by Herta Müller
On contact with water, it’s not the water that flows but the fly ash, because it sucks up the water and swells into formations, like in a cave. The formations can look like stacks of dishes or, if they’re very big, like cement children eating gray apples. Fly ash mixed with water can work magic.
But without light and water, the fly ash just sits there, dead. On the cellar walls it looks just like real fur, on your padded cap like artificial fur, in your nostrils like rubber plugs. Albert Gion’s face is black, in the cellar it disappears, all I see are the whites of his eyes and his teeth swimming through the air. With Albert Gion I never know if he’s sad or simply withdrawn. When I ask, he says: I don’t give it any thought. We’re just two pill bugs underground. Seriously.
After our shift is over we shower in the banya next to the factory gate. Head, neck, and hands are soaped up three times, but the fly ash stays gray and the cold slag stays violet. The cellar colors have eaten into our skin. That didn’t bother me, though, in fact I was even a little proud, after all they were also the colors of my life-giving delusion.
Bea Zakel felt sorry for me, she paused to find a tactful way of putting it, but she knew it wasn’t a compliment when she said: You look like you stepped out of a silent movie, like Valentino.
She had just washed her hair, her silk braid was plaited smooth and still damp. Her cheeks were well nourished, they blushed red like strawberries.
One time, when I was a child, I ran rhrough the garden while Mother and Aunt Fini were drinking coffee. I found a thick ripe strawberry—the first I’d ever seen—and called out: Look at this, a frog’s on fire and it’s glowing.
I brought a little piece of hot glowing slag home from the camp, stuck to my right shin. It cooled off inside me and changed into a piece of cold slag that shimmers through my skin like a tattoo.
The burgundy silk scarf
Once on our way home from the night shift, my cellar companion Albert Gion said: Now that the days are getting warmer, even if we don’t have any food we can always put our hunger in the sun and warm it up. I didn’t have any food so I went into the camp yard to warm up my hunger. The grass was still brown, battered, and singed by the frost. The March sun had a pale fringe. It drifted across the rippled-water sky above the Russian village. And I drifted over to the garbage behind the mess hall, goaded by the hunger angel. Most of the others were still at work, so if no one else had been there yet, I might just find a few potato peels. But then I saw Fenya by the mess hall talking to Bea Zakel, so I pretended I was out on a walk, since I could no longer rummage through the garbage. Fenya was wearing her purple sweater, and that made me think of my burgundy silk scarf. After the fiasco with the gaiters I didn’t want to go back to the market. But surely Bea Zakel could trade my scarf for sugar and salt, anyone who could talk the way she could had to be good at haggling. Fenya headed off to the mess hall and her bread, limping in agony. As soon as I caught up to Bea I asked her: When are you going to the market. She said: Maybe tomorrow.
Bea could leave whenever she wanted to, she could always get a pass from Tur, if she even needed one. She waited on the bench by the main street while I went to fetch my scarf. It was lying on the bottom of my suitcase next to my white batiste handkerchief. I hadn’t touched it for months, it was as soft as skin. I felt a shiver down my spine, I was ashamed in front of the scarf with its flowing squares, because I was so ragged and it was still so soft and alluring, with its matte and shiny checks. It hadn’t changed in the camp, the checked pattern had maintained the same quiet order as before. The scarf wasn’t really right for me anymore, and I wasn’t right for it.
As I handed it to Bea, her gaze again slid furtively off to the side. Her eyes were enigmatic, the only beautiful thing about her. She wrapped the scarf around her neck and couldn’t resist crossing her arms and stroking it with both hands. Her shoulders were narrow, her arms thin as sticks. But her hips and backside were impressive, a powerful foundation of hefty bones. With her delicate torso and massive lower body, Bea Zakel looked as if she’d been put together out of two different women.
Bea took my burgundy scarf to trade. But the next day Tur Prikulitsch was wearing the scarf around his neck at roll call. And for the entire week that followed. He had transformed my burgundy silk scarf into a roll-call rag. After that, every roll call was a dumb show starring my scarf. And it looked good on him, too. My bones were heavy as lead, I lost my ability to breathe in and out at the same time, to roll my eyes back without lifting my head and find a hook in a corner of cloud. My scarf draped around Tur Prikulitsch’s neck wouldn’t let me do it.
