The Hunger Angel Part 1

The Hunger Angel.

Herta Muller.

On packing suitcases.

All that I have I carry on me.

Or: All that is mine I carry with me.

I carried all I had, but it wasn't mine. Everything either came from someone else or wasn't what it was supposed to be. A gramophone box served as a pigskin suitcase. The light overcoat came from my father. The fancy coat with the velvet collar from my grandfather. The knickers from Uncle Edwin. The leather gaiters came from our neighbor Herr Carp, the green woolen gloves from Aunt Fini. Only the burgundy silk scarf and the toilet kit belonged to me, presents from the previous Christmas.

The war was still on in January 1945. In their dismay at my being s.h.i.+pped off in the dead of winter to who knows where in Russia, everyone wanted to give me something that might be of use, even if it couldn't help. Because nothing in the world could possibly help: I was on the Russians' list, and that was that. So everyone gave me something, and kept their thoughts to themselves. And I took what they gave. I was seventeen years old, and in my mind this going away couldn't have come at a better time. Not that I needed the Russians' list, but if things didn't turn out too badly, I thought, this leaving might even be a good thing. I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes. Instead of fear I felt a secret impatience. And I had a bad conscience about it, because the same list that caused my relatives such despair was fine with me. They were afraid something might happen to me in a foreign country. I simply wanted to go to a place that didn't know who I was.

Something had just happened to me. Something forbidden. Something strange, filthy, shameless, and beautiful. It happened in the Alder Park, far in the back, on the other side of the short-gra.s.s mounds. Afterward, on my way home, I went to the pavilion in the middle of the park where the bands played on holidays. I sat there a while. Sunlight came stabbing through the finely carved wood. I stared at the empty circles, squares, and trapezoids, held together by white tendrils with claws, and I saw their fear. This was the pattern of my aberration, of the horror on my mother's face. In the pavilion I vowed: I'm never coming back to this park.

But the more I tried to stop myself, the faster I went back-after two days. For a rendezvous, as it was known in the park.

That next rendezvous was with the same first man. He was called THE SWALLOW. The second man was new, his name was THE FIR. The third was THE EAR. Then came THE THREAD. Then ORIOLE and CAP. Later HARE, CAT, GULL. Then THE PEARL. Only we knew which name belonged to whom. The park was a wild animal crossing, I let myself be pa.s.sed from one man to the next. And it was summer with white skin on birch trees and shrubs of elderberry and mock orange leafing out to form an impenetrable wall of green.

Love has its seasons. Autumn brought an end to the park. The trees grew naked, and we moved our rendezvous to the Neptune Baths. An oval sign with a swan hung next to the iron gate. Every week I met up with a married man twice my age. He was Romanian. I won't say what name he used or what name I used. We staggered our arrivals, so that no one and nothing could have any idea that we'd arranged to meet: not the cas.h.i.+er ensconced in the leaded-gla.s.s windows of her booth, nor the s.h.i.+ny stone floor, nor the rounded middle column, nor the water-lily tiles on the wall, nor the carved wooden stairs. We swam in the pool with all the others and didn't come together until we were both in the sauna.

Back then, before my time in the camp as well as after I returned, and all the way up to 1968 when I left the country, every rendezvous could have landed me in prison. Minimum five years, if I'd been caught. Some were. They went straight from the park or the baths to a brutal interrogation and then to jail. And from there to the penal colony on the ca.n.a.l. Today I know that almost n.o.body came back from there. The ones who did were walking corpses-old before their time and broken, of no use for any love in the world.

And in the camp-if I'd been caught in the camp I'd be dead.

After those five camp years I roamed the busy streets, day in and day out, silently rehearsing what to say in case I was arrested, preparing a thousand excuses and alibis to counter the verdict: CAUGHT IN THE ACT. I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

Once during the last rendezvous-summer I took a long way home from the park and found myself near the Holy Trinity Church on the main square. This chance detour turned out to be significant: I saw the time that was coming. On a column next to the side-altar stood a saint in a gray cloak, with a sheep draped around his neck as a collar. This sheep draped around the neck is silence. There are things we do not speak of. But I know what I'm talking about when I say that silence around the neck is different from silence inside the mouth. Before, during, and after my time in the camp, for twenty-five years, I lived in fear-of my family and of the state. Fear of a double disgrace: that the state would lock me away as a criminal and that my family would disown me out of shame. On crowded streets I would stare at the gla.s.s panes of the shops, at the windows of streetcars, of houses, I would gaze into fountains and puddles-checking to make sure I wasn't transparent after all.

