Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel

I hid my three lined notebooks under my bed, in my new wooden trunk, which had been serving as my dresser ever since I came home.

I nailed crates for a whole year. I could squeeze twelve little nails between my lips and flick twelve through my fingers at the same time. I could nail as quickly as I could breathe. The boss said: You have a gift for this, because your hands are so flat.

But they weren’t my hands, just the flat breath of the Russian quota. 1 shovel load = 1 gram bread was transformed into to 1 nail head = 1 gram bread. I thought about deaf Mitzi, Peter Schiel, Irma Pfeifer, Heidrun Gast, and Corina Marcu, all lying naked in the earth. As far as my boss was concerned they were butter boxes and eggplant crates, but for me they were little fir-wood coffins. For me to meet my goal the nails had to fly through my fingers. I managed 800 nails an hour, no one else even came close. Every little nail had its hard head, and every nail was under the supervision of the hunger angel.

In the second year I enrolled in a night class on concrete manufacture. By day I was a concrete expert at a construction site on the Ucea River. That’s where I made my first design for a round house, on blotting paper. Even the windows were round, everything with corners reminded me of a cattle car. With every line I drafted, I thought about Titi, the foreman’s son.

Late that summer, Titi came with me to the Alder Park. An old peasant woman was standing at the entrance with a basket of wild strawberries, fiery red and tiny, like tongue tips. And each had a stem on its green collar like very thin wire. A few had three-fingered serrated leaves. She gave me one to taste. I bought two large bags for Titi and myself. We walked around the carved wood pavilion. Then I lured him farther and farther along the stream and through the bushes, behind the short-grass mounds. After we’d eaten the strawberries Titi crumpled his bag and wanted to throw it away. I said: Give it to me. He reached out his hand, I took it and wouldn’t let go. He looked at me coldly and said: Hey. That couldn’t be brushed off with laughing and talking.

The fall quickly colored its leaves and was soon over. I kept away from the Alder Park.

My second winter home the snow came early and stayed, by November the small town was packed in a padded suit. All the men had women. All the women had children. All the children had sleds. And they were all fat and home-sated. They ran through the white in tight-fitting dark coats. My coat was home-sated too since it was the same worn-out coat from Uncle Edwin. But it was light-colored and slightly dirty and much too big. All the people passing by were home-sated, but the scraps of breath flying out of their mouths showed the truth: here they were, going about their lives, but life was flying away. And they all watched it go, their eyes glistening like brooches of agate, emerald, or amber. One day, early or soon or late, onedroptoomuchhappiness awaits them too.

I was homesick for the lean winters. The hunger angel was running around with me, and he doesn’t think. He led me to the crooked street. A man was coming from the opposite end. He didn’t have a coat but a fringed plaid blanket. He didn’t have a wife but a hand cart. The cart didn’t have a child but a black dog with a white head, which bobbed loosely in time with the turning wheels. As the plaid blanket came closer, I saw the outline of a heart-shovel on the man’s right breast. As the cart went by, the heart-shovel turned into a singe mark from a flatiron and the dog into a metal canister with an enameled funnel in its neck. As I watched him walk away the canister with the funnel turned back into a dog. And I had arrived at the Neptune Baths.

The swan on the sign had three glass feet made of icicles. The wind rocked the swan, one of the glass feet broke off. On the ground, the shattered icicle was the coarse-grained salt from the camp that still needed breaking up. I stamped on it with my heel. When it was fine enough to sprinkle, I went through the open iron gate and stood in front of the entrance. Without thinking, I passed through the door into the hall. The dark stone floor reflected everything like still water. I saw my light-colored coat swimming below me to the cashier’s booth.

The woman at the register asked: One or two.

I hoped it was only the optical illusion speaking out of her mouth and not suspicion. I hoped all she saw were the twin coats and not the fact that I was on my way to my old life. The woman was new. But the hall recognized me, the shiny floor, the middle column, the leaded-glass windows of the cashier’s booth, the water-lily tiles. The cold decoration had its own memory, the ornaments hadn’t forgotten who I was. I had my wallet inside my jacket, but I pretended to search for it in my coat pocket and said:

I left my wallet at home, I don’t have any money.

The cashier said: That doesn’t matter. I’ve already torn the ticket, go ahead and pay next time. I’ll just take down your name.

I said: No, absolutely not.

She reached out of her booth and tugged at my coat. I shrank back, puffed out my cheeks, lowered my head, and shuffled backward in the direction of the door, narrowly avoiding the middle column.

She called after me: I trust you, I’ll just take down your name.

Only then did I notice that she really did have a green pencil behind her ear. I backed into the door handle and yanked at the door. I had to pull hard, the metal spring wouldn’t give. I slipped through the crack, the door squeaked shut behind me. I rushed through the iron gate and into the street.

It was already dark. The swan on the sign was sleeping white, and the air slept black. Under the lantern at the street corner it was snowing gray feathers. Although I wasn’t moving, I heard my steps inside my head. Then I started to walk and stopped hearing them. My mouth smelled of chlorine and lavender oil. I thought about the etuba. And all the way home I talked to the snow that was dizzily flying from one lantern to the next. But the snow I was talking to wasn’t the snow I was walking in, it was a famished snow from far away, a snow that recognized me from going door-to-door.

That evening, too, my grandmother took a step toward me and placed three fingers on her forehead, but asked:

You’re back so late, do you have a girl.

The next day in the schoolyard I met Emma. She was taking a class in accounting. She had light eyes, not the same brass yellow as Tur Prikulitsch, more like a quince. And like everyone else in town she had a dark home-sated coat. Four months later I married Emma. Since Emma’s father was deathly ill we didn’t have a celebration. We moved in with Emma’s parents. All that was mine I carried on me, my three lined notebooks and clothes all fit inside the wooden trunk from the camp. Emma’s father died four days later. Her mother moved into the living room and gave us the bedroom with the double bed.

We lived with Emma’s mother for half a year. Then we left Hermannstadt and moved to the capital, to Bucharest. The number of our building was 68, like the number of bunks in the barrack. Our apartment was on the fifth floor, it had just one room and a small kitchenette, with a toilet out in the hall. But nearby, twenty minutes by foot, was a park. When summer came to the city, I used a dusty path as a shortcut. Then the park was only fifteen minutes away. While I waited in the stairwell for the elevator, two light-colored woven cables moved up and down inside the wire cage, as if Bea Zakel’s braids were rising and falling.

One evening I was sitting with Emma at the Golden Jug restaurant, two tables away from the orchestra. As the waiter poured the wine he covered his ear and said: You hear that, I told the boss over and over that the piano’s out of tune. So what does he do, he throws out the piano player.