Pulling myself together, I finally asked Tur Prikulitsch after roll call where the scarf had come from. He said, with no hesitation: From home, I’ve had it forever.
He didn’t mention Bea. Two weeks had passed, and Bea hadn’t given me so much as a crumb of sugar or salt. Did the two of them, well-foddered as they were, have any idea how deeply they were betraying my hunger. Wasn’t it their fault that I’d sunk into such misery that my own scarf didn’t suit me anymore. Didn’t they realize that it was still my property as long as I hadn’t received anything in exchange. A whole month passed, the sun lost its paleness. The orach came up again silver-green, the wild dill spread its feathers. On my way back from the cellar I picked greens for my pillowcase. When I bent down everything around me went dark, all I could see was the black sun. I cooked my orach and and it tasted like mud, since I still didn’t have any salt. And Tur Prikulitsch was still wearing my scarf, and I was still going to the cellar for the night shift and afterward passing through the empty afternoons to the garbage behind the mess hall, because even that tasted better than mock spinach or orach soup with no salt.
On my way to the garbage I again ran into Bea Zakel, and once more she started talking about the Beskid Mountains that flow into the eastern Carpathians. When she reached the part about leaving her little village of Lugi and arriving in Prague, just as Tur was finally switching from becoming a missionary to business, I interrupted her and asked:
Bea, did you give Tur my scarf.
She said: He simply took it. That’s how he is.
How, I said.
Well, just like that, she said. I’m sure he’ll give you something in return, maybe a day off.
It wasn’t the sun sparkling in her eyes, it was fear. It wasn’t me she was afraid of, it was Tur.
Bea, what good is a day off, I said. What I need is sugar and salt.
On chemical substances
Chemical substances are just like slag. Who knows what’s seeping out of the piles of waste, the rotting wood, the rusting iron, and the broken brick. Odors aren’t the only problem. When we arrived in the camp, we were shocked at what we saw, the coke plant was utterly destroyed. It was hard to believe the damage was just from the war. The rotting, rusting, molding, crumbling were older than the war. As old as human indifference, as old as the poison found in chemical substances. Clearly the chemicals themselves had ganged up and forced the factory into ruin. There must have been breakdowns and explosions in the iron of the pipes and machines. The factory was once state-of-the-art, the latest technology from the twenties and thirties, German industry. You could still make out names like FOERSTER and MANNESMANN on pieces of scrap.
We looked for names in the scrap and searched our heads for pleasant words as an antidote to the poison, because we sensed that these chemicals were continuing their attacks, and now plotting against us as well. And against our forced labor. In fact, the Russians and the Romanians had already found a pleasant word for our forced labor, it was on the list they had back home: REBUILDING. That was a detoxified word. If they were going to talk about BUILDING they should have called it FORCED BUILDING.
Because I was completely at the mercy of the chemical substances—they corroded our shoes, clothes, hands, and mucous membranes—I decided to reinterpret their odors for my own benefit. I told myself there were fragrant lanes, and for every path on the compound I came up wi
th something enticing: fir resin, lemon blossoms, naphthalene, shoe polish, furniture wax, chrysanthemums, glycerin soap, camphor, alum. I refused to let the chemicals have their poisonous way with me, and so I succeeded in creating a pleasant addiction for myself. Being pleasantly addicted didn’t mean I had made my peace with the chemicals. It only meant that, just as there were hunger words and eating words, there were also words of escape from these poisonous substances. And for me these words were both a necessity and a torture, because I believed them, and at the same time I knew why I needed them.
On my way to the yama, I saw water running down the rectangular scrubbing tower. I christened it PAGODA. The water gathered in a tank around its base and even in summer smelled like winter coats, like naphthalene. A round white smell, like the mothballs in the wardrobe back home. Close to the pagoda the naphthalene had more of an angular black smell. After I passed the pagoda, it became round and white again. I saw myself as a child, on the train to the Wench, on our way to summer vacation. I’m looking out the window at the gas fields around Kleinkopisch and spot the burning well. The flame is fox red, and I’m amazed that a flame that small could cause the whole valley to dry up. All the cornfields are ash gray, like at the end of autumn, they’re old and withered, and it’s only the middle of summer. This is the fire that’s been in the news, and WELL is a bad word in a headline because it means the gas field is on fire again and no one can put it out. My mother says the latest plan is to bring water buffalo blood from the slaughterhouse, five thousand liters. They hope the blood will quickly congeal and plug the well. The well smells like our winter coats in the wardrobe, I say. And my mother says: Yes, naphthalene.