My father was an art teacher. With the Neptune Baths inside my head, whenever he used the word WATERCOLOR I'd flinch as though he'd kicked me. The words knew how far I'd already gone. At the dinner table my mother said: Don't stab the potato with your fork because it will fall apart, use your spoon, the fork is for meat. My temples were throbbing. Why is she saying meat when she's talking about forks and potatoes. What kind of meat does she mean. I was my own thief, the words came out of nowhere and caught me.

Like all the Germans in our little town, my mother, and especially my father, believed in the beauty of blond braids and white knee-stockings. They believed in the black square of Hitler's mustache and in the Aryan heritage of us Transylvanian Saxons. The physical part of my secret alone was a gross abomination. And with a Romanian there was the additional matter of Ra.s.senschande.

I wanted to escape from my family, to a camp if need be. But I felt sorry for my mother, who had no idea how little she knew me. And who would think of me more frequently when I was away than I of her.

Inside the church, next to the saint with the sheep of silence, I had seen the white alcove with the inscription: HEAVEN SETS TIME IN MOTION. Packing my suitcase, I thought: The white alcove has done its work. This is the time that's been set in motion. I was also happy I wasn't being sent off to war, into the snow at the front. Foolishly brave and obedient, I went on packing. And I took whatever was offered-leather gaiters with laces, knickers, the coat with the velvet collar-even though none of it was really right for me. Because this wasn't about clothes, but about the time that had been set in motion, about growing up, with one set of things or another. The world is not a costume ball, I thought, and no one who's forced to go to Russia in the dead of winter need worry about looking ridiculous.

A patrol consisting of two policemen-a Romanian and a Russian-went from house to house carrying a list. I no longer remember whether the word CAMP was uttered inside our home. Or what other word might have been spoken, except RUSSIA. If the word CAMP was mentioned, it didn't frighten me. Despite the war and the silence about my rendezvous draped around my neck, I was only seventeen years old and still living in my bright, silly childhood. The words WATERCOLOR and MEAT affected me. My brain didn't register the word CAMP.

Back then, at the table with the fork and potatoes, when my mother caught me with the word meat, I remembered how she used to shout down to the courtyard where I was playing: If you don't come to dinner right away, if I have to call you one more time, you can just stay where you are. But I didn't always come right away, and once, when I finally went upstairs, she said: Why don't you just pack your satchel and go out into the world and do whatever you want. She pulled me into my room, grabbed my woolen cap and my jacket, and stuffed them inside my little backpack. I said, But I'm your child, where am I supposed to go.

A lot of people think packing a suitcase is something you learn through practice, like singing or praying. We had no practice and no suitcase. When my father was sent to join the Romanian soldiers on the front, there was nothing to pack. Soldiers are given everything they need, it's all part of the uniform. But we had no idea what we were packing for, except a long journey and a cold place. If you don't have the right things, you improvise. The wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn out to be the only right things, simply because they're what you have.

My mother brought the gramophone from the living room and set it on the kitchen table. Using a screwdriver, I made it into a suitcase. First I took out the spindle and turntable. Then I corked up the hole for the crank. The fox-red velvet lining stayed. I also kept the triangular emblem with HIS MASTER'S VOICE and the dog facing the horn. I put four books on the bottom: a cloth-bound edition of Faust, the slim volume of Weinheber, Zarathustra, and my anthology of poems from eight centuries. No novels, since you just read them once and never again. After the books came my toilet kit, containing: 1 bottle eau de toilette, 1 bottle Tarr aftershave, 1 shaving soap, 1 razor, 1 shaving brush, 1 alum stone, 1 hand soap, 1 nail scissors. Next to the toilet kit I put: 1 pair wool socks (brown, darned), 1 pair knee-high socks, 1 red-and-white-checked flannel s.h.i.+rt, 2 short plain underpants. My new burgundy-colored silk scarf went on the very top so it wouldn't get crushed. It had a pattern of s.h.i.+ny checks alternating with matte. With that the case was full.

Then came my bundle: 1 day blanket off the sofa (wool, bright blue and beige plaid, a huge thing but not very warm). And rolled into that: 1 lightweight overcoat (salt-and-pepper, very worn) and 1 pair leather gaiters (ancient, from the First World War, melon-yellow, with laces).

