Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel

Back then, at the table with the fork and potatoes, when my mother caught me with the word meat, I remembered how she used to shout down to the courtyard where I was playing: If you don’t come to dinner right away, if I have to call you one more time, you can just stay where you are. But I didn’t always come right away, and once, when I finally went upstairs, she said:

Why don’t you just pack your satchel and go out into the world and do whatever you want. She pulled me into my room, grabbed my woolen cap and my jacket, and stuffed them inside my little backpack. I said, But I’m your child, where am I supposed to go.

A lot of people think packing a suitcase is something you learn through practice, like singing or praying. We had no practice and no suitcase. When my father was sent to join the Romanian soldiers on the front, there was nothing to pack. Soldiers are given everything they need, it’s all part of the uniform. But we had no idea what we were packing for, except a long journey and a cold place. If you don’t have the right things, you improvise. The wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn out to be the only right things, simply because they’re what you have.

My mother brought the gramophone from the living room and set it on the kitchen table. Using a screwdriver, I made it into a suitcase. First I took out the spindle and turntable. Then I corked up the hole for the crank. The fox-red velvet lining stayed. I also kept the triangular emblem with HIS MASTER’S VOICE and the dog facing the horn. I put four books on the bottom: a cloth-bound edition of Faust , the slim volume of Weinheber, Zarathustra , and my anthology of poems from eight centuries. No novels, since you just read them once and never again. After the books came my toilet kit, containing: 1 bottle eau de toilette, 1 bottle Tarr aftershave, 1 shaving soap, 1 razor, 1 shaving brush, 1 alum stone, 1 hand soap, 1 nail scissors. Next to the toilet kit I put: 1 pair wool socks (brown, darned), 1 pair knee-high socks, 1 red-and-white-checked flannel shirt, 2 short plain underpants. My new burgundy-colored silk scarf went on the very top so it wouldn’t get crushed. It had a pattern of shiny checks alternating with matte. With that the case was full.

Then came my bundle: 1 day blanket off the sofa (wool, bright blue and beige plaid, a huge thing but not very warm). And rolled into that: 1 lightweight overcoat (salt-and-pepper, very worn) and 1 pair leather gaiters (ancient, from the First World War, melon-yellow, with laces).

Then came the haversack with: 1 tin of Scandia brand ham, 4 sandwiches, a few leftover Christmas cookies, 1 canteen of water with a cup.

Then my grandmother set the gramophone box, the bundle, and the haversack beside the door. The two policemen had said they’d come for me at midnight. My bags stood ready to go.

Then I got dressed: 1 pair long underwear, 1 flannel shirt (beige and green plaid), 1 pair knickers (gray, from Uncle Edwin, as I said), 1 cloth vest with knitted sleeves, 1 pair wool socks, and 1 pair lace-up boots. Aunt Fini’s green gloves lay within easy reach on the table. As I laced up my boots I thought about a summer vacation years earlier in the Wench highlands. My mother was wearing a sailor suit that she had made. On one of our walks she let herself sink into the tall grass and pretended to be dead. I was eight years old. The horror: the sky fell into the grass. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see it swallowing me. My mother jumped up, shook me, and said: So, do you love me. See, I’m still alive.

My boots were laced up. I sat at the table waiting for midnight. And midnight came, but the patrol was late. Three more hours had to pass—that’s almost too much for anyone. And then they were there. My mother held up the coat with the black velvet collar, and I slipped inside. She cried. I pulled on the green gloves. On the wooden walkway, just next to the gas meter, my grandmother said: I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK.

I didn’t set out to remember her sentence. I carried it to the camp without thinking. I had no idea it was going with me. But a sentence like that has a will of its own. It worked inside me, more than all the books I had packed. I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK became the heart-shovel’s accomplice and the hunger angel’s adversary. And because I did come back, I can say: a sentence like that keeps you alive.

It was three in the morning, on the fifteenth of January, 1945, when the patrol came for me. The cold was getting worse: it was −15° C.

We rode in a canvas-topped truck through the empty town to the exhibition hall. The Transylvanian Saxons had used it as a banquet hall. Now it was an assembly camp. Some 300 people were crammed inside. Mattresses and straw sacks lay strewn on the floor. Vehicles arrived throughout the night, from the surrounding villages as well as from the town, and unloaded the people who’d been collected. It was impossible to count how many, there was no way to see everything, even though the light in the hall stayed on the whole night. Toward morning I counted nearly 500. People ran around looking for acquaintances. Word had it that carpenters were being requisitioned at the train station, that they were outfitting the cattle cars with plank beds made of fresh lumber. And that other craftsmen were equipping the trains with cylindrical stoves. And that others were sawing toilet holes into the floor. People talked a lot, quietly, with eyes wide open, and they cried a lot, quietly, with eyes shut. The air smelled of old wool, sweaty fear and greasy meat, vanilla pastries, liquor. One woman took off her headscarf. She was obviously from the country, her braid had been doubled and pinned up to the top of her head with a semicircular horn comb. The teeth of the comb disappeared in her hair, but the two corners of its curved edge stuck out like little pointed ears. The ears and her thick braid made the back of her head look like a sitting cat. I sat like a spectator in the middle of all the legs and luggage. For a few minutes I fell asleep and dreamed:

My mother and I are in a cemetery, standing in front of a freshly dug grave. A plant half my height is growing in the middle of the grave. The leaves are furry, and its stem has a pod with a leather handle, a little suitcase. The pod is open the width of a finger and lined with fox-red velvet. We don’t know who has died. My mother says: Take the chalk out of your coat pocket. But I don’t have any, I say. I reach in my pocket and find a piece of tailor’s chalk. My mother says: We have to write a short name on the suitcase. Let’s write RUTH—we don’t know anybody named that. I write RUHT—rests, as on a gravestone.

In my dream it was clear to me that I had died, but I didn’t want to tell my mother just yet. I was startled out of my sleep by an older man with an umbrella who sat down on the straw sack next to me and spoke into my ear: My brother-in-law wants to come, but the place is guarded. They won’t let him in. We’re still in town, he can’t come here, and I can’t go home. A bird was flying on each silver button of the man’s jacket—a wild duck, or rather an albatross, because the cross on his badge turned into an anchor when I leaned in closer. The umbrella stood between us like a walking stick. I asked: Are you taking that along. Yes I am, he said, it snows even more there than it does here.

No one told us how or when we were supposed to leave the hall—or I should say, when we’d be allowed to leave, since I was anxious to get going, even if that meant traveling to Russia in a cattle car with a gramophone box and a velvet collar around my neck. I don’t remember how we finally got to the station, just that the cattle cars were tall. I’ve also forgotten the boarding, we spent so many days and nights traveling in the cattle car, it seemed we’d been there forever. Nor can I remember how long we stayed on the train. I thought that traveling a long time meant we were traveling a great distance. As long as we keep moving, I thought, nothing can happen. As long as we keep moving, everything is fine.