Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

I think the mixture of goodwill and guile that these couplings revealed was probably as varied and possibly as wretched as the different mixes of coal. You couldn’t mix what wasn’t there. You had to mix what you had. And I had to keep out of all the mixes and make sure no one had any idea why.

The accordion player probably sensed why, there was something disdainful in his manner. I felt hurt even if I did find him repulsive. I couldn’t resist looking at his face each time the glow from the factory lit up the sky and for as long as the light lasted. Every quarter hour I saw his neck above the accordion and his doglike head and his frightening eyes, white and stony, staring off to the side. Then the sky was black night once again. And I waited a quarter hour until the dog’s head reappeared, as ugly as before. The summer Paloma on the Appellplatz always went like that. Only once did something different happen.

It was late September, on one of our last dance nights outside. I was sitting the way I so often did, with my feet on the wooden bench and both knees tucked under my chin. Paul Gast the lawyer took a break from the dancing and sat down next to my feet and said nothing. Perhaps he really did think about his dead wife Heidrun Gast every now and then. Because the moment he leaned back, a star fell over the Russian village. He said:

Leo, you have to wish for something, fast.

The Russian village swallowed the falling star, and all the others glittered like coarse salt.

I couldn’t think of anything, he said, how about you.

I said: That we’ll come out alive.

That was a lie, spread as carelessly as hay. I had wished that my ersatz-brother was no longer alive. I wanted to hurt my mother. After all, I didn’t even know him.

Happiness is something sudden.

I know mouth happiness and head happiness.

Mouth happiness comes with eating and is shorter than your mouth, even shorter than the word mouth. It doesn’t even have time to climb into your head when you pronounce the word. Mouth happiness doesn’t want to be talked about. If I were to talk about mouth happiness I’d have to add SUDDENLY before each sentence. And after each sentence: DON’T TELL ANYONE, BECAUSE EVERYONE IS HUNGRY.

I’ll say it just this once: Suddenly you pull down the acacia branch, pick flowers and eat. You don’t tell anyone, because everyone is hungry. You pick sorrel on the side of the path and eat. You pick wild thyme between the pipes and eat. You pick chamomile by the door to the cellar and eat. You pick wild garlic by the fence and eat. You pull down the branch and pick black mulberries and eat. You pick wild oats in the empty fields and eat. You don’t find a single potato peel behind the mess hall, but you do find a cabbage stalk, and eat.

In winter you don’t pick a thing. You leave your shift and head home to the barrack and don’t know where the snow will taste best. Should you take a handful right from the stairs to the cellar or hold off for the coal heap that’s snowed under or wait until you’re at the camp gate. Without deciding, you take a handful off the white cap on the fencepost and freshen up your pulse and your mouth and your throat down to your heart. Suddenly you no longer feel tired. You don’t tell anyone, because everyone is tired.

Barring disaster, each day is like the next. You want each day to be like the next. But with happiness it’s a little different, it’s a matter of luck. Five comes after nine, says Oswald Enyeter the barber, and if you think of it that way, luck is always a little balamuc. I must be lucky because my grandmother said: I know you’ll come back. I don’t tell anyone, either, because everyone wants to come back. To be happy you need a goal. I have to find a goal, even if it’s nothing more than the snow on the fencepost.

Head happiness is easier to talk about than mouth happiness.

Mouth happiness wants to be alone. It’s mute and introverted. But head happiness is gregarious and craves other people. It’s a happiness that wanders around, even if it’s limping along behind. It lasts longer than you can bear. Head happiness is fragmented and difficult to sort out, it mixes itself whatever way it wants and changes quickly from bright to

dark

blurred

blind

resentful

hidden

fluttering

hesitant

impetuous

pushy

unsteady

fallen

dropped

stacked

threaded

deceived

threadbare

crumbled

confused

lurking

prickly

uneasy

repeated

cheeky

stolen

thrown away

left over

missed by just a hair.

Head happiness can have wet eyes, a craned neck, or shaky fingers. But it always bangs around in your forehead like a frog in a tin can.

The very last happiness is the onedroptoomuchhappiness. That comes when you die. I still remember that when Irma Pfeifer died in the mortar pit, Trudi Pelikan opened her mouth like a great big zero, made a clicking sound, and said in one word:

Onedroptoomuchhappiness.

She was right, because whenever we cleared away the dead we could see the relief, we could tell that the tangled nest inside the skull, the dizzying swing in the breath, the rhythm-crazed pump in the breast, the empty waiting room in the stomach were finally leaving them in peace.

There was never such a thing as pure head happiness, because hunger was in the mouths of everyone.

Even sixty years after the camp, eating still excites me greatly. I eat with every pore of my body. When I eat with other people I become unpleasant. I behave as though my way of eating were the only way. The others don’t know mouth happiness, they eat sociably and politely. But when I eat, I think about the onedroptoomuchhappiness and how it will come to everyone as sure as we’re sitting there, and that we’ll have to give up the nest in our skull, the swing in our breath, the pump in our chest, the waiting room in our stomach. I love eating so much that I don’t want to die, because then I couldn’t eat anymore. For sixty years I have known that returning home was not enough to subdue my camp happiness. To this day its hunger bites the middle out of every other feeling. And what’s left in the middle of me is emptiness.

Every day since I came back home, each feeling has a hunger of its own and expects me to reciprocate, but I don’t. I won’t ever let anyone cling to me again. I’ve been taught by hunger and am unreachable out of humility, not pride.

During the skinandbones time, all I had inside my brain was a hurdy-gurdy droning day and night: hunger deceives, cold slashes, tiredness burdens, homesickness devours, bedbugs and lice bite. I wanted to work out a trade with things that aren’t alive but aren’t dead either. I wanted to make an emergency exchange, trading my body for the horizon line above and the dusty roads on the earth below. I wanted to borrow their endurance, exist without my body, and when the worst was over, slip back into my body and reappear in my fufaika. This had nothing to do with dying, quite the opposite.

Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed. And we agree, absolute zero and I, that absolute zero itself is beyond discussion, except in the most roundabout way. The zero’s wide-open mouth can eat but not speak. The zero encircles you with its strangling tenderness. An emergency exchange has no tolerance for compromise. It is urgent and direct, like:

1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

During the skinandbones time my emergency exchange must have worked. Now and then I must have had the endurance of the horizon and the dusty roads. Otherwise with nothing but my skin and bones in the fufaika I wouldn’t have survived.