The Hunger Angel Read online

  Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

  I know that even lice can yearn for home, in three different places: there’s the head louse, the clothes louse, and the crab louse. The head louse crawls on your scalp, behind your ears, in your eyebrows, along the hairline on your neck. If your neck itches, it could also be a clothes louse in your shirt collar. The clothes louse doesn’t crawl. It sits in the stitches of whatever you’re wearing. It’s called a clothes louse but it doesn’t live off threads. The crab louse crawls and itches inside your pubic hair. We didn’t say: Pubic hair. We said: I’ve got an itch down there.

  Lice come in different sizes, but they’re all white and look like little crabs. When you squeeze them between your thumbnails you hear a dry crack. They leave behind a watery speck on one nail and a sticky speck of blood on the other. The colorless eggs are strung together like a glass rosary or transparent peas in a pod. Lice are only dangerous if they’re carrying typhus or typhoid fever. Otherwise you can live with them. You get used to itching all over.

  You might think that the camp lice got transferred from head to head at the barber’s, by comb. But they had no need of that, they were able to crawl from bed to bed inside the barrack. We set the feet of our bunks in tin cans filled with water so as to block their path, but they were as hungry as we were and found other ways. We shared lice during roll call, in line at the food counter, at the long tables in the mess hall, at work loading and unloading, while squatting during a cigarette break, while dancing the Paloma.

  Our heads were shorn with a special clipper, the men by Oswald Enyeter in his barber room, the women by the Russian medic in a wooden shack next to the sick barrack. When their hair was first cut off, the women were allowed to take their braids and keep them in their suitcases as souvenirs of themselves.

  I don’t know why the men didn’t help each other pick lice. The women put their heads together every day, told stories and sang and picked the lice off one another.

  In the very first winter, Zither Lommer taught us how to remove the lice from wool sweaters. At sunset, when it’s well below freezing, you dig a hole in the ground thirty centimeters deep, stick the sweater in the hole, and loosely cover the hole, leaving just a little bit of wool sticking out, the length of a finger. During the night all the lice crawl out of the sweater. By sunrise they’ve gathered in white clumps on the little tip of wool. Then you can squash them all at once with your shoe.

  Once March came and we could work the earth, we dug holes between the barracks. Each evening the sweater tips stuck out of the ground, like a knitted garden that bloomed at dawn with white foam, like cauliflower. We squashed the lice and pulled the sweaters out of the ground. The sweaters again kept us warm, and Zither Lommer said: Clothes don’t die even when you bury them.

  The seven years after my return home were seven years without lice. But for sixty years, whenever there’s cauliflower on my plate, I’m eating lice from the sweater tips at sunrise. And to this day whipped cream is never just a topping on the cake.

  In the camp, from the second year on, we had a new method of getting rid of lice—the ETUBA, a hot-air chamber over a hundred degrees Celsius set up next to the showers. Every Saturday we hung our clothes on iron hooks which circled around on rollers like the little trolleys in the cooling room of a slaughterhouse. The clothes took much longer to roast than we did to shower, about one and a half hours—we quickly ran out of time, as well as hot water. So we stood in the entrance area and waited. Bent, mangy figures, in our nakedness we looked like worn-out draft animals. But no one was ashamed. What is there to be ashamed of when you no longer have a body. Yet our bodies were the reason we were in the camp, to perform bodily labor. The less of a body we had, the more it punished us. The shell that was left belonged to the Russians. I was never ashamed in front of the others, only in front of my earlier self, remembering my days in the Neptune baths, when my skin was smooth and I was giddy from the lavender steam and the gasping delight. When I never thought about worn-out draft animals on two legs.

  After the clothes came out of the etuba, they stank of heat and salt. The fabric was singed and brittle. But two or three passes through the etuba turned smuggled sugar beets into candied fruit. I never had any sugar beets to bring to the etuba. I had a heart-shovel, coal, cement, sand, cinder blocks, and cellar slag. I had spent one terrifying day with the potatoes, but not a single day in the field with the sugar beets. Only the men who loaded and unloaded sugar beets at the kolkhoz had candied fruit in the etuba. I knew what candied fruit looked like from home: glass green, raspberry red, lemon yellow—little gemstones sprinkled inside a cake that got stuck between your teeth. The candied sugar beets were earthy brown, once peeled they looked like sugar-glazed fists. When I saw the others eating them, my homesickness ate cake, and my stomach contracted.

  In the women’s barrack on New Year’s Eve in our fourth year, I, too, ate candied beets—in a cake that Trudi Pelikan hadn’t so much baked as built. Instead of candied fruit there were candied beets, instead of nuts, sunflower seeds—instead of flour, corn bran—instead of dessert plates, faience tiles from the dying room in the sick barrack. Along with that, each of us received one cigarette from the market—LUCKY STRIKE. I took two puffs and was drunk. My head floated off my shoulders and merged with the other faces, the bunks started spinning in circles. We sang and locked arms and swayed to the Cattle Car Blues:

  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

  Kati Sentry sat with her piece of cake at the little table under the barrack light. She watched us impassively. But when the song was over she rocked on her chair and said: UUUH, UUUH.

