swear I remember seeing patches on the windows from the start, but I don’t have evidence. I was too busy photographing my hand wiping condensation off the living room windows.   

When the mould comes for my toddler’s possessions in the living room, I am sure this is something very different from our Scottish pinpricks. We find the eruption behind the Elsa DUPLO under the window. This one is penicillium and is the size of the entire DUPLO box. I order mould remover, non-chlorine based. This will be a long battle. 

Now, the mould has stopped hiding altogether. The wallpaper in the kitchen turns yellow and soon after, green with aspergillus. Why is there wallpaper in the kitchen? We contemplate moving, but my husband has just received his health insurance tied to this address, and we are still waiting for mine and our children’s to arrive — all by post. We cannot move.  

My Bulgarian friend who has lived in Kreuzberg, East Berlin, for eight years tells me it’s a landlord’s job to ensure safe conditions for living. But I am exhausted.  

We settle into a routine of cleaning each weekend our three types of mould; four, if one counts the ‘dead’ one in the bedroom. It has definitely grown from the thumb-thick patch at the beginning; it’s now nearly palm-sized. The Internet says it might be Stachybotrys chartarum, a source of highly damaging mycotoxins.  

Meanwhile, our son is bullied in preschool, and one time it happens in front of my husband and the teacher. The teacher tells off the bully, then proceeds to explain loudly to my husband, in front of both children, that this is only happening because my son is a picky eater and the kids don’t like that. My son has a gag reflex to dairy, and in Scotland, Norway, and Romania his needs were accommodated. But in Berlin, this teacher has made him sit down with a piece of cheese-on-toast for forty-five minutes until he swallows the entire thing.   

For a society to not become a petri dish for bullies, there needs to be safeguarding — especially at doctors’, in childcare settings, in housing. We are learning the hard way that there is no safeguarding available in Berlin, not to us.  

One Saturday afternoon, outside quiet hours, the week before the German elections, my husband is vacuuming and hears a loud knock. It’s the downstairs neighbour, who has been banging on our radiators since day one. 

‘Do you know there are other people living in this building?’ 

My husband understands German, but doesn’t speak it sufficiently well so answers in English. The neighbour yells back: 

‘You have no place in Germany if you don’t speak German!’ He continues along these lines for a few minutes, until my husband apologises and is made to promise that there will be no more noise from our flat ever again. 

A few days later, my toddler cries at 7 pm. The neighbour returns. I dart to the door. I understand something about Deutsch sprechen. Shaking, I shout back that I will report him for harassment.  

I do. I write (in English) to the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, the British Embassy, the estate agency, and the landlady. The landlady says the neighbour has given the image of this ugly xenophobic German. She sends a letter via her lawyer to the neighbour, then sends a fax, in German, to the same Anti-Discrimination Agency. She receives a response within days, which she forwards to me. I receive no response until three months later.  

Around the time the harassment happens, I start having breathing issues. A few days later, Germany sees its highest voting turnout since reunification. I book flights out of Germany for as soon as I can. 

Three weeks after our premature departure, the landlady emails to say the flat is all mouldy and in no state to be rented out. She charges us 2,046.76 euros for repainting. Between sneezes, I finally look up ‘dead’ black mould; it was harmful from the start.  

These are lines outside of time, poet Arghezi wrote in 1931 of the mould flowers that became language.  

When I return to western Romania – my first home – I pass a half-built house growing all varieties of mucegai. Across town, I notice people talking in doorframes, phones ringing, words being written on bright screens. An old couple, dressed in faded dark blue, make their way to a polling station. 

The 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for entries until 30 June 2026.

Cover image: Ancient Sound by Paul Klee