Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Our Christmas tree stood on the little table below the cuckoo clock. Paul Gast the lawyer hung two brown bread-balls as ornaments. At the time I didn’t ask myself how he had enough bread for ornaments, first because I was sure he’d eat them the next day, and also because as he was kneading the little balls, he told us a story from home:

Our high school in Oberwischau used to have an Advent wreath that hung right over the teacher’s desk. The candles were lit every morning, before our first-period class, which was Geography. Our teacher, Herr Leonida, was completely bald. One morning the candles were burning and we started singing: O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie grün sind deine Blä— And all of a sudden Herr Leonida let out a shriek: the pink wax had dripped onto his bald head. Blow out those candles, he screamed. Then he jumped over to his chair, grabbed his coat, and pulled out a small knife—a little silver fish. He looked right at me and yelled: Come here. He opened the little knife and lowered his head for me to scrape off the wax. I managed to do it without nicking him, but as soon as I was sitting at my desk, he came up and slapped me. When I tried to wipe the tears from my eyes, he screamed: Hands behind your back.

Bea Zakel had persuaded Tur Prikulitsch to give me a propusk— a pass—so I could go to the market. The chance of getting a pass is something you don’t mention to a hungry person. I didn’t mention it to anybody. I took my pillowcase and Herr Carp’s leather gaiters. As always, it was a matter of finagling the best deal for the most calories. At eleven o’clock I set off, that is to say we set off, my hunger and I.

The day was still hazy from the rain. Peddlers stood in the mud, showing their wares: men with rusty screws and gear wheels, and wrinkled old women with tin dishes and little piles of blue pigment for house paint. The puddles around the paint were blue. Right nearby were other piles, of sugar and salt, dried prunes, corn flour, millet, barley, and peas. Even corn-flour cakes with sugar-beet paste, set on green horseradish leaves. Women without teeth were selling thick sour milk in metal containers, and a one-legged boy with a crutch was standing by a bucket full of red raspberry water. A few young drifters ran around hustling bent knives, forks, and fishing rods. Little silver fish flitted like living safety pins inside empty tin cans from America.

I pushed through the crowd with my leather gaiters on my arm, pausing in front of an old man in uniform with bald patches on his head and a dozen war medals on his chest. He had two books displayed at his feet: one was about Popocatépetl, and the other had a cover showing two fat fleas. I skimmed through the flea book because it had lots of pictures. Two fleas on a seesaw, next to them the trainer’s hand wielding a tiny whip, a flea on the back of a rocking chair, a flea harnessed to a wedding coach fashioned from a nutshell, the chest of a boy with two fleas between his nipples and two parallel chains of fleabites of even lengths running from the fleas down to his navel.

The man in uniform reached out and grabbed my leather gaiters and held them up first to his chest, then to his shoulders. I showed him they were meant for the legs. He let out a hollow laugh, from his belly, the way Tur Prikulitsch sometimes did during roll call, like big turkeys do. His upper lip kept catching on the stump of a tooth. The peddler selling next to him came over and rubbed the leather laces of the gaiters between his fingers. Then a man appeared carrying a handful of knives, which he stuck in his coat pocket. He took the gaiters and held them up to his left hip and his right, then placed them on his bottom and hopped around like a fool, while the man in uniform made farting noises. And then another man came whose neck was all bundled up. He walked on a crutch with an armrest made from a broken scythe wrapped in rags. He slipped his crutch into one of the gaiters and hurled it into the air. I ran after it and picked it up. A little farther down the other gaiter came flying. I bent over to pick that one up and there, lying in the mud next to my gaiter, was a crumpled banknote.

Somebody’s lost that, I thought. With luck he hasn’t noticed it’s missing. Or maybe he’s already looking for it, maybe while that mob was teasing me one of them saw it or saw me bend over and is waiting to see what I’ll do next. They were still laughing at me and my gaiters, but the money was already in my fist.

I had to quickly make myself scarce and so I pressed into the crowd. I clutched the gaiters tightly under my arm and smoothed out the bill, it was 10 rubles.

10 rubles was a fortune. Don’t waste time calculating, just eat, I thought, what doesn’t get eaten can go in the pillowcase. I’d had enough of the gaiters—those embarrassing leftovers from another universe, they only made me stick out. So I just dropped them on the ground and flitted off with my 10 rubles like a little silver fish.

My throat was throbbing, I was sweating with fright and paid two rubles for two cups of red raspberry water, which I drank down in one gulp. Then I bought two corn-flour cakes with sugar-beet paste. I even ate the horseradish leaves, thinking that because they were bitter, they must be good for the stomach, like medicine. Then I bought four Russian pancakes with cheese filling. Two for me and two for the pillowcase. After that I drank one small canful of thick sour milk and bought two pieces of sunflower-seed cake, both of which I ate. Then I saw the one-legged boy again and drank another cup of red raspberry water. After that I counted how much money I had left: 1 ruble and 6 kopeks, not enough for sugar, or even salt. While I was counting, I could feel the woman with the dried prunes watching me. She had one brown eye and one eye that was completely white and without a pupil, like a bean. I showed her my money. She pushed my hand away, saying no and waving her arms as if she were shooing flies. I stayed rooted where I was and kept holding up my money. I started to shiver, then crossed myself and mumbled as if praying: Our Father, save me from this goddamned hideous hag. Lead her into temptation and deliver me from evil. As I mumbled, I thought about Fenya’s cold saintliness, and when I was done I said a hard, clear AMEN, to give some form to my prayer. The woman was moved and fixed me with her bean eye. Then she took my money and filled an old green Cossack cap with prunes. I dumped half of them in my pillowcase and the rest in my quilted cap, to eat right away. And after I finished the prunes in the cap, I ate the two pancakes I had left. And then there was nothing in the pillowcase except a handful of prunes.

The wind flew warmly through the acacias, the mud in the puddles curled up into gray cups. On the path that ran beside the road to the camp a goat was tethered to a stake. Its neck was rubbed raw from constantly chafing against the rope, which had circled the stake so many times the goat could no longer reach the grass. The goat had a sidelong gaze like Bea Zakel and a tormented quality like Fenya. It tried to follow me. I thought about the blue, dry-frozen goats that had been split in two and tossed into the cattle car and which we had used for heating. I was only halfway to the camp, I was going to be late, and on top of that I’d be showing up with prunes in my pillowcase. To keep them away from the guards I ate the rest. Through the poplars behind the Russian village I could already see the cooling tower. Above its white cloud the sun grew square and slipped into my mouth. My throat was walled shut, I gasped for air. My stomach ached, my intestines rumbled and twisted in my belly like scimitars. My eyes teared up, and the cooling tower began to spin. I leaned against a mulberry tree, and the earth beneath it began to spin. A truck began to flutter on the road, and on the path three stray dogs began to blur together. I threw up all over the tree, and I felt so bad about wasting all the expensive food that I cried even as I threw up.