Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Who switched my country, I asked.

The hunger angel looked at me from the sky and said: America.

And where is Transylvania, I asked.

He said: In America.

Where did all the people go, I asked.

He said nothing.

On the second night he also refused to tell me where the people had gone, and on the third night as well. And that bothered me the whole next day. Albert Gion sent me straight from our shift to the other men’s barrack to see Zither Lommer, who was known for interpreting dreams. He shook thirteen big white beans into my padded cap, turned them out onto the lid of his suitcase, and studied how far apart each bean was from the others. Then he examined their wormholes, dents, and scratches. Between the third and the ninth bean he saw a street, and the seventh was my mother. Numbers two, four, six, and eight were wheels, but small. The vehicle was a baby carriage. A white baby carriage. I said that was impossible, we didn’t have our baby carriage anymore, because my father had converted it into a shopping cart as soon as I learned to walk. Zither Lommer asked if the converted baby carriage was white, and showed me on bean number nine how there was even a head inside the carriage, with a blue bonnet, probably a boy. I put my cap back on and asked what else he saw. He said: Nothing else. I had a piece of saved bread in my jacket. He said I didn’t owe him anything since it was my first time. But I think it was because I was so devastated.

I went back to my barrack. I’d learned nothing about Transylvania and America and where the people had gone. Or about myself, either. It was a pity about the beans, I thought, maybe they were just used up from all the dreams here in the camp. But they’d make a good soup.

I’m always telling myself I don’t have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I’m only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It’s not that I’m stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I’m weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I’m more of a coward. The difference is minimal, though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn’t cry, that doesn’t dwell on homesickness. For instance one about chestnuts and how they smell—even though that really does have to do with homesickness. But I make sure I only think about the Austro-Hungarian chestnuts that Grandfather told me about, the ones that smelled of fresh leather, the ones he shelled and ate before setting off around the globe on the Austrian sailing frigate Donau. That way I use the homesickness from my grandfather’s story to tame my own homesickness here, to make it disappear. So, when I do have a feeling, it’s actually a smell. The word-smell from the chestnuts or from the sailor. Over time every word-smell withers and dries out, like Zither Lommer’s beans. Of course you can become a monster if you give up crying. The only thing that keeps me from becoming a monster, assuming I haven’t turned into one already, is the sentence: I know you’ll come back.

I taught my homesickness to be dry-eyed a long time ago. Now I’d like it to become ownerless. Then it would no longer see my condition here and wouldn’t ask about my family back home. Then my mind would no longer be home to people, only objects. Then I could simply shove them back and forth across the place where it hurts, the way we shove our feet when we dance the Paloma. Objects may be small or large, and some may be too heavy, but they are finite.

If I can manage all this, my homesickness will no longer be susceptible to yearning. It will merely be hunger for home as the place where I once was full.

For two months in the camp I ate potatoes as a supplement to the mess-hall fodder. Two months of boiled potatoes, strictly rationed into three-day cycles of appetizer, entrée, and dessert.

The appetizers consisted of peeled potatoes, boiled with salt and sprinkled with wild dill. I saved the peels for the next day, when I treated myself to an entrée of diced potatoes with noodles. The saved peels mixed with the fresh peels were my noodles. Day three was dessert—unpeeled potatoes, cut into slices and grilled on the fire, then sprinkled with roasted wild oat kernels and a bit of sugar.

I had borrowed half a measure of sugar and half a measure of salt from Trudi Pelikan. Like all of us, after the third anniversary of the peace Trudi Pelikan had thought they’d soon let us go home, so she gave her bell-shaped coat with the beautiful fur cuffs to Bea Zakel, who traded it at the market for five measures of sugar and five measures of salt. That deal went better than the one with my silk scarf, which Tur Prikulitsch still wore to roll call. No longer all the time, though, and never in the heat of summer, just every few days, now that autumn was here. And every few days I asked Bea Zakel when I’d get something for my scarf, either from her or from Tur.

After one evening roll call without the silk scarf Tur Prikulitsch ordered me, my cellar companion Albert Gion, and Paul Gast the lawyer to his office. Tur reeked of sugar-beet liquor. Not only his eyes but his tongue seemed oiled. He crossed out some columns on his list and filled our names in elsewhere and explained that Albert Gion didn’t have to go to the cellar tomorrow and that I didn’t have to go to the cellar and the lawyer didn’t have to go to the factory. But what he wrote down was different from what he said. We were all confused. So Tur Prikulitsch started over, and this time he explained that Albert Gion had to go the cellar tomorrow as always, but with the lawyer, not with me. When I asked why not with me, he half-closed his eyes and said: Because tomorrow morning at six o’clock sharp you’re going to the kolkhoz. Don’t take anything, you’re coming back in the evening. When I asked how I was getting there, he said: What do you mean how, on foot. You pass three slag heaps on your right, then keep an eye out for the kolkhoz on your left.

I was convinced I was going for more than just one day. The people assigned to the kolkhoz died more quickly. They lived five or six steps below the earth, in holes they had dug out of the ground, with roofs made of twigs and grass. The rain dripped down from above, and the groundwater seeped up from below. They were given one liter of water daily for drinking and washing. They died of thirst in the heat instead of starving to death. And with all the filth and vermin, their wounds got infected with tetanus. Everyone in the camp was afraid of the kolkhoz. I was convinced that instead of paying me for the scarf, Tur Prikulitsch was sending me to the kolkhoz to die, and then he would have inherited the scarf from me.

At six o’clock I set off with my pillowcase in my jacket, in case there was something to steal at the kolkhoz. The wind whistled over the fields of cabbages and beets, the grasses swayed orange, the dew glistened in waves. I saw patches of fiery orach. The wind pushed against me, the entire steppe streamed into me, urging me to collapse because I was so thin and it was so greedy. I passed a cabbage field and a narrow swath of acacias and then the first slag heap, then grassland, and after that a cornfield. Then came the second slag heap. Steppe-dogs peered out over the grass. They stood on their hind legs, with brown furry backs and pale bellies and tails the length of a finger. They nodded and pressed their front paws together like human hands at prayer. Their ears were on the sides of their heads, like human ears. They nodded for one final second, then the empty grass rippled over their burrows, but very differently than in the wind.

Only then did it occur to me that the animals could sense I was walking through the steppe alone and unguarded. Steppe-dogs have keen instincts, I thought, what they’re praying for is flight, for escape. And I could escape, but where to. Maybe they think I’ve already made my escape and they’re trying to warn me. I looked back to see if I was being followed. Two figures were coming up far behind me, they appeared to be a man and a child, carrying two short-handled shovels, not rifles. The sky stretched out over the steppe like a blue net that seemed to grow out of the earth at the horizon, with no gap to slip through.