Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

At the beginning of November, Tur Prikulitsch summons me to his office.

I have a letter from home.

My mouth is smacking with joy so much I can’t close it. Tur opens one half of a cabinet and searches through a box. The closed half has a picture of Stalin pasted on the door: his cheekbones are high and gray like two slag heaps, his nose is as impressive as an iron bridge, his mustache looks like a swallow. The coal stove next to the table is clanging away, a tin pot of black tea is humming on top. Next to the stove is the bucket with anthracite. Tur says: Put in a little more coal while I look for your letter.

I pick through the bucket for three suitable chunks, the flame shoots up like a white hare jumping through a yellow hare. Then the yellow one jumps through the white one, the hares tear each other apart and whistle in two-part harmony: Hase-vey . The fire blows heat into my face and the waiting blows fear. I close the little feed door and Tur closes the cabinet. He hands me a Red Cross postcard.

The postcard has a photo that’s been sewn on with white thread, evenly stitched by machine. The photo is of a baby. Tur looks me in the face, and I look at the card, and the child sewn onto the card looks me in the face, and from the door of the cabinet Stalin looks all of us in the face.

Underneath the photo is written:

Robert, b. April 17, 1947.

My mother’s handwriting. The baby is wearing a crocheted bonnet with a bow under his chin. I read once again: Robert, b. April 17, 1947. Nothing else. The handwriting is like a stab, my mother’s practical thinking, saving space by abbreviating born with b. My pulse is throbbing in the card and not in the hand that’s holding it. Tur places the mail register and a pencil on the table, I’m supposed to find my name and sign. He goes to the stove, spreads out his hands, and listens to the tea water humming and the hares whistling in the fire. First the columns start to swim before my eyes, then the letters. Then I kneel at the edge of the table, drop my hands on the table and my face in my hands, and sob.

Do you want some tea, asks Tur. Do you want brandy. I thought you’d be happy.

Yes, I say, I’m happy, because we still have our old sewing machine at home.

I drink a glass of brandy with Tur Prikulitsch, and then another. Much too much for skinandbones people. The brandy burns in my stomach and the tears burn in my face. It’s been forever since I cried, I’ve taught my homesickness to be dry-eyed. I’ve even managed to make it ownerless. Tur presses a pencil into my hand and points to the proper column. My hand shakes as I write: Leopold. I need your full name, says Tur. You write the rest, I say, I can’t.

Then I step out into the snow, the sewn-on child tucked away in the pocket of my fufaika. Looking in at the office window, I can see the cushion used to stop the draft, the one Trudi Pelikan told me about. It’s very evenly stitched and stuffed. Corina Marcu’s hair couldn’t have been enough, there has to be other hair inside the cushion as well. Funnels of white start flowing from the lightbulbs, the rear watchtower is swinging back and forth in the sky. Zither Lommer’s white beans are strewn all across the snowyard. The snow slips farther and farther away, along with the camp wall. But on the path where I am walking, it rises up to my neck. The wind has a sharp scythe. I have no feet, I’m walking on my cheeks, and soon I have no cheeks. I have nothing but the sewn-on child, my ersatz-brother. My parents had a baby because they’ve given up on me. Just as my mother abbreviated born with b., she’ll abbreviate died with d. She’s already done so. Isn’t my mother ashamed of the space below the precisely stitched white thread, below the handwritten line, the space in which I can’t help but read:

As far as I’m concerned you can die where you are, we’ll have more room at home.

My mother’s Red Cross postcard came in November. It had taken seven months to get to the camp. She’d sent it from home in April. By then the sewn-on child was already nine months old.

I stowed the postcard with my ersatz-brother in the bottom of my suitcase, next to the white handkerchief. My mother had written only one line on the card, and not a word in that line was about me. I didn’t even appear in the white space below the line.

In the Russian village I’d learned to beg for food. But I wasn’t going to beg my mother to mention my name. For the two years that followed I forced myself not to answer her card. Over the past two years the hunger angel had taught me how to beg, and in the two that followed he taught me tough pride, as rough and raw as being steadfast with bread. He tormented me cruelly. Day after day he showed me my mother forgetting all about me so that she could feed her ersatz-child. Tidy and well nourished, she pushed her white baby carriage back and forth inside my head. And I watched her from all sides, from every place I didn’t appear, including the white space below the line.

Everyone in the camp has his own here and now. Everyone touches the ground in rubber galoshes or wooden shoes, even if he’s twelve meters below the earth, sitting on the board of silence.

When Albert Gion and I aren’t working, we sit on a bench made of two stones and a board. The lightbulb burns in its wire cage, and a coke fire burns in the iron basket. We rest and don’t speak. I often ask myself, Can I still do arithmetic. Given that we’re now in our fourth year of camp, and our third year of peace, there must have also been a first and second peace year here in the cellar, just like there must have been a time before the peace, without me. And the number of day and night shifts must correspond to the number of layers in the earth. I should have counted my shifts with Albert Gion, but can I still do arithmetic.

Can I still read. My father gave me a book for Christmas: Physics and You . According to the book, each and every thing—every person and every event—has its own place and its own time. This is a law of nature. It follows that each and every thing has its reason for being in the world, and also a wire that connects it to everything else that exists, the MINKOWSKI-WIRE. As I sit here, I have a Minkowski-wire running straight up from my head. When I bend, it bends, and when I move, it moves with me. So I’m not alone. Every corner in the cellar also has its wire, as does every person in the camp. And no wire touches another. Above all our heads is a strictly ordered forest of wires. Every person is in his place and breathes with his wire. The cooling tower breathes double, since the cooling-tower cloud likely has a wire of its own. But the book doesn’t account for all the things inside a labor camp. For instance, the hunger angel must have a Minkowski-wire of his own, only it’s not clear from the book if the hunger angel’s wire always stays attached to us, which is why he never really goes away when he says he’s coming back. Maybe the book would have impressed the hunger angel. I should have brought it along.

I almost always sit in silence on the cellar bench and peer into my head as if through a bright crack in a door. The book also said that every person is moving through his own film at every moment and in every place, and that the reels all spin at sixteen frames per second. PROBABILITY OF PRESENCE was another memorable phrase in Physics and You. As if there were a chance I might not really be here. Then I could be elsewhere without even having to want to leave here. And that’s because as a body in a specific place, in this case the cellar, I am a particle, but because of my Minkowski-wire I am also a wave. And as a wave I can also be in another place, and someone who isn’t here can be here with me. I can pick out anyone I want. But instead of a person I’d rather it be an object, that would go better with the layers of earth in the cellar. For instance, the DINOSAUR, which was the name of the long-distance bus that ran between Hermannstadt and the spa town ten kilometers away: very elegant, dark red, with chrome bumpers. My mother and Aunt Fini used to take the DINOSAUR to the baths. When they came back they let me lick their bare arms to taste the salt from the baths. And they told me how the salt collected in pearly scales on the grass stalks in the meadow. Through the bright door-crack in my head I cause the DINOSAUR to run between me and the cellar. It has its own bright door-crack and its own Minkowski-wire. Our wires never touch, but our bright door-cracks join below the lightbulb, where the fly ash is swirling around with its Minkowski-wire. And on the bench beside me Albert Gion sits quietly with his Minkowski-wire. The bench is the board of silence, because Albert Gion can’t tell me which film he’s in at the moment, just like I can’t tell him that I have a dark-red long-distance bus with chrome bumpers right here in the cellar. Every shift is a work of art. But its Minkowski-wire is nothing but a steel cable with little carts moving up and down. And every cart with its wire is nothing but a load of slag twelve meters below the earth.