Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Even now it’s a mystery to me how our bodies get nourished. Things are torn down and built up inside the body just like at a construction site. You see yourself along with all the others day in and day out, but you never know how much inside you is breaking apart or coming together. How the calories give and take remains a riddle. How they erase all traces when they take, and put them back, when they give. You can’t say exactly when things started to get better, but you know your strength has returned.

In our last year of camp we were given cash for our work. We could buy things at the market. We ate dried prunes, fish, Russian pancakes with sweet or salty cheese, bacon and lard, corn-flour cakes with sugar-beet paste, oily sunflower halva. Within a few weeks we were completely renourished. Fat and full as a sponge—BAMSTI was the word in the camp. We became men and women again, as though we were experiencing a second puberty.

The new vanity began with the women. The men went on shuffling into the day wearing their quilted work clothes, still content with how they looked, and pleased merely to supply the women with material for their vanity. The hunger angel developed a taste for clothes, for the new camp fashion. The men brought one-meter lengths of snow-white cotton rope from the factory. The women unraveled the rope, knotted the threads together, and used iron hooks to crochet bras, stockings, blouses, and vests. The stitches were always pulled to the inside, so you didn’t see a single knot on the finished product. The women even fashioned hair ribbons and brooches out of the cotton threads. Trudy Pelikan wore a crocheted water-lily brooch like a demitasse pinned to her breast. One of the Zirris wore a lily-of-the-valley brooch with white thimbles affixed with wire, Loni Mich wore a dahlia dyed with red brick dust. During the first phase of this cotton transfer, I, too, was still content with how I looked. But I soon wanted to spruce myself up. I spent several long hours painstakingly sewing a newsboy cap out of my torn coat with the velvet collar. I had worked out the pattern in my head, a difficult, sophisticated construction. I took a band of tire rubber big enough so that the cap could be raked over the ear, and wrapped it in material. I used roofing felt for the bill, stiffened the oval upper part with cement-sack paper, and lined the whole cap with usable remnants from a tattered undershirt. The inner lining mattered to me, I felt my old vanity resurfacing, my need to look good even in places other people never see. It was a cap of expectation, a cap for better times.

A store in the Russian village further enhanced the women’s crocheted camp fashion with toilet soap, powder, and rouge. All were the same brand: KRASNIY MAK—Red Poppy. The powder was pink and had a sharp, sweet aroma. The hunger angel was amazed.

The BALLETKI were the first fashion craze that caught on with men as well as women. I took half a rubber tire to the cobbler, others managed to get some rubberized material from the conveyor belt in the factory. The cobbler fashioned light summer shoes with very thin pliable soles, perfectly fitted to every foot. Handmade on the last, very elegant, good for stepping out. The hunger angel became light-footed. The Paloma grew giddy with excitement, everyone went to the plaza and danced until shortly before midnight, when the anthem sounded.

The women wanted to look nice for themselves and for the other women, but they also wanted to appeal to the men. And the men, eager to get at the crocheted underwear behind the blankets, worked a little harder on their own appearance. So in the wake of the balletki, men’s fashion moved beyond the shoe. New fashions, new loves, mating season at the animal crossing, pregnancies, abortions in the local hospital. But also more and more babies behind the wooden screen in the sick barrack.

I paid a visit to Herr Reusch, who came from Guttenbrunn in the Banat. I only knew him from the Appell. By day he cleaned rubble out of the bombed-out factory. In the evening he repaired torn fufaikas in exchange for tobacco. He was a master tailor, and when the hunger angel started running around so recklessly, Herr Reusch’s expertise was very much in demand. He rolled out a thin scrap of ribbon marked with centimeters, and measured me from my neck to my ankles. Then he said, one and a half meters of material for the pants and three meters for the jacket. Plus three big buttons and six small ones. He said he’d take care of the jacket lining himself. For the jacket I also wanted a belt with a buckle. He suggested a buckle with two metal rings and an inverted box pleat for the back of the jacket. He said that was the latest thing in America.

I ordered two metal rings from Anton Kowatsch and took all my cash to the store in the Russian village. The material for the pants was a muted blue with a bright-gray nap. The material for the jacket was a plaid of sandy beige and cement-sack brown, the squares stood out as if in relief. I also bought a ready-made tie, moss green with slanted diamonds. And three meters of repp fabric for a shirt, in light gray-green. Then some larger buttons for the pants and jacket and twelve very small ones for the shirt. That was in April 1949.

Three weeks later I had the shirt and the suit with the inverted box pleat and the iron buckle. Now at last the burgundy silk scarf with its matte and shiny checked pattern would have suited me perfectly. Tur Prikulitsch hadn’t worn it for a long time, he’d probably thrown it away. The hunger angel was no longer inside our brains, but he was still perched on our necks. And he had a good memory, though he didn’t need it, since our camp fashion was just another kind of hunger—eye hunger. The hunger angel said: Don’t waste all your money, who knows what’s yet to come. And I thought: Everything that’s yet to come is already here.

I wanted some fancy clothes for going out, for the camp street, for the Paloma plaza, and even for the path to my cellar through the weeds, rust, and rubble. I changed clothes in the cellar before my shift. The hunger angel warned: Pride comes before a fall. But I told him: We’re alive. We only live once. The orach never leaves here either, and yet it puts on red jewelry and tailors itself a new glove with a different thumb for every leaf.

Meanwhile my gramophone box had its new key, but was gradually becoming too small. I had the carpenter build me a solid wooden trunk for my new clothes. And I commissioned a substantial lock for the trunk from Paul Gast in the metal shop.

When I presented my new clothes on the plaza for the first time, I thought: Everything that’s yet to come is already here. If only everything would stay the way it is.

The orach still grew whistling-green in the fourth year of peace, but we didn’t pick it, we no longer felt the savage hunger. After four years of being starved, we were convinced that we were now being fattened up, not to go home but to stay here and work. Every year, the Russians waited expectantly for what was coming, while we were afraid of what might be in store. To us, the old time was a hurdle to overcome, for them a new time was flowing into their giant land.

There was a rumor that for years Tur Prikulitsch and Bea Zakel had been hoarding clothes meant for us, that they’d sold them at the market and divided the money with Shishtvanyonov. As a result, many people had to freeze to death who, even according to the rules of the camp, had a right to underwear, fufaikas, and shoes. We no longer counted how many. But I knew that 334 dead internees were resting in peace according to the registry Trudi Pelikan kept in the sick barrack, and I knew which peace they were resting in—the first, second, third, or fourth. For weeks I wouldn’t think about them, but then they’d pop up like a rattle inside my brain and stay with me all day long.