Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Beyond the farmyards on the outskirts we came to a small town of yellow-ochre houses with crumbling stucco walls and rusty tin roofs. Streetcar rails could be seen in the remnants of asphalt, and now and then two-wheeled carts from the bread factory moved along the rails, pulled by horses. The carts were covered with white linen, like the bread cart in the camp. But the half-starved horses made me wonder whether it was bread the cloth was covering and not fully starved bodies.

Kobelian said: The town is called Novo-Gorlovka. So the town has the same name as the camp, I asked. He said: No, the camp has the same name as the town. There were no signs. Anyone who drove here knew the name of the place, just as Kobelian and the Lancia did. Strangers like Karli Halmen and myself had to ask. And whoever didn’t have anyone to ask didn’t wind up here and had no business being here in the first place.

We had to pass through the town to pick up the bricks. They take a while to load: one and a half hours, if you have two people and can park the Lancia close by. You carry four at a time, pressing them together like an accordion. Three are too few and five are too many. You could carry five, but the middle one would slip out. You’d need a third hand to hold it. You fill the entire truck bed, making sure there are no gaps, stacking the bricks in three or four layers. Bricks have a bright resonance, each one sounds a little different, but the red dust is always the same and settles on your clothes. Brick dust is dry, it doesn’t envelop you like cement dust, and it isn’t as oily as coal dust. The brick dust made me think of sweet red paprika, though it has no smell.

On the way back, the Lancia never rattled: it was too heavily weighed down. We again drove through Novo-Gorlovka, over the streetcar rails, past the farmyards in the outskirts, and down the road under the wisps of clouds drifting over the steppe. All the way to the camp. And then past the camp to the construction site.

Unloading went faster than loading. The bricks did have to be stacked, but not so carefully, because they’d be hauled off the next day to the masons on the scaffold.

With the travel time there and back, and the loading and unloading, we managed two trips a day. Then it was evening. Occasionally Kobelian would take us out one more time, without saying anything. Then Karli and I knew it was a private delivery. We only filled half the truck bed with a single layer of bricks, and drove back to the seven-story ruin. There we turned off into a low-lying area where the houses were bordered by rows of poplars. At that time of day the clouds were as red as the bricks. We drove between a fence and a woodshed into Kobelian’s yard. The truck jerked to a stop, and I found myself standing up to my waist in the middle of a withered fruit tree, its branches full of shrunken balls from the previous summer, or the one before. Karli climbed up to me. The last bit of daylight dangled fruit in front of our faces, and Kobelian let us pick some before we unloaded.

The balls were dry as wood, you had to lick and suck at them before they tasted like sour cherries. If you chewed them well, the pit felt very smooth and hot on the tongue. Those night cherries were a happy thing, but they only sharpened our hunger.

On the way home the night was made of ink. It was good to arrive late at the camp. Roll call was over, and supper had long since started. The thin soup from the top of the kettle had been served to others. There was a better chance of getting something more substantial.

But arriving too late was bad. Then the soup was all gone. Then you had nothing except this big empty night, and the lice.

I’m sitting on the bench with the backrest. Bea Zakel has washed her hands at the well and is walking down the path. She sits down next to me. Her eyes slowly drift off to the side, almost as if she were cross-eyed. But she isn’t, she lets them slide like that because she knows it makes her look more striking. So striking that I feel self-conscious. Then she starts talking, just like that. She speaks as fast as Tur Prikulitsch, but not as capriciously. She turns her drifting eyes toward the factory, follows the cloud from the cooling tower, and tells me about the mountains where the three lands meet: Galicia, Slovakia, and Romania.

When she lists the mountains from home she talks more slowly: the Lower Tatra, the Beskids, which flow into the Eastern Carpathians, by the headwaters of the river Tisza. My village is called Lugi, she says, a poor village stashed away near Kaschau. There the mountains stare down through our heads until we die. The people who stay are given to brooding. Many move away. That’s why I left, to attend the conservatory in Prague.

The cooling tower is a tall matron, wearing her dark wooden casing like a corset. The white clouds pass through her narrow waist and rise out of her mouth day and night. And they move away, like the people leaving Bea Zakel’s mountains.

I tell Bea about the mountains around Transylvania, which are also part of the Carpathians, I say. Except our mountains have deep, round lakes. People call them sea-eyes, and they’re so deep that their bottoms connect to the Black Sea far underground. When you stare into a mountain lake you have your feet on the mountain and your eyes in the sea. My grandfather says that far below the earth the Carpathians are carrying the Black Sea on their arm.

Then Bea talks about Artur Prikulitsch, how he’s part of her childhood. That he comes from the same village and lived on the same street and even sat at the same desk with her in school. When they played together she had to be the horse and Tur was the coachman. The street was steep, and one day she fell and though she didn’t realize it until later, she had broken her foot. Tur goaded her on with his whip and claimed that she was just pretending to be in pain because she didn’t want to be his horse anymore. Whenever she played with Tur he was always a sadist, she says, and I tell her about the Millipede Game. The children were divided into two millipedes. One was supposed to pull the other across a chalked line in order to eat it. In each of the millipedes the children were told to put their arms around each other’s waists and pull with all their strength. We were practically torn apart, I got bruises on my hips and a dislocated shoulder.

I’m not a horse, and you’re not a millipede, says Bea. If you are what you play, you’re bound to get punished for it, that might as well be a law. And you can never escape the law, even if you move to Prague. Or to a camp, I say. Yes, because Tur moves with you, says Bea. He also left our village and went off to Prague to study. At first he wanted to become a missionary but ended up switching to business instead. You know, the laws of the small village, and even the laws of Prague, are strict, says Bea. That’s why you can’t escape them, because they were made by strict people.

Once again Bea lets her eyes slide into a sidelong glance and she says:

I love people who are strict.

At least one of them, I think, but I have to hold my tongue, because she lives off this strictness, and her strict person has given her this job in the clothes room, which is a lot nicer than what he’s assigned to me. She complains about Tur Prikulitsch, she wants to live like him but still be one of us. When she talks fast she sometimes comes close to denying the difference between us and her. But at the last moment she slips back into her safe place. Maybe it’s her sense of safety that causes her eyes to drift. It’s possible that she’s always thinking about her privileged position when she talks with me. And that she talks so much because in addition to her strict person, she wants to have a little freedom—freedom he doesn’t know about. Or maybe she’s coaxing me out of my reserve, maybe she confides everything we talk about to him.