Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Often, when I heard the little bells from the coke batteries, I had the sense they were ringing in a new year. And I thought: Someday I’d like to see a bench in a park instead of on the camp street, a bench with someone on it who’s footloose and free, who’s never been in a camp. On the plaza one evening the words CREPE SOLES made the rounds. Our singer Loni Mich asked what crepe was. And Karli Halmen winked at Paul Gast the lawyer and said, crepe comes from krepieren , to kick the bucket, we’ll all be wearing crepe soles when we kick the bucket and go to the great sky over the steppe. After crepe soles the talk was of MUTTON CHOPS, which were supposed to be the latest thing in America. Loni Mich now asked what mutton chops were. The accordion player Konrad Fonn told her it meant hair cut like shaggy wool around your ears.

Every two weeks the cinema in the Russian village showed films and newsreels for us, the people from the camp. Mostly Russian films, but also some from America and even requisitioned German films from Berlin. In one of the American newsreels we saw confetti flying between the skyscrapers like snow and singing men with crepe soles and sideburns down to their chin. After the film the barber Oswald Enyeter said that these sideburns were the mutton chops. See, here we’ve gone completely Russian and it turns out we’re following the latest American fashion, he said.

I didn’t know what mutton chops were, either. I seldom went to the cinema. Because of my shift I was always working in the cellar or else too tired from working in the cellar when they showed the films. But I had my balletki for the summer, Kobelian had given me half a tire. And I could lock my gramophone suitcase, Paul Gast had made me a key with three fine bits like mouse teeth. From the carpenter I had a new wooden trunk with a good lock. I was outfitted with new clothes. I had no need of crepe soles in the cellar, and while I could grow mutton chops if I wanted to, they sounded more like something for Tur Prikulitsch. To me they looked downright apish.

Now it was easy for me to imagine running into Bea Zakel or Tur Prikulitsch in some other place, where we’d be on equal terms, perhaps at a train station with cast-iron pilasters and hanging baskets of petunias like at a spa. For instance: I’ll climb aboard the train and Tur Prikulitsch will be sitting in the same compartment. I’ll say a brief hello and sit diagonally across from him, that’s all. At least I’ll act as if that’s all, I won’t ask if he married Bea Zakel, even though I’ll see his wedding ring. I’ll unpack my sandwich and set it on the little folding table. White bread thickly spread with butter and slices of pink boiled ham. I won’t enjoy the sandwich, but I’ll make sure he doesn’t notice that. Or perhaps I’ll run into Zither Lommer and he’ll be with the singer Loni Mich. Neither will recognize me, but I’ll notice that her goiter has gotten bigger. The two of them will offer to take me to a concert in the Athenaeum. I’ll decline and let them go their way. Then I’ll appear as an usher in the Athenaeum and stop them at the entrance and point and say: Let’s see your tickets, even-numbered seats on the right and odd on the left, I see you have 113 and 114 so you’re sitting apart. And only when I laugh will they recognize me. But maybe I won’t laugh.

I imagined a second meeting with Tur Prikulitsch, in a big city in America. This time he doesn’t have a wedding ring, he’s coming up the stairs with one of the Zirris on his arm. The Zirri won’t recognize me but Tur will wink like Uncle Edwin the time he said: Quite the ladies’ man, aren’t I. But I’ll just go on my way and that will be that.

Maybe I’ll still be relatively young when I get out of the camp, in the prime of my life, as they say, like in Loni Mich’s song: I WAS SCARCELY THIRTY. Maybe I’ll meet Tur Prikulitsch a third and fourth time and on numerous occasions after that, in a third, fourth, sixth, or even eighth future. One day I’ll look out of a third-floor hotel window and it will be raining. And on the street below a man will be opening his umbrella. He’ll take a long time and will get wet because his umbrella won’t open. I’ll see that his hands are Tur’s hands, but he won’t know that. If he realized that, I’ll think to myself, he wouldn’t take so long trying to open his umbrella, or else he’d put on gloves, or else he wouldn’t venture out on this street in the first place. If it weren’t Tur Prikulitsch but just a man with Tur’s hands, I’d call out from my window: Hey, why don’t you go across the street, you won’t get wet under the marquee. If the man looks up he might say: Do we know each other. And I would say: I don’t know your face but I know your hands.

Someday, I thought, I’ll stroll down elegant lanes, where people have a different way of life than in the small town where I was born. The elegant lane will be a promenade by the Black Sea. The water will be white with foam, with rocking waves like I’ve never seen. Neon signs will light up the promenade, saxophones will play. I’ll run into Bea Zakel and recognize her by her slowly drifting eyes. I won’t have a face, because she won’t recognize me. She’ll still have her heavy hair, but it won’t be braided, it will flutter around her temples, bleached flour-white, like seagull wings. She’ll also still have her high cheekbones, which will cast two hard-edged shadows, the way buildings do at high noon. The right angles of the shadows will make me think about the settlement behind the camp.

A new Russian settlement had gone up behind the camp in the third fall—rows of little houses known as Finnish cabins because they were built from prefabricated wooden parts that came from Finland. Karli Halmen told me that the parts had been precisely cut and that they came with detailed construction plans. And that all the parts got mixed up when they were unloaded, so that no one knew what went where. The construction was a disaster, with too few parts here and too many there, and sometimes the wrong parts altogether. In all my years in the camp, the construction supervisor was the only person who saw the deportees as people from civilized countries, where a right angle really did have ninety degrees. He considered us thinking human beings and not just forced laborers, which is why I remember him so well. Once during a cigarette break at the construction site he gave a speech about socialism and its good intentions being wrecked by people who didn’t know what they were doing. He concluded with the remark: The Russians know what a right angle is, but they can’t manage to build one.

Someday, I thought to myself, who knows in which year of peace and in which future, I’ll come to the land with the mountain ridges, the place I travel to in my dreams when I ride through the sky on the white pig, the place people say is my homeland.

There were many variations on the theme of going home, different scenarios circulated through the camp. According to one, our best years would be behind us by the time we made it back, and we’d suffer the same fate as the prisoners of war from the First World War—a return journey lasting decades. Shishtvanyonov orders us to our last and shortest roll call and proclaims:

I hereby disband the camp. Get lost.

And everyone heads out on his own, farther east, in the wrong direction, because all roads west are closed. Over the Urals, all the way across Siberia, past Alaska, America, and then Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. Then, twenty-five years later, we’ll arrive at our home in the west, assuming it’s still there and not already part of Russia.

In other versions we never even leave, they keep us here so long that the camp turns into a village without watchtowers, and we simply become villagers out of habit, though we still won’t be Russians or Ukrainians. Or they keep us here until we no longer want to leave, because we’re convinced that no one is waiting for us at home, that other people are living in our houses, and that our families have long since been driven out to who knows where, and no longer have a home of their own either. Or we wind up wanting to stay here because we no longer know what to make of our home and our home no longer knows what to make of us.