Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

There had been three attempts to escape from the camp. All three men who tried came from the Carpatho-Ukraine, like Tur Prikulitsch. Despite the fact they spoke fluent Russian, all three were caught and paraded at roll call, their bodies disfigured from the beatings they’d received. After that they were never seen again, sent either to a penal camp or to their grave.

To my left I now saw a little hut made of boards, and a guard wearing a pistol on his belt, a thin young man, half a head shorter than me. He’d been waiting for me and waved me over. I didn’t get a chance to catch my breath, he was in a rush, we hurried past the fields of cabbage. He was chewing sunflower seeds, popping two in his mouth at the same time. He bit down once, then spat both husks out of one corner of his mouth while snapping up the next seeds in the other, after which the empty husks went flying out again. We walked as quickly as he snapped. Maybe he’s mute, I thought. He didn’t speak, he didn’t sweat, his mouth acrobatics never lost their rhythm. He walked as though the wind were pulling him forward, cracking his seeds like a husking machine, without saying a word. Then he grabbed my arm and we stopped. Scattered across the field were some twenty women. They had no tools, they were digging potatoes with their bare hands. The guard assigned me to a row. The sun was standing in the middle of the sky like a glowing ember. I shoveled with my hands, the ground was hard. My skin cracked, the dirt burned in the cuts. When I lifted my head, swarms of little specks flickered before my eyes. The blood froze inside my brain. Out here, this young man with the pistol was not only our guard but also nachal’nik, foreman, and inspector all in one. When he caught the women talking he whipped them in the face with a potato plant or stuffed a rotten potato in their mouths. And he wasn’t mute. I couldn’t understand what he was screaming, but it wasn’t coal curses, construction-site commands, or cellar words.

It slowly dawned on me that Tur Prikulitsch had something else in mind. That he had made an agreement with the young man, who was supposed to work me all day long and then shoot me in the evening, as I attempted to escape. Or else he was supposed to stick me in my own private hole for the night, since I was the only man here. And probably not just for tonight, but for every night from now on, and I’d never make it back to the camp.

When evening came, our guard, nachal’nik, foreman, and inspector also became camp commandant. The women lined up to be counted. They stated their names and numbers, opened their fufaikas to the left to show their pockets, and held out their hands with two potatoes in each. They were allowed to take four middle-sized ones. If a potato was too big it was exchanged. I was the last person in line and held out my pillowcase. It was filled with twenty-seven potatoes, seven middle-sized and twenty larger ones. I, too, was allowed to keep four middle-sized potatoes, the others I had to take out. The pistol man asked my name. I said: Leopold Auberg. As if in response to my name, he took a middle-sized potato and kicked it over my shoulder. I ducked. The next one he’s not going to kick with his foot, I thought, he’ll throw it at my head and shoot it in midair with his pistol and blow it to shreds along with my brains. He didn’t take his eyes off me as I was thinking that, and when I stuck my pillowcase in my pants pocket he grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the line, and, as if he were once again mute, pointed me in the direction I had come from that morning, at the evening, and at the steppe. Then he left me standing there. He commanded the women to march and set off behind them, in the opposite direction. I stood at the edge of the field and watched him march away with the women. I was certain that he’d leave his brigade any minute and come back, that he’d fire his pistol just once, that there’d be no witnesses, only the verdict: Shot while attempting to escape.

The brigade moved off into the distance like a brown snake, smaller and smaller. I stood rooted in front of the big pile of potatoes and now began to think Tur Prikulitsch’s agreement wasn’t with the guard but with me. That this pile of potatoes was the agreement, and Tur wanted to pay for my scarf with potatoes.

I stuffed my clothes with potatoes of all sizes, all the way up to my cap. I counted 273. The hunger angel helped me—he was, after all, a notorious thief. But after he’d helped me, he was once again a notorious tormentor and left me to fend for myself on the long way home. The potatoes were heavier than I was.

I set off. Soon I was itching everywhere: the head louse, the neck-and-throat louse, the armpit louse, the chest louse, and the pubic louse. My toes already itched from the footwraps in the galoshes. To scratch anywhere I would have had to lift my arm, which I couldn’t do with my overstuffed sleeves. To walk normally I would have had to bend my knees, which I couldn’t do with my overstuffed pant legs. I shuffled past the first slag heap. The second heap didn’t come and didn’t come, or maybe I’d missed it, and now it was much too dark to make out the third slag heap. Stars were strung out across all parts of the sky. I knew the Milky Way ran north and south, because Oswald Enyeter the barber had explained it to me after the second one of his countrymen tried to escape and failed, and was put on display at the roll-call grounds. To travel west, he said, you have to cross the Milky Way and turn right, then go straight, always keeping the Big Dipper on your right. But I couldn’t even find the second and third slag heaps that now, on my way back, should be coming up on my left. Better to be guarded all around than lost all around. The acacias, the corn, even my steps were cloaked in black. The cabbages followed me like human heads in a fantastic assortment of caps and hairstyles. The moon wore a white bonnet and touched my face like a nurse. Maybe I no longer need the potatoes at all, I thought, maybe I’m going to die from the poison in the cellar and just don’t know it yet. I heard halting birdcalls from the trees and a sad, gurgling lament in the distance. The night silhouettes flowed around me. I can’t allow myself to be afraid, I thought, or else I’ll drown. I talked to myself, so as not to pray:

The things that last never squander themselves, they need only one unchanging connection to the world. The steppe connects to the world through lurking, the moon through giving light, the steppe-dogs through fleeing, and the grass through swaying. And my connection to the world is through eating.

The wind hummed, I heard my mother’s voice. In that last summer at home my mother should not have said: Don’t stab the potato with your fork because it will fall apart, use your spoon, the fork is for meat. But my mother couldn’t have imagined that the steppe would know her voice, that one night on the steppe the potatoes would pull me into the earth and all the stars would stab me from above. No one could have guessed, back then at the table, that I would be hauling myself like a big trunk through fields and grassland all the way to the camp gate. That only three years later I would be alone in the night, a man made of potatoes, and that what I would call my way home was a road back to a camp.

At the gate, the dogs barked in their soprano night-voices that always sounded like crying. Perhaps Tur Prikulitsch had also made an agreement with the guards, because they waved me through with no inspection. I heard them laughing behind me, their shoes tapping on the ground. With my clothes stuffed so full, I couldn’t turn around, presumably one of the guards was aping my stiff gait.

The next day I took three middle-sized potatoes to Albert Gion on our night shift, thinking he might want to roast them in peace and quiet over the fire in back, in the open iron basket. He didn’t. He studied them one at a time and put them in his cap. He asked: Why exactly 273.