Then came the haversack with: 1 tin of Scandia brand ham, 4 sandwiches, a few leftover Christmas cookies, 1 canteen of water with a cup.

Then my grandmother set the gramophone box, the bundle, and the haversack beside the door. The two policemen had said they'd come for me at midnight. My bags stood ready to go.

Then I got dressed: 1 pair long underwear, 1 flannel s.h.i.+rt (beige and green plaid), 1 pair knickers (gray, from Uncle Edwin, as I said), 1 cloth vest with knitted sleeves, 1 pair wool socks, and 1 pair lace-up boots. Aunt Fini's green gloves lay within easy reach on the table. As I laced up my boots I thought about a summer vacation years earlier in the Wench highlands. My mother was wearing a sailor suit that she had made. On one of our walks she let herself sink into the tall gra.s.s and pretended to be dead. I was eight years old. The horror: the sky fell into the gra.s.s. I closed my eyes so I wouldn't see it swallowing me. My mother jumped up, shook me, and said: So, do you love me. See, I'm still alive.

My boots were laced up. I sat at the table waiting for midnight. And midnight came, but the patrol was late. Three more hours had to pa.s.s-that's almost too much for anyone. And then they were there. My mother held up the coat with the black velvet collar, and I slipped inside. She cried. I pulled on the green gloves. On the wooden walkway, just next to the gas meter, my grandmother said: I KNOW YOU'LL COME BACK.

I didn't set out to remember her sentence. I carried it to the camp without thinking. I had no idea it was going with me. But a sentence like that has a will of its own. It worked inside me, more than all the books I had packed. I KNOW YOU'LL COME BACK became the heart-shovel's accomplice and the hunger angel's adversary. And because I did come back, I can say: a sentence like that keeps you alive.

It was three in the morning, on the fifteenth of January, 1945, when the patrol came for me. The cold was getting worse: it was 15 C.

We rode in a canvas-topped truck through the empty town to the exhibition hall. The Transylvanian Saxons had used it as a banquet hall. Now it was an a.s.sembly camp. Some 300 people were crammed inside. Mattresses and straw sacks lay strewn on the floor. Vehicles arrived throughout the night, from the surrounding villages as well as from the town, and unloaded the people who'd been collected. It was impossible to count how many, there was no way to see everything, even though the light in the hall stayed on the whole night. Toward morning I counted nearly 500. People ran around looking for acquaintances. Word had it that carpenters were being requisitioned at the train station, that they were outfitting the cattle cars with plank beds made of fresh lumber. And that other craftsmen were equipping the trains with cylindrical stoves. And that others were sawing toilet holes into the floor. People talked a lot, quietly, with eyes wide open, and they cried a lot, quietly, with eyes shut. The air smelled of old wool, sweaty fear and greasy meat, vanilla pastries, liquor. One woman took off her headscarf. She was obviously from the country, her braid had been doubled and pinned up to the top of her head with a semicircular horn comb. The teeth of the comb disappeared in her hair, but the two corners of its curved edge stuck out like little pointed ears. The ears and her thick braid made the back of her head look like a sitting cat. I sat like a spectator in the middle of all the legs and luggage. For a few minutes I fell asleep and dreamed: My mother and I are in a cemetery, standing in front of a freshly dug grave. A plant half my height is growing in the middle of the grave. The leaves are furry, and its stem has a pod with a leather handle, a little suitcase. The pod is open the width of a finger and lined with fox-red velvet. We don't know who has died. My mother says: Take the chalk out of your coat pocket. But I don't have any, I say. I reach in my pocket and find a piece of tailor's chalk. My mother says: We have to write a short name on the suitcase. Let's write RUTH-we don't know anybody named that. I write RUHT-rests, as on a gravestone.

In my dream it was clear to me that I had died, but I didn't want to tell my mother just yet. I was startled out of my sleep by an older man with an umbrella who sat down on the straw sack next to me and spoke into my ear: My brother-in-law wants to come, but the place is guarded. They won't let him in. We're still in town, he can't come here, and I can't go home. A bird was flying on each silver b.u.t.ton of the man's jacket-a wild duck, or rather an albatross, because the cross on his badge turned into an anchor when I leaned in closer. The umbrella stood between us like a walking stick. I asked: Are you taking that along. Yes I am, he said, it snows even more there than it does here.

