Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

One evening in the summer of the second year, a cuckoo clock appeared on the wall above the tin bucket that contained our drinking water, right next to the door. No one could figure out how it got there. It belonged to the barrack and to the nail it hung from, and to no one else. But it bothered all of us together and each of us individually. In the empty afternoons, the ticking listened and listened, whether we were coming or going or sleeping. Or simply lying in bed, lost in our thoughts, or waiting because we were too hungry to fall asleep and too drained to get up. But after the waiting nothing came, except the ticking in the back of our throat, doubled by the ticking from the clock.

Why did we need a cuckoo clock here. Not to measure the time. We had nothing to measure, the anthem from the loudspeaker woke us every morning, and in the evening it sent us off to bed. Whenever we were needed, they came to get us, from the yard, the mess hall, from our sleep. The factory sirens were a clock for us, as were the white cooling tower cloud and the little bells from the coke oven batteries.

Presumably it was Anton Kowatsch, the drummer, who had dragged in the cuckoo clock. Although he swore he had nothing to do with it, he wound it every day. As long as it’s hanging there it might as well run, he said.

It was a perfectly normal cuckoo clock, but the cuckoo wasn’t normal. At three-quarters past the hour it called the half hour, and at a quarter past it called the hour. When it reached the hour, it either forgot everything or sounded the wrong time, calling twice as much or only half of what it should. Anton Kowatsch claimed that the cuckoo was calling the right time, but in different parts of the world. He was infatuated with the clock and its cuckoo, the two fir-cone weights made of heavy iron, and the speedy pendulum. He would have happily let the cuckoo call out the other parts of the world all through the night. But no one else in the barrack wanted to lie awake or sleep in the lands called by the cuckoo.

Anton Kowatsch was a lathe operator in the factory, and in the camp orchestra he was a percussionist and played the drum for our pleated version of La Paloma. It pained him that no one in the camp orchestra could play big-band swing the way his partners had back in Karansebesch. He was also a tinkerer, and had fashioned his instruments at the lathe in the metal shop. He wanted the worldly cuckoo clock to conform to the Russian day-and-night discipline. By narrowing the voice aperture in the cuckoo mechanism he tried to give the cuckoo a short, hollow night sound that was one octave lower than its bright day sound, which he hoped to lengthen. But before he could get a handle on the habits of the cuckoo, someone tore it out of the clock. The little door was wrenched partly off its hinge. When the clockwork wanted to animate the bird to sing, the little door opened up halfway, but instead of the cuckoo all that came out of the housing was a small piece of rubber, like an earthworm. The rubber vibrated, and you could hear a pitiful rattling noise that sounded just like the coughing, throat-clearing, snoring, farting, and sighing we did in our sleep. In that way the rubber worm protected our nighttime rest.

Anton Kowatsch became as excited about the worm as he was about the cuckoo, and especially about the sound it made. Each evening, when the loudspeaker anthem chased us into the barrack, Anton Kowatsch used a bent wire to switch the little piece of rubber to its nighttime rattle. He’d linger next to the clock, look at his reflection in the water bucket, and wait for the first rattle, as if hypnotized. When the little door opened, he’d hunch over a bit, and his left eye, which was slightly smaller than his right, would sparkle right on time. One evening, after the worm had rattled, he said to himself more than to me: Well well, it looks like our worm has picked up a little phantom pain from the cuckoo.

I liked the clock.

I didn’t like the crazy cuckoo, or the worm, or the speedy pendulum. But I did like the two fir-cone weights. They were nothing more than heavy, inert iron, but I saw the fir forests in our mountains at home. The dense black-green mantle of needles high overhead. And below, strictly aligned, as far as the eye can see, the trunks—wooden legs that stand when you stand and walk when you walk and run when you run. But not the way you do, more like an army. You feel afraid, your heart starts pounding beneath your tongue, and then you notice the shiny needle-fall underfoot, this bright calm scattered with fir cones. You bend over and pick up two and stick one in your pocket. The other you hold in your hand, and suddenly you’re no longer alone. The fir cones help you remember that the army is nothing but a forest, and that being lost in the forest is nothing more than going for a walk.

My father took great pains to teach me how to whistle, and how to tell where a whistle was coming from, so you could find a person who was lost in the woods by whistling back. I understood the usefulness of whistling, but I didn’t understand the right way to blow the air through my lips. I did it backward, filling my chest with air instead of sending sound to my lips. I never learned to whistle. Every time he tried to show me, all I could think about was what I saw, how men’s lips glisten on the inside, like rose quartz. He said that sooner or later I’d realize how useful it was. He meant the whistling. But I was thinking about the glassy skin inside the lips.

Actually the cuckoo clock belonged to the hunger angel. What was important in the camp was not our time, but rather the question: Cuckoo, how much longer will I live.

Katharina Seidel came from Bakowa in the Banat. Either someone from her village paid to be taken off the list and some scoundrel grabbed her instead, or the scoundrel was a sadist and she was on the list from the beginning. Kati was born feebleminded and all five years in the camp she had no idea where she was. A small version of a large woman, she had stopped growing while still a child, except in girth. She had a long brown braid, and her head was circled with a wreath of tightly curled hair. At first the women combed her hair every day, and later, after the lice plague began, every few days.

Kati Sentry wasn’t suited for any type of work. She didn’t understand what a quota was, or a command, or a punishment. She disrupted the course of the shift. During the second winter, to keep her busy, they came up with a sentry job. She was to go from one barrack to the next, keeping watch.

For a while she’d come to our barrack, sit at the small table, cross her arms, screw up her eyes, and peer into the prickly light from the bulb. The chair was too high for her, her feet didn’t reach the floor. When she got bored she held on to the edge of the table and rocked back and forth. She could hardly stand that for more than an hour, then she’d be off to another barrack.

By summer she had stopped going to any barrack but ours, because she liked the cuckoo clock, although she didn’t know how to tell time. She’d spend the night sitting under the light, arms crossed, waiting for the rubber worm to come out of his little door. When the worm started to rattle, she would open her mouth as if to join in, but wouldn’t make any sound. By the time the worm came out again she’d be asleep with her face on the table. Before falling asleep she always laid her braid on the table and held on to it all night long. Maybe that way she wasn’t so alone. Maybe she was afraid in this forest of beds for sixty-eight men. Maybe the braid helped her the way the fir cones helped me in the forest. Or perhaps she held her braid simply to make sure no one stole it.