The Hunger Angel Read online

  Sometimes I’m convinced I died a hundred years ago, and that the soles of my feet are transparent. When I look through the bright crack in my head, what I’m really searching for is this stubborn shy hope that at some time and in some place someone is thinking of me. Even if that person cannot know where I am at any given moment. It may be that I’m the old gap-toothed man in the upper-left corner of a wedding photo that doesn’t exist, and simultaneously a skinny child in a schoolyard that also doesn’t exist. Likewise, I am both the rival and the brother of my ersatz-brother, and he is also my rival because we both exist at the same moment. But we exist at different moments, too, since we have not seen each other ever, that is, at any one point in time.

  And at the same moment I know that the hunger angel sees me dead, but the death that he sees has not happened to me, not yet.

  Black dogs

  I step out of the cellar into the blinding morning snow. Four statues made of black slag are standing on the watchtowers. They’re not soldiers, but four black dogs. The first and the third statues move their heads, while the second and fourth stay frozen. Then the first dog moves its legs, the fourth moves its rifle, and the second and third stay frozen.

  The snow on the roof of the mess hall is a white linen sheet. Why did Fenya put the bread cloth on the roof.

  The cooling-tower cloud is a white baby carriage rolling toward the white birches in the Russian village. One day, when the white batiste handkerchief was in its third winter inside my suitcase, I went out begging again. I knocked on the door of the old Russian woman. A man my age opened. I asked if his name was Boris. He said NYET. I asked if an old lady lived here. He said NYET.

  In the mess hall the bread is on its way. Someday when I’m alone at the bread counter, I’ll screw up my courage and ask Fenya: When am I going home, I’m practically a statue made of black slag. Fenya will say: Well, you have tracks in the cellar, and you have a mountain. The little carts are always going home, you should go with them. You used to like taking the train into the mountains. And I’ll say: But that was when I was still at home. Well, she’ll say, so everything will be just like it was at home.

  But then I enter the mess hall and take my place in line. The bread is covered with white snow from the roof. I could work things out so I’m the last one in line, so I could be alone with Fenya when she administers my bread. But I don’t dare, her saintliness is too cold, and her face has the same three noses it always does—two of them being the beaks of her scales.

  A spoon here, a spoon there

  It was Advent once again, and I was amazed to see my little wire tree with the green fir-wool set up on the table in the barrack. Paul Gast the lawyer had kept it in his suitcase, and this year he decorated it with three bread-ball ornaments. Because we’ve been here three years, he said. He could afford to treat us to the bread ornaments because he stole the bread from his wife, but he didn’t think we knew that.

  Heidrun Gast lived in one of the women’s barracks, as married couples weren’t allowed to live together. She already had the dead-monkey face, the slit mouth running from one ear to the other, swollen eyes, and the white hare in the hollows of her cheeks. Since summer she’d been working in the garage, where she had to fill the truck batteries. Her face was more pockmarked than her fufaika, from all the sulfuric acid.

  Every day in the mess hall we saw what the hunger angel could do to a marriage. The lawyer searched for his wife like a watchdog. If she was sitting at a table between other people, he gave her arm a tug, then squeezed in close to her so that her soup was next to his. When she looked away for a second he dipped his spoon in her bowl. If she noticed what he was doing he said: A spoon here, a spoon there.

  January had barely begun. The little tree with the bread ornaments was still on the table in our barrack when Heidrun Gast died. And the bread ornaments were still hanging on the little tree when Paul Gast started wearing his wife’s coat with the small rounded collar and the tattered pocket flaps made of rabbit fur. He also started to get shaved more often than he used to.

  By the middle of January our singer Loni Mich was wearing the coat. And the lawyer was allowed behind her blanket. Around this time the barber asked: Anyone here have children back home.

  The lawyer said: I do.

  How many, asked the barber.

  Three, said the lawyer.

  His eyes stared out of the shaving lather and fixed on the door, where my padded cap with the earflaps hung on a hook like a duck that had been shot out of the sky. The lawyer heaved a deep sigh, blowing a gob of foam off the back of the barber’s hand onto the ground. It landed between the chair legs, right next to the lawyer’s rubber galoshes. Wrapped around the soles of his galoshes and tied off at the ankles were two brand-new, glistening pieces of copper wire.

  Once my hunger angel was a lawyer

  Don’t ever tell this to my husband, said Heidrun Gast. She was sitting between Trudi Pelikan and me, because Paul Gast the lawyer hadn’t come to eat that day, he had an abscessed tooth. So Heidrun Gast was able to talk.