Petroleum, the Russians call it NYEFT’. You sometimes see the word on the cistern cars. It means oil, but immediately makes me think of naphthalene. Nowhere does the sun sting the way it does here, at the corner of the moika, the eight-story ruin of the coal washer. The sun sucks the oil out of the asphalt, leaving a sharp, greasy smell, bitter and salty, like a giant box of shoe polish. On hot days at noontime, my father would lie down on the couch for an hour’s nap while my mother polished his shoes. No matter when I pass the moika, it’s always noontime back home.
The fifty-eight coke batteries are numbered and look like a long row of open coffins standing on end. Bricks on the outside and crumbling fireclay inside. I think about CRUMBLING FIRE COFFINS. Puddles of oil glisten on the ground, the chips of fireclay scab up with yellow crystals. The smell reminds me of the yellow chrysanthemum bushes in Herr Carp’s garden, but the only thing that grows here is poisonously pale grass. Noontime lies down in the hot wind, the bit of grass is undernourished just like us, it drags itself along carrying wavy stalks.
Albert Gion and I have the night shift. On my way to the cellar in the evening I pass all the pipes, a few packed in fiberglass, others naked and rusted. Some are knee-high, others run over my head. I really ought to follow one of these pipes, I think, at least once. At least once I ought to know where it’s coming from and where it’s going. Of course I still wouldn’t know what it’s transporting, assuming it’s transporting anything at all. But if I followed one that was letting off white steam, at least I’d know it was transporting something—naphthalene steam. Surely somebody could sit down with me at least once and explain the workings of the coke plant. I’d like to know what happens here. But I’m not sure that the technical procedures, which have their own words, won’t interfere with my escape words. I don’t even know if I could absorb all the names of the hulking skeletons in the open lanes and clearings. White steam hisses out of the valves, I sense the ground vibrating under my feet. On the other side of the plant, the quarter-hour bell tinkles at battery number one and soon afterward the bell rings at number two. The exhausters show their iron ribs of ladders and stairs. And beyond the exhausters, the moon wanders into the steppe. On nights like this I see Hermannstadt, the small-town gables from back home, the Bridge of Lies, the Fingerling Stairway, and next to it the pawnshop TREASURE CHEST. I also see Herr Muspilli, our chemistry teacher.
The valves in the thicket of pipes are NAPHTHALENE SPRINGS, they drip. At night you see how white the stopcocks are, different from snow, a flowing white. And the towers are a different black from the night, prickly black. And the moon has one life here and another life at home, over the small-town gables. In both places its light shines all night long, illuminating its ancient inventory—a plush chair and a sewing machine. The plush chair smells like lemon blossoms, the sewing machine like furniture wax.
The MATRON, the imposing hyperbolic cooling tower, has my full admiration, she must be a hundred meters tall. Her black impregnated corset smells like fir resin. Her unchanging white cooling-tower cloud is made of steam. The steam doesn’t smell, but it does stimulate the membranes of the nose and intensifies all the smells present, as well as the urge to invent escape words. Only the hunger angel can deceive as well as the Matron. Near the tower there’s a pile of artificial fertilizer, from before the war. Kobelian told me that the fertilizer was also a coal derivative. DERIVATIVE sounded comforting. From a distance, the prewar artificial fertilizer glinted like glycerin soap in cellophane. I saw myself as an eleven-year-old boy in Bucharest, in the summer of 1938, in the Calea Victoriei. My first visit to a modern department store, with a candy section a whole block long. Sweet breath in my nose, cellophane crackling in my fingers. Cold and hot shivers inside and out: my first erection. On top of that, the store was called Sora—sister.
The prewar artificial fertilizer has layers of transparent yellow, mustard green, and gray—all baked together and smelling bitter, like alum. I have to trust the alum stone, after all, it staunches bleeding. Some of the plants that grow here consume nothing but alum, they bloom purple like stanched blood and later have brown-lacquered berries, like the dried blood of the steppe-dogs.
