by Herta Müller
The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant, Shishtvanyonov: a gnashing and sputtering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can’t understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that’s caught a cold.
While everyone else was suffering at attention during the evening roll call, the shift workers who didn’t have to be counted tended their orach or other delicacies over little fires—built with coal between two bricks—in the corner of the camp behind the well. Beets, potatoes, even millet, if a clever barter had paid off—ten beets for a jacket, three measures of millet for a sweater, half a measure of sugar or salt for a pair of woolen socks.
For a special meal the pot needed to be covered, but there weren’t any lids. At best a piece of tin, and even that might exist more in the mind than anywhere else. But however they did it, people always managed to create a lid out of something. And even though it was never really a lid except in words, they kept repeating: That pot needs a lid. Perhaps memory has put a lid on itself when you can no longer say what the lid was made of, and when there was never but always a lid, no matter where it came from.
In any case, as evening fell, some fifteen to twenty little fires flickered in the corner of the camp behind the well. The rest of us had no food except what was served in the mess hall, nothing to cook on our own. The coal smoked, and the cooks watched their pots, spoon in hand. The pots came from the mess hall, pitiful mess kits of local manufacture. Gray-brown-enameled tin dishes full of pockmarks and dents. On the fire in the yard they were pots, and on the tables in the mess hall they were bowls. As soon as one person finished cooking his meal, other people with pots were waiting to take over the fire.
When I had nothing to cook, the smoke snaked through my mouth. I drew in my tongue and chewed on nothing. I swallowed my spit with the evening smoke and thought about bratwurst. When I had nothing to cook, I walked close to the pots and pretended I was on my way to brush my teeth at the well before going to bed. But by the time I put the toothbrush in my mouth I’d already eaten twice. First I ate the yellow fire with the hunger of my eyes and then the smoke with the hunger of my mouth. As I ate, everything around me went still, all I could hear was the rumble of the coke ovens from the factory yard. The faster I tried to leave the well, the slower I went. I had to tear myself away from the little fires. In the rumble of the coke ovens I heard my stomach growling, the whole scene was filled with hunger. The sky sank black onto the earth, and I staggered back to the yellow light of the barrack.
You didn’t need toothpaste to brush your teeth. The toothpaste from home was quickly gone. And salt was far too valuable, no one would have spit that out, it was worth a fortune. I can remember the salt, and how much it was worth. But I can’t remember my toothbrush at all. I had one in my toilet kit. But that couldn’t have lasted four years. And I wouldn’t have been able to buy a new one until the fifth and last year, when we were given some money, cash for our work. In any case, I can’t remember a new toothbrush, if there was one. Perhaps I preferred to spend my money on new clothes instead of a new toothbrush. I’m sure that the first toothpaste, the one I took from home, was called CHLORODONT. The name wants to be remembered. But I’ve forgotten the brushes—the one I must have taken from home and the one that probably replaced that one. The same with my comb. I’m sure I had one. I can remember the word BAKELITE. At the end of the war, all the combs we had at home were made of Bakelite.
Can it be that I forgot the things I brought from home sooner than I forgot the things I acquired in the camp. And if so, is that because they traveled with me. Is it because they were my own and therefore I didn’t give them any more thought, just went on using them until they were used up, and even longer. As though with them I was at home and not somewhere else. Can it be that I remember the objects that belonged to others better because I had to borrow them.
I definitely remember the aluminum combs. They came during the time of lice. The lathe operators and metalworkers made them in the factory and gave them to the women. They had jagged teeth and felt moist in your hand and on your scalp, because they were cold to the touch. When you worked with them they quickly took on your body warmth, and they smelled bitter, like radish. Their smell clung to your hand long after you’d put down the comb. The aluminum combs made nests in your hair, you had to tug and pull. They caught more hair in their teeth than lice.
But for lice there were also square horn combs with teeth on both sides. The village girls had brought them from home. On one side thick teeth for parting the hair, on the other fine teeth for nits. The horn combs were solid and heavy in the hand. Your hair didn’t catch in the teeth, it came out sleek and smooth. You could borrow the horn combs from the village girls.
For sixty years now, at night I try to recall the objects from the camp: the things I carry in my night-suitcase. Ever since I came back, the sleepless night is a suitcase made of black leather. And the suitcase is lodged in my forehead. For sixty years now I don’t know if I can’t sleep because I’m trying to recall the objects, or whether I struggle to recall them because I can’t sleep. One way or the other, the night always packs its black suitcase against my will. And it’s against my will that I have to remember. And even if I didn’t have to, but wanted to, I’d rather not have to want to.
Occasionally the objects from the camp attack me, not one at a time, but in a pack. Then I know they’re not—or not only—after my memory, but that they want to torment me. Scarcely do I remember that I had brought along some sewing things in my toilet kit than a towel barges in, a towel whose appearance I no longer remember. And then comes a nail brush I’m not sure I had. A pocket mirror that was either there or not. And a watch I may have taken with me, but I can’t remember what became of it. I’m pursued by objects that may have had nothing to do with me. They want to deport me during the night, fetch me home to the camp. Because they come in a pack, there isn’t room enough in my head. I feel pressure in my stomach rising to the roof of my mouth. My breath teeters over, I have to pant. A toothcombneedlescissormirrorbrush is a monster, just as hunger is a monster. And these objects would not gang up on me if hunger were not one of them.
