Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Because the skinandbones people were sexless to each other, the hunger angel coupled with everyone. He also betrayed the flesh he had just stolen from us, dragging more and more lice and bedbugs into our beds. The skinandbones time meant the weekly delousing parade in the yard after work. Every person and every thing had to be taken outside to be deloused—suitcases, clothes, bunks, and ourselves.

It was the third summer, the acacias were blooming, the evening breeze smelled like warm café au lait. I had taken everything outside. Then Tur Prikulitsch came over with the green-toothed Tovarishch Shishtvanyonov, who was carrying a freshly peeled willow cane, twice as long as a flute, flexible enough for beating, with a sharpened tip for rummaging around. Disgusted by our misery, he would skewer things in our suitcases and fling them out onto the ground.

I had positioned myself as close as possible to the middle of the delousing parade, because the searches at the front and near the end were merciless. But this time Shishtvanyonov decided he wanted to bring some rigor to the middle. His cane drilled through the clothes in my gramophone box and hit my toilet kit. He put down the cane, opened my toilet kit, and discovered my secret cabbage soup. For three weeks I’d been storing cabbage soup in the two beautiful bottles I couldn’t throw away just because they were empty. And so, because they were empty I filled them with cabbage soup. One was a round-bellied bottle of rippled glass, with a screw top, the other had a flat belly and a wider neck, for which I’d even whittled a decent wooden stopper. To keep the cabbage soup from spoiling, I sealed it airtight the way we sealed stewed fruit at home. Trudi Pelikan lent me a candle from the sick barrack, and I dripped some stearine around the stopper.

Shto eto , asked Shishtvanyonov.

Cabbage soup.

What for.

He shook the little bottle so that the soup foamed up.

Na pamyat’ , I said.

Kobelian had taught me that Russians considered memento a good word, that’s why I said it. But Shishtvanyonov was probably wondering what I needed this memento for. Who could be dumb enough to need little bottles of cabbage soup to remind him of cabbage soup when cabbage soup is served here twice a day.

For home, he asked.

I nodded. That was the worst thing possible, that I intended to take cabbage soup home in little bottles. He would have beaten me on the spot, and I could have put up with it, but he was only halfway through his parade and didn’t want to fall behind. He confiscated my bottles and ordered me to report to him.

The next morning Tur Prikulitsch escorted me out of the mess hall to the officers’ room. He marched down the camp street like a driven man, and I followed like a condemned man. I asked him what I should say. Without turning around he waved his hand dismissively as if to say, I’m not getting involved. Shishtvanyonov roared at me. Tur could have saved himself the trouble of translating, by now I knew it all by heart. I was a Fascist, a spy, a saboteur, and a pest, I had no culture, and by stealing cabbage soup I was committing treason against the camp, against Soviet authority, and against the Soviet people.

The cabbage soup was thin enough in the camp, but in these bottles with their narrow necks, it was almost completely clear. And as far as Shishtvanyonov was concerned, the few strands of cabbage floating in the bottles were a clear denunciation. My situation was precarious. Then Tur held up his finger, he had an idea: medicine. For the Russians, though, medicine was only a half-good word. Tur realized that just in time, so he twirled his index finger against his forehead as if he were drilling a hole and said, with a hint of meanness in his voice: Obscurantism.

That made sense. Tur explained that I’d only been in the camp for three years, that I wasn’t yet reeducated, that I still believed in magic potions against disease, and so I kept the bottle with the screw top against diarrhea, and the one with the stopper against constipation. Shishtvanyonov pondered what Tur was saying, and not only believed him but even went so far as to note that while obscurantism was admittedly not good in the camp, it wasn’t such a bad thing in life. He examined both bottles one more time, shook them until the foam rose in their necks, then moved the one with the screw top a little to the right and the one with the wooden stopper exactly the same distance to the left so that the two bottles were touching each other. By then Shishtvanyonov’s mouth had softened and his gaze had mellowed, thanks to the bottles. Tur had another good idea and said:

Get lost. Now.

I suspect that Shishtvanyonov didn’t simply throw the bottles away, for some inexplicable—or even explicable—reason.

But what are reasons, really. To this day I don’t know why I filled the bottles with cabbage soup. Did it have something to do with my grandmother’s sentence: I know you’ll come back. Was I really so naïve as to think I’d come home and present the cabbage soup to my family as though I were bringing them two bottles of life in the camp. Or was I still clinging to the notion, despite the hunger angel, that whenever you go on a trip you bring back a souvenir. From her one and only voyage on a ship my grandmother had brought me a sky-blue, thumb-sized Turkish slipper from Constantinople. But that was my other grandmother, who hadn’t said anything about coming back, who lived in a different house and hadn’t even been at ours to say good-bye. Did I think the bottles would be some kind of witness for me at home. Or was one bottle gullible and the other skeptical. Was the screw-top bottle filled with my trip home and the stoppered bottle filled with my staying here forever. Could it be that they were opposites, just like diarrhea and constipation. Did Tur Prikulitsch know more about me than he should. Was talking to Bea Zakel doing me any good.

Was going home even the opposite of staying here. I probably wanted to be up to both possibilities, if it came to that. I probably wanted to make sure that my life here, my life in general, wouldn’t stay trapped in yearning to go home every day and never being able to. The more I wanted to go home, the more I tried not to want it so much that I’d be destroyed if they never let me. I never lost my yearning to go home, but in order to have something besides that, I told myself that even if they kept us here forever, this would still be my life. After all, the Russians have their lives. I don’t want to struggle so hard against settling here. All I have to do is stay the way the stoppered half of me already is. I can reeducate myself, I don’t yet know how, but the steppe will see to it. The hunger angel had taken possession of me, my scalp was fluttering. My hair had just been clipped on account of lice.

Once during the previous summer, Kobelian had unbuttoned his shirt in the open air, and as it fluttered, he’d said something about the grassy soul of the steppe and his Ural heart. That could beat in my breast as well, I thought.

That morning the sun rose very early like a red balloon, so big and round that it made the sky over the coke plant look flat.

Our shift had begun during the night. We were standing under the floodlight inside the pek basin, a settling tank two meters deep and two barracks long and wide. The basin was coated with an ancient, vitrified layer of pitch one meter thick. Our job was to clean out the basin with crowbars and pickaxes, chip away the pitch, and load it into wheelbarrows. Then push the wheelbarrows up a rickety plank that led out of the basin to the tracks, and up another plank to dump the pieces in the freight car.

We chipped away at the black glass: fluted, curved, and jagged shards whizzed by our heads. There was no sign of dust. But then, when I came back down the rickety plank, pushing my empty wheelbarrow out of the black night and into the white funnel of light, the air shimmered like an organza cape made of glass dust. As soon as the wind shook the floodlamp, the cape turned into a shiny chrome birdcage that hovered in the exact same spot.