Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel

Men and women, young and old, their bags stacked at the head of their plank beds, talking and keeping quiet, eating and sleeping. Bottles of liquor made the rounds. People grew accustomed to the journey, some even attempted to flirt. They made contact with one eye and looked away with the other.

I sat next to Trudi Pelikan and said: I feel like I’m on a ski trip in the Carpathians, in the cabin at Lake Bâlea, where half a high school class was swallowed up by an avalanche. She said: That can’t happen to us, we didn’t bring any skis. But with a gramophone box like that you can ride ride ride through the day through the night through the day, you know Rilke don’t you, said Trudi Pelikan in her bell-shaped coat with the fur cuffs that reached to her elbows. Cuffs of brown hair like two half-dogs. Trudi Pelikan sometimes crossed her arms, hiding her hands in her sleeves, and then the two halves became a whole dog. That was before I’d seen the steppe, otherwise I would have thought of the little marmots we called steppe-dogs. Trudi Pelikan smelled like warm peaches, even her breath, and even after three or four days in the cattle car. She sat in her coat like a lady taking the streetcar to work and told me how she’d hidden for four days in a hole in the ground behind the shed in her next-door neighbor’s garden. But then the snow came, and every step between house and shed and hole became visible. Her mother could no longer bring her food in secret. The footsteps were plain to see all over the garden. The snow denounced her, she had to leave her hiding place of her own accord, voluntarily forced by the snow. I’ll never forgive that snow, she said. You can’t rearrange freshly fallen snow, you can’t fix snow so it looks untouched. You can rework earth, she said, and sand and even grass if you try hard enough. Water takes care of itself, because it swallows everything and flows back together once it’s done swallowing. And air is always in place because you can’t see it. Everything but snow would have kept quiet, said Trudi Pelikan. It’s all the fault of the snow. The fact that it fell in town, as if it knew exactly where it was, as if it felt completely at home there. And the fact that it immediately sided with the Russians. The snow betrayed me, said Trudi Pelikan, that’s why I’m here.

The train rolled on for 12 or 14 days, countless hours without stopping. Then it stopped for countless hours without moving. We didn’t know where we were at any given moment. Except when someone on one of the top bunks could read a station sign through the narrow trap window: BUZĂU. The iron stove in the middle of the train car crackled. Bottles of liquor passed from hand to hand. Everyone was tipsy: some from drink, others from uncertainty. Or both.

The phrase HAULED OFF BY THE RUSSIANS came to mind, and all that might mean, but it didn’t cause us despair. They couldn’t line us up against the wall until we got there, and for the moment we were still moving. The fact that they hadn’t lined us up against the wall and shot us long ago, as we had been led to expect from the Nazi propaganda at home, made us practically giddy. In the cattle car the men learned to drink just for the sake of drinking. The women learned to sing just for the sake of singing:

Always the same solemn song, to the point where you no longer knew whether it was really being sung or not, because the air was singing. The song rocked back and forth inside your head, and fit the rhythm of the ride—a Cattle Car Blues, a Song of the Time Set in Motion. It became the longest song of my life, the women sang it for five whole years, until the song became as homesick as we were.

The sliding door, which had been sealed from the outside, was opened four times. Twice, when we were still on Romanian soil, they tossed half a goat inside the car. The animal had been skinned and sawed lengthwise in two. It was frozen stiff and crashed onto the floor. The first time we thought the goat was wood for burning. We broke the carcass into pieces and put it on the fire. It was so dry and scrawny it didn’t stink at all, and it burned well. The second time we heard the word PASTRAMA: air-dried meat for eating. We burned our second goat, too, and laughed. It was every bit as stiff and blue as the first one, a ghastly bundle of bones. But we were too quick to laugh, it was arrogant of us to spurn those two kindly Romanian goats.

Familiarity increased as time passed. In the cramped space, people performed the little tasks: sitting down, getting up. Rummaging through suitcases, taking things out, fitting them back in. Going to the toilet hole behind two raised blankets. Every tiny detail brought another in its wake. Inside a cattle car, you lose the traits that make you distinct. You exist more among others than by yourself. There’s no need for special consideration. People are simply there together, one for the other, like at home. Perhaps I’m only talking about myself when I say that today. Perhaps that wasn’t even true for me. Perhaps the cramped quarters of the cattle car softened me, because I wanted to leave anyway, and I had enough to eat in my suitcase. We had no idea about the savage hunger that would soon attack us. During the next five years, when the hunger angel descended upon us, how often did we look like those stiff blue goats. And how mournfully did we long for them.

We were now in the Russian night, Romania lay behind us. We felt a strong jolt and waited for an hour while the train axles were switched to steppe-gauge, to accommodate the broader Russian track. There was so much snow outside it lit up the night. Our third stop was in an empty field. The Russian guards shouted UBORNAYA. All the doors of all the cars were opened. We tumbled out, one after the other, into the low-lying snowland, sinking in up to our knees. Without understanding the actual word, we sensed that ubornaya meant a communal toilet stop. High overhead, very high, the round moon. Our breath flew in front of our faces, glittering white like the snow under our feet. Machine pistols on all sides, leveled. And now: Pull down your pants.

The embarrassment, the shame of the world. How good that this snowland was so alone with us, that no one was watching it force us close together to do the same thing. I didn’t need to, but I pulled down my pants and crouched. How mean and how still this nightland was, how it embarrassed us as we attended to our needs. How to my left Trudi Pelikan hoisted her bell-coat up under her arms and pulled her pants below her ankles, the hissing between her shoes. How the lawyer Paul Gast groaned as he tried to force a movement, how his wife Heidrun’s bowels croaked from diarrhea. How all around the stinking warm steam immediately froze and glistened in the air. How the snowland meted out its drastic treatment, leaving each of us to our desolation, our bare bottoms, and the noise of our intestines. How pitiful our entrails became in their common condition.

Perhaps it was my terror, more than myself, that grew up so suddenly that night. Perhaps this was the only way for us to recognize our common condition. Because every one of us, without exception, automatically turned to face the track as we took care of our needs. All of us kept the moon to our backs, we refused to let the open door of the cattle car out of our sight, we needed it like the door to a room. We had the crazy fear that the doors might shut without us and the train drive away. One of us cried out into the vast night: So here we are, the Shitting Saxons. Wasting away in more ways than one. Well, you’re all happy to be alive—I’m right, aren’t I. He gave an empty laugh like tin. Everyone moved away from him. Then he had room around him and took a bow, like an actor, and repeated in a solemn, lofty tone: It’s true, isn’t it—you’re all happy to be alive.