Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Then Shishtvanyonov climbed out of the cab, rubbed his chin, and shook his legs, perhaps because they were still asleep. He waved the heavily wrapped guards over. They opened the tailgate and threw down pickaxes and crowbars. Shishtvanyonov spoke unusually briefly and quietly, gesticulating with his index finger. He climbed back inside and the empty truck drove away with him.

Tur had to give Shishtvanyonov’s mumbling the tone of a command and shouted: Dig holes for trees.

We searched for the tools in the snow as if they were presents. The earth was frozen hard as bone. The pickaxes bounced off the ground, the crowbars clanged like iron against iron. Nut-sized clods sprayed into our faces. I sweated in the cold, and froze as I sweated. I split into two halves, one ember, one ice. My upper body was scorched with fire, it bent and blazed away automatically for fear of the quota. My lower body was numb with frost, my legs pressed cold and dead into my gut.

By afternoon our hands were bloody, but the holes were only knuckle-deep. And that’s how we left them.

The holes didn’t get finished until late spring, when two long rows of trees were planted. They grew quickly. These trees didn’t grow anywhere else, not on the steppe, not in the Russian village, nowhere nearby. Throughout our time in the camp no one knew what they were called. The taller they grew, the whiter their branches and trunks became. Not delicate and wax-white translucent like birches, but robust, with dull skin like plaster paste.

During my first summer home, I saw these plaster-white camp trees in the Alder Park, old and huge. Uncle Edwin looked in his tree atlas and found: Stout and sturdy, this rapid-growing tree can shoot up to a height of 35 meters, with a trunk reaching two meters in diameter. Specimens can attain an age of 200 years.

Uncle Edwin had no idea how correct, or rather, how fitting the description was, when he read out the word SHOOT. He said: This tree doesn’t seem to need a lot of care and it’s quite beautiful. But its name is a royal lie. Why is it called BLACK POPLAR when its trunk is so white.

I didn’t contradict him. I only thought to myself: If you’ve spent half the night under a black-lacquered sky, waiting to be shot, the name isn’t a lie at all.

In the camp there were many kinds of cloth. Life moved from one cloth to the next. From the footwrap to the hand towel, to the bread cloth, the orach pillowcase, the door-to-door begging cloth, and even to a handkerchief, if you happened to have one.

The Russians in the camp had no need of handkerchiefs. They pressed one nostril shut with their index finger and blew the snot out through the second like dough, right onto the ground. Then they shut the cleaned nostril and the snot sprayed out the other. I practiced this but without success. No one in the camp used a handkerchief to wipe his nose. Whoever had one used it for sugar and salt, and when it was all in tatters, as toilet paper.

One time a Russian woman gave me a handkerchief as a present. It was after work, very cold. Hunger had driven me back to the Russian village. I went door-to-door with a piece of anthracite coal, which people used for heating. I knocked at one dwelling. An old Russian woman answered, took my coal, and let me in. The room was low, the window set in the wall at the level of my knee. Two scrawny, gray-white spotted chickens were perched on a stool. One of them had a comb hanging over its eyes. It flipped its head like a person without hands whose hair has fallen into his face.

The old woman spoke for some time. I only understood a word here and there but could sense what it was about. She was afraid of her neighbors, she’d been living all alone for a long time with just her two chickens, yet she’d rather talk to them than to her neighbors. She had a son my age named Boris who was as far from home as I was, but in the opposite direction, in a camp in Siberia, a penal battalion, because a neighbor had denounced him. Perhaps you and my son Boris will be lucky, she said, and you’ll be able to go home soon. She pointed to the chair, and I sat down at the end of the table. She took the cap off my head and laid it on the table. She set a wooden spoon next to the cap. Then she went to the stove and ladled potato soup out of a pot into a tin bowl. She must have given me a whole liter. I spooned away; she stood over my shoulder and watched.

The soup was hot, I slurped it down, watching her out of the corner of my eye. And she nodded. I wanted to eat slowly, because I wanted the soup to last. But my hunger crouched in front of the bowl like a ravenous dog. The two chickens had fluffed out their feathers, pulled in their feet, and were asleep. The soup heated me down to my toes. My nose was dripping. Podozhdi , wait, said the Russian woman, then went into the next room and came back with a snow-white handkerchief. She placed it in my hand and closed my fingers around it as a sign I should keep it. It was a gift. But I didn’t dare blow my nose. What happened in that moment went beyond going door-to-door, beyond me and her and a handkerchief. It was about her son. And it made me feel good and it didn’t, because she or I or both of us had gone slightly too far. She had to do something for her son because I was there, and because he was as far away from home as I was. I felt bad that I was there, that I wasn’t him. And I was embarrassed that she felt the same way but couldn’t show it because she could no longer bear worrying about him. And I could no longer bear being two people at once, two people who had been deported—that was too much for me. That wasn’t as simple as two chickens roosting next to each other on a stool. I was already one burden too many for myself.

Afterward, back on the street, I used my coarse, dirty coal cloth as a handkerchief. After blowing my nose I wrapped it around my neck, it became my scarf. As I went on, I used the two ends of the scarf to wipe my eyes, several times and very quickly, so no one would notice. Of course no one was watching me, but I didn’t want to notice it either. I was all too aware that there’s an unspoken law that you should never start to cry if you have too many reasons to do so. I told myself that my tears were due to the cold, and I believed myself.

The snow-white handkerchief was made of the most delicate batiste. It was old, a nice piece from the time of the tsars, with a hand-embroidered silk ajour border. The openwork between the stitches was very precise, and there were little rosettes in the corners. I hadn’t seen anything that beautiful in a long time. At home, the beauty of normal everyday objects wasn’t worth mentioning. And in the camp it was better to forget such beauty. But the beauty of this handkerchief got to me. It made my heart ache. Would he ever come home, this old Russian woman’s son, this man who was himself but also me. To keep these thoughts at bay I started singing. For the sake of both of us, I sang the Cattle Car Blues:

The sky was running by—plump, cushiony clouds. Then the early moon looked at me with the face of my mother. The clouds moved one cushion underneath her chin and another one just behind her right cheek. Then they pulled that cushion back out through her left cheek. And I asked the moon: Is my mother now so frail. Is she sick. Is our house still there. Is she still at home, or is she in a camp as well. Is she even still alive. Does she know that I’m alive, or is she already weeping for her dead son whenever she thinks of me.

That was my second winter in the camp, we weren’t allowed to write letters home, or send any sign of life. The birch trees in the Russian village were bare, under their branches the snowy rooftops looked like crooked beds in an open-air barrack. And in the early twilight, the birch skin showed a different paleness than during the day, and a different whiteness from the snow. I saw the wind swimming gracefully through the branches. A small, wood-brown dog came trotting toward me down the path along the woven willow fence. He had a triangular head and long legs, straight and thin as sticks. White breath came flying out of his mouth as though he were eating my handkerchief while drumming with his legs. The little dog ran past me as if I were nothing more than the shadow of the fence. And he was right: on my way home to the camp I was just another ordinary Russian object in the twilight.