Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Then it all lay glistening beside the mulberry tree.

All of it, all of it.

I leaned my head against the trunk and stared at the glistening chewed-up food, as if I could eat it all over again with my eyes. Then I passed under the first watchtower in the empty wind, with an empty pillowcase and an empty stomach. The same as before, except without my leather gaiters. My lucky gaiters. The guard was spitting sunflower-seed husks from the tower, they sailed through the air like flies. The emptiness inside me was bitter as gall, I felt sick. But the minute I was in the yard I was already wondering if there was any cabbage soup left in the mess hall. The mess hall was closed. And I chanted to the drumming clatter of my wooden shoes:

The Matron with her white cloud is real. My shovel is real. My bunk in the barrack is real. And I’m sure there’s a gap between being hungry and dropping dead. I just have to find it, since the urge to eat is stronger than I am. Fenya limps but thinks straight. Her chilly saintliness is just. She gives me my share of food. Why go to the market, the camp keeps me locked up for my own good. I can only be made a laughingstock where I don’t belong. I’m at home in the camp. The guard from this morning recognized me, he waved me through the gate. And his dog knows me too, he didn’t budge from the warm pavement. And the roll-call grounds know me, and I can find my way to my barrack even with my eyes closed. I don’t need a day pass, I have the camp, and the camp has me. All I need is a bunk and Fenya’s bread and my tin bowl.

I don’t even need Leo Auberg.

Hunger is an object.

The angel has climbed into my brain.

The angel doesn’t think. He thinks straight.

He’s never absent.

He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction.

He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me.

He knew all of this before he met me, and he knows my future.

He lingers in every capillary like quicksilver. First a sweetness in my throat. Then pressure on my stomach and chest. The fear is too much.

Everything has become lighter.

The hunger angel leans to one side as he walks with open eyes. He staggers around in small circles and balances on my breath-swing. He knows the homesickness in the brain and the blind alleys in the air.

The air angel leans to the other side as he walks with open hunger.

He whispers to himself and to me: where there is loading there can also be unloading. He is of the same flesh that he is deceiving. Will have deceived.

He knows about saved bread and cheek-bread and he sends out the white hare.

He says he’s coming back but stays where he is.

When he comes, he comes with force.

It’s utterly clear:

1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

Hunger is an object.

After wolfing down our food in the mess hall, we shove the long wooden tables and the benches against the wall. Now and then on Saturday nights we’re allowed to dance until a quarter before midnight, then we have to put everything back. At twelve on the dot, when the loudspeaker plays the Russian anthem, everyone has to be in his barrack. On Saturdays the guards are feeling happy from drinking sugar-beet liquor and their fingers can be light on the trigger. If someone’s found dead in the yard on Sunday morning the word is: attempted escape. The fact that he had to run to the latrine in his underwear because his guts were worn out and could no longer digest the cabbage soup is no excuse. Even so, we shuffle out a tango now and then on our mess-hall Saturdays. When you dance you’re like the Crescent Moon Madonna at Café Martini, living on your tiptoes in the world you come from—the world of ballrooms and garlands and Chinese lanterns, of evening dresses, brooches, ties, pocket squares, and cuff links. My mother is dancing. She has her hair in a bun braided like a little basket, with two curls spiraling down her cheeks. She’s wearing light-brown sandals with high heels and straps as thin as pear peels, a green satin dress, and a brooch right over her heart—four emeralds in the shape of a lucky clover. And my father is wearing his sand-gray suit with a white square in his pocket and a white carnation in his buttonhole.

But I’m wearing lice in my fufaika and footwraps that stink inside my rubber galoshes, I’m a forced laborer getting dizzy from the ballroom back home and the emptiness in my stomach. I dance with Zirri Kaunz, the one with the silky hair on her hands. The other Zirri, with the olive-sized wart under her ring finger, is Zirri Wandschneider. While we’re dancing, Zirri Kaunz assures me that she comes from the village of Kastenholz—or Boxwood—and not from Wurmloch—Wormhole—like the other Zirri. And that her father came from Wolkendorf—or Cloudville. That before she was born her parents moved to Kastenholz because her father bought a large vineyard there. I tell her there’s also a village called Liebling—Darling—and a town called Gross-Scham or Big-Shame, but they’re in the Banat, not Transylvania. I don’t understand the first thing about the Banat, says Zirri. I don’t either, I say, spinning around her in my sweaty fufaika, while her sweaty fufaika spins around me. The whole mess hall is spinning. There’s nothing to understand when everything is spinning. And then I mention the wooden cabins behind the camp, which for some reason are called Finnish cabins though the people who live there are Russian Ukrainians. There’s nothing to understand about that either, I say.

After the break comes La Paloma. I dance with the other Zirri. Loni Mich, our singer, stands half a step in front of the musicians. For La Paloma she takes another half step forward, because she wants to have the song all to herself. She keeps her arms and legs completely still, but her eyes roll and her head sways. Her small goiter trembles, her voice turns raw like the undertow of deep water:

Everyone has to keep silent while dancing our pleated Paloma. You go mute and think what you have to think, even if you don’t want to. We shove our homesickness across the floor like a heavy crate. Zirri lets her feet drag, I press my hand against the small of her back until she regains the rhythm. She’s had her head turned away from me for some time, so I can’t see her face. But her back is quivering, and I can tell that she’s crying. The shuffling is loud enough so that I don’t have to say anything. What could I say other than she shouldn’t cry.

It’s impossible to dance without toes, so Trudi Pelikan sits on a bench off to the side, and I sit down next to her. In the first winter her toes froze. The following summer they were squashed by the lime wagon. That fall they were amputated because worms got under the bandage. Since then Trudi Pelikan has walked on her heels, so she compensates by tilting her shoulders forward. That makes her back a little hunched, and her arms as stiff as shovel handles. She couldn’t work at the construction site or in a factory or in the garage, and during the second winter she was assigned to the sick barrack.

We talk about the sick barrack, that it’s nothing more than a place to die. Trudi Pelikan says: Ichthyol salve is the only thing we have that’s of any use. Even the Russian medic has remarked that the Germans die in waves. The winter wave is the biggest. The second biggest comes in summer, when the diseases spread. The autumn wave comes when the tobacco ripens. People poison themselves with tobacco broth, it costs less than coal alcohol. And it doesn’t cost a thing to open your vein with a shard of glass, or to slice off your hand or foot. It doesn’t cost anything to run headfirst into a brick wall until you collapse, either, although that’s a little harder to do, says Trudi Pelikan.