Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

When you haven’t heard from that other world you know as home for so long, you wonder if you should even want to go back, or what you should wish for once you’re there. In the camp, all wishing was taken away from us. We didn’t have to decide anything, nor did we want to. It’s true, we wanted to go home, but we contented ourselves with looking back, and didn’t dare yearn ahead. People mistook memory for yearning. How can you tell the difference, if the same thing keeps churning in your head over and over and your world is so lost to you that you don’t even miss it.

What will become of me at home, I thought. Wandering in the valley between the mountain ridges, I’ll always be a returnee, wherever I go I’ll always be preceded by a tch-tch-tch, as though a train were pulling in. I’ll fall into my own trap, into a horrible intimacy. That’s my family, I’ll say, and I will mean the people from the camp. My mother will tell me I should become a librarian, because then I’d never be out in the cold. And you always wanted to read, she’ll say. My grandfather will tell me I should consider becoming a traveling salesman. Since you always wanted to travel, he’ll say. My mother may say this, and my grandfather may say that, but here it was the fourth year of peace and despite the new ersatz-brother, I had no idea whether they were still alive. In the camp, professions like traveling salesman were good for head happiness, because they gave you something to talk about.

Once on the board of silence in the cellar I talked about it with Albert Gion and even managed to coax him into speaking. Maybe I’ll become a traveling salesman later on, I said, with all kinds of stuff in my suitcase, silk scarves and pencils, colored chalk, salves, and stain-remover. I remember a shell from Hawaii that my grandfather brought my grandmother, as big as a gramophone funnel, with bluish mother-of-pearl on the inside. Or maybe I’ll become a builder, a master of blueprints, I said on the board of silence in the cellar, an ozalid-blue master. Then I’ll have my own office. I’ll build houses for people with money, and one of them will be completely round like this iron basket. First I’ll draw the plans on sandwich paper. In the center there’ll be a pole running from the cellar up to the cupola. The rooms will be like slices of a cake—four, six, or eight sections of a circle. I’ll set the sandwich paper in a frame on top of the blueprint paper and set the frame in the sun to be exposed for five to ten minutes. Then I’ll roll the blueprint paper into a tube and run some ammonia steam inside and just a few minutes later my plans will come out beautifully: pink, purple, cinnamon-brown.

Albert Gion listened to me and said: Blueprints, haven’t you had enough of steam by now, I think you’re overtired. The reason we’re in the cellar in the first place is because we don’t have a profession, much less a good one. Barber, cobbler, tailor—those are good professions. The best, at least here in the camp. But either you brought them from home or you didn’t. Those are professions that decide your fate. If we’d known we’d be sent to a camp someday we would all have become barbers or cobblers or tailors. Never traveling salesmen or master builders or master blueprinters.

Albert Gion was right. Is hauling mortar a profession. If you spend years carrying mortar or cinder blocks or shoveling coal or scratching potatoes out of the earth with your hands or cleaning up the cellar, you know how to do something, but that doesn’t count. Hard labor is not a profession. And labor was all what was demanded of us, never a profession. Fetch and carry is all we did, and that’s no profession.

We no longer felt the savage hunger, and the orach still grew silver-green. Soon it would turn woody and flaming red. But because we knew what hunger was, we didn’t pick it, we bought fatty foods at the market and wolfed them down without restraint. We fattened up our old homesickness, it soaked up the hasty new meat. But even with the new meat, I fed myself the same old dream: Someday even I will stroll down elegant lanes. Even I.

After the skinandbones time and the emergency exchange were all behind me—when I had balletki, cash, food, new flesh on my bones, and new clothes in my new trunk—we were released. It was hard to accept. For my five years in the camp I have five things to say:

1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed.

The emergency exchange is a visitor from the other side.

Inside the camp, the we-form is singular.

Perimeters run deep.

But all five things have one truth in common: they are fundamental, like the silence that exists between them, and not the silence in front of witnesses.

I came home from the camp at the beginning of January 1950. Once again I was in a living room, sitting in a deep square underneath a ceiling of white stucco, like snow. My father was painting the Carpathians, every few days a new watercolor, with gray-toothed mountains and fir trees smudged with snow, almost always in the same arrangement. Rows of firs at the foot of the mountain, groups of firs on the slope, pairs and single fir trees on the ridge, with birches sticking out here and there like white antlers. Evidently clouds were the most difficult to paint, they always wound up looking like gray sofa cushions. And the Carpathians always looked sleepy.

My grandfather had died, and my grandmother was sitting in his plush chair doing crossword puzzles. Now and then she asked for help: sofa in the orient, part of a shoe beginning with t , breed of horses, roof made of sailcloth.

My mother was knitting one pair of woolen socks after the other for her ersatz-child Robert. The first pair was green, the second white, and after that came brown, red flecked with white, blue, gray. My confusion started with the white pair—I saw my mother knitting clumps of lice, and with each new sock I saw our knitted garden between the barracks, the sweater tips at daybreak. I lay on the sofa, the ball of wool lay in the tin dish beside my mother’s chair, it was livelier than I was. The yarn climbed and hovered and dropped. Two fist-sized balls of wool were needed for each sock, but it was impossible to tell how much that would be if laid out in a single strand, the total length for all the socks might cover the distance from the sofa to the train station, which was a neighborhood I avoided. At last my feet felt warm, they only itched on the instep, which was always where the footwraps first froze to the skin. The winter days turned gray as early as four o’clock. My grandmother switched on the light. The lampshade was a pale-blue funnel trimmed with dark-blue tassels. The lamp didn’t cast much light on the ceiling, which stayed gray as the stucco-snow began to melt. The next morning it was once again white. I imagined that it froze during the night, while we were sleeping in the other rooms, like the icy lace in the empty field behind the zeppelin. The clock ticked away beside the wardrobe. The pendulum flew, shoveling our time in between the furniture: from the wardrobe to the window, from the table to the sofa, from the stove to the plush chair, from the day into the evening. On the wall, the ticking was my breath-swing, in my breast it was my heart-shovel, which I missed very much.

Early one morning at the end of January, Uncle Edwin came by to take me to the crate factory and introduce me to his boss. Out on the street, I saw a face in the window at Herr Carp’s, who lived next door in the Schulgasse. The face was cut off at the neck by the frost pattern on the windowpane. Strands of icy hair twined around a forehead, a sliding greenish eye, and there was Bea Zakel in a white-flowered robe, her braid now heavy and gray. Herr Carp’s cat was sitting in the window the way it always did, but I felt sorry for Bea, that she had aged so quickly. I knew the cat could only be a cat, that the telegraph pole wasn’t a guard, that the blazing white of the snow wasn’t the camp street but the Schulgasse. I knew that nothing here could be anything other than itself, because everything had stayed at home. Everything except me. Among all these home-sated people, I was dizzy with freedom. I was jumpy, my spirit conditioned for catastrophe, trained in doglike fear, my brain geared to submission. I saw Bea Zakel in the window waiting for me, and I’m sure she saw me walk by. I should have greeted her, at least nodded or waved. But that didn’t occur to me until it was too late, we were already two houses farther down. When we reached the end of the street and turned the corner, my uncle hooked his arm into mine. I was walking close to him but he must have sensed how far away I was. He was probably just hooking his arm into his old coat, which I was wearing. His lungs were whistling. There was a long silence, and then he said something I felt he didn’t really want to say. His lungs seemed to be forcing him to speak, which is why he had two voices when he said: I hope they take you on at the factory. It seems things are a bit grouchy at home. He was referring to the disabler.