No one told us how or when we were supposed to leave the hall-or I should say, when we'd be allowed to leave, since I was anxious to get going, even if that meant traveling to Russia in a cattle car with a gramophone box and a velvet collar around my neck. I don't remember how we finally got to the station, just that the cattle cars were tall. I've also forgotten the boarding, we spent so many days and nights traveling in the cattle car, it seemed we'd been there forever. Nor can I remember how long we stayed on the train. I thought that traveling a long time meant we were traveling a great distance. As long as we keep moving, I thought, nothing can happen. As long as we keep moving, everything is fine.

Men and women, young and old, their bags stacked at the head of their plank beds, talking and keeping quiet, eating and sleeping. Bottles of liquor made the rounds. People grew accustomed to the journey, some even attempted to flirt. They made contact with one eye and looked away with the other.

I sat next to Trudi Pelikan and said: I feel like I'm on a ski trip in the Carpathians, in the cabin at Lake Balea, where half a high school cla.s.s was swallowed up by an avalanche. She said: That can't happen to us, we didn't bring any skis. But with a gramophone box like that you can ride ride ride through the day through the night through the day, you know Rilke don't you, said Trudi Pelikan in her bell-shaped coat with the fur cuffs that reached to her elbows. Cuffs of brown hair like two half-dogs. Trudi Pelikan sometimes crossed her arms, hiding her hands in her sleeves, and then the two halves became a whole dog. That was before I'd seen the steppe, otherwise I would have thought of the little marmots we called steppe-dogs. Trudi Pelikan smelled like warm peaches, even her breath, and even after three or four days in the cattle car. She sat in her coat like a lady taking the streetcar to work and told me how she'd hidden for four days in a hole in the ground behind the shed in her next-door neighbor's garden. But then the snow came, and every step between house and shed and hole became visible. Her mother could no longer bring her food in secret. The footsteps were plain to see all over the garden. The snow denounced her, she had to leave her hiding place of her own accord, voluntarily forced by the snow. I'll never forgive that snow, she said. You can't rearrange freshly fallen snow, you can't fix snow so it looks untouched. You can rework earth, she said, and sand and even gra.s.s if you try hard enough. Water takes care of itself, because it swallows everything and flows back together once it's done swallowing. And air is always in place because you can't see it. Everything but snow would have kept quiet, said Trudi Pelikan. It's all the fault of the snow. The fact that it fell in town, as if it knew exactly where it was, as if it felt completely at home there. And the fact that it immediately sided with the Russians. The snow betrayed me, said Trudi Pelikan, that's why I'm here.

The train rolled on for 12 or 14 days, countless hours without stopping. Then it stopped for countless hours without moving. We didn't know where we were at any given moment. Except when someone on one of the top bunks could read a station sign through the narrow trap window: BUZU. The iron stove in the middle of the train car crackled. Bottles of liquor pa.s.sed from hand to hand. Everyone was tipsy: some from drink, others from uncertainty. Or both.

The phrase HAULED OFF BY THE RUSSIANS came to mind, and all that might mean, but it didn't cause us despair. They couldn't line us up against the wall until we got there, and for the moment we were still moving. The fact that they hadn't lined us up against the wall and shot us long ago, as we had been led to expect from the n.a.z.i propaganda at home, made us practically giddy. In the cattle car the men learned to drink just for the sake of drinking. The women learned to sing just for the sake of singing: The daphne's blooming in the wood.

The ditches still have snow.

The letter that you sent to me.

Has filled my heart with woe.

Always the same solemn song, to the point where you no longer knew whether it was really being sung or not, because the air was singing. The song rocked back and forth inside your head, and fit the rhythm of the ride-a Cattle Car Blues, a Song of the Time Set in Motion. It became the longest song of my life, the women sang it for five whole years, until the song became as homesick as we were.

The sliding door, which had been sealed from the outside, was opened four times. Twice, when we were still on Romanian soil, they tossed half a goat inside the car. The animal had been skinned and sawed lengthwise in two. It was frozen stiff and crashed onto the floor. The first time we thought the goat was wood for burning. We broke the carca.s.s into pieces and put it on the fire. It was so dry and scrawny it didn't stink at all, and it burned well. The second time we heard the word PASTRAMA: air-dried meat for eating. We burned our second goat, too, and laughed. It was every bit as stiff and blue as the first one, a ghastly bundle of bones. But we were too quick to laugh, it was arrogant of us to spurn those two kindly Romanian goats.

