Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

My bloodlust had swallowed my reason. And I wasn’t the only one, we were a mob. We dragged Karli in his bloody, piss-soaked underwear out into the night, next to the barrack. It was February. We stood him against the barrack wall, he staggered and fell over. Without any discussion, the drummer and I undid our pants, then Albert Gion and all the others. And because we were all getting ready for bed anyway, one after the other we pissed on Karli Halmen’s face. Paul Gast the lawyer joined in as well. Two watchdogs barked, and a guard came running after them. The dogs smelled the blood and growled, the guard cursed. The lawyer and the guard carried Karli to the sick barrack. We watched them leave and used the snow to wipe the blood off our hands. Everyone went back to the barrack in silence and crawled into bed. I had a spot of blood on my wrist, I turned it toward the light and thought, How bright red Karli’s blood is, like sealing wax, as if it came from the artery and not the vein. In the barrack it was dead silent, and I heard the rubber worm rattling in the cuckoo clock, sounding so close it could be inside my head. I no longer thought about Karli Halmen, or about Fenya’s endlessly white linen, or even about the unreachable bread. I fell into a deep, calm sleep.

The next morning Karli Halmen’s bed was empty. We went to the mess hall as always. The snow was empty as well, no longer red, fresh snow had fallen. Karli Halmen spent two days in the sick barrack. After that he was back with us in the mess hall just as before, except with pus-filled wounds, swollen eyes, and blue lips. The business with the bread was over, everyone acted the same as always. We didn’t hold the theft against Karli Halmen. And he never held his punishment against us. He knew he had earned it. The bread court does not deliberate, it punishes. It knows no mitigation, it needs no legal code. It is a law unto itself, because the hunger angel is also a thief who steals the brain. Bread justice has no prologue or epilogue, it is only here and now. Totally transparent, or totally mysterious. In any case, the violence meted out by bread justice is different from hungerless violence. You cannot approach the bread court with conventional morality.

The bread court took place in February. By April, Karli Halmen was sitting on a chair in Oswald Enyeter’s barber room, his wounds had healed, his beard had grown like trampled grass. My turn was next, and I waited behind him in the mirror, the way Tur Prikulitsch usually waited behind me. The barber placed his furry hands on Karli’s shoulders and asked: Since when are we missing two front teeth. Karli Halmen answered, speaking not to me, nor to the barber, but to the barber’s furry hands: Since the case of the stolen bread.

After his beard had been shaved off, I sat down on the chair. It was the only time that Oswald Enyeter ever whistled a kind of serenade as he shaved, and a spot of blood came spilling out of the lather. Not bright red like sealing wax, but dark red, like a raspberry in the snow.

When our hunger is at its peak, we talk about childhood and food. The women at greater length than the men. And no one talks at greater length than the women from the countryside. Each of their recipes takes three acts, like a play. The dramatic tension builds as opinions differ over ingredients. And it really heats up over a bread-bacon-and-egg stuffing, when a whole onion is called for, and a half just won’t do, when you need six and not just four cloves of garlic, and when the onions and garlic better be grated and not just minced. And when old rolls make better crumbs than bread, and caraway is better than pepper, and marjoram is better than anything including tarragon, which of course goes with fish but not duck. The play reaches its climax when the mixture clearly has to be inserted just under the skin to absorb the fat during roasting, or absolutely has to be spooned into the stomach cavity so it won’t soak up all the fat. Sometimes the Lutheran stuffed duck wins out, and sometimes the Catholic one.

And when the women from the country make soup noodles out of words, they spend at least half an hour thrashing out how many eggs are needed and whether the dough should be stirred with a spoon or kneaded by hand before it gets rolled out glassy thin but doesn’t tear and is left to dry on the noodle board. And then it’s another quarter hour before the dough gets rolled and cut, before the noodles move off the board and into the soup, before the soup is slowly stirred or quickly brought to a rolling boil and is finally served with either a good handful or just a pinch of freshly chopped parsley sprinkled on top.

The women from the city don’t argue about how many eggs to put in the dough but how few. Because they’re always scrimping on everything, their recipes aren’t even enough for a curtain-raiser.

