Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

On my way to the yama, I saw water running down the rectangular scrubbing tower. I christened it PAGODA. The water gathered in a tank around its base and even in summer smelled like winter coats, like naphthalene. A round white smell, like the mothballs in the wardrobe back home. Close to the pagoda the naphthalene had more of an angular black smell. After I passed the pagoda, it became round and white again. I saw myself as a child, on the train to the Wench, on our way to summer vacation. I’m looking out the window at the gas fields around Kleinkopisch and spot the burning well. The flame is fox red, and I’m amazed that a flame that small could cause the whole valley to dry up. All the cornfields are ash gray, like at the end of autumn, they’re old and withered, and it’s only the middle of summer. This is the fire that’s been in the news, and WELL is a bad word in a headline because it means the gas field is on fire again and no one can put it out. My mother says the latest plan is to bring water buffalo blood from the slaughterhouse, five thousand liters. They hope the blood will quickly congeal and plug the well. The well smells like our winter coats in the wardrobe, I say. And my mother says: Yes, naphthalene.

Petroleum, the Russians call it NYEFT’. You sometimes see the word on the cistern cars. It means oil, but immediately makes me think of naphthalene. Nowhere does the sun sting the way it does here, at the corner of the moika, the eight-story ruin of the coal washer. The sun sucks the oil out of the asphalt, leaving a sharp, greasy smell, bitter and salty, like a giant box of shoe polish. On hot days at noontime, my father would lie down on the couch for an hour’s nap while my mother polished his shoes. No matter when I pass the moika, it’s always noontime back home.

The fifty-eight coke batteries are numbered and look like a long row of open coffins standing on end. Bricks on the outside and crumbling fireclay inside. I think about CRUMBLING FIRE COFFINS. Puddles of oil glisten on the ground, the chips of fireclay scab up with yellow crystals. The smell reminds me of the yellow chrysanthemum bushes in Herr Carp’s garden, but the only thing that grows here is poisonously pale grass. Noontime lies down in the hot wind, the bit of grass is undernourished just like us, it drags itself along carrying wavy stalks.

Albert Gion and I have the night shift. On my way to the cellar in the evening I pass all the pipes, a few packed in fiberglass, others naked and rusted. Some are knee-high, others run over my head. I really ought to follow one of these pipes, I think, at least once. At least once I ought to know where it’s coming from and where it’s going. Of course I still wouldn’t know what it’s transporting, assuming it’s transporting anything at all. But if I followed one that was letting off white steam, at least I’d know it was transporting something—naphthalene steam. Surely somebody could sit down with me at least once and explain the workings of the coke plant. I’d like to know what happens here. But I’m not sure that the technical procedures, which have their own words, won’t interfere with my escape words. I don’t even know if I could absorb all the names of the hulking skeletons in the open lanes and clearings. White steam hisses out of the valves, I sense the ground vibrating under my feet. On the other side of the plant, the quarter-hour bell tinkles at battery number one and soon afterward the bell rings at number two. The exhausters show their iron ribs of ladders and stairs. And beyond the exhausters, the moon wanders into the steppe. On nights like this I see Hermannstadt, the small-town gables from back home, the Bridge of Lies, the Fingerling Stairway, and next to it the pawnshop TREASURE CHEST. I also see Herr Muspilli, our chemistry teacher.

The valves in the thicket of pipes are NAPHTHALENE SPRINGS, they drip. At night you see how white the stopcocks are, different from snow, a flowing white. And the towers are a different black from the night, prickly black. And the moon has one life here and another life at home, over the small-town gables. In both places its light shines all night long, illuminating its ancient inventory—a plush chair and a sewing machine. The plush chair smells like lemon blossoms, the sewing machine like furniture wax.

The MATRON, the imposing hyperbolic cooling tower, has my full admiration, she must be a hundred meters tall. Her black impregnated corset smells like fir resin. Her unchanging white cooling-tower cloud is made of steam. The steam doesn’t smell, but it does stimulate the membranes of the nose and intensifies all the smells present, as well as the urge to invent escape words. Only the hunger angel can deceive as well as the Matron. Near the tower there’s a pile of artificial fertilizer, from before the war. Kobelian told me that the fertilizer was also a coal derivative. DERIVATIVE sounded comforting. From a distance, the prewar artificial fertilizer glinted like glycerin soap in cellophane. I saw myself as an eleven-year-old boy in Bucharest, in the summer of 1938, in the Calea Victoriei. My first visit to a modern department store, with a candy section a whole block long. Sweet breath in my nose, cellophane crackling in my fingers. Cold and hot shivers inside and out: my first erection. On top of that, the store was called Sora— sister.

The prewar artificial fertilizer has layers of transparent yellow, mustard green, and gray—all baked together and smelling bitter, like alum. I have to trust the alum stone, after all, it staunches bleeding. Some of the plants that grow here consume nothing but alum, they bloom purple like stanched blood and later have brown-lacquered berries, like the dried blood of the steppe-dogs.

Anthracene is another chemical substance. It lurks on every path and eats through your rubber galoshes. Anthracene is oily sand, or oil that has crystallized into sand. When you step on it, it instantly reverts to oil, inky blue, silver green like trampled mushrooms. Anthracene smells like camphor.

And now and then the odor of coal tar rises from the pitch basin despite all my fragrant paths and all my words of escape. Ever since my daylight poisoning I am afraid of the pitch basin and happy to have the cellar.

But even in the cellar there must be substances that can’t be seen or smelled or tasted. And they are the most devious. Since I can’t spot them, I can’t rename them with my escape words. They hide from me, but they also make sure I get the healthy milk. Once a month, after the shift, Albert Gion and I are given healthy milk against the invisible substances, so that we won’t succumb to the poisons as fast as Yuri, the Russian who worked in the cellar with Albert Gion before my daylight poisoning. To help us last longer, once a month at the factory guard shack they pour half a liter of healthy milk into a tin bowl. It’s a gift from another world. It tastes like the person you could have remained if you hadn’t gone into the service of the hunger angel. I believe the milk. I believe that it helps my lungs. That every sip destroys the poison, that the milk is like the snow, whose purity surpasses all expectations.

All of them, all of them.

And every day I hope its effect will protect me for a full month. I don’t dare say it but I say it nevertheless: I hope the fresh milk is the unknown sister of my white handkerchief. And the flowing version of my grandmother’s wish. I know you’ll come back.

Three nights in a row I was haunted by the same dream. Once again I was riding home through the clouds on a white pig. But this time when I looked down, the land had a different appearance, there was no sea along its edge. And no mountains in the middle, no Carpathians. Only flat land, and not a single village. Nothing but wild oats everywhere, already autumn-yellow.