Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

As soon as the beaks of her scale started moving up and down, I followed them with my eyes. My tongue twitched along with the beaks. I closed my mouth, but parted my lips so Fenya could see my toothy smile. We smiled out of necessity and out of principle, our smiles were genuine and false, helpless and underhanded at the same time, so as not to lose Fenya’s favor. So as not to challenge her sense of justice but encourage it, and if possible even increase it by a few grams.

But nothing helped, she was always in a foul mood. Her right leg was so much shorter than her left that we said she was lame, and this limp seemed to cause the right corner of her mouth to twitch up and down, while twisting the left into a permanent grimace. When she hobbled up to the bread counter, her bad mood appeared to come from the dark bread, and not from her short leg. Her mouth gave her face an agonized appearance—especially the right half.

And because she was the one who gave us our bread, her limping and her tormented face struck us as something fateful, like the staggering gait of history. Fenya seemed to exude a Communist saintliness. She was undoubtedly a loyal member of the camp’s administrative cadre, otherwise she would never have become mistress of the bread and accomplice of the hunger angel.

All alone she stood behind the counter in her whitewashed chamber, between abacus and scales, wielding the large knife. She must have carried lists in her head. She knew exactly who should get six hundred grams, who eight hundred grams, and who was to receive the thousand-gram ration.

I was overcome by Fenya’s ugliness. But in time I came to see that it was beauty turned inside out, and that made her the object of my veneration. Disgust would have made me bitter and would have been risky in view of her scales. I scraped and bowed, and often hated myself for doing so, but only after I’d savored her bread and felt halfway sated for a few minutes.

Today I imagine Fenya having administered all the bread I ever ate. First was the daily bread from Transylvania, the in-the-sweat-of-thy-face sour bread of the Lutheran God. Second was the wholesome brown bread from Hitler’s golden ears of grain in the German Reich. Third was the ration of khlyeb on the Russian scales. I believe the hunger angel knew of this trinity of the bread, and that he exploited it.

The bread factory made the first deliveries at dawn. By the time we arrived at the mess hall, between six and seven, Fenya had already measured out the portions. She placed each person’s ration back on the scales and balanced it against the weight, adding a bit more or cutting off a corner. Then she pointed her knife at the beaks, cocked her heavy chin, and looked at you as if she were seeing you for the first time in four hundred days.

Early on—around the time of the stolen bread—it dawned on me that Fenya’s saintliness, cold and cruel, had crept inside the bread, which is why we were capable of killing in the name of hunger.

By reweighing the bread like that, Fenya showed us that she was just. The ready portions lay on the shelves, covered with linen sheets. Before doling out a ration she would lift the cloth a little bit and then put it back, exactly as the practiced beggars did with their coal when going door-to-door. In her whitewashed chamber, with her white apron and white sheets, Fenya was like a priestess celebrating bread hygiene as a pillar of camp civilization. Of world civilization. The flies had no choice but to land on the fabric instead of the bread. They couldn’t get to the bread until we were holding it. And if they didn’t fly away quickly enough we ate their hunger along with our bread. At the time, I never thought about the flies’ hunger, or even about the hygienic rites with the white bread linens.

Fenya’s sense of justice, this combination of bitter resentment and accurate weighing, made me utterly submissive. There was perfection in her very repulsiveness. Fenya was neither good nor bad, she was not a person but the law in a crocheted sweater. It never would have occurred to me to compare her to other women, because no other woman was so agonizingly disciplined and so immaculately ugly. She was like the rationed loaves we coveted—appallingly wet, sticky, and disgracefully nourishing.

Each morning we received our ration for the whole day. Like most people, I belonged to the eight-hundred-gram group—that was the normal ration. Six hundred was for light work inside the camp: moving waste from the latrines into cisterns, sweeping snow, spring and fall cleaning, whitewashing the rocks along the main street. Only a few people were given a thousand grams, that was the exceptional ration for the heaviest labor. Even six hundred grams sounds like a lot, but the bread was so heavy that a single slice as thick as the length of your thumb weighed eight hundred grams, if cut from the center of the loaf. If you were lucky enough to get the heel, with the dry crusty corners, the slice was two thumbs thick.

The first decision of the day was: Am I steadfast enough to not eat my entire portion at breakfast with my cabbage soup. Can I, in all my hunger, save a little piece for the evening. At midday there was nothing to decide, since we were at work and there was no meal. In the evening after work, assuming I’d been steadfast in the morning, came the second decision: Am I steadfast enough just to check that my saved bread is still under my pillow, only look and nothing more. Can I hold off eating it until I’m in the mess hall, after evening roll call, which could take another two hours, or even longer.

If I hadn’t been steadfast in the morning, I had no leftover bread in the evening and no decision to make. Then I would fill my spoon just halfway and slurp deeply. I had learned to eat slowly, to swallow a little spit after every spoonful of soup. The hunger angel said: Spit makes the soup longer, and going to bed early makes the hunger shorter.

I went to bed early but woke up constantly, because my throat was swollen and pulsing. Whether I kept my eyes open or closed, whether I tossed around or stared at the lightbulb, whether someone was snoring as if he were drowning, whether the rubber worm from the cuckoo clock was rattling or not—the night was boundlessly vast, and in the night Fenya’s bread cloths were endlessly large, and beneath them lay the abundant, unreachable bread.

In the morning, after the anthem, hunger hurried off with me to breakfast, to Fenya. To the heroic first decision: Am I steadfast today, can I save a piece of bread for the evening, and on and on.

But how far on.

Each day the hunger angel gnawed at my brain. And one day he raised my hand. And with my hand I nearly struck Karli Halmen dead—because of the bread he had stolen.

Karli Halmen had the day off. He had the barrack all to himself, since everyone was at work. He’d eaten his entire ration of bread at breakfast. And that evening, when Albert Gion came off his shift, he found his saved bread had disappeared. Albert Gion had been steadfast for five days in a row, he’d saved five little pieces of bread, a whole day’s ration. He had been on our shift the entire day and, like everyone else who’d saved his bread, he had spent the entire day thinking about eating it with his evening soup. Like everyone else, the first thing he did when he came off the shift was to look under his pillow. His bread was no longer there.

Albert Gion’s bread wasn’t there, and Karli Halmen was sitting on his bed in his underwear. Albert Gion positioned himself in front of Karli Halmen and without saying a word punched him in the mouth three times. Without saying a word, Karli Halmen spat two teeth onto his bed. The accordion player dragged Karli by the neck to the water bucket and held his head under water. Bubbles came out of his mouth and nose, then gasping sounds, and after that it was quiet. The drummer then pulled Karli’s head out of the water and choked him until his mouth started twitching as hideously as Fenya’s. I pushed the drummer away, but then I pulled off my wooden shoe. And I raised my hand, so high I would have killed the bread thief. Up to that moment Paul Gast the lawyer had been watching from his upper bunk. He jumped on my back, tore the shoe out of my hand, and threw it against the wall. Karli Halmen had wet himself and was lying next to the bucket, spitting up bready slime.