  She had made this same deep uuuh, the dull sound of the deportation train, at our last stop during the snow-night four years ago. I froze, others cried. Trudi Pelikan also broke down. And Kati Sentry watched us cry and ate her cake. You could see that she liked it.

  There are words that do whatever they want with me. I no longer know if the Russian word VOSH’ means the bedbugs or the lice. With my word VOSH’ I mean both. Maybe the word can’t tell one from the other. But I can.

  The bedbugs climbed up the walls, and during the night they dropped from the ceiling onto our beds. I don’t know if they dropped during the day as well and we just didn’t see them. But they were another reason the light in the barrack was kept on all night long.

  Our bed frames were made of iron. Rusty bars with raw welded seams. The bedbugs reproduced there as well as in the unplaned boards under the straw sacks. Whenever the bedbugs gained the upper hand, we had to take our beds out into the yard—that mostly happened on weekends. We had wire brushes made by the men in the factory that we used on the bedbugs, brushing the bed frames and the boards so hard that they turned red with blood. Exterminating bedbugs was one order we were eager to carry out. We wanted to clean our beds and have a few nights’ peace. We were happy to see the blood of the bedbugs, because it was our own. The more blood we saw, the more determined we were to brush down the bed. All the hate was drawn out of us. We brushed the bedbugs to death and felt a kind of pride, as if they were the Russians.

  Then exhaustion hit us like a blow to the head. Pride that is tired makes you sad. Our pride brushed itself down to size until the next time. Knowing that all our work was ultimately in vain, we carried the beds, temporarily free of bedbugs, back to the barracks. And with pitiful humility, we told ourselves: At least now night can come.

  And sixty years later I dream: I’ve been deported for the second, third, or sometimes even the seventh time. I set down my gramophone suitcase by the well and wander around t
he Appellplatz. There are no brigades here, no nachal’niks. I have no work. The world has forgotten me, and so has the new camp administration. I mention my experience as a camp veteran. I explain that I have my heart-shovel, and that my day and night shifts were always works of art. I’m not some Johnny-come-lately, I know how to do things. I know about cellars and slag. I have a blue-black, beetle-sized piece of slag grown into my shin from the first time I was deported. I show it off like a hero’s medal. I don’t know where I’m supposed to sleep, everything here is new. Where are the barracks, I ask. Where is Bea Zakel, where is Tur Prikulitsch. Limping Fenya has a different crocheted sweater in every dream, but she always has the same sash made of white bread cloth. She says there isn’t any camp administration. I feel neglected. Nobody wants me here, but under no circumstances am I allowed to leave.

  In which camp did my dream end up. Does my dream even care that the heart-shovel and the slag cellar really existed. That the five imprisoned years are more than enough for me. Does my dream want to go on deporting me and then refuse to let me work when I reach the seventh camp. That really hurts. I have nothing to counter with, no matter how many times the dream deports me and no matter which camp I end up in.

  If I’m ever to be deported again in this life, I’ll know: there are things that intend a different thing, even if you may not want that second thing at all.

  What’s driving me to stay so attached. Why do I insist on being miserable at night. Why can’t I be free. Why am I forcing the camp to belong to me. Homesickness. That’s the last thing I need.

  A bright moment

  One afternoon I found Kati Sentry sitting at the little wooden table in the barrack, probably because of the cuckoo clock. Who knows how long she’d been there. When I came in she asked me: Do you live here.

  I said: Yes.

  I do, too, she said, but behind the church. We moved into the new house last spring. Then my little brother died. He was old.

  I said: But he was younger than you.

  He was sick, that makes you old, she said. Then I put on his suede shoes and went back to the old house. There was a man in the courtyard. Then the man asked me, how did you get here. I showed him the suede shoes. Then he said, next time bring your head.

  Then what did you do, I asked.

  Then I went inside the church, she said.

  I asked: What was your little brother’s name.

  She said: Latzi, just like you.

  But my name is Leo, I said.

  Maybe when you’re at home, but here your name is Latzi, she said.

  Such a bright moment, I thought, there’s even a louse—a Laus—inside the name, since Latzi comes from Ladislaus.

  Kati Sentry stood up, hunched over, and glanced at the cuckoo clock one more time from the door. But her right eye shimmered at me like old silk. She raised her index finger and said:

  You know, you better stop waving to me in church.

  Carelessness spread like hay

  In the summer we were allowed to dance outside on the Appellplatz. Just before nightfall the swallows flew in pursuit of their hunger, the trees turned darkly jagged, and the clouds were tinged with red. Later a finger-thin moon hung over the mess hall. Anton Kowatsch’s drumming drifted on the wind, the dancing couples swayed like bushes. The little bells of the coke batteries chimed, and the glow that followed every wave of tinkling lit up the sky over our heads. Before the brightness faded you could see Singing Loni’s trembling goiter and the heavy eyes of Konrad Fonn the accordionist, always staring off to where there was nothing and nobody.

  There was something bestial in the way Konrad Fonn pulled the ribs of the accordion apart and squeezed them together. His drooping eyelids hinted at a lascivious nature, but his eyes were too hollow