Familiarity increased as time pa.s.sed. In the cramped s.p.a.ce, people performed the little tasks: sitting down, getting up. Rummaging through suitcases, taking things out, fitting them back in. Going to the toilet hole behind two raised blankets. Every tiny detail brought another in its wake. Inside a cattle car, you lose the traits that make you distinct. You exist more among others than by yourself. There's no need for special consideration. People are simply there together, one for the other, like at home. Perhaps I'm only talking about myself when I say that today. Perhaps that wasn't even true for me. Perhaps the cramped quarters of the cattle car softened me, because I wanted to leave anyway, and I had enough to eat in my suitcase. We had no idea about the savage hunger that would soon attack us. During the next five years, when the hunger angel descended upon us, how often did we look like those stiff blue goats. And how mournfully did we long for them.

We were now in the Russian night, Romania lay behind us. We felt a strong jolt and waited for an hour while the train axles were switched to steppe-gauge, to accommodate the broader Russian track. There was so much snow outside it lit up the night. Our third stop was in an empty field. The Russian guards shouted UBORNAYA. All the doors of all the cars were opened. We tumbled out, one after the other, into the low-lying snowland, sinking in up to our knees. Without understanding the actual word, we sensed that ubornaya meant a communal toilet stop. High overhead, very high, the round moon. Our breath flew in front of our faces, glittering white like the snow under our feet. Machine pistols on all sides, leveled. And now: Pull down your pants.

The embarra.s.sment, the shame of the world. How good that this snowland was so alone with us, that no one was watching it force us close together to do the same thing. I didn't need to, but I pulled down my pants and crouched. How mean and how still this nightland was, how it embarra.s.sed us as we attended to our needs. How to my left Trudi Pelikan hoisted her bell-coat up under her arms and pulled her pants below her ankles, the hissing between her shoes. How the lawyer Paul Gast groaned as he tried to force a movement, how his wife Heidrun's bowels croaked from diarrhea. How all around the stinking warm steam immediately froze and glistened in the air. How the snowland meted out its drastic treatment, leaving each of us to our desolation, our bare bottoms, and the noise of our intestines. How pitiful our entrails became in their common condition.

Perhaps it was my terror, more than myself, that grew up so suddenly that night. Perhaps this was the only way for us to recognize our common condition. Because every one of us, without exception, automatically turned to face the track as we took care of our needs. All of us kept the moon to our backs, we refused to let the open door of the cattle car out of our sight, we needed it like the door to a room. We had the crazy fear that the doors might shut without us and the train drive away. One of us cried out into the vast night: So here we are, the s.h.i.+tting Saxons. Wasting away in more ways than one. Well, you're all happy to be alive-I'm right, aren't I. He gave an empty laugh like tin. Everyone moved away from him. Then he had room around him and took a bow, like an actor, and repeated in a solemn, lofty tone: It's true, isn't it-you're all happy to be alive.

An echo rang in his voice. A few people started to cry, the air was like gla.s.s. His face was submerged in madness. The drool on his jacket had glazed over. Then I noticed his badge: it was the man with the albatross b.u.t.tons. He stood all by himself, sobbing like a child. Now all that was next to him was the fouled snow. And behind him: the frozen world and the moon, as on an X-ray.

The locomotive let out a dull whistle. The deepest UUUUH I ever heard. Everyone pushed to get to the door. We climbed in and rode on.

I would have recognized the man even without his badge. But I never saw him in the camp.

Orach.

None of the underclothes they issued us had b.u.t.tons. The unders.h.i.+rts and the long underpants each had two small ties. The pillowcases had two sets of ties. By night the pillowcase was a pillowcase. By day it was a canvas sack you carried with you for whatever might come your way, also for stealing and begging.

