Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Bea, I say, the song of my childhood goes like this:

Because the strongest scent from my childhood is the rotten stench of germinating corn. In summer we’d go to the Wench highlands for eight weeks of vacation. By the time we came back, the corn we’d left on the sand pile in the courtyard had sprouted. I pulled it out of the sand, the cobs were falling apart, with smelly yellow kernels dangling off to the side from white, threadlike roots.

Bea repeats: Yellow corn, no time. Then she sucks on her finger and says: Growing up is a good thing.

Bea Zakel is taller than me by half a head. Her braids are rolled around her head, a silk cord thick as an arm. Perhaps her proud look doesn’t only come from sitting in the clothes room, but because she has to carry this heavy hair. She probably had this heavy hair as a child, so that in her poor, stashed-away village, the mountains wouldn’t stare down through her head until she died.

But she won’t die here in the camp. Tur Prikulitsch will see to that.

By the end of October it was sleeting icy nails and snow. Our guard and the site inspector gave us our quotas and went straight back to the camp, to their warm rooms. At the construction site a quiet day began, without the dread of shouted orders.

But this quiet day was interrupted when Irma Pfeifer screamed. Perhaps HELPHELP or ICAN’TTAKEANYMORE—we couldn’t make out the exact words. We grabbed shovels and wooden boards and ran to the mortar pit, but not fast enough, the supervisor was already there. Raising his shovel, he ordered us to drop everything: Ruki nazad —Hands behind your backs. He forced us to stand there and look into the mortar pit. There was nothing we could do.

Irma Pfeifer was lying facedown in the bubbling mortar. First it swallowed her arms, then the gray mass came oozing over the backs of her knees. For an eternity, a few seconds, the mortar rippled and waited. Then the mixture suddenly sloshed up to her hips, and then wobbled between her head and her cap. Her head began to sink and her cap floated away, with outspread earflaps, drifting slowly to the edge of the pit like a fluffed-up pigeon. Shaved bare and scabbed with lice bites, the back of her head hovered a moment like half a melon. When that, too, went under, all we could see was her back, and the supervisor said: Zhalko, ochyen’ zhalko.

Then he brandished his shovel, drove the whole group to the edge of the construction site, where the lime women worked, and shouted: Vnimanye, lyudi . Attention, people—if a saboteur is looking for death that’s fine with us. She jumped in, he said, the bricklayers saw it all from up on the scaffold. Konrad Fonn the accordion player had to translate for the supervisor.

After that we had to line up, march into the camp, and stand in formation to be counted. It was still early morning, still raining ice-nails, and we stood there, aghast, silent outside and in. Shishtvanyonov ran yelling out of his office, foaming at the mouth like an overheated horse. He hurled his leather gloves at us. Wherever one landed, someone had to bend down and take it back to him. Again and again. Then Shishtvanyonov turned us over to Tur Prikulitsch. He was wearing an oilcloth coat and rubber boots. He had us count off, step forward, step back, count off, step forward, step back, into the evening.

No one knows when Irma Pfeifer was fished out of the mortar pit or where they scraped a little dirt away to bury her. The next morning the sun was cold and bare. There was fresh mortar in the pit, everything was as usual. No one mentioned the previous day. I’m sure more than one person thought about Irma Pfeifer and her fine cap and her good quilted work jacket, since she was probably laid to rest in her clothes, and the dead have no need of clothes when the living are freezing.

Irma Pfeifer wanted to take a shortcut. She was carrying a sack of cement in front of her and couldn’t see where she was going. The sack had soaked up the icy rain and went down before she did, which is why we didn’t see any sack when we came to the mortar pit. At least that’s what Konrad Fonn the accordion player thought. You can think all kinds of things. But you can’t know for sure.

It was the night of December 31, New Year’s Eve, in our second year. Halfway through the night the loudspeakers summoned us to the Appellplatz. We were chased down the main street of the camp, flanked by eight guards with rifles and dogs, and followed by a truck hauling a trailer. In the tall snow behind the factory, where the empty fields began, we were told to line up in rows along the brick wall and wait. We thought: This is the night we will be shot.

I pushed into the front row so I could be one of the first. That way I wouldn’t have to load corpses onto the truck, which was already waiting off the road. Shishtvanyonov and Tur Prikulitsch had crawled into the cab, the motor was running to keep them warm. The guards paced up and down. The dogs huddled together, their eyes squeezed shut by the cold. Now and then they lifted a paw so it wouldn’t get frostbitten.

We stood there, our faces aged, our eyebrows covered with frost, our lips shivering. Some of the women mumbled prayers. This is the end, I told myself. My grandmother’s farewell was: I know you’ll come back. That, too, was in the middle of the night, but also in the middle of the world. At home they’ve already welcomed the New Year, maybe raised a glass to me, a midnight toast to my being alive. I hope they thought about me in the first hours of the New Year and then climbed into their warm beds. By now my grandmother’s wedding ring should be lying on the nightstand, she takes it off every evening because it’s too tight. And I am standing here, waiting to be shot.

I saw all of us standing in a giant box. Its top was made of sky, lacquered black by the night and decorated with sharply whetted stars. The bottom was lined knee-deep with cotton wool, so that we would fall into softness. And the sides of the giant box were draped with stiff, icy brocade, silken tangles of fringe, endless lace. Toward the back of the box, between the watchtowers, a catafalque of snow was lying on the wall of the camp. And on top of that, as tall as the towers, a stack of bunk beds reached to the sky, a tiered coffin with room for all of us to be laid out, just like in the barracks. And over the topmost tier was the black-lacquered cover of the night. From the towers at the head and foot of the catafalque, two honor guards dressed in black kept watch over the dead. At the head, nearest the camp gate, the guard lights shined like a candelabra. At the darker foot end, the snow-draped crown of the mulberry tree made a magnificent bouquet, with all our names on countless paper bows. Snow muffles sound, I thought, almost no one will hear the shooting. Our families are slumbering away, tipsy, unsuspecting, worn out from celebrating New Year’s Eve in the middle of the world. Maybe they’re dreaming about our enchanted burial in the New Year.

I had no desire to leave the box with the tiered coffins. Fear of death can become a kind of trance if you try to master it but don’t quite succeed. Even the icy cold that keeps you from moving softens the horror. Death by freezing lulled me into a state where I could surrender to death by shooting.

But then two of the heavily wrapped Russians from the trailer tossed shovels at our feet. Tur Prikulitsch and one of the Russians laid out four knotted ropes parallel to the factory wall, forming two corridors between the looming darkness and the snowy brightness. Shishtvanyonov had fallen asleep in the cab. Perhaps he was drunk. He slept with his chin on his chest, like a forgotten passenger left in the train at the last station. He slept the whole time we shoveled. No, we shoveled the whole time he slept, because Tur Prikulitsch had to wait for his instructions. The whole time he slept, we went on digging two ditches between the ropes, for our execution. I don’t know how long we dug, until the sky turned gray. And that’s how long I heard my shovel repeating: I know you’ll come back, I know you’ll come back. The shoveling had shaken me awake, I now preferred to go on starving and freezing and slaving away for the Russians rather than get shot. My grandmother was right: I will come back. Although I qualified that with: But do you know how hard this is.