by Herta Müller
Unloading was always a job for two or three people. Not counting the hunger angel, because we weren’t sure whether there was one hunger angel for all of us or if each of us had his own. The hunger angel approached everyone, without restraint. He knew that where things can be unloaded, other things can be loaded. In terms of mathematics, the results could be horrifying: if each person has his own hunger angel, then every time someone dies, a hunger angel is released. Eventually there would be nothing but abandoned hunger angels, abandoned heart-shovels, abandoned coal.
On the hunger angel
Hunger is always there.
Because it’s there, it comes whenever and however it wants to. The causal principle is the work of the hunger angel.
When he comes, he comes with force.
It’s utterly clear:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
I myself could do without the heart-shovel. But my hunger depends on it. I wish the heart-shovel were my tool. But the shovel is the master, and I am the tool. I submit to its rule. Nevertheless it’s my favorite shovel. I’ve forced myself to like it. I submit because it is a better master when I’m compliant, when I don’t hate it. I ought to thank it, because when I shovel for my bread I am distracted from my hunger. Since hunger never goes away, the heart-shovel makes sure that shoveling gets put ahead of hunger. Shoveling takes priority when you are shoveling, otherwise your body can’t manage the work.
The coal gets shoveled away, but fortunately there’s never any less of it. New shipments arrive every day from Yasinovataya, so it says on the coal cars. Every day the head becomes possessed by shoveling. The body, steered by the head, becomes the tool of the shovel. And nothing more.
Shoveling is hard. Having to shovel and not being able to is one thing. Wanting to shovel and not being able to brings a double despair—first bowing to the coal and then buckling under. I’m not afraid of the shoveling, but of myself. Afraid my mind might wander while I’m shoveling. That sometimes happened to me early on, sapping the strength I needed for shoveling. The heart-shovel notices right away if I’m not there exclusively for it. Then a thin cord of panic begins to choke me. The double stroke beats away in my temples, stark and severe, it picks up my pulse and becomes a jangle of horns. I’m on the verge of breaking down, my throat swells. The hunger angel climbs to the roof of my mouth and hangs his scales. He puts on my eyes and the heart-shovel goes dizzy, the coal starts to blur. He wears my cheeks over his chin. He sets my breath to swinging, back and forth. The breath swing is a delirium—and what a delirium. I look up, the sky is filled with summer cotton wool, embroidered clouds, very still. My brain twitches, pinned to the sky with a needle, at the only fixed point it has left, where it fantasizes about food. I can see the tables in the air, decked in white, and the gravel crunches beneath my feet. And the sunlight comes stabbing through the middle of my brain. The hunger angel looks at his scales and says:
You’re still not light enough for me. Why don’t you just let go.
I say: You’re deceiving me with my own flesh. It has become your slave. But I am not my flesh. I am something else and I won’t let go. Who I am is no longer the question, but I won’t tell you what I am. What I am is what’s deceiving your scales.
The second winter in the camp was often like that. Early in the morning I come back from the night shift, dead tired, thinking: It’s my time off, I ought to sleep. And I lie down, but I can’t sleep. All 68 beds in the barrack are empty, everyone else is at work. I’m drawn outside into the empty yard of the afternoon. The wind tosses thin snow that crackles against my neck. With open hunger the angel leads me to the garbage pile behind the mess hall. I stumble after him, trailing a little way behind, dangling from the roof of my mouth. Step after step, I follow my feet, assuming they aren’t his. Hunger is my direction, assuming it isn’t his. The angel lets me pass. He isn’t turning shy, he just doesn’t want to be seen with me. Then I bend my back, assuming it isn’t his. My craving is raw, my hands are wild. They are definitely my hands: the angel does not touch garbage. I shove the potato peelings into my mouth and close both eyes, that way I can taste them better, the frozen peels are sweet and glassy.
The hunger angel looks for traces that can’t be erased, and erases traces that can’t be saved. Fields of potatoes pass through my brain, the farm plots angled between the grassy meadows in the Wench, mountain potatoes from back home. The first pale, round, new potatoes, the gnarled glass-blue late potatoes, the fist-sized, leather-shelled, yellow-sweet flour potatoes, the slender, smooth-skinned oval rose-potatoes that stay firm when boiled. Their flowers in the summer: yellow-white, pinkish-gray, or waxy purplish clusters on bitter-green plants with angular stalks.
How quickly I devour the frozen potato peels, spread my lips and shove them into my mouth, one after the other, without stopping, just like the hunger. All of them, so that they form a single long ribbon of potato peel.
All of them, all of them.
Evening comes. And everyone comes home from work. And they all climb into their hunger. Hunger is a bunk, a bed frame, when one hungry person is watching the others. But that is deceptive, I can sense in myself that hunger is climbing into us. We are the frame for the hunger. All of us eat with closed eyes. We feed the hunger all night long. We fatten him up, for the shovel.
