Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Hunger is always there.

Because it’s there, it comes whenever and however it wants to. The causal principle is the work of the hunger angel.

When he comes, he comes with force.

It’s utterly clear:

1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

I myself could do without the heart-shovel. But my hunger depends on it. I wish the heart-shovel were my tool. But the shovel is the master, and I am the tool. I submit to its rule. Nevertheless it’s my favorite shovel. I’ve forced myself to like it. I submit because it is a better master when I’m compliant, when I don’t hate it. I ought to thank it, because when I shovel for my bread I am distracted from my hunger. Since hunger never goes away, the heart-shovel makes sure that shoveling gets put ahead of hunger. Shoveling takes priority when you are shoveling, otherwise your body can’t manage the work.

The coal gets shoveled away, but fortunately there’s never any less of it. New shipments arrive every day from Yasinovataya, so it says on the coal cars. Every day the head becomes possessed by shoveling. The body, steered by the head, becomes the tool of the shovel. And nothing more.

Shoveling is hard. Having to shovel and not being able to is one thing. Wanting to shovel and not being able to brings a double despair—first bowing to the coal and then buckling under. I’m not afraid of the shoveling, but of myself. Afraid my mind might wander while I’m shoveling. That sometimes happened to me early on, sapping the strength I needed for shoveling. The heart-shovel notices right away if I’m not there exclusively for it. Then a thin cord of panic begins to choke me. The double stroke beats away in my temples, stark and severe, it picks up my pulse and becomes a jangle of horns. I’m on the verge of breaking down, my throat swells. The hunger angel climbs to the roof of my mouth and hangs his scales. He puts on my eyes and the heart-shovel goes dizzy, the coal starts to blur. He wears my cheeks over his chin. He sets my breath to swinging, back and forth. The breath swing is a delirium—and what a delirium. I look up, the sky is filled with summer cotton wool, embroidered clouds, very still. My brain twitches, pinned to the sky with a needle, at the only fixed point it has left, where it fantasizes about food. I can see the tables in the air, decked in white, and the gravel crunches beneath my feet. And the sunlight comes stabbing through the middle of my brain. The hunger angel looks at his scales and says:

You’re still not light enough for me. Why don’t you just let go.

I say: You’re deceiving me with my own flesh. It has become your slave. But I am not my flesh. I am something else and I won’t let go. Who I am is no longer the question, but I won’t tell you what I am. What I am is what’s deceiving your scales.

The second winter in the camp was often like that. Early in the morning I come back from the night shift, dead tired, thinking: It’s my time off, I ought to sleep. And I lie down, but I can’t sleep. All 68 beds in the barrack are empty, everyone else is at work. I’m drawn outside into the empty yard of the afternoon. The wind tosses thin snow that crackles against my neck. With open hunger the angel leads me to the garbage pile behind the mess hall. I stumble after him, trailing a little way behind, dangling from the roof of my mouth. Step after step, I follow my feet, assuming they aren’t his. Hunger is my direction, assuming it isn’t his. The angel lets me pass. He isn’t turning shy, he just doesn’t want to be seen with me. Then I bend my back, assuming it isn’t his. My craving is raw, my hands are wild. They are definitely my hands: the angel does not touch garbage. I shove the potato peelings into my mouth and close both eyes, that way I can taste them better, the frozen peels are sweet and glassy.

The hunger angel looks for traces that can’t be erased, and erases traces that can’t be saved. Fields of potatoes pass through my brain, the farm plots angled between the grassy meadows in the Wench, mountain potatoes from back home. The first pale, round, new potatoes, the gnarled glass-blue late potatoes, the fist-sized, leather-shelled, yellow-sweet flour potatoes, the slender, smooth-skinned oval rose-potatoes that stay firm when boiled. Their flowers in the summer: yellow-white, pinkish-gray, or waxy purplish clusters on bitter-green plants with angular stalks.

How quickly I devour the frozen potato peels, spread my lips and shove them into my mouth, one after the other, without stopping, just like the hunger. All of them, so that they form a single long ribbon of potato peel.

All of them, all of them.

Evening comes. And everyone comes home from work. And they all climb into their hunger. Hunger is a bunk, a bed frame, when one hungry person is watching the others. But that is deceptive, I can sense in myself that hunger is climbing into us. We are the frame for the hunger. All of us eat with closed eyes. We feed the hunger all night long. We fatten him up, for the shovel.

I eat a short sleep, then wake up and eat the next short sleep. One dream is like the next, each involves eating. Our compulsion to eat finds a merciful outlet in our dreams, though that, too, is a torment. I eat wedding soup and bread, stuffed peppers and bread, baumtorte . Then I wake up in the barrack, peer at the shortsighted lightbulb. I fall back asleep and eat kohlrabi soup and bread, hasenpfeffer and bread, strawberry ice cream in a silver bowl. Then hazelnut noodles and fancy kipfel pastries. And then sauerkraut stew and bread, rum cake. Then boiled pig’s head with horseradish and bread. And just when I’m about to start in on a haunch of venison with bread and apricot compote, the loudspeaker begins to blare away, and it’s already morning. I eat and eat, but my sleep stays thin, and my hunger shows no sign of tiring.

When the first three of us died of hunger, I knew exactly who they were and the order of their deaths. I thought about each of them for several long days. But three never stays three. One number leads to another. And the higher the number gets, the more hardened it becomes. When you’re nothing but skin and bones and in bad shape yourself, you do what you can to keep the dead at a distance. The mathematical traces show that by March of the fourth year 330 people had died. With numbers like that you can no longer afford separate feelings. We thought of the dead only briefly.

Before it even had a chance to settle, we cast off the dreary mood, chased away the weary sadness. Death always looms large and longs for all. You can’t give him any of your time. He has to be driven away like a bothersome dog.

Never was I so resolutely opposed to death as in the five years in the camp. To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.

The first three deaths in the camp were:

Deaf Mitzi crushed by two coal cars.

Kati Meyer buried alive in the cement tower.

Irma Pfeifer drowned in the mortar.

And in my barrack, the first to die was the machinist Peter Schiel, from coal alcohol poisoning.

In every case the cause of death was different, but hunger was always part of it.

In pursuit of the mathematical traces, I once looked at Oswald Enyeter, the barber, in the mirror and said: Everything simple is pure result, and every one of us has a mouth with a roof. The hunger angel places everyone on his scales, and when someone lets go, he jumps off the heart-shovel. Those are his two laws: causality and the lever principle.

Of course you can’t ignore them, the barber said, but you can’t eat them either. That’s also a law.

I looked in the mirror and said nothing.

Your scalp is covered with little flowers, the barber said. We’ll have to use the clippers, that’s the only thing that can help.