Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

At six a.m. the shift was over, it had been light outside for an hour. The sun was now shriveled but angry, its globe tight like a pumpkin. My eyes were on fire, every suture in my skull was throbbing. On the way home to the camp everything was glaring. The veins in my neck were ticking away, about to explode, my eyeballs were boiling inside my head, my heart was drumming in my chest, my ears were crackling. My neck swelled like hot dough and stiffened. Head and neck became one. The swelling spread to my shoulders, neck and upper body became one. The light drilled through me, I had to hurry into the darkness of the barrack. But it wasn’t dark enough, even the light from the window was deadly. I covered my head with my pillow. Relief came toward evening, but so did the night shift, and I had to go back to the floodlight at the pitch basin. On the second night, the nachal’nik came by with a bucket of lumpy, gray-pink paste that we smeared on our faces and necks before entering the site. The paste dried right away and then flaked off.

When the sun rose the next morning, the tar was raging inside my head even worse than before. I lurched into camp like a cat on its last legs and went directly to the sick barrack. Trudi Pelikan stroked my forehead. The medic drew a head in the air that was even more swollen than mine and said SOLNTSYE and SVYET and BOLIT. And Trudi Pelikan cried and explained something about photochemical mucosal reactions.

What’s that.

Daylight poisoning, she said.

She handed me a horseradish leaf with a dollop of salve they’d concocted out of marigolds and lard, for rubbing into the raw skin so it wouldn’t crack. The medic told me I was too sensitive to work at the pitch basin, she said she might talk to Tur Prikulitsch and that in the meantime she’d write a note saying I needed three days to recover.

I spent three days in bed. Half asleep, half awake, I floated back home on waves of fever, to summer mornings in the Wench. The sun rises very early behind the fir trees, like a red balloon. I peek through the crack of the door, my parents are still asleep. I go into the kitchen, on the kitchen table there’s a shaving mirror propped against the milk can. My Aunt Fini, who’s as thin as a nutcracker, is wearing a white organza dress. She’s running with a curling iron back and forth between the gas stove and the mirror, putting a wave in her hair. Then she combs my hair with her fingers and uses her spit to slick down my cowlick. She takes me by the hand, we go outside to pick daisies for the breakfast table.

The dewy grass comes up to my shoulders, the meadow rustles and buzzes, it’s full of white-fringed daisies and bluebells. The only thing I pick is ribwort, we call it shoot-weed, because you can use the stem as a sling and shoot the seed spike pretty far. I shoot at the glaring white organza dress. All of a sudden a living chain of locusts appears between the organza and Aunt Fini’s equally white slip, hooked claw to claw and wrapped around her lower body. She drops her daisies, holds out her arms, and freezes in place. And I slip under her dress and shovel away the locusts with my hands, faster and faster. They’re cold and heavy like wet screws. They pinch, I feel afraid. I look up and, instead of Aunt Fini with her freshly waved hair, I see a locust colossus on two skinny legs.

Under the organza dress was the first time I ever had to shovel in desperation. Now I was lying in a barrack for three days, rubbing myself with marigold salve, while everyone else went on working at the pitch basin site. But because I was too sensitive, Tur Prikulitsch reassigned me to the slag cellar.

Which is where I stayed.

There are two of us, Albert Gion and myself, two cellar-people working below the boilers of the factory. In the barrack Albert Gion is quick-tempered. In the dark cellar he is deliberate but decisive, the way melancholy people are. Maybe he wasn’t always like that, maybe he became like that in the cellar, the way cellars are. He’s been working here a long time. We don’t say much, only what’s necessary.

Albert Gion says: I’ll flip three carts, then you flip three.

I say: After that I’ll straighten the mountain—as we called the pile of slag.

He says: Right, then you go push.

Between flipping and pushing, the shift goes back and forth, until we’re halfway through, until Albert Gion says:

Let’s sleep for thirty minutes under the board, below number seven, it’s quiet there.

And then we start the second half.

Albert Gion says: I’ll flip three carts, then you flip three.

I say: After that I’ll straighten the mountain.

He says: Right, then you go push.

I say: I’ll push when number nine is full.

He says: No, you flip now, I’ll push, the bunker’s already full.

At the end of the shift one of us says: Come on, let’s make sure the cellar’s nice and clean for the next shift.

After my first week in the cellar, Tur Prikulitsch was once again standing behind me in the barber’s mirror. I was half-shaved, and he raised his oily eyes and spotless fingers and asked:

So how are things in the cellar.

Cozy, I said, every shift is a work of art.

He smiled over the barber’s shoulder, but had no idea how true this really was. You could hear the thin hatred in his tone, his nostrils had a pink shine, his temples were veined with marble.

Your face was pretty filthy yesterday, he said, and your cap was so full of holes its guts were hanging out.

Doesn’t matter, I said, the coal dust is finger-thick and furry. But after every shift the cellar’s nice and clean, because every shift is a work of art.

After my first day in the cellar, Trudi said in the mess hall: No more pitch—you’re a lucky man. It’s nicer below ground, isn’t it.

Then she told me that when she was hauling the lime wagon during her first year in camp, she’d often close her eyes and dream. Now she takes naked corpses out of the dying room to the back of the courtyard and lays them on the ground like freshly stripped logs. She said that now, too, when she carries the corpses to the door, she often closes her eyes and has the same dream as when she was harnessed to the lime wagon.

What is it, I asked.

That a rich, handsome, young American—he doesn’t really have to be handsome or young, an old canned-pork tycoon would do—that a rich American falls in love with me. Actually, he doesn’t even have to fall in love, he just has to be rich enough to pay my way out of here and marry me. Now, that would be a stroke of luck, she said. And if on top of that he had a sister for you.

She doesn’t really have to be beautiful or young, and she doesn’t even have to fall in love, I echoed. At that Trudi Pelikan laughed hysterically. The right corner of her mouth started fluttering and left her face, as though the thread connecting laughter to skin had torn in two.

That’s why I kept things short when I told Trudi Pelikan about my recurring dream of riding home on the white pig. Just one sentence, and without the white pig:

You know, I said, I often dream that I’m riding home through the sky on a gray dog.

She asked: Is it one of the guard dogs.

No, a village dog, I said.

Trudi said: Why ride, it’s faster to fly. I only dream when I’m awake. When I’m taking the corpses out to the courtyard, I wish I could fly away to America, like a swan.

I wondered if she knew about the swan on the oval sign at the Neptune Baths. I didn’t ask her, but I did say: You know why a swan sounds hoarse when it sings, because its throat is always hungry.

In the summer I saw an embankment of white slag in the middle of the steppe and thought about the snowy peaks of the Carpathians. Kobelian said the embankment was originally supposed to become a road. The white slag was baked solid, with a grainy composition, like you find in lime-sinks or shell-sand. Here and there the white was streaked with pink that was often so dark it turned gray at the edge. I don’t know why pink aging into gray is so heart-stoppingly beautiful, no longer like a mineral, but weary-sad, like people. Does homesickness have a color.