  And what she told us was this: The garage where she worked was housed in a bombed-out factory. The ceiling over the repair bay had a hole as big as a tree canopy. She could look up through the hole and see people clearing rubble from the next level of the factory. Now and then a potato was lying on the floor of the repair bay, which a man had tossed down especially for Heidrun Gast. Always the same man. Heidrun Gast looked up at him, and he looked down at her. They couldn’t talk, he was surrounded by guards up in the factory just as she was down in the garage. The man wore a striped fufaika, he was a German prisoner of war. The last potato was a very small one, Heidrun Gast found it lying among the toolboxes. It’s possible that the potato had been there one or two days and she just hadn’t seen it. Either the man had tossed it down in more of a hurry than usual or else the potato had rolled farther than usual because it was so small. Or he had deliberately tossed it in a different spot. At first Heidrun Gast wasn’t sure the potato had really come from the man above and hadn’t been placed there by the nachal’nik as a trap. She nudged it halfway under the stairs with the tip of her shoe, so the potato couldn’t be seen unless you knew it was there. She wanted to make sure the nachal’nik wasn’t spying on her. She waited until just before quitting time, and when she picked up the potato she noticed there was a thread tied around it. As always, Heidrun Gast had looked up through the hole as often as she could that day, but there was no sign of the man. Back in her barrack that evening she bit off the thread. The potato had been sliced in two, and a scrap of cloth placed between the two halves. She could make out some writing: ELFRIEDE RO, ERSTRASS, ENSBU, and, on the bottom, ERMAN. The other letters had been eaten away by the potato starch. After the lawyer had finished his soup in the mess hall and returned to his barracks, Heidrun Gast went out to the yard, found a late fire, tossed in the scrap of cloth, and roasted the two potato halves. I realize that I ate a message, she told us, and that was sixty-one days ago. I know he didn’t go home, and I’m sure he didn’t die, he was still healthy. He just vanished from the face of the earth, she said, like the potato in my mouth. I miss him.

  A thin film of ice quivered in her eyes. The hollows of her cheeks were furred in white and clinging to her bones. Her hunger angel had to see there was nothing more to be gotten from her. I felt queasy, it seemed that the more Heidrun Gast confided in me, the sooner her hunger angel was likely to leave her. As if her hunger angel were looking to move in with me.

  Only the hunger angel could forbid Paul Gast from eating his wife’s food. But the hunger angel is a thief himself. All the hunger angels know each other, I thought, just as we all know each other. And they have the same professions we do. Paul Gast’s hunger angel is a lawyer just like he is. And Heidrun Gast’s hunger angel fetches and carries for her husband’s. Mine also fetches and carries, but I have no idea for whom.

  I said: Heidrun, eat your soup.

  I can’t, she said.

  I
reached for her soup. Trudi Pelikan was also eyeing it furtively. And Albert Gion from across the table. I began spooning away, without counting. I didn’t slurp, because slurping takes longer. I ate for myself, without Heidrun Gast or Trudi Pelikan or Albert Gion. I forgot everything around me, the entire mess hall. I sucked the soup into my heart. Faced with this bowl of soup, my hunger angel ceased being a servant and became a lawyer.

  I shoved the empty dish over to Heidrun Gast, until it touched the little finger of her left hand. She licked her unused spoon and wiped it dry on her jacket, as if she and not I had eaten the soup. Either she could no longer tell whether she was eating or watching, or she was acting as though she had eaten. One way or the other, you could see her hunger angel stretched out inside her slit mouth, mercifully pale on the outside and dark blue inside. He may have even been able to stand in a horizontal position. And it was clear that he was counting her days in the thin cabbage soup. But it’s also possible that he had forgotten Heidrun Gast and was calibrating the scale in the back of my throat. Or that as we were eating he was figuring out how much he could get from me and how long it would be before he got it.

  I have a plan

  When the hunger angel weighs me, I will deceive his scales.

  I will be just as light as my saved bread. And just as hard to bite.

  You’ll see, I tell myself, it’s a short plan with a long life.

  The tin kiss

  After supper I went to the cellar for the night shift. There was a brightness in the sky. A flock of birds was flying like a gray necklace from the Russian village toward the camp. I don’t know if the birds were screeching in the brightness or in the roof of my mouth. I also don’t know if they were screeching with their beaks or rubbing their feet together or if their wings had old bones with no cartilage.

  Suddenly a piece of the necklace broke away and split into mustaches. Three of them flew right into the soldier in the rear watchtower, just under the brim of his cap. They stayed there a long time, and didn’t fly out again until I’d reached the factory gate and turned around one more time. The soldier’s rifle was shaking, but he stayed frozen. I thought, The man is made of wood, and the rifle of flesh.

  I didn’t want to trade places with the guard in the tower or with the bird necklace. Nor did I want to be the slag worker who has to climb down the same sixty-four steps into the cellar every evening. But I did want to trade places. I think I wanted to be the rifle.

  During the night shift I flipped one cart after the next, as always, and Albert Gion did the pushing. Then we switched. The hot slag cloaked us in fog. The pieces of ember smelled like fir resin and my sweaty neck like honey tea. The whites of Albert Gion’s eyes swung back and forth like two peeled eggs, his teeth like a lice comb. In the cellar his black face had disappeared.

