Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel

After work, instead of going home I went in the opposite direction, away from the residential streets and across the main square. I wanted to look inside the Holy Trinity Church to see if the white alcove and the saint with the sheep around his neck were still there.

A fat boy was standing on the square, wearing white kneesocks, short houndstooth-patterned pants, and a white frilled shirt, as if he’d run away from a party. He was shredding a white bouquet of dahlias and feeding the pigeons. Eight of them were convinced it was bread: they picked at the white dahlias on the cobblestones and then gave up. A few seconds later they’d forgotten everything, they jerked their heads and started picking at the flowers all over again. How long did their hunger believe that dahlias would turn into bread. And what was the boy after. Was he playing a trick on them or was he as dumb as the pigeons’ hunger. I didn’t want to think about the tricks that hunger plays. I wouldn’t have stopped at all if the boy had been feeding bread to the pigeons instead of shredded dahlias. The church clock showed ten of six. I hurried across the square to make it to the church before it closed.

Then I saw Trudi Pelikan walking toward me. It was the first time I’d seen her since the camp. She was using a cane. We noticed each other too late for her to avoid me, she put her cane down on the pavement and bent down over her shoe. It wasn’t even untied.

Both of us had been back in our hometown for more than half a year. For our own sakes we preferred to act as though we didn’t know each other. There’s nothing to understand about that. I quickly turned my head, but how gladly I would have put my arms around her and and let her know that I agreed with her. How gladly I would have said: I’m sorry you had to be the one to bend down, I don’t need a cane, next time I can do it for both of us, if you’ll let me. Her cane was polished and had a rusty claw on the bottom and a white knob on top.

Instead of going inside the church I made a sharp left onto the narrow street I’d come from. The sun stabbed at my back, the heat ran straight into my scalp as if my head were bare metal. The wind was dragging a carpet of dust, the treetops were singing. A little whirlwind formed on the sidewalk and swept through me, then touched down, leaving the pavement speckled with black. The wind droned and flung the first few drops. The storm was here, I heard the rustle of glass beads, and suddenly ropes of water went whipping past. I fled into a stationery shop.

As I stepped inside I wiped the water off my face with my sleeve. A salesgirl came out through a narrow curtained doorway. She was wearing worn-out felt shoes with tassels that looked like paintbrushes growing out of the insteps. She went behind the counter. I stayed next to the display window for a while, watching her with one eye and looking outside with the other. Suddenly her right cheek swelled up. Her hands were resting on the counter, her signet ring—it was a man’s ring—was much too heavy for her bony fingers. Her right cheek went flat again, even hollow, and then her left cheek swelled up. I heard something clicking against her teeth and realized she was sucking on a candy. She closed one eye and then the other, her eyelids were made of paper. She said: My tea water’s boiling. She disappeared through the little door and at that moment a cat slipped out from under the curtain, came up to me, and nuzzled my pants as if it knew me. I picked it up, it weighed practically nothing. This isn’t a cat at all, I told myself, just gray-striped boredom that’s grown fur, the patience of fear on a narrow street. The cat sniffed at my wet coat. Its nose was leathery and rounded like a heel. When it set its front paws on my shoulder and peered inside my ear, it wasn’t even breathing. I pushed its head away, and the cat jumped to the ground. It jumped without making a sound and landed like a scrap of cloth. The cat was empty on the inside. The salesgirl’s hands were also empty when she came back through the door. Where was the tea, she couldn’t have drunk it that fast. And her right cheek was swollen again.

Her signet ring scratched against the counter.

I asked for a notebook.

Graphed or lined, she asked.

I said: Lined.

Do you have something small, I can’t make change, she said. She puckered her lips and both cheeks went hollow. The candy slipped out onto the counter. It had some transparent pattern, she stuffed it quickly back in her mouth. It wasn’t candy at all, she was sucking on a polished drop of glass from a chandelier.

The next day was Sunday. I began to write in the lined notebooks. The first chapter was titled: FOREWORD. It began with the sentence: Will you understand me, question mark.

By you I meant the notebook. And seven pages had to do with a man named T.P. And another man named A.G. And one named K.H. and O.E. And a woman named B.Z. I gave Trudi Pelikan the alias SWAN. I wrote out the name of the factory Koksokhim Zavod and the coal station Yasinovataya. Also the names Kobelian and Kati Sentry. I even mentioned her little brother Latzi and her bright moment. The chapter ended with a long sentence:

In the morning after I washed up, a drop of water fell out of my hair and ran down my nose into my mouth like a drop of time—I really ought to grow a trapezoidal beard so no one in town will know who I am.

Over the next weeks I expanded the FOREWORD into three notebooks.

I didn’t mention the fact that Trudi Pelikan and I had traveled back home in separate cattle cars. We did this deliberately but without any prior discussion. I also left out my old gramophone suitcase. I described my new wooden trunk and my new clothes precisely: the balletki, the paneled cap, the shirt, the tie, and the suit. But I said nothing about my sobbing fit on the way home, when we arrived at the receiving camp in Sighetul Marmaţiei, the first Romanian train station. Or about the weeklong quarantine in the freight depot at the end of the platform. I had broken down because I was afraid of being sent into freedom, afraid of the abyss that loomed so close by, and my fear made the way home shorter and shorter. I sat there nested between my gramophone suitcase and my new wooden trunk, in my new body and my new clothes, with my slightly swollen hands. The cattle car wasn’t sealed, so we had the door wide open as we pulled into Sighetul Marmaţiei. The platform was covered with a film of thin snow, I stepped over sugar and salt. The puddles were frozen gray, the ice was scratched like the face of my sewn-on brother.

When the Romanian police handed out the tickets for the rest of the trip home, I held my farewell to the camp in my hand and sobbed. Home was at most ten hours away, with two changes, one in Baia Mare and one in Klausenburg. Our singer Loni Mich snuggled up to Paul Gast the lawyer, focused her eyes on me, and thought she was whispering. But I understood every word she said:

Look how he’s bawling, he’s falling apart.

I thought about that sentence a lot. Then I wrote it down on an empty page. And the next day I scratched it out. The day after that I wrote it down again underneath. Scratched it out again, wrote it down again. When the page was full I tore it out. That’s memory.

Instead of mentioning my grandmother’s sentence, I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK, or the white batiste handkerchief or the healthy milk, I went on for pages triumphantly describing my saved bread and the cheek-bread. And my persistence in the emergency exchange with the horizon and the dusty streets. When I got to the hunger angel I went into raptures, as if he’d only saved me and not tormented me. That’s why I scratched out FOREWORD and wrote AFTERWORD above it. I was now free, but it was an immense personal disaster that I was irrevocably alone and bearing false witness against myself.