We stole before, during, and after work, though never while begging-which we referred to as going door-to-door-and never from a neighbor in the barrack. Nor was it stealing when on the way home after work we combed the rubble heaps, picking weeds until our pillow was full. As early as March the women from the country spotted the edible orach with the serrated leaves they called MELDE. Here it was called LOBODA. We also picked wild dill, a kind of gra.s.s with feathery leaves. But none of it was any good unless you had salt. And you could only get salt by bartering at the market. The salt was gray and coa.r.s.e like gravel, you had to break it up. Salt was worth a fortune. We had two recipes for orach: Salt the leaves and tear the wild dill into tiny bits and sprinkle on top and eat raw, like field greens. Or else boil the stems whole, in salt water. Fished out of the pot with a spoon, orach stems make a delightful mock spinach. The broth can also be drunk, either as a clear soup or a green tea.

Spring orach is tender, the whole plant finger-high and silver-green. By early summer it's knee-high and the leaves are splayed. Each leaf can look like a different glove, always with the thumb pointing down. When silvery green like that, the orach is a cool plant, a food for spring. You have to watch out in summer, though, because it quickly grows tall and dense, with hard, woody stems. Then it tastes bitter, like loam. Eventually the plant forms a thick middle stalk that reaches up to your waist, and spreads out into a loose shrub. And by midsummer the leaves and stems start to take on color: first pink, then blood-red, later a reddish purple, and in the fall a deep indigo. Each stem develops cl.u.s.ters of flowers, just like stinging nettle. But the orach cl.u.s.ters don't hang, they stick out, angled upward. They, too, turn from pink to indigo.

It's strange: the orach isn't really beautiful until it begins to change color, long after it ceases to be edible. Then the plant lingers along the wayside, protected by its beauty. The time for eating orach is over. But not the hunger, which is always greater than we are.

What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry. If you can't think of anything else. Your mouth begins to expand, its roof rises to the top of your skull, all senses alert for food. When you can no longer bear the hunger, your whole head is racked with pain, as though the pelt from a freshly skinned hare were being stretched out to dry inside. Your cheeks wither and get covered with pale fur.

I never knew whether the orach should be reproached for being inedible, for turning woody and refusing to cooperate. Did the plant know that it no longer served us and our hunger, but rather the hunger angel. The red flower cl.u.s.ters were jeweled ornaments around the neck of the hunger angel. From the first frost in early autumn, the orach put on more and more jewelry, until it froze to death. Poisonously beautiful colors that stabbed our eyes. The cl.u.s.ters, countless rows of red necklaces along every wayside, adorned the hunger angel. He had his jewels. And we had our mouths, which had grown so high and hollow that our steps echoed inside. A bright void in the skull, as if we'd swallowed too much glaring light. A light that sweetly creeps up your throat and swells and rises to your brain. Until you no longer have a brain inside your head, only the hunger echo. No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.

I looked at the orach that could no longer be eaten and tried to think about something else-about the last tired warmth of late summer, before the ice-winter came. But instead I thought about the potatoes we didn't have. And about the women who lived on the kolkhoz who probably did have potatoes in their daily cabbage soup. Though apart from that, no one envied them. They lived in holes in the earth and had to work much longer every day than we did: from dawn to dusk.

Springtime in the camp was the season for cooking orach picked off the rubble heap. The German name MELDE sounded as if it meant more than it did. In fact, MELDE was for us a word without any overtone, a word that left us in peace. It wasn't the MELDE DICH-present yourself-of roll call. This MELDE wasn't a roll-call weed, but a wayside word. If anything, it was a word for after evening roll call, an after-roll-call weed. Because we couldn't cook our orach until we had been counted, and that took forever because the numbers never came out right.

There were five work battalions, or ORBs-Otdyel'niy Rabochiy Batal'on-in our camp, each consisting of between five hundred and eight hundred internees. I was a.s.signed to battalion number 1009, and my work number was 756.

For the Appell, or roll call, we stood in rank and file-what an expression for those five miserable regiments of swollen eyes, large noses, hollow cheeks. Our stomachs and legs were distended from the brown bog water. In freezing cold or searing heat, we spent entire evenings standing at attention. Only the lice were allowed to move. During the endless counting they could drink their fill, parade across our miserable flesh, crawl over us from head to pubic hair for hours on end. And after they were sated and resting in the seams of our quilted work clothes, we'd still be standing at attention. And s.h.i.+shtvanyonov, our camp commandant, would still be screaming. We didn't know his first name. He was simply Tovarishch s.h.i.+shtvanyonov. But that was long enough to make you stammer with fear whenever you said it. For me the sound always conjured the rumble of the deportation locomotive. And the white alcove in the church at home, HEAVEN SETS TIME IN MOTION. Perhaps we had to stand so long to stop the time in motion. Our bones became heavy as iron. When the flesh on your body disappears, your bones become a burden, and the ground pulls you downward.

