Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

The braid did get stolen, but not by us. As punishment for falling asleep, Tur Prikulitsch had her taken to the sick barrack, where the female medic was told to shave Kati Sentry’s head. That evening Kati came to the mess hall with her cut-off braid and laid it on the table like a snake. She dunked the upper end in her soup and held it to her bare head so it would take root. Then she tried to feed the bottom end, and cried. Heidrun Gast took the braid away and told her it would be better to forget it. After dinner Heidrun Gast tossed the braid into one of the little fires in the yard and Kati Sentry looked on in silence as it burned.

Even with a shaved head Kati Sentry liked the cuckoo clock, and even with a shaved head she fell asleep after the rubber worm’s first rattle, her hand clasping the missing braid. And she continued holding her hand that way even after her hair started growing back. But she also continued to fall asleep on duty, and several months later her head was shaved once again. After that her hair grew back so sparse that you saw more lice bites than hair. But that still didn’t stop her from falling asleep on duty, until Tur Prikulitsch finally understood that you can put any human being to the drill, no matter how wretched, but you can’t bend a feeble mind to your will. The sentry post was abolished.

Once during roll call, before her head was first shaved, Kati Sentry was standing in the middle of a row. She took off her cap, placed it on the snow, and sat down. Shishtvanyonov shouted: Get up, Fascist! Tur Prikulitsch jerked her up by her braid, but when he let go she sat down again. He kicked her in the small of her back until she lay doubled up on the ground, holding her braid in her fist and her fist in her mouth. The end of her braid stuck out as though she’d bitten off half a little brown bird. She lay there until after the Appell, when one of us helped her up and took her to the mess hall.

Tur Prikulitsch could order us around as he wished, but he disgraced himself with his coarse treatment of Kati Sentry. And when that backfired, he disgraced himself with his show of sympathy. Because she was beyond correction and beyond help, Kati Sentry showed how hollow his authority really was. In order to save face, Tur Prikulitsch softened. He had Kati Sentry sit next to him on the ground during roll call. For hours she would sit on her quilted cap and watch him in amazement as though he were a marionette. After roll call, her cap would be frozen to the snow and had to be pried off the ground.

For three summer evenings in a row Kati Sentry disrupted the roll call. For a while she sat quietly next to Prikulitsch, then scooted close to his feet and started polishing his shoe with her cap. He stepped on her hand. She pulled it away and polished the other shoe. Then he stepped on her hand with his other foot. When he lifted his foot she jumped up and ran through the assembled ranks, fluttering her arms and cooing like a dove. We all held our breath, and Tur let out a hollow laugh like a big turkey-cock. Three times Kati Sentry managed to polish his shoes and become a dove. After that she was no longer allowed at roll call. Instead she had to mop the floors in the barracks. She took a bucket of water from the well, wrung out the rag, wrapped it around the broom, and changed the dirty water after every barrack. She worked without hesitation, her mind unclouded by any distraction. The floor was cleaner than ever before. She mopped thoroughly, without haste, perhaps out of habit from home.

Nor was she all that crazy. For roll call, instead of Appell she said APFEL—apple. When the little bell rang at the coke batteries she thought it was time for mass. She didn’t have to invent illusions, because her mind wasn’t in the camp to begin with. The way she behaved didn’t conform to camp regulations, but it did fit the circumstances. There was something elemental about her that we envied. Even the hunger angel was baffled when faced with her instincts. He visited her as he did all of us, but he did not climb into her brain. Kati performed the most basic tasks without thinking, abandoning herself to whatever came her way. She survived the camp without going door-to-door. She was never seen rummaging through the kitchen waste behind the mess hall. She ate what could be found in the yard and on the factory grounds. Seeds, leaves, and flowers in the weeds. And all kinds of insects—worms and caterpillars, maggots and beetles, spiders and snails. And in the snowy yard inside the camp the frozen excrement of the watchdogs. We were amazed at how the dogs trusted her, as if this human were one of them as she tottered about, her cap flapping over her ears.

Kati Sentry’s madness never went beyond what we could put up with. She was neither clinging nor aloof. Through all the years in the camp she seemed as much at home as a house pet. There was nothing alien about her. We liked her.

One September afternoon after my shift, the sun was still blazing hot in the sky. I drifted along the overgrown paths behind the mouth of the coal silo. Singed by the summer, the skeletons of wild oats shimmered like fish bones as they swayed among the fiery orach, which had long since turned inedible. Inside the hard husks, the kernels were still milky. I ate. On my way back I didn’t want to swim through the weeds again and so I decided to go a different way. Kati Sentry was sitting by the zeppelin. Her hands were on an anthill swarming with black ants. She was licking them off and eating them. I asked: Kati, what are you doing.

She said: I’m making gloves for myself, they tickle.

Are you cold, I asked.

She said: Not today, tomorrow. My mother baked poppy-seed rolls, they’re still warm. Don’t step on them with your feet, you can wait, you’re not a hunter. When the rolls are all gone the soldiers will be counted at the apple. Then they’ll go home.

By then her hands were swarming black again. Before she licked off the ants, she asked: When is the war over.

I said: The war’s been over for two years. Come, let’s go back to the camp.

She said: Can’t you see I don’t have any time now.

Fenya never wore a fufaika, she wore a white work apron, and a crocheted wool sweater over that—a different sweater every day. One was nut brown, another a dirty purple, like unpeeled beets, one was muddy yellow and another speckled with whitish gray. Each was too loose in the sleeve and too tight at the stomach. We never knew which sweater was meant for which day, or why Fenya wore them at all, or why she wore them over the apron. They couldn’t have kept her warm, they had more holes than wool. The wool was from before the war, repeatedly knitted and unraveled, but still good for crocheting. The yarn may have been salvaged from all the worn-out sweaters of a single large family, or else inherited from everyone in it who had died. We knew nothing about Fenya’s family, or whether she even had one, before or after the war. None of us was interested in Fenya personally. But we were all devoted to her, because she doled out the bread. She was the bread, the mistress from whose hands we ate, like dogs, day after day.

Our eyes clung to her, as though she might create the bread for us. Our hunger examined everything about her very closely. Her eyebrows like two toothbrushes, her face with its powerful chin, her too-short horse lips that didn’t quite cover her gums, her gray fingernails gripping the large knife she used to fine-tune the rations, her kitchen scale with its two beaks.

Most of all, her heavy eyes, as lifeless as the wooden beads on the abacus she rarely touched. The fact that she was repulsively ugly was something we couldn’t admit even to ourselves. We were afraid she might see what we were thinking.