Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Sometimes I’m convinced I died a hundred years ago, and that the soles of my feet are transparent. When I look through the bright crack in my head, what I’m really searching for is this stubborn shy hope that at some time and in some place someone is thinking of me. Even if that person cannot know where I am at any given moment. It may be that I’m the old gap-toothed man in the upper-left corner of a wedding photo that doesn’t exist, and simultaneously a skinny child in a schoolyard that also doesn’t exist. Likewise, I am both the rival and the brother of my ersatz-brother, and he is also my rival because we both exist at the same moment. But we exist at different moments, too, since we have not seen each other ever, that is, at any one point in time.

And at the same moment I know that the hunger angel sees me dead, but the death that he sees has not happened to me, not yet.

I step out of the cellar into the blinding morning snow. Four statues made of black slag are standing on the watchtowers. They’re not soldiers, but four black dogs. The first and the third statues move their heads, while the second and fourth stay frozen. Then the first dog moves its legs, the fourth moves its rifle, and the second and third stay frozen.

The snow on the roof of the mess hall is a white linen sheet. Why did Fenya put the bread cloth on the roof.

The cooling-tower cloud is a white baby carriage rolling toward the white birches in the Russian village. One day, when the white batiste handkerchief was in its third winter inside my suitcase, I went out begging again. I knocked on the door of the old Russian woman. A man my age opened. I asked if his name was Boris. He said NYET. I asked if an old lady lived here. He said NYET.

In the mess hall the bread is on its way. Someday when I’m alone at the bread counter, I’ll screw up my courage and ask Fenya: When am I going home, I’m practically a statue made of black slag. Fenya will say: Well, you have tracks in the cellar, and you have a mountain. The little carts are always going home, you should go with them. You used to like taking the train into the mountains. And I’ll say: But that was when I was still at home. Well, she’ll say, so everything will be just like it was at home.

But then I enter the mess hall and take my place in line. The bread is covered with white snow from the roof. I could work things out so I’m the last one in line, so I could be alone with Fenya when she administers my bread. But I don’t dare, her saintliness is too cold, and her face has the same three noses it always does—two of them being the beaks of her scales.

It was Advent once again, and I was amazed to see my little wire tree with the green fir-wool set up on the table in the barrack. Paul Gast the lawyer had kept it in his suitcase, and this year he decorated it with three bread-ball ornaments. Because we’ve been here three years, he said. He could afford to treat us to the bread ornaments because he stole the bread from his wife, but he didn’t think we knew that.

Heidrun Gast lived in one of the women’s barracks, as married couples weren’t allowed to live together. She already had the dead-monkey face, the slit mouth running from one ear to the other, swollen eyes, and the white hare in the hollows of her cheeks. Since summer she’d been working in the garage, where she had to fill the truck batteries. Her face was more pockmarked than her fufaika, from all the sulfuric acid.

Every day in the mess hall we saw what the hunger angel could do to a marriage. The lawyer searched for his wife like a watchdog. If she was sitting at a table between other people, he gave her arm a tug, then squeezed in close to her so that her soup was next to his. When she looked away for a second he dipped his spoon in her bowl. If she noticed what he was doing he said: A spoon here, a spoon there.

January had barely begun. The little tree with the bread ornaments was still on the table in our barrack when Heidrun Gast died. And the bread ornaments were still hanging on the little tree when Paul Gast started wearing his wife’s coat with the small rounded collar and the tattered pocket flaps made of rabbit fur. He also started to get shaved more often than he used to.

By the middle of January our singer Loni Mich was wearing the coat. And the lawyer was allowed behind her blanket. Around this time the barber asked: Anyone here have children back home.

The lawyer said: I do.

How many, asked the barber.

Three, said the lawyer.

His eyes stared out of the shaving lather and fixed on the door, where my padded cap with the earflaps hung on a hook like a duck that had been shot out of the sky. The lawyer heaved a deep sigh, blowing a gob of foam off the back of the barber’s hand onto the ground. It landed between the chair legs, right next to the lawyer’s rubber galoshes. Wrapped around the soles of his galoshes and tied off at the ankles were two brand-new, glistening pieces of copper wire.

Don’t ever tell this to my husband, said Heidrun Gast. She was sitting between Trudi Pelikan and me, because Paul Gast the lawyer hadn’t come to eat that day, he had an abscessed tooth. So Heidrun Gast was able to talk.

And what she told us was this: The garage where she worked was housed in a bombed-out factory. The ceiling over the repair bay had a hole as big as a tree canopy. She could look up through the hole and see people clearing rubble from the next level of the factory. Now and then a potato was lying on the floor of the repair bay, which a man had tossed down especially for Heidrun Gast. Always the same man. Heidrun Gast looked up at him, and he looked down at her. They couldn’t talk, he was surrounded by guards up in the factory just as she was down in the garage. The man wore a striped fufaika, he was a German prisoner of war. The last potato was a very small one, Heidrun Gast found it lying among the toolboxes. It’s possible that the potato had been there one or two days and she just hadn’t seen it. Either the man had tossed it down in more of a hurry than usual or else the potato had rolled farther than usual because it was so small. Or he had deliberately tossed it in a different spot. At first Heidrun Gast wasn’t sure the potato had really come from the man above and hadn’t been placed there by the nachal’nik as a trap. She nudged it halfway under the stairs with the tip of her shoe, so the potato couldn’t be seen unless you knew it was there. She wanted to make sure the nachal’nik wasn’t spying on her. She waited until just before quitting time, and when she picked up the potato she noticed there was a thread tied around it. As always, Heidrun Gast had looked up through the hole as often as she could that day, but there was no sign of the man. Back in her barrack that evening she bit off the thread. The potato had been sliced in two, and a scrap of cloth placed between the two halves. She could make out some writing: ELFRIEDE RO, ERSTRASS, ENSBU, and, on the bottom, ERMAN. The other letters had been eaten away by the potato starch. After the lawyer had finished his soup in the mess hall and returned to his barracks, Heidrun Gast went out to the yard, found a late fire, tossed in the scrap of cloth, and roasted the two potato halves. I realize that I ate a message, she told us, and that was sixty-one days ago. I know he didn’t go home, and I’m sure he didn’t die, he was still healthy. He just vanished from the face of the earth, she said, like the potato in my mouth. I miss him.

A thin film of ice quivered in her eyes. The hollows of her cheeks were furred in white and clinging to her bones. Her hunger angel had to see there was nothing more to be gotten from her. I felt queasy, it seemed that the more Heidrun Gast confided in me, the sooner her hunger angel was likely to leave her. As if her hunger angel were looking to move in with me.