Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Kati Sentry sat with her piece of cake at the little table under the barrack light. She watched us impassively. But when the song was over she rocked on her chair and said: UUUH, UUUH.

She had made this same deep uuuh, the dull sound of the deportation train, at our last stop during the snow-night four years ago. I froze, others cried. Trudi Pelikan also broke down. And Kati Sentry watched us cry and ate her cake. You could see that she liked it.

There are words that do whatever they want with me. I no longer know if the Russian word VOSH’ means the bedbugs or the lice. With my word VOSH’ I mean both. Maybe the word can’t tell one from the other. But I can.

The bedbugs climbed up the walls, and during the night they dropped from the ceiling onto our beds. I don’t know if they dropped during the day as well and we just didn’t see them. But they were another reason the light in the barrack was kept on all night long.

Our bed frames were made of iron. Rusty bars with raw welded seams. The bedbugs reproduced there as well as in the unplaned boards under the straw sacks. Whenever the bedbugs gained the upper hand, we had to take our beds out into the yard—that mostly happened on weekends. We had wire brushes made by the men in the factory that we used on the bedbugs, brushing the bed frames and the boards so hard that they turned red with blood. Exterminating bedbugs was one order we were eager to carry out. We wanted to clean our beds and have a few nights’ peace. We were happy to see the blood of the bedbugs, because it was our own. The more blood we saw, the more determined we were to brush down the bed. All the hate was drawn out of us. We brushed the bedbugs to death and felt a kind of pride, as if they were the Russians.

Then exhaustion hit us like a blow to the head. Pride that is tired makes you sad. Our pride brushed itself down to size until the next time. Knowing that all our work was ultimately in vain, we carried the beds, temporarily free of bedbugs, back to the barracks. And with pitiful humility, we told ourselves: At least now night can come.

And sixty years later I dream: I’ve been deported for the second, third, or sometimes even the seventh time. I set down my gramophone suitcase by the well and wander around the Appellplatz. There are no brigades here, no nachal’niks. I have no work. The world has forgotten me, and so has the new camp administration. I mention my experience as a camp veteran. I explain that I have my heart-shovel, and that my day and night shifts were always works of art. I’m not some Johnny-come-lately, I know how to do things. I know about cellars and slag. I have a blue-black, beetle-sized piece of slag grown into my shin from the first time I was deported. I show it off like a hero’s medal. I don’t know where I’m supposed to sleep, everything here is new. Where are the barracks, I ask. Where is Bea Zakel, where is Tur Prikulitsch. Limping Fenya has a different crocheted sweater in every dream, but she always has the same sash made of white bread cloth. She says there isn’t any camp administration. I feel neglected. Nobody wants me here, but under no circumstances am I allowed to leave.

In which camp did my dream end up. Does my dream even care that the heart-shovel and the slag cellar really existed. That the five imprisoned years are more than enough for me. Does my dream want to go on deporting me and then refuse to let me work when I reach the seventh camp. That really hurts. I have nothing to counter with, no matter how many times the dream deports me and no matter which camp I end up in.

If I’m ever to be deported again in this life, I’ll know: there are things that intend a different thing, even if you may not want that second thing at all.

What’s driving me to stay so attached. Why do I insist on being miserable at night. Why can’t I be free. Why am I forcing the camp to belong to me. Homesickness. That’s the last thing I need.

One afternoon I found Kati Sentry sitting at the little wooden table in the barrack, probably because of the cuckoo clock. Who knows how long she’d been there. When I came in she asked me: Do you live here.

I said: Yes.

I do, too, she said, but behind the church. We moved into the new house last spring. Then my little brother died. He was old.

I said: But he was younger than you.

He was sick, that makes you old, she said. Then I put on his suede shoes and went back to the old house. There was a man in the courtyard. Then the man asked me, how did you get here. I showed him the suede shoes. Then he said, next time bring your head.

Then what did you do, I asked.

Then I went inside the church, she said.

I asked: What was your little brother’s name.

She said: Latzi, just like you.

But my name is Leo, I said.

Maybe when you’re at home, but here your name is Latzi, she said.

Such a bright moment, I thought, there’s even a louse—a Laus —inside the name, since Latzi comes from Ladislaus.

Kati Sentry stood up, hunched over, and glanced at the cuckoo clock one more time from the door. But her right eye shimmered at me like old silk. She raised her index finger and said:

You know, you better stop waving to me in church.

In the summer we were allowed to dance outside on the Appellplatz. Just before nightfall the swallows flew in pursuit of their hunger, the trees turned darkly jagged, and the clouds were tinged with red. Later a finger-thin moon hung over the mess hall. Anton Kowatsch’s drumming drifted on the wind, the dancing couples swayed like bushes. The little bells of the coke batteries chimed, and the glow that followed every wave of tinkling lit up the sky over our heads. Before the brightness faded you could see Singing Loni’s trembling goiter and the heavy eyes of Konrad Fonn the accordionist, always staring off to where there was nothing and nobody.

There was something bestial in the way Konrad Fonn pulled the ribs of the accordion apart and squeezed them together. His drooping eyelids hinted at a lascivious nature, but his eyes were too hollow and cold for that. The music didn’t enter his soul—he just shooed the songs away, and they crawled into us. His accordion shuffled along, hollow and dull. Ever since Zither Lommer had supposedly boarded a ship in Odessa, to head somewhere in the direction of home, the orchestra was missing its warm bright tones. Maybe the accordion was as out of tune as the musician, maybe it questioned whether deportees pairing off and swaying on the Appellplatz like bushes really counted as dancing.

Kati Sentry was sitting on the bench, swinging her feet in time to the music. If a man asked her to dance she would run off into the darkness. Now and then she danced with one of the women, craning her neck and gazing at the sky. She must have danced often in the past since she was able to follow changes of rhythm. When she sat on the bench she would throw pebbles if she saw the couples come too close together. It wasn’t a game, either, her face remained serious. Albert Gion told me that most people forget all about the Appellplatz on those nights, that they go so far as to say they’re dancing on the plaza. He also told me he was never going to dance with Zirri Wandschneider again, she was clinging to him like a leech and hell-bent on giving herself to him. Besides, it wasn’t him, it was the music doing the seducing, here in the darkness, he told me. During the winter Paloma, emotions stayed pleated like the ribs of the accordion, and locked up in the mess hall. The summer dance stirred up carelessness and spread it over our melancholy like hay. The barrack windows shimmered weakly, people felt rather than saw one another. Trudi Pelikan was of the opinion that homesickness trickled from the head to the belly when we were outside on the plaza. She saw the patterns of the couples shifting from one hour to the next—homesickness in pairs, was how she put it.