Telling a recipe takes greater art than telling a joke. The punch line has to hit home even though it’s not funny. Here in the camp it’s already a joke as soon as you say: FIRST TAKE. The punch line is that there’s nothing to take. But no one bothers to say that. Recipes are the jokes of the hunger angel.

To get inside the women’s barracks you have to run a gauntlet. As soon as you step inside you have to say who you’re looking for, without waiting to be asked. Your best bet is to ask a question yourself: Is Trudi here. And while you’re asking you head for Trudi Pelikan’s bed, in the third row on the left. The beds are two-story iron bunks, just like in the men’s barracks. Some have blankets draped as a screen, for evening love. I’m never interested in going behind the blanket, though, all I’m after are recipes. The women think I’m too shy, because I once had books. They believe that reading makes you delicate and sensitive.

I never read the books I brought to the camp. Since paper is strictly forbidden, I kept my books hidden under some bricks behind the barracks until the middle of the first summer. Then I auctioned them off. For 50 pages of Zarathustra cigarette paper I received 1 measure of salt, and 70 pages fetched 1 measure of sugar. For the clothbound Faust in its entirety Peter Schiel made me my own lice comb out of tin. I consumed the lyrical anthology from eight centuries in the form of corn flour and lard and converted the slim volume of Weinheber into millet. That doesn’t make you delicate, just discreet.

Discreetly, after work, I look at the young Russians on duty taking a shower. I’m so discreet that I forget why I’m looking. They would kill me if I remembered.

Once again I was not steadfast. I ate all my bread in the morning. Once again I’m sitting next to Trudi Pelikan on the edge of her bed. The two Zirris sit opposite us, on Corina Marcu’s bed. She’s been at the kolkhoz for weeks. I look at the little golden hairs and the black wart on the emaciated fingers of the Zirris and, so as not to start right in on food, I talk about my childhood.

Every summer we used to take a long vacation in the country—we, meaning my mother, myself, and the servant girl Lodo. We had a summerhouse in the Wench highlands, across from Schnürleibl Mountain. We stayed for eight weeks. During these eight weeks we always took one day-trip to Schässburg, the nearest town. We had to go down into the valley to catch the train. Our station was called Hétur in Hungarian, and Siebenmänner in German. When the bell rang on the roof of the station attendant’s hut, we knew that the train had left Danesch and would be arriving in five minutes. We had to board right from track level, because there was no platform, so when the train pulled up, the door was as high as my chest. Before we climbed on I inspected the car from underneath, the black wheels with the shiny rims, the chains, hooks, and buffers. Then we rode past our swimming place, past Toma’s house and past the field that belonged to old Zacharias—to whom we gave two packs of tobacco each month for letting us walk through his barley to get to the river. Next came the iron bridge, with the yellow water rolling below. Then the eroded sand cliffs, topped by Villa Franca. And then we were in Schässburg, where we always went straight to the elegant Café Martini on the market square. We stood out a little among the guests because we were dressed a bit too casually—my mother in culottes and I in my shorts with knee-high socks, gray so they wouldn’t show dirt so quickly. Only Lodo wore the Sunday clothes she’d brought from her village, a white peasant blouse and a black headscarf with a border of roses and a green silk fringe. Red-shaded roses, as big as apples, bigger than real roses. On that day we could eat whatever we wanted, and as much as we could. We could choose among marzipan truffles, chocolate cake, savarins, cream cake, nut cake roll, Ischler tartlet, cream puffs, hazelnut crisps, rum cake, napoleons, nougat, and doboschtorte. And ice cream—strawberry ice cream in a silver dish or vanilla ice cream in a glass dish or chocolate ice cream in a porcelain bowl, always with whipped cream. And, finally, if we were still able, sour-cherry cake with jelly. My arms felt the cool touch of the marble tabletop and the backs of my knees felt the soft plush of the chair. And up on the black buffet, teetering in the wind of the fan, wearing a long red dress, standing on her tiptoes atop a very thin moon, was the Crescent Moon Madonna.