  During the break, sitting on the board of silence, the little coke fire lit up our legs all the way to our knees. Albert Gion unbuttoned his jacket and asked: What does Heidrun Gast miss more, the German or the potatoes. That wasn’t the first time she’s untied a potato, who knows what was written on the other scraps. The lawyer’s right to steal her food. An old marriage makes you hungry, infidelity makes you full. Albert Gion tapped me on the knee, as a sign the break was over, I thought. But then he said: Tomorrow I’m taking the soup, what does your Minkowski-wire say to that. My Minkowski-wire said nothing. We sat there a while in silence. My black hand disappeared on the bench. Just like his.

  The next day Paul Gast was again sitting next to his wife in the mess hall, despite his abscessed teeth. He was back to eating, and Heidrun Gast was back to keeping quiet. What my Minkowski-wire said to that was that I was disappointed, as so often. And that Albert Gion was being spiteful in a way I’d never seen. He was out to spoil the lawyer’s meal and tried to pick a fight. He accused the lawyer of snoring so loud it was unbearable. Then I turned spiteful too and told Albert Gion that his snoring was even worse than the lawyer’s. Albert Gion was furious that I’d spoiled his fight. He raised his hand to strike me, and his bony face was like a horse’s head. By that time the lawyer’s spoon was already well into his wife’s soup. She dipped her spoon less and less and he dipped his more and more. He slurped, and his wife began to cough, just to do something with her mouth. And when she coughed she covered her mouth, daintily holding out her little finger that was corroded by the sulfuric acid and grimy from the lubricating oil. Here in the mess hall all of us had dirty fingers, the only one with clean hands was Oswald Enyeter the barber, but the hair on his hands was as dark as the filth on ours, and looked as though he’d borrowed some fur from the steppe-dogs. Trudi Pelikan also had clean hands, ever since she became a nurse. Clean, but colored yellowish brown from rubbing ichthyol on all the sick people.

  While I was thinking about Heidrun Gast’s little finger and the condition of our hands, Karli Halmen came up to me and wanted to swap bread. My mind wasn’t clear enough for swapping bread, so I fended him off and stuck with my own portion. Then he traded with Albert Gion. That pained me, because the piece of bread that Albert Gion then bit into seemed bigger than mine by a third.

  From all around the mess hall came the clatter of tin. Every spoonful of soup is a tin kiss, I thought. And every one of us is ruled by our hunger, as though by an alien power. But no matter how well I knew that in the moment, I forgot it right away.

  The way of the world

  The naked truth is that Paul Gast the lawyer stole his wife’s soup right out of her bowl until she could no longer get out of bed and died because she couldn’t help it, just like he stole her soup because his hunger couldn’t help it, just like he wore her coat with the rabbit-fur pocket flaps and couldn’t help it that she had died, just like our singer Loni Mich wore the coat and couldn’t help it that a coat was free because the lawyer’s wife had died, just like the lawyer couldn’t help it that he was also free because his wife had died, just like he couldn’t help wanting to replace her with Loni Mich, and Loni Mich couldn’t help wanting a man behind the blanket, or wanting a coat, or that the two things were tied together, just like the winter couldn’t help being icy cold and the coat couldn’t help being so warm, and the days couldn’t help being a chain of causes and effects, just like all causes and effects couldn’t help it that they were the naked truth, even though this was all about a coat.

  That was the way of the world: because each person couldn’t help it, no one could.

  White hare

  Father, the white hare is hunting us down, chasing us out of life. He’s growing in the hollows of more and more cheeks.

  He hasn’t crawled out of my face yet, he’s just been looking at my flesh from the inside, because it is also his. Hase-veh.

  His eyes are coals, his muzzle is a tin dish, his legs are pokers, his stomach is a little cart in the cellar, his path is a set of tracks rising steeply up the mountain.

  He’s still sitting inside me, pink-skinned, waiting with his own knife, which is also Fenya’s, the knife for cutting bread.

  Homesickness. That’s the last thing I need

  The seven years after my return home were seven years without homesickness, without Heimweh. But when I looked in the display window of the bookstore on the main square and saw The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway, I read The Sun Also Rises by Heimweh. And so I bought the book and set off on my home-weh, I mean my way home.

  There are words that do whatever they want with me. They’re completely different from me and they think differently than what they really are. They deliberately pop into my mind so I’ll think there’s one thing that intends a different thing, even though I may not want that second thing at all. Hemingway. Heimweh. Homesickness. That’s the last thing I need.

  There are words that have me as their target, that seem created solely for my re-deportation—not counting the word RE-DEPORTATION. That word would be of no use if I were re-deported. Another useless word is MEMORY. The word HARM won’t help if I’m re-deported, either. Nor the word EXPERIENCE. Whenever
I have to deal with these useless words, I have to pretend I’m dumber than I am. But they’re harder on me with each new encounter.

  In the camp we had lice on our heads, in our eyebrows, on our necks, in our armpits, and in our pubic hair. We had bedbugs in our bunks. We were hungry. But we didn’t say: I have lice and bedbugs or I’m hungry. We said: I’m homesick. Which was the last thing we needed.