Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

What kind of flowers, I asked.

Little pus flowers, he said.

It was a blessing when he started to clip my hair close to the scalp.

One thing is certain, I thought: the hunger angel knows who his accomplices are. He pampers them and then drops them. Then they shatter. And he with them. He’s made of the same flesh that he’s deceiving. This is consistent with his lever principle.

And what am I to say to that now. Everything that happens is always simple. And there’s a principle to how things proceed, assuming that they last. And if things last for five years you can no longer discern or even notice any principle. And it seems to me that if someone is inclined to talk about it later, there’s nothing that can’t be included: the hunger angel thinks straight, he’s never absent, he doesn’t go away but comes back, he knows his direction and he knows my boundaries, he knows where I come from and what he does to me, he walks to one side with open eyes, he never denies his own existence, he’s disgustingly personal, his sleep is transparent, he’s an expert in orach, sugar, and salt, lice and homesickness, he has water in his belly and in his legs.

All you can do is list.

If you don’t let go, things will be only half as bad, you think. To this day, the hunger angel speaks out of your mouth. But no matter what he says, this remains utterly clear:

1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

Except you’re not allowed to talk about hunger when you’re hungry. Hunger is not a bunk or a bed frame, otherwise it could be measured. Hunger is not an object.

During a ransacked night, when there was no thought of sleep, no merciful outlet for our hunger, because the lice would not stop their torture, during such a night Peter Schiel noticed that I wasn’t sleeping either. I sat up in my bed and he sat up in his bed diagonally opposite and asked:

What does give-and-take mean.

I said: Sleep.

Then I lay back down. He stayed sitting up, and I heard a gurgling sound. Bea Zakel had traded Peter Schiel’s wool sweater at the market for some alcohol made from anthracite. He drank it. And didn’t ask me any more questions.

The next morning Karli Halmen said: He asked a few more times what give-and-take meant. You were sound asleep.

Behind the factory is a place with no coke ovens, no extractor fans, no steaming pipes, where the tracks come to an end, where all we can see from the mouth of the coal silo is a heap of rubble overgrown with flowering weeds, a pitiful bare patch of earth at the edge of the wilderness, crisscrossed by well-trodden paths. There, out of sight to all but the white cloud drifting from the cooling tower far across the steppe, is a gigantic rusted pipe, a discarded seamless steel tube from before the war. The pipe is seven or eight meters long and two meters high and has been welded together at the end closest to the silo. The end that faces the empty fields is open. A mighty pipe, no one knows how it wound up here. But everyone knows what purpose it has served since we arrived in the camp. It’s called THE ZEPPELIN.

This zeppelin may not float high and silver in the sky, but it does set your mind adrift. It’s a by-the-hour hotel tolerated by the camp administration and the nachal’niks—a trysting place where the women from our camp meet with German POWs who are clearing the rubble in the wasteland or in the bombed-out factories. Wildcat weddings was how Anton Kowatsch put it: Open your eyes sometime when you’re shoveling coal, he told me.

As late as the summer of Stalingrad, that last summer on the veranda at home, a lovethirsty female voice had spoken from the radio, her accent straight from the Reich: Every German woman should give the Führer a child. My Aunt Fini asked my mother: How are we to do that, is the Führer planning to come here to Transylvania every night, or are we supposed to line up one by one and visit him in the Reich.

We were eating jugged hare, my mother licked the sauce off a bay leaf, pulling the leaf slowly out of her mouth. And when she had licked it clean, she stuck it in her buttonhole. I had a feeling they were only pretending to make fun of him. The twinkle in their eyes suggested they’d be more than a little happy to oblige. My father noticed as well: he wrinkled his forehead and forgot to chew for a while. And my grandmother said: I thought you didn’t like men with mustaches. Send the Führer a telegram that he better shave first.

Since the silo yard was vacant after work, and the sun still glaring high above the grass, I went down the path to the zeppelin and looked inside. The front of the pipe was shadowy, the middle was very dim, and the back was pitch-dark. The next day I opened my eyes while I was shoveling coal. Late in the afternoon I saw three or four men coming through the weeds. They wore quilted work jackets like ours, except theirs had stripes. Just outside the zeppelin they sat down in the grass up to their necks. Soon a torn pillowcase appeared on a stick outside the pipe—a sign for occupied. A while later the little flag was gone. Then it quickly reappeared and disappeared once more. As soon as the first men had gone, the next three or four came and sat down in the grass.

I also saw how the women in the work brigades covered for each other. While three or four wandered off into the weeds, the others engaged the nachal’nik in conversation. When he asked about the ones who had left they explained it was because of stomach cramps and diarrhea. That was true, too, at least for some—but of course he couldn’t tell for how many. The nachal’nik chewed on his lip and listened for a while, but then kept turning his head more and more frequently in the direction of the zeppelin. At that point I saw the women resort to a new tactic, they whispered to our singer, Loni Mich, who began singing loud enough to shatter glass, drowning out all the noise made by our shoveling—

—and suddenly all the women who had disappeared were back. They crowded in among us and shoveled away as if nothing had happened.

I liked the name zeppelin: it resonated with the silvery forgetting of our misery, and with the quick, catlike coupling. I realized that these unknown German men had everything our men were lacking. They had been sent by the Führer into the world as warriors, and they also were the right age, neither childishly young nor overripe like our men. Of course they, too, were miserable and degraded, but they had seen battle, had fought in the war. For our women they were heroes, a notch above the forced laborers, offering more than evening love in a barrack bed behind a blanket. Evening love in the barrack remained indispensable. But for our women it smelled of their own hardship, the same coal and the same longing for home. And it led to the same worn-out give-and-take, with the man providing the food, while the woman cleaned and consoled. Love in the zeppelin was free of all concerns except for the hoisting and lowering of the little white flag.

Anton Kowatsch was convinced I would disapprove of the women going to the zeppelin. No one could have guessed that I understood them all too well, that I knew all about arousal in disheveled clothes, about roving desire and gasping delight in the Alder Park and the Neptune baths. No one could imagine that I was reliving my own rendezvous, more and more often: SWALLOW, FIR, EAR, THREAD, ORIOLE, CAP, HARE, CAT, SEAGULL. Then PEARL. No one had any idea I was carrying so many cover names in my head, and so much silence around my neck.

Even inside the zeppelin, love had its seasons. The wildcat weddings came to an end in our second year, first because of the winter, and later because of the hunger. When the hunger angel was running rampant during the skinandbones time, when male and female could not be distinguished from each other, coal was still unloaded at the silo. But the paths in the weeds were overgrown. Purple tufted vetch clambered among the white yarrow and the red orach, the blue burdocks bloomed, and the thistles as well. The zeppelin slept and belonged to the rust, just as the coal belonged to the camp, the grass belonged to the steppe, and we belonged to hunger.