Anthracene is another chemical substance. It lurks on every path and eats through your rubber galoshes. Anthracene is oily sand, or oil that has crystallized into sand. When you step on it, it instantly reverts to oil, inky blue, silver green like trampled mushrooms. Anthracene smells like camphor.
And now and then the odor of coal tar rises from the pitch basin despite all my fragrant paths and all my words of escape. Ever since my daylight poisoning I am afraid of the pitch basin and happy to have the cellar.
But even in the cellar there must be substances that can’t be seen or smelled or tasted. And they are the most devious. Since I can’t spot them, I can’t rename them with my escape words. They hide from me, but they also make sure I get the healthy milk. Once a month, after the shift, Albert Gion and I are given healthy milk against the invisible substances, so that we won’t succumb to the poisons as fast as Yuri, the Russian who worked in the cellar with Albert Gion before my daylight poisoning. To help us last longer, once a month at the factory guard shack they pour half a liter of healthy milk into a tin bowl. It’s a gift from another world. It tastes like the person you could have remained if you hadn’t gone into the service of the hunger angel. I believe the milk. I believe that it helps my lungs. That every sip destroys the poison, that the milk is like the snow, whose purity surpasses all expectations.
All of them, all of them.
And every day I hope its effect will protect me for a full month. I don’t dare say it but I say it nevertheless: I hope the fresh milk is the unknown sister of my white handkerchief. And the flowing version of my grandmother’s wish. I know you’ll come back.
Who switched my country
Three nights in a row I was haunted by the same dream. Once again I was riding home through the clouds on a white pig. But this time when I looked down, the land had a different appearance, there was no sea along its edge. And no mountains in the middle, no Carpathians. Only flat land, and not a single village. Nothing but wild oats everywhere, already autumn-yellow.
Who switched my country, I asked.
The hunger angel looked at me from the sky and said: America.
And where is Transylvania, I asked.
He said: In America.
Where did all the people go, I asked.
He said nothing.
On the second night he also refused to tell me where the people had gone, and on the third night as well. And that bothered me the whole next day. Albert Gion sent me straight from our shift to the other men’s barrack to see Zither Lommer, who was known for interpreting dreams. He shook thirteen big white beans into my padded cap, turned them out onto the lid of his suitcase, and studied how far apart each bean was from the others. Then he examined their wormholes, dents, and scratches. Between the third and the ninth bean he saw a street, and the seventh was my mother. Numbers two, four, six, and eight were wheels, but small. The vehicle was a baby carriage. A white baby carriage. I said that was impossible, we didn’t have our baby carriage anymore, because my father had converted it into a shopping cart as soon as I learned to walk. Zither Lommer asked if the converted baby carriage was white, and showed me on bean number nine how there was even a head inside the carriage, with a blue bonnet, probably a boy. I put my cap back on and asked what else he saw. He said: Nothing else. I had a piece of saved bread in my jacket. He said I didn’t owe him anything since it was my first time. But I think it was because I was so devastated.
I went back to my barrack. I’d learned nothing about Transylvania and America and where the people had gone. Or about myself, either. It was a pity about the beans, I thought, maybe they were just used up from all the dreams here in the camp. But they’d make a good soup.
I’m always telling myself I don’t have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I’m only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It’s not that I’m stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I’m weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I’m more of a coward. The difference is minimal, though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn’t cry, that doesn’t dwell on homesickness. For instance one about chestnuts and how they smell—even though that really does have to do with homesickness. But I make sure I only think about the Austro-Hungarian chestnuts that Grandfather told me about, the ones that smelled of fresh leather, the ones he shelled and ate before setting off around the globe on the Austrian sailing frigate Donau. That way I use the homesickness from my grandfather’s story to tame my own homesickness here, to make it disappear. So, when I do have a feeling, it’s actually a smell. The word-smell from the chestnuts or from the sailor. Over time every word-smell withers and dries out, like Zither Lommer’s beans. Of course you can become a monster if you give up crying. The only thing that keeps me from becoming a monster, assuming I haven’t turned into one already, is the sentence: I know you’ll come back.