The Hunger Angel: A Novel

by Herta Müller

  My second winter home the snow came early and stayed, by November the small town was packed in a padded suit. All the men had women. All the women had children. All the children had sleds. And they were all fat and home-sated. They ran through the white in tight-fitting dark coats. My coat was home-sated too since it was the same worn-out coat from Uncle Edwin. But it was light-colored and slightly dirty and much too big. All the people passing by were home-sated, but the scraps of breath flying out of their mouths showed the truth: here they were, going about their lives, but life was flying away. And they all watched it go, their eyes glistening like brooches of agate, emerald, or amber. One day, early or soon or late, onedroptoomuchhappiness awaits them too.

  I was homesick for the lean winters. The hunger angel was running around with me, and he doesn’t think. He led me to the crooked street. A man was coming from the opposite end. He didn’t have a coat but a fringed plaid blanket. He didn’t have a wife but a hand cart. The cart didn’t have a child but a black dog with a white head, which bobbed loosely in time with the turning wheels. As the plaid blanket came closer, I saw the outline of a heart-shovel on the man’s right breast. As the cart went by, the heart-shovel turned into a singe mark from a flatiron and the dog into a metal canister with an enameled funnel in its neck. As I watched him walk away the canister with the funnel turned back into a dog. And I had arrived at the Neptune Baths.

  The swan on the sign had three glass feet made of icicles. The wind rocked the swan, one of the glass feet broke off. On the ground, the shattered icicle was the coarse-grained salt from the camp that still needed breaking up. I stamped on it with my heel. When it was fine enough to sprinkle, I went through the open iron gate and stood in front of the entrance. Without thinking, I passed through the door into the hall. The dark stone floor reflected everything like still water. I saw my light-colored coat swimming below me to the cashier’s booth.

  The woman at the register asked: One or two.

  I hoped it was only the optical illusion speaking out of her mouth and not suspicion. I hoped all she saw were the twin coats and not the fact that I was on my way to my old life. The woman was new. But the hall recognized me, the shiny floor, the middle column, the leaded-glass windows of the cashier’s booth, the water-lily tiles. The cold decoration had its own memory, the ornaments hadn’t forgotten who I was. I had my wallet inside my jacket, but I pretended to search for it in my coat pocket and said:

  I left my wallet at home, I don’t have any money.

  The cashier said: That doesn’t matter. I’ve already torn the ticket, go ahead and pay next time. I’ll just take down your name.

  I said: No, absolutely not.

  She reached out of her booth and tugged at my coat. I shrank back, puffed out my cheeks, lowered my head, and shuffled backward in the direction of the door, narrowly avoiding the middle column.

  She called after me: I trust you, I’ll just take down your name.

  Only then did I notice that she really did have a green pencil behind her ear. I backed into the door handle and yanked at the door. I had to pull hard, the metal spring wouldn’t give. I slipped through the crack, the door squeaked shut behind me. I rushed through the iron gate and into the street.

  It was already dark. The swan on the sign was sleeping white, and the air slept black. Under the lantern at the street corner it was snowing gray feathers. Although I wasn’t moving, I heard my steps inside my head. Then I started to walk and stopped hearing them. My mouth smelled of chlorine and lavender oil. I thought about the etuba. And all the way home I talked to the snow that was dizzily flying from one lantern to the next. But the snow I was talking to wasn’t the snow I was walking in, it was a famished snow from far away, a snow that recognized me from going door-to-door.

  That evening, too, my grandmother took a step toward me and placed three fingers on her forehead, but asked:

  You’re back so late, do you have a girl.

  The next day in the schoolyard I met Emma. She was taking a class in accounting. She had light eyes, not the same brass yellow as Tur Prikulitsch, more like a quince. And like everyone else in town she had a dark home-sated coat. Four months later I married Emma. Since Emma’s father was deathly ill we didn’t have a celebration. We moved in with Emma’s parents. All that was mine I carried on me, my three lined notebooks and clothes all fit inside the wooden trunk from the camp. Emma’s father died four days later. Her mother moved into the living room and gave us the bedroom with the double bed.

  We lived with Emma’s mother for half a year. Then we left Hermannstadt and moved to the capital, to Bucharest. The number of our building was 68, like the number of bunks in the barrack. Our apartment was on the fifth floor, it had just one room and a small kitchenette, with a toilet out in the hall. But nearby, twenty minutes by foot, was a park. When summer came to the city, I used a dusty path as a shortcut. Then the park was only fifteen minutes away. While I waited in the stairwell for the elevator, two light-colored woven cables moved up and down inside the wire cage, as if Bea Zakel’s braids were rising and falling.

