Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

He’s still sitting inside me, pink-skinned, waiting with his own knife, which is also Fenya’s, the knife for cutting bread.

The seven years after my return home were seven years without homesickness, without Heimweh . But when I looked in the display window of the bookstore on the main square and saw The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway, I read The Sun Also Rises by Heimweh. And so I bought the book and set off on my home-weh, I mean my way home.

There are words that do whatever they want with me. They’re completely different from me and they think differently than what they really are. They deliberately pop into my mind so I’ll think there’s one thing that intends a different thing, even though I may not want that second thing at all. Hemingway. Heimweh. Homesickness. That’s the last thing I need.

There are words that have me as their target, that seem created solely for my re-deportation—not counting the word RE-DEPORTATION. That word would be of no use if I were re-deported. Another useless word is MEMORY. The word HARM won’t help if I’m re-deported, either. Nor the word EXPERIENCE. Whenever I have to deal with these useless words, I have to pretend I’m dumber than I am. But they’re harder on me with each new encounter.

In the camp we had lice on our heads, in our eyebrows, on our necks, in our armpits, and in our pubic hair. We had bedbugs in our bunks. We were hungry. But we didn’t say: I have lice and bedbugs or I’m hungry. We said: I’m homesick. Which was the last thing we needed.

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

I know that even lice can yearn for home, in three different places: there’s the head louse, the clothes louse, and the crab louse. The head louse crawls on your scalp, behind your ears, in your eyebrows, along the hairline on your neck. If your neck itches, it could also be a clothes louse in your shirt collar. The clothes louse doesn’t crawl. It sits in the stitches of whatever you’re wearing. It’s called a clothes louse but it doesn’t live off threads. The crab louse crawls and itches inside your pubic hair. We didn’t say: Pubic hair. We said: I’ve got an itch down there.

Lice come in different sizes, but they’re all white and look like little crabs. When you squeeze them between your thumbnails you hear a dry crack. They leave behind a watery speck on one nail and a sticky speck of blood on the other. The colorless eggs are strung together like a glass rosary or transparent peas in a pod. Lice are only dangerous if they’re carrying typhus or typhoid fever. Otherwise you can live with them. You get used to itching all over.

You might think that the camp lice got transferred from head to head at the barber’s, by comb. But they had no need of that, they were able to crawl from bed to bed inside the barrack. We set the feet of our bunks in tin cans filled with water so as to block their path, but they were as hungry as we were and found other ways. We shared lice during roll call, in line at the food counter, at the long tables in the mess hall, at work loading and unloading, while squatting during a cigarette break, while dancing the Paloma.

Our heads were shorn with a special clipper, the men by Oswald Enyeter in his barber room, the women by the Russian medic in a wooden shack next to the sick barrack. When their hair was first cut off, the women were allowed to take their braids and keep them in their suitcases as souvenirs of themselves.

I don’t know why the men didn’t help each other pick lice. The women put their heads together every day, told stories and sang and picked the lice off one another.

In the very first winter, Zither Lommer taught us how to remove the lice from wool sweaters. At sunset, when it’s well below freezing, you dig a hole in the ground thirty centimeters deep, stick the sweater in the hole, and loosely cover the hole, leaving just a little bit of wool sticking out, the length of a finger. During the night all the lice crawl out of the sweater. By sunrise they’ve gathered in white clumps on the little tip of wool. Then you can squash them all at once with your shoe.

Once March came and we could work the earth, we dug holes between the barracks. Each evening the sweater tips stuck out of the ground, like a knitted garden that bloomed at dawn with white foam, like cauliflower. We squashed the lice and pulled the sweaters out of the ground. The sweaters again kept us warm, and Zither Lommer said: Clothes don’t die even when you bury them.

The seven years after my return home were seven years without lice. But for sixty years, whenever there’s cauliflower on my plate, I’m eating lice from the sweater tips at sunrise. And to this day whipped cream is never just a topping on the cake.

In the camp, from the second year on, we had a new method of getting rid of lice—the ETUBA, a hot-air chamber over a hundred degrees Celsius set up next to the showers. Every Saturday we hung our clothes on iron hooks which circled around on rollers like the little trolleys in the cooling room of a slaughterhouse. The clothes took much longer to roast than we did to shower, about one and a half hours—we quickly ran out of time, as well as hot water. So we stood in the entrance area and waited. Bent, mangy figures, in our nakedness we looked like worn-out draft animals. But no one was ashamed. What is there to be ashamed of when you no longer have a body. Yet our bodies were the reason we were in the camp, to perform bodily labor. The less of a body we had, the more it punished us. The shell that was left belonged to the Russians. I was never ashamed in front of the others, only in front of my earlier self, remembering my days in the Neptune baths, when my skin was smooth and I was giddy from the lavender steam and the gasping delight. When I never thought about worn-out draft animals on two legs.

After the clothes came out of the etuba, they stank of heat and salt. The fabric was singed and brittle. But two or three passes through the etuba turned smuggled sugar beets into candied fruit. I never had any sugar beets to bring to the etuba. I had a heart-shovel, coal, cement, sand, cinder blocks, and cellar slag. I had spent one terrifying day with the potatoes, but not a single day in the field with the sugar beets. Only the men who loaded and unloaded sugar beets at the kolkhoz had candied fruit in the etuba. I knew what candied fruit looked like from home: glass green, raspberry red, lemon yellow—little gemstones sprinkled inside a cake that got stuck between your teeth. The candied sugar beets were earthy brown, once peeled they looked like sugar-glazed fists. When I saw the others eating them, my homesickness ate cake, and my stomach contracted.

In the women’s barrack on New Year’s Eve in our fourth year, I, too, ate candied beets—in a cake that Trudi Pelikan hadn’t so much baked as built. Instead of candied fruit there were candied beets, instead of nuts, sunflower seeds—instead of flour, corn bran—instead of dessert plates, faience tiles from the dying room in the sick barrack. Along with that, each of us received one cigarette from the market—LUCKY STRIKE. I took two puffs and was drunk. My head floated off my shoulders and merged with the other faces, the bunks started spinning in circles. We sang and locked arms and swayed to the Cattle Car Blues: