Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

We slog away and hear our own heartbeats and: Take care with the cement. Be sparing with the cement. Don’t let the cement fly away. Don’t let the cement get wet. But the cement scatters on its own, it squanders itself, it could not be more miserly toward us. We live the way the cement wants us to. Cement is the thief, he has robbed us, not the other way around. Not only that: the cement makes you spiteful. It sows mistrust when it scatters itself, cement is a schemer.

Every evening on the way home, as soon as the work site was far enough behind me and I had enough distance from the cement, I realized that we weren’t betraying one another. We were all being betrayed by the Russians and their cement. But even though I knew this, the very next day I suspected everybody all over again. And they felt it. They suspected me, too. And I felt it. The cement and the hunger angel are accomplices. Hunger pulls open your pores and crawls in. Once it’s inside, the cement seals them back shut and there you are, cemented in.

In the cement tower the cement can turn deadly. The structure is 40 meters high, with no windows. Considering the height, there isn’t much inside, but there is enough to drown in. The cement is loose, not in sacks. We use our bare hands to scoop it into buckets. This cement is old but spry, nasty, and alert. It lies in wait for us, slides onto us, gray and silent, faster than we can jerk back and run away. Cement can flow, and when it does it runs faster and smoother than water. It can carry you off and drown you.

I became cement-sick. For weeks I saw cement everywhere: the clear sky was cement that had been smoothed out, the cloudy sky was rough cement. Rain tied threads of cement to the earth. My metal bowl flecked with gray was made of cement. The watchdogs had cement fur, as did the rats in the kitchen waste behind the mess hall. The lizards crawling between the shacks were clad in cement. The mulberry trees were covered with tentworm nests, funnels of silk and cement. I tried wiping them out of my eyes when the sun was glaring but that’s not where they were. And in the evenings a cement bird perched on the edge of the well at the roll-call grounds. His song was scratchy, a cement song. Paul Gast the lawyer recognized the bird from back home—a calandra lark. I asked: Is it made of cement there, too. He hesitated before saying: Back home it comes from the south.

I didn’t ask him the other question, because you could see it in the pictures in the barracks and hear it from the loudspeakers: Stalin’s cheekbones and voice may have been made of steel, but his mustache was pure cement.

In the camp every type of work made you dirty. But nothing was as relentless as the cement. Cement is as impossible to escape as the dust of the earth, you can’t tell where it comes from because it’s already there. And apart from hunger, the only thing in our minds that’s as quick as cement is homesickness. It steals from you the same way cement does, and you can drown in it as well. It seems to me there’s only one thing in our minds quicker than cement, and that’s fear. And that’s the only explanation I can give for why, as early as the beginning of the first summer, I had to jot this down in secret on a piece of thin brown cement-sack paper:

I didn’t write more because cement has to be spared. Actually I wanted to write something completely different:

But I didn’t write that, just said it quietly under my breath, where it shattered, the cement grinding in my teeth. Then I was silent.

You have to be sparing with paper, too. And keep it well hidden. Anyone caught writing on paper was sent to detention—a concrete box, eleven steps belowground, so narrow all you can do is stand. Stinking of excrement and full of vermin. Iron bars at the top.

In the evening, in the shuffle of footsteps on the way home, I often thought: There’s less and less cement, it can disappear all by itself. I’m made of cement, too, and there’s less and less of me. So why can’t I disappear.

The lime women are one of eight brigades at the site. First they haul the wagon with the lumps of lime up the steep hill next to the stable, then down to the edge of the construction site, where the slaking pit is located. The wagon consists of a large trapezoidal wooden box on wheels. On each side of the shaft, five women are harnessed with leather straps around their shoulders and hips. A guard walks alongside. The women’s eyes are thick and wet from the strain of pulling, and their mouths are half open.

Trudi Pelikan is one of the lime women.

When rain spills over the steppe for weeks and the mud around the slaking pit dries into furry flowers, the alderflies become unbearable. Trudi Pelikan says they smell the salt in your eyes and the sweetness in your mouth. And the weaker you are, the more your eyes tear up and the more sugar is in your spit. Trudi Pelikan was harnessed in the rearmost position, because she was too weak for the front. The alderflies didn’t alight on the corners of her eyes but right on her pupils, and not on her lips but right inside her mouth. Trudi Pelikan stumbled. When she fell, the wagon rolled over her toes.

Trudi Pelikan and I, Leopold Auberg, came from Hermannstadt. We didn’t know each other before we had to climb inside the cattle car. Artur Prikulitsch and Beatrice Zakel—Tur and Bea—had known each other since they were children. They came from the village of Lugi in the mountains, in the Carpatho-Ukraine, where three lands meet. Oswald Enyeter came from the same region, from Rachiv. And so did the accordion player Konrad Fonn, from the little town of Sucholol. My truck companion Karli Halmen came from Kleinbetschkerek, and Albert Gion, with whom I was later in the slag cellar, came from Arad. Sarah Kaunz with the silky hairs on her hands came from Wurmloch, and Sarah Wandschneider with the wart on her ring finger came from Kastenholz. They didn’t know each other before the camp, yet they looked as if they could be sisters. In the camp they were nicknamed the two Zirris. Irma Pfeifer came from the small town of Deta, and deaf Mitzi—Annamarie Berg—from Mediasch. Paul Gast the lawyer and his wife Heidrun Gast were from Oberwischau. Anton Kowatsch the drummer came from the Banat mountain region, from Karansebesch. Katharina Seidel, whom we called Kati Sentry, came from Bakowa. She was feebleminded and for all five years didn’t realize where she was. The mechanic Peter Schiel, who died from drinking coal alcohol, came from Bogarosch. Ilona Mich—Singing Loni—came from Lugosch. Herr Reusch, the tailor, from Guttenbrunn. And so on.

We were all Germans and had been rounded up at home. All except Corina Marcu, who arrived at the camp with bottle curls, a fur coat, patent-leather shoes, and a cat brooch on her velvet dress. She was Romanian; the transport guards had picked her up the night we stopped in Buzău and stuck her in the cattle car. Presumably they had to fill a gap in the list, replace a woman who had died during the trip. Corina Marcu froze to death in the third year while shoveling snow on a railroad embankment. And David Lommer, known as Zither Lommer because he played the zither, was Jewish. Because his tailor shop had been expropriated, he traveled around the country, plying his trade, stopping at the better homes. He had no idea how he wound up as a German on the Russians’ list. His home was in Dorohoi, in Moldavia. His parents and his wife and four children had fled the Fascists. He didn’t know where they were, and they didn’t know where he was, even before he was deported. He was sewing a woolen suit for an officer’s wife in Grosspold when he was picked up.