I eat a short sleep, then wake up and eat the next short sleep. One dream is like the next, each involves eating. Our compulsion to eat finds a merciful outlet in our dreams, though that, too, is a torment. I eat wedding soup and bread, stuffed peppers and bread, baumtorte. Then I wake up in the barrack, peer at the shortsighted lightbulb. I fall back asleep and eat kohlrabi soup and bread, hasenpfeffer and bread, strawberry ice cream in a silver bowl. Then hazelnut noodles and fancy kipfel pastries. And then sauerkraut stew and bread, rum cake. Then boiled pig’s head with horseradish and bread. And just when I’m about to start in on a haunch of venison with bread and apricot compote, the loudspeaker begins to blare away, and it’s already morning. I eat and eat, but my sleep stays thin, and my hunger shows no sign of tiring.
When the first three of us died of hunger, I knew exactly who they were and the order of their deaths. I thought about each of them for several long days. But three never stays three. One number leads to another. And the higher the number gets, the more hardened it becomes. When you’re nothing but skin and bones and in bad shape yourself, you do what you can to keep the dead at a distance. The mathematical traces show that by March of the fourth year 330 people had died. With numbers like that you can no longer afford separate feelings. We thought of the dead only briefly.
Before it even had a chance to settle, we cast off the dreary mood, chased away the weary sadness. Death always looms large and longs for all. You can’t give him any of your time. He has to be driven away like a bothersome dog.
Never was I so resolutely opposed to death as in the five years in the camp. To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.
The first three deaths in the camp were:
Deaf Mitzi crushed by two coal cars.
Kati Meyer buried alive in the cement tower.
Irma Pfeifer drowned in the mortar.
And in my barrack, the first to die was the machinist Peter Schiel, from coal alcohol poisoning.
In every case the cause of death was different, but hunger was always part of it.
In pursuit of the mathematical traces, I once looked at Oswald Enyeter, the barber, in the mirror and said: Everything simple is pure result, and every one of us has a mouth with a roof. The hunger angel places everyone on his scales, and when someone lets go, he jumps off the heart-shovel. Those are his two laws: causality and the lever principle.
Of course you can’t ignore them, the barber said, but you can’t eat them either. That’s also a law.
I looked in the mirror and said nothing.
Your scalp is covered with little flowers, the barber said. We’ll have to use the clippers, that’s the
only thing that can help.
What kind of flowers, I asked.
Little pus flowers, he said.
It was a blessing when he started to clip my hair close to the scalp.
One thing is certain, I thought: the hunger angel knows who his accomplices are. He pampers them and then drops them. Then they shatter. And he with them. He’s made of the same flesh that he’s deceiving. This is consistent with his lever principle.
And what am I to say to that now. Everything that happens is always simple. And there’s a principle to how things proceed, assuming that they last. And if things last for five years you can no longer discern or even notice any principle. And it seems to me that if someone is inclined to talk about it later, there’s nothing that can’t be included: the hunger angel thinks straight, he’s never absent, he doesn’t go away but comes back, he knows his direction and he knows my boundaries, he knows where I come from and what he does to me, he walks to one side with open eyes, he never denies his own existence, he’s disgustingly personal, his sleep is transparent, he’s an expert in orach, sugar, and salt, lice and homesickness, he has water in his belly and in his legs.
All you can do is list.
If you don’t let go, things will be only half as bad, you think. To this day, the hunger angel speaks out of your mouth. But no matter what he says, this remains utterly clear:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
Except you’re not allowed to talk about hunger when you’re hungry. Hunger is not a bunk or a bed frame, otherwise it could be measured. Hunger is not an object.
Coal alcohol
During a ransacked night, when there was no thought of sleep, no merciful outlet for our hunger, because the lice would not stop their torture, during such a night Peter Schiel noticed that I wasn’t sleeping either. I sat up in my bed and he sat up in his bed diagonally opposite and asked:
What does give-and-take mean.
I said: Sleep.
Then I lay back down. He stayed sitting up, and I heard a gurgling sound. Bea Zakel had traded Peter Schiel’s wool sweater at the market for some alcohol made from anthracite. He drank it. And didn’t ask me any more questions.
The next morning Karli Halmen said: He asked a few more times what give-and-take meant. You were sound asleep.
The zeppelin
Behind the factory is a place with no coke ovens, no extractor fans, no steaming pipes, where the tracks come to an end, where all we can see from the mouth of the coal silo is a heap of rubble overgrown with flowering weeds, a pitiful bare patch of earth at the edge of the wilderness, crisscrossed by well-trodden paths. There, out of sight to all but the white cloud drifting from the cooling tower far across the steppe, is a gigantic rusted pipe, a discarded seamless steel tube from before the war. The pipe is seven or eight meters long and two meters high and has been welded together at the end closest to the silo. The end that faces the empty fields is open. A mighty pipe, no one knows how it wound up here. But everyone knows what purpose it has served since we arrived in the camp. It’s called THE ZEPPELIN.
This zeppelin may not float high and silver in the sky, but it does set your mind adrift. It’s a by-the-hour hotel tolerated by the camp administration and the nachal’niks—a trysting place where the women from our camp meet with German POWs who are clearing the rubble in the wasteland or in the bombed-out factories. Wildcat weddings was how Anton Kowatsch put it: Open your eyes sometime when you’re shoveling coal, he told me.