I practiced forgetting myself during roll call, to the point where I couldn't tell breathing out from breathing in. I practiced rolling my eyes up without lifting my head, to look for a corner of cloud where I might hang my bones. If I was able to forget myself, and found the heavenly hook, it held on to me. But often there was no cloud, only blue sky, like open water.

Often there was nothing but an unbroken cover of clouds, a uniform gray.

Often the clouds were running, and no hook could hold fast.

Often the rain burned my eyes and glued my clothes to my skin.

Often the frost bit into my entrails.

On days like that the sky lifted my eyes up, and the roll call pulled them down-then my bones just hung inside me, with nothing to hold on to.

The kapo, Tur Prikulitsch, strutted back and forth between us and Commandant s.h.i.+shtvanyonov, his lists slipping out of his hands, dog-eared from constant leafing. Every time he called out a number, his chest wobbled like a rooster's. His hands were still a child's. My hands grew in the camp: square, hard, and flat, like two boards.

If someone screwed up his courage after roll call and asked one of the nachal'niks, or even Commandant s.h.i.+shtvanyonov, when we would be going home, they would say curtly: SKORO-soon.

This Russian SOON robbed us of the longest time in the world.

Tur Prikulitsch had Oswald Enyeter, the barber, trim his nose hairs and fingernails. The two men came from the same region, near Rachiv in the Carpatho-Ukraine, where three lands meet. I asked if it was customary in that part of the world for barbers to trim the nails of their better clients. The barber said: No, it's not. That comes from Tur, not from home. What's from home is five coming after nine. What do you mean, I asked. That things are a little balamuc. What's that, I asked. All mixed up, like a madhouse.

Tur Prikulitsch spoke Russian as well as German. He wasn't Russian like s.h.i.+shtvanyonov, nonetheless he belonged to the Russians, not to us. He was interned along with us, but he was the adjutant of the camp administration. He translated the Russian commands and added his own in German. He divided us into work battalions on a sheet of paper, a.s.signing each name and work number to a specific battalion. That way he had an overview of everything. Each of us had to know his number day and night and never forget that we were not private individuals but numbered laborers.

In the columns next to our names Tur Prikulitsch wrote: kolkhoz, factory, rubble removal, sand transport, rail segment, construction, coal transport, garage, c.o.ke battery, slag cellar. Everything depended on what he wrote in that column. Whether we would end up tired, dog tired, or dead tired. Whether we would have time and energy to go door-to-door after work. Whether we'd be able to rummage around in the kitchen waste behind the mess hall unnoticed.

Tur Prikulitsch himself never went to work, never had to report to any battalion or brigade or s.h.i.+ft. He ruled and was therefore alert and disparaging. When he smiled it was a trap. When you returned his smile-and everyone had to-you felt you were his fool. Tur Prikulitsch smiles because he's entered something in the column next to your name, some new and worse a.s.signment. Between the barracks, along the main street of the camp, I avoid him, preferring to keep enough distance to make speaking impossible. He lifts his legs high when he walks and carefully places his s.h.i.+ny shoes on the ground like two patent-leather purses, as if the empty time were dropping out of him, right through his soles. He notices everything. People say that even what he forgets becomes an order.

At the barber's I'm no match for Tur Prikulitsch. He says whatever he wants, there's no risk. It's in his interest to insult us. He knows he has to keep us in our place, so things stay the way they are. He stretches out his neck and always talks down to us. He has the whole day to admire himself. I admire him as well: he's athletically built, with bra.s.s-colored eyes and an oily gaze, small ears that lie flat like two brooches, a porcelain chin, nostrils pink like tobacco flowers, a neck like candle wax. He's fortunate that he never has to get dirty. And this good fortune makes him more attractive than he deserves to be. He doesn't know the hunger angel, so he can give commands at roll call, strut around the camp, smile cunningly in the barber room. But he can't take part in our conversation. I know more about Tur Prikulitsch than he would like, because I know Bea Zakel well. She is his mistress.

The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant, s.h.i.+shtvanyonov: a gnas.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke 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 gla.s.s 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 what 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 b.u.t.tocks like a s.h.i.+p.

Eight brigades were a.s.signed 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.