Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel

Emma gave me a sharp look. Yellow gears were turning inside her eyes. They were rusted, her lids caught on them when she blinked. Then her nose twitched, the gears freed up, and Emma said, with clear eyes: See, it’s always the player that gets it and never the piano.

How come she waited until the waiter left before she said that. I hoped she didn’t know what she was saying. At that time my nickname in the park was THE PLAYER.

Fear is merciless. I stopped going to the nearby park. And I changed my nickname. For the new park, which was far from our apartment and close to the train station, I took the name THE PIANO.

One rainy day Emma came home with a straw hat. She’d gotten off the bus near the small hotel DIPLOMAT, where a man was standing under the awning. He was wearing a straw hat. As Emma walked by, he asked if he could share her umbrella, just to the bus stop on the corner. He was a head taller than Emma even without the hat, so Emma had to hold the umbrella very high. He didn’t offer to take it, just stuck his hand in his pocket, practically shoving her into the rain. He said that whenever the drops make bubbles it rains for days. It had rained like that when his wife passed away. He’d put off the funeral for two days, but the rain didn’t stop. He’d set the wreaths outside at night so they could drink the water, but that didn’t help the flowers, which got soaked and rotted. After saying that, his voice grew slippery and he babbled something that ended with the sentence: My wife married a coffin.

When Emma said that marrying and dying were two different things, he said that they were both things to be afraid of. When Emma asked why, he demanded her wallet. Otherwise I’ll have to steal one in the bus, he said, from some frail prewar lady, with nothing inside but a picture of her dead husband. As the man ran away his straw hat flew into a puddle. Emma had given him her wallet. Don’t scream, he had told her, or I’ll have to use this. He was holding a knife.

When Emma finished her story, she added: Fear is merciless. I nodded.

Emma and I often agreed on things like that. I won’t say any more, because when I speak, I only pack myself in silence a little differently, in the secrets of all the parks and all the agreements with Emma. Our marriage lasted eleven years. And Emma would have stayed with me, I know. What I don’t know is why.

Around that time CUCKOO and NIGHTSTAND were arrested in the park. I knew the police managed to get nearly everyone to talk and that nothing could help me if someone mentioned THE PIANO. So I applied for permission to travel to Austria. To speed things up I wrote the invitation from Aunt Fini myself. Next time you’ll go, I told Emma—married couples were never allowed to travel to the West together. She agreed. While I was in the camp Aunt Fini had married and moved to Austria. She’d met a confectioner from Graz named Alois aboard the DINOSAUR, on her way to the salt baths. I had told Emma all about Aunt Fini’s curling iron, the wave in her hair, and the locusts under her gauzy dress, now I led her to believe that I wanted to see my aunt again and meet her confectioner.

To this day nothing weighs more on my conscience. I dressed as though for a short trip, boarded the train with a light suitcase, and traveled to Graz. From there I sent a card the size of my hand:

Dear Emma,

Fear is merciless.

I’m not coming back.

Emma didn’t know what my grandmother had told me. We’d never talked about the camp. I deliberately used her words, adding NOT on the card in the hope that even the opposite of my grandmother’s sentence would be of some help.

That was more than thirty years ago.

Emma remarried.

I remained unattached. Wild animal crossings, nothing more.

The urgency of lust and the fickleness of luck are now long past, even if my brain still lets itself be seduced at every turn. Sometimes it’s a certain way of walking on the street, or a pair of hands inside a shop. In the streetcar it’s a certain way of looking for a place to sit. In the train compartment the prolonged hesitation when asking: Is this seat taken, and then a certain way of stowing the luggage that confirms my intuition. In the restaurant it’s a certain way the waiter has of saying: Yes, sir, no matter what his voice is like. But to this day nothing seduces me so much as cafés. I sit at a table, sizing up the customers. With one or two men it’s a certain way of slurping their coffee. And the way their lips glisten on the inside like rose quartz when they put down their cups. But only with one or two men.

One or two men can set off the patterns of arousal inside my head. The old habits act young even if I know they’re frozen in place like figurines in a display window. Even if they know I no longer suit them because I’ve been ransacked by age. Once I was ransacked by hunger and didn’t suit my silk scarf. Against expectation I was nourished with new flesh. But we have yet to come up with a new flesh that can counter the ransacking of age. I used to believe it wasn’t entirely in vain that I let myself be deported into the sixth, seventh, or even eighth year of camp. That I might recover the five stolen years, that the process of aging might be postponed. It didn’t happen that way, the flesh reckons differently when it surrenders. It’s barren inside and on the outside it glints in your face as eye hunger. And the eye hunger says:

You are still THE PIANO.

Yes, I say, the piano that no longer plays.

Little treasures have a sign that says, Here I am.

Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember.

But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying, I was there.

I WAS THERE was what Tur Prikulitsch claimed should be written on treasures. My Adam’s apple bobbed up and down under my chin as though I’d swallowed my elbow. The barber said: We’re still here. That’s five coming after nine for you.

Back then in the barber room I thought that if you didn’t die in the camp then everything later would be After. That we’d be out of the camp, free, possibly even back home. Then we could say: I WAS THERE. But five comes after nine, we’ve been lucky, but our luck is a little balamuc, and we have to explain where and how. So why should someone like Tur Prikulitsch go back home and claim he never needed any luck.

Perhaps even back then someone from the camp had already decided to kill Tur Prikulitsch. Someone who was running around with the hunger angel while Tur Prikulitsch was strutting in his shiny patent-leather purselike shoes. Perhaps during the skinandbones time someone standing at roll call or locked up inside in the concrete box was rehearsing how he might split Tur Prikulitsch’s forehead in two. Or was this someone up to his neck in snow beside a train embankment or up to his neck in coal at the yama or in sand at the kar’yer or inside the cement tower. Or did he swear revenge when he was lying on his bunk, unable to sleep in the yellow light of the barrack. Maybe he planned the murder on the day that Tur, with his oily gaze, was at the barber’s, talking about treasures. Or at the moment when he asked me in the mirror, so how are things in the cellar. Or at the very instant I was saying: Cozy, every shift is a work of art. I guess a murder with a tie in the mouth and an axe on the stomach is also a work of art, a belated one.

By now I’ve realized that what’s written on my treasures is THERE I STAY. That the camp let me go home only to create the space it needed to grow inside my head. Since I came back, my treasures no longer have a sign that says HERE I AM or one that says I WAS THERE. What’s actually written on my treasures is: THERE I’M STUCK. The camp stretches on and on, bigger and bigger, from my left temple to my right. So when I talk about what’s inside my skull I have to talk about an entire camp. I can’t protect myself by keeping silent and I can’t protect myself by talking. I exaggerate in one case just as I do in the other, but I WAS THERE doesn’t fit in either. And there’s no way of getting it right.