As late as the summer of Stalingrad, that last summer on the veranda at home, a lovethirsty female voice had spoken from the radio, her accent straight from the Reich: Every German woman should give the Führer a child. My Aunt Fini asked my mother: How are we to do that, is the Führer planning to come here to Transylvania every night, or are we supposed to line up one by one and visit him in the Reich.
We were eating jugged hare, my mother licked the sauce off a bay leaf, pulling the leaf slowly out of her mouth. And when she had licked it clean, she stuck it in her buttonhole. I had a feeling they were only pretending to make fun of him. The twinkle in their eyes suggested they’d be more than a little happy to oblige. My father noticed as well: he wrinkled his forehead and forgot to chew for a while. And my grandmother said: I thought you didn’t like men with mustaches. Send the Führer a telegram that he better shave first.
Since the silo yard was vacant after work, and the sun still glaring high above the grass, I went down the path to the zeppelin and looked inside. The front of the pipe was shadowy, the middle was very dim, and the back was pitch-dark. The next day I opened my eyes while I was shoveling coal. Late in the afternoon I saw three or four men coming through the weeds. They wore quilted work jackets like ours, except theirs had stripes. Just outside the zeppelin they sat down in the grass up to their necks. Soon a torn pillowcase appeared on a stick outside the pipe—a sign for occupied. A while later the little flag was gone. Then it quickly reappeared and disappeared once more. As soon as the first men had gone, the next three or four came and sat down in the grass.
I also saw how the women in the work brigades covered for each other. While three or four wandered off into the weeds, the others engaged the nachal’nik in conversation. When he asked about the ones who had left they explained it was because of stomach cramps and diarrhea. That was true, too, at least for some—but of course he couldn’t tell for how many. The nachal’nik chewed on his lip and listened for a while, but then kept turning his head more and more frequently in the direction of the zeppelin. At that point I saw the women resort to a new tactic, they whispered to our singer, Loni Mich, who began singing loud enough to shatter glass, drowning out all the noise made by our shoveling—
Evening spreads across the vale
Softly sings the nightingale
—and suddenly all the women who had disappeared were back. They crowded in among us and shoveled away as if nothing had happened.
I liked the name zeppelin: it resonated with the silvery forgetting of our misery, and with the quick, catlike coupling. I realized that these unknown German men had everything our men were lacking. They had been sent by the Führer into the world as warriors, and they also were the right age, neither childishly young nor overripe like our men. Of course they, too, were miserable and degraded, but they had seen battle, had fought in the war. For our women they were heroes, a notch above the forced laborers, offering more than evening love in a barrack bed behind a blanket. Evening love in the barrack remained indispensable. But for our women it smelled of their own hardship, the same coal and the same longing for home. And it led to the same worn-out give-and-take, with the man providing the food, while the woman cleaned and consoled. Love in the zeppelin was free of all concerns except for the hoisting and lowering of the little white flag.
Anton Kowatsch was convinced I would disapprove of the women going to the zeppelin. No one could have guessed that I understood them all too well, that I knew all about arousal in disheveled clothes, about roving desire and gasping delight in the Alder Park and the Neptune baths. No one could imagine that I was reliving my own rendezvous, more and more often: SWALLOW, FIR, EAR, THREAD, ORIOLE, CAP, HARE, CAT, SEAGULL. Then PEARL. No one had any idea I was carrying so many cover names in my head, and so much silence around my neck.
Even inside the zeppelin, love had its seasons. The wildcat weddings came to an end in our second year, first because of the winter, and later because of the hunger. When the hunger angel was running rampant during the skinandbones time, when male and female could not be distinguished from each other, coal was still unloaded at the silo. But the paths in the weeds were overgrown. Purple tufted vetch clambered among the white yarrow and the red orach, the blue burdocks bloomed, and the thistles as well. The zeppelin slept and belonged to the rust, just as the coal belonged to the camp, the grass belonged to the steppe, and we belonged to hunger.
On the phantom pain of the cuckoo clock
One evening in the summer of the second year, a cuckoo clock
appeared on the wall above the tin bucket that contained our drinking water, right next to the door. No one could figure out how it got there. It belonged to the barrack and to the nail it hung from, and to no one else. But it bothered all of us together and each of us individually. In the empty afternoons, the ticking listened and listened, whether we were coming or going or sleeping. Or simply lying in bed, lost in our thoughts, or waiting because we were too hungry to fall asleep and too drained to get up. But after the waiting nothing came, except the ticking in the back of our throat, doubled by the ticking from the clock.
Why did we need a cuckoo clock here. Not to measure the time. We had nothing to measure, the anthem from the loudspeaker woke us every morning, and in the evening it sent us off to bed. Whenever we were needed, they came to get us, from the yard, the mess hall, from our sleep. The factory sirens were a clock for us, as were the white cooling tower cloud and the little bells from the coke oven batteries.