  One evening I was sitting with Emma at the Golden Jug restaurant, two tables away from the orchestra. As the waiter poured the wine he covered his ear and said: You hear that, I told the boss over and over that the piano’s out of tune. So what does he do, he throws out the piano player.

  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. Wh
ile 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.

  On treasures

  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.

  But there are treasures, Tur Prikulitsch was correct about that. The fact that I came back is a stroke of crippled luck that’s permanently grateful, a survival top that starts spinning at the least damned thing. It has me in its grip just like all my treasures, which I cannot bear but also can’t let go of. I’ve been using them now for over sixty years. They are weak and pushy, intimate and disgusting, forgetful and vindictive, worn out and new. They are Artur Prikulitsch’s dowry and I can’t tell one from the other. When I list them, I start to stumble.

  My proud inferiority.

  My grumbled fear-wishes.

  My reluctant haste, I jump from zero all the way to a hundred.

  My defiant compliance, I acknowledge that everyone is right so I can hold it against them.

  My fumbled opportunism.

  My polite miserliness.

  My wearied envy of yearning, of others who know what they want from life. A feeling like stiff wool, cold and frizzy.

  My steep-sided hollowness, I’m all spooned out, hard-pressed on the outside and empty on the inside ever since I no longer have to go hungry.

  My lateral transparency, that I fall apart by going inward.

  My burdened afternoons, time moving with me in between the furniture, slowly and heavily.

  My fundamental leaving in a lurch. I need much closeness, but I don’t give up control. I’m a master of the silken smile even as I shrink back. Since the hunger angel, I don’t allow anyone to possess me.

  The most burdensome of my treasures is my compulsion to work. It is the reverse of forced labor, an emergency exchange. In me sits the merciful compeller, a relative of the hunger angel. He knows how to keep all my other treasures in line. He climbs into my brain, pushing me into the enchantment of compulsion, because I am afraid of being free.

  From my room I can see the clock tower of the Schlossberg here in Graz. At my window is a large drawing table. My latest blueprint is lying on my desk like a faded tablecloth. The paper’s full of dust, like the summer on the streets outside. When I look at it, it doesn’t remember me. Every day since spring a man has been passing in front of my apartment walking a short-haired white dog. He has a black walking stick, extremely thin, with just a slight curve for a handle, like a giant vanilla bean. If I wanted to, I could greet the man and tell him that his dog looks exactly like the white pig that my homesickness used to ride through the sky. The truth is I’d like to have a word with the dog. It would be good if the dog went on a walk by himself for once, or just with the vanilla bean and without the man. Maybe that will happen someday. In any case, I’ll be staying where I am, and the street will stay where it is, and there’s a lot of summer left. I have time, and I wait.

  What I like best of all is sitting at my little white formica table, one meter long and one meter wide, a square. When the clock tower strikes half past two, the sun falls into the room. The shadow on the
floor from my little table is a gramophone suitcase. It plays the daphne song or the pleated Paloma. I pick up the cushion off the sofa and dance into my awkward afternoon.

  There are also other partners.

  I’ve danced with the teapot.

  With the sugar bowl.

  With the biscuit tin.

  With the telephone.

  With the alarm clock.

  With the ashtray.

  With the house key.

  My smallest partner is a torn-off coat button.

  Not true.

  Once a dusty raisin was lying underneath the little white formica table. And I danced with the raisin. Then I ate it. And then there was a distance deep within me.

  Afterword

  By the summer of 1944 the Red Army had advanced deep inside Romania; the Fascist dictatorship was overthrown, and its leader, Ion Antonescu, was arrested and later executed. Romania surrendered and in a surprise move declared war on its former ally, Nazi Germany. In January 1945 the Soviet general Vinogradov presented a demand in Stalin’s name that all Germans living in Romania be mobilized for “rebuilding” the war-damaged Soviet Union. All men and women between seventeen and forty-five years of age were deported to forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union.

  My mother, too, spent five years in a labor camp.

  The deportations were a taboo subject because they recalled Romania’s Fascist past. Those who had been in the camp never spoke of their experiences except at home or with close acquaintances who had also been deported, and then only indirectly. My childhood was accompanied by such stealthy conversations; at the time I didn’t understand their content, but I did sense the fear.

  In 2001, I began having conversations with former deportees from my village. I knew that the poet Oskar Pastior had been deported, and I told him I wanted to write a book on the subject. He offered to help me with his recollections. We began to meet regularly; he talked, and I wrote down what he said. We soon found ourselves wanting to write the book together.