When the objects gang up on me at night, choking me, I fling open the window and hold my head out in the fresh air. A moon is in the sky like a glass of cold milk, it rinses my eyes. My breath again finds its rhythm. I swallow the cold air until I’m no longer in the camp. Then I close the window and lie back down. The bedding knows nothing and warms me. The air in the room looks at me and smells of warm flour.
Cement
There was never enough cement. But always more than enough coal. Also enough cinder blocks, gravel, and sand. But the cement always ran out. It dwindled all by itself. You had to beware of the cement—it could become a nightmare. Not only did it disappear all by itself but also into itself. Then everything was full of cement and there was no cement left.
The brigade leader shouted: Take care with the cement.
The foreman shouted: Be sparing with the cement.
And when the wind was blowing: Don’t let the cement fly away.
And when it rained or snowed: Don’t let the cement get wet.
Cement sacks are made of paper. But the paper is too thin to hold a full sack. Whether carried by one person or two, by its belly or its four corners—it tears. If the sack tears, you can’t be sparing with the cement. If the torn sack is dry, half the cement winds up on the ground. If the torn sack is wet, half the cement sticks to the paper. There’s nothing to be done: the more you try to be sparing with the cement, the more it wastes itself. The cement is treacherous, just like dust on the road, and fog, and smoke—it flies into the air, crawls on the ground, sticks to the skin. It can be seen everywhere and grasped nowhere.
You have to be sparing with the cement, but wha
t you really have to watch out for when it comes to cement is yourself. You carry the sack with care, but even so, the cement inside grows less and less. You get accused of destroying the economy, of being a Fascist, a saboteur, a cement thief. You stumble ahead, deaf to all the yelling. You shove the wheelbarrows full of mortar up a slanted board onto the scaffold. The board sways, you grip the wheelbarrow tightly. The swaying might send you flying into the sky, because your empty stomach is climbing into your head.
What are the cement guards worried about. A forced laborer has nothing but his quilted work clothes—his fufaika—on his body, and a suitcase and a bunk inside his barrack. Why would anyone steal cement. It’s not something we take because we’re stealing, it’s dirt that forces itself onto our bodies. Every day we feel this blind hunger, but cement cannot be eaten. We freeze and we sweat, but cement doesn’t warm and doesn’t cool. It stirs suspicion because it flies and crawls and sticks, because it loses all form, vanishes soft and gray for no reason, like a wild hare.
The construction site was behind the camp, next to a stable that hadn’t housed a horse in years, only empty troughs. Six houses were being built for Russians—six two-family dwellings, each with three rooms. So we were told, but we imagined there’d be at least five families in each house, because from going door-to-door we had seen how poor the people were, and the many emaciated schoolchildren. Both girls and boys had shaved heads and light-blue smocks. Always lined up in pairs, holding hands, singing patriotic songs as they marched through the mud beside the construction site. A silent, rotund schoolmistress traipsed back and forth, looking morose and swinging her buttocks like a ship.
Eight brigades were assigned to the site. They dug foundations, hauled cinder blocks and sacks of cement, stirred the lime slurry and the concrete, poured the foundations, mixed the mortar, carried it in hods, carted it to the scaffold in the wheelbarrow, made the plaster for the walls. All six houses were going up at the same time, people were constantly running here and there, it was utter mayhem and nothing got done. You could see the workers, and you could see the mortar and the bricks, but you couldn’t see the walls going up. That’s the funny thing about construction: you never actually notice the walls growing, even if you watch the whole day. And then three weeks later, all of a sudden, they’re up, so they must have been growing—perhaps during the night, all on their own, just like the moon. They grow every bit as inexplicably as the cement disappears.
The cement guards order you around, but no sooner do you start one thing than they chase you off to do another. You get slapped and kicked. You become dour and melancholy on the inside and slavish and cowardly on the outside. The cement eats away at your gums. When you open your mouth your lips tear like the cement-sack paper. So you keep your mouth shut and obey.
Mistrust grows higher than any wall. In our construction-site misery everyone suspects everyone else of taking advantage, of protecting himself, of carrying the lighter end of the cement sack. Everyone is humiliated by the shouting, deceived by the cement, betrayed by the construction site. If someone dies, the most the foreman says is: Zhalko, ochyen’ zhalko—What a pity. Right after that he changes his tone and barks: Vnimanye—Attention.
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:
SUN HIGH IN THE HAZE
YELLOW CORN, NO TIME
I didn’t write more because cement has to be spared. Actually I wanted to write something completely different:
Deep and crooked and lurking reddish
the half-moon stands in the sky
already setting
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
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 th
e 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.
A motley crew
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.