Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

After our shift is over we shower in the banya next to the factory gate. Head, neck, and hands are soaped up three times, but the fly ash stays gray and the cold slag stays violet. The cellar colors have eaten into our skin. That didn’t bother me, though, in fact I was even a little proud, after all they were also the colors of my life-giving delusion.

Bea Zakel felt sorry for me, she paused to find a tactful way of putting it, but she knew it wasn’t a compliment when she said: You look like you stepped out of a silent movie, like Valentino.

She had just washed her hair, her silk braid was plaited smooth and still damp. Her cheeks were well nourished, they blushed red like strawberries.

One time, when I was a child, I ran rhrough the garden while Mother and Aunt Fini were drinking coffee. I found a thick ripe strawberry—the first I’d ever seen—and called out: Look at this, a frog’s on fire and it’s glowing.

I brought a little piece of hot glowing slag home from the camp, stuck to my right shin. It cooled off inside me and changed into a piece of cold slag that shimmers through my skin like a tattoo.

Once on our way home from the night shift, my cellar companion Albert Gion said: Now that the days are getting warmer, even if we don’t have any food we can always put our hunger in the sun and warm it up. I didn’t have any food so I went into the camp yard to warm up my hunger. The grass was still brown, battered, and singed by the frost. The March sun had a pale fringe. It drifted across the rippled-water sky above the Russian village. And I drifted over to the garbage behind the mess hall, goaded by the hunger angel. Most of the others were still at work, so if no one else had been there yet, I might just find a few potato peels. But then I saw Fenya by the mess hall talking to Bea Zakel, so I pretended I was out on a walk, since I could no longer rummage through the garbage. Fenya was wearing her purple sweater, and that made me think of my burgundy silk scarf. After the fiasco with the gaiters I didn’t want to go back to the market. But surely Bea Zakel could trade my scarf for sugar and salt, anyone who could talk the way she could had to be good at haggling. Fenya headed off to the mess hall and her bread, limping in agony. As soon as I caught up to Bea I asked her: When are you going to the market. She said: Maybe tomorrow.

Bea could leave whenever she wanted to, she could always get a pass from Tur, if she even needed one. She waited on the bench by the main street while I went to fetch my scarf. It was lying on the bottom of my suitcase next to my white batiste handkerchief. I hadn’t touched it for months, it was as soft as skin. I felt a shiver down my spine, I was ashamed in front of the scarf with its flowing squares, because I was so ragged and it was still so soft and alluring, with its matte and shiny checks. It hadn’t changed in the camp, the checked pattern had maintained the same quiet order as before. The scarf wasn’t really right for me anymore, and I wasn’t right for it.

As I handed it to Bea, her gaze again slid furtively off to the side. Her eyes were enigmatic, the only beautiful thing about her. She wrapped the scarf around her neck and couldn’t resist crossing her arms and stroking it with both hands. Her shoulders were narrow, her arms thin as sticks. But her hips and backside were impressive, a powerful foundation of hefty bones. With her delicate torso and massive lower body, Bea Zakel looked as if she’d been put together out of two different women.

Bea took my burgundy scarf to trade. But the next day Tur Prikulitsch was wearing the scarf around his neck at roll call. And for the entire week that followed. He had transformed my burgundy silk scarf into a roll-call rag. After that, every roll call was a dumb show starring my scarf. And it looked good on him, too. My bones were heavy as lead, I lost my ability to breathe in and out at the same time, to roll my eyes back without lifting my head and find a hook in a corner of cloud. My scarf draped around Tur Prikulitsch’s neck wouldn’t let me do it.

Pulling myself together, I finally asked Tur Prikulitsch after roll call where the scarf had come from. He said, with no hesitation: From home, I’ve had it forever.

He didn’t mention Bea. Two weeks had passed, and Bea hadn’t given me so much as a crumb of sugar or salt. Did the two of them, well-foddered as they were, have any idea how deeply they were betraying my hunger. Wasn’t it their fault that I’d sunk into such misery that my own scarf didn’t suit me anymore. Didn’t they realize that it was still my property as long as I hadn’t received anything in exchange. A whole month passed, the sun lost its paleness. The orach came up again silver-green, the wild dill spread its feathers. On my way back from the cellar I picked greens for my pillowcase. When I bent down everything around me went dark, all I could see was the black sun. I cooked my orach and and it tasted like mud, since I still didn’t have any salt. And Tur Prikulitsch was still wearing my scarf, and I was still going to the cellar for the night shift and afterward passing through the empty afternoons to the garbage behind the mess hall, because even that tasted better than mock spinach or orach soup with no salt.

On my way to the garbage I again ran into Bea Zakel, and once more she started talking about the Beskid Mountains that flow into the eastern Carpathians. When she reached the part about leaving her little village of Lugi and arriving in Prague, just as Tur was finally switching from becoming a missionary to business, I interrupted her and asked:

Bea, did you give Tur my scarf.

She said: He simply took it. That’s how he is.

How, I said.

Well, just like that, she said. I’m sure he’ll give you something in return, maybe a day off.

It wasn’t the sun sparkling in her eyes, it was fear. It wasn’t me she was afraid of, it was Tur.

Bea, what good is a day off, I said. What I need is sugar and salt.

Chemical substances are just like slag. Who knows what’s seeping out of the piles of waste, the rotting wood, the rusting iron, and the broken brick. Odors aren’t the only problem. When we arrived in the camp, we were shocked at what we saw, the coke plant was utterly destroyed. It was hard to believe the damage was just from the war. The rotting, rusting, molding, crumbling were older than the war. As old as human indifference, as old as the poison found in chemical substances. Clearly the chemicals themselves had ganged up and forced the factory into ruin. There must have been breakdowns and explosions in the iron of the pipes and machines. The factory was once state-of-the-art, the latest technology from the twenties and thirties, German industry. You could still make out names like FOERSTER and MANNESMANN on pieces of scrap.

We looked for names in the scrap and searched our heads for pleasant words as an antidote to the poison, because we sensed that these chemicals were continuing their attacks, and now plotting against us as well. And against our forced labor. In fact, the Russians and the Romanians had already found a pleasant word for our forced labor, it was on the list they had back home: REBUILDING. That was a detoxified word. If they were going to talk about BUILDING they should have called it FORCED BUILDING.

Because I was completely at the mercy of the chemical substances—they corroded our shoes, clothes, hands, and mucous membranes—I decided to reinterpret their odors for my own benefit. I told myself there were fragrant lanes, and for every path on the compound I came up with something enticing: fir resin, lemon blossoms, naphthalene, shoe polish, furniture wax, chrysanthemums, glycerin soap, camphor, alum. I refused to let the chemicals have their poisonous way with me, and so I succeeded in creating a pleasant addiction for myself. Being pleasantly addicted didn’t mean I had made my peace with the chemicals. It only meant that, just as there were hunger words and eating words, there were also words of escape from these poisonous substances. And for me these words were both a necessity and a torture, because I believed them, and at the same time I knew why I needed them.