Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Once I simply decided not to go. It wasn’t easy. There had been a big earthquake the night before. An apartment house had collapsed in Bucharest and buried a number of people. In our town all that collapsed were a few chimneys, and at home two pipes fell off the stove, but I used the earthquake as an excuse. The gym instructor didn’t inquire further, but I was already feeling the effects of my special training: my act of disobedience only reinforced my sense of being crippled.

In these exciting times my father photographed girl gymnasts and Transylvanian Saxon girls in folk costume. He had even purchased a Leica to do so. And he became a Sunday hunter. On Mondays I’d watch him skin the hares he had shot. Stretched out without their fur, stiff and tinged with blue, the hares looked like the Saxon gymnast girls at the barre. The hares were eaten. The pelts were nailed to the wall of the shed and after drying got stored in a tin chest in the attic. Every six months Herr Fränkel came to pick them up. Then he stopped coming. No one wanted to know anything more. He was Jewish, reddish-blond, tall, and nearly as slender as a hare. Little Ferdi Reich and his mother, who lived in the rear of the building, were no longer there either. No one wanted to know anything more.

It was easy not to know anything. Refugees arrived from Bessarabia and Transnistria, they were given lodging, stayed a while, and went on. Then German soldiers came from the Reich, were given lodging, stayed a while, and went on. Neighbors and relatives and teachers went off to fight for the Romanian Fascists or for Hitler. Some came home on leave from the front and others didn’t. There were also rabble-rousers who avoided the front but stirred things up at home and wore their uniforms to the ballrooms and cafés.

Our science teacher, too, wore a uniform when he taught us about the yellow lady’s slipper growing in the moss. And the edelweiss. The edelweiss was more than a plant, it was a fashion. Everyone wore some kind of talisman: badges and pins with edelweiss and gentian, or airplanes and tanks, or various types of weapons. I collected and traded different types of insignia, learning the order of ranks by heart. My favorite was private first class. I thought it meant someone who was very good in private, because we had Dietrich from the Reich billeted in our house. My mother sunbathed on the roof of the shed, and Dietrich watched her through the skylight with a pair of binoculars. And my father watched him from the veranda, dragged him to the courtyard, took a hammer, and smashed his binoculars on the pavement next to the shed. My mother moved to my Aunt Fini’s for two days with a small bag of clothes under her arm. A week earlier, Dietrich had given my mother two coffee demitasses for her birthday. It was all my fault, I had told him she collected demitasses, and had gone with him to the porcelain store, where I pointed out two little cups my mother was bound to like. They were pale pink, like the most delicate cartilage, with a silver rim and a drop of silver on the top of the handle. My second favorite insignia was made of Bakelite and had an edelweiss coated with phosphorus that glowed in the dark like the alarm clock.

Our science teacher went off to fight and didn’t come back. Our Latin teacher came home on leave from the front and dropped by our school. He sat at the teacher’s desk and taught a Latin class. It was soon over, and things didn’t go as he had expected. One student who had often been decorated with rose hips said right at the beginning of class: Sir, tell us what it’s like at the front. The teacher bit his lips and said: It’s not what you think. Then his face went rigid and his hands started to shake. We’d never seen him like that before. It’s not what you think, he repeated. And then he laid his head on the table, let his arms droop next to his chair like a rag doll, and cried.

The Russian village is small. When you go begging you hope not to run into another beggar from the camp. Everyone begs with coal. If you’re a practiced beggar, you carry your chunk of coal wrapped in a rag, cradled in your arm like a sleeping child. You knock on a door, and if it opens, you lift the rag and show your wares. From May through September the prospects for the coal trade aren’t very good. But coal is all we have.

Going door-to-door, I saw petunias in someone’s garden: an entire bed full of pale-pink little cups with silver rims. As I walked on I closed my eyes and said, DEMITASSES, then counted the letters in my head: ten. Next I counted ten steps, then twenty, for both cups. But where I stopped there was no house. So I counted to one hundred for all ten demitasses my mother had in her china cabinet, and found myself three houses farther along. There were no petunias. I knocked on the door.

Riding somewhere was always a happy thing.

First of all: as long as you’re moving, you haven’t arrived. As long as you haven’t arrived, you don’t have to work. Riding in a truck gives you time to recover.

Second: when you ride, you come to some place that couldn’t care less about you. You can’t be yelled at or beaten by a tree. Under a tree, yes, but the tree can’t help that.

When we arrived at the camp, our only point of reference was NOVO-GORLOVKA, which could be the name of the camp or a town or the entire region. It couldn’t be the name of the factory, though, since we knew that was KOKSOKHIM-ZAVOD. I did find a cast-iron manhole cover beside the well in the camp yard, and used my school Greek to decipher the Cyrillic letters as DNEPROPETROVSK, but that could be a nearby city, or some foundry at the other end of Russia. Whenever you were able to leave the camp, you got to see more than letters—the wide steppe and the villages on the steppe. For that reason, too, riding somewhere was a happy thing.

Every morning, a transport crew was assigned to the vehicles in the garage behind the camp, mostly two men at a time. Karli Halmen and I wound up on a four-ton LANCIA from the 1930s. There were five trucks in the garage, and we knew the pros and cons of each. The Lancia was a good truck, not too tall and fully metal, no wood. The five-ton MAN, whose wheels came up to your chest, wasn’t as good. And with the Lancia came the driver Kobelian, who had a crooked mouth. He was a good-natured man.

When Kobelian said KIRPICH we understood he meant bricks, and that we would be driving through the boundless steppe to pick up a load. If it had rained the night before, the burned-out wreckage of automobiles and tanks would flash in the hollows. The steppe-dogs darted away from the wheels. Karli Halmen sat with Kobelian inside the cab. I preferred to stand in the truck bed and hold on to the top. In the distance I saw a seven-story redbrick tenement with empty windows and no roof. Half in ruins and all by itself, but very modern. Maybe it was the first building of a new settlement that had been scrapped overnight. Maybe the war had arrived before the roof.

The road was bumpy, the Lancia rattled past the scattered farms. Waist-high stinging nettle grew in some of the yards, and white chickens, thin as cloud wisps, roosted on iron bedsteads. Nettles only grow where there are people, my grandmother had told me, and burdocks only grow where there are sheep.

I never saw anyone in the farmyards. I wanted to see people who didn’t live in the camp, who had a home, a fence, a yard, a room with a carpet, maybe even a carpet beater. Where carpets are beaten, I thought, you can trust the peace. There, life is civilized. There, people are left alone.

On our very first drive with Kobelian I’d seen a frame for beating carpets in one of the farmyards. It had a roller so the carpet could be moved up and down. And next to that I saw a large white enameled watering can that looked like a swan, with its beak and slender neck and heavy belly. That was so beautiful that I kept a lookout for carpet-beating frames on every ride, even far out on the steppe, in the empty wind. But I never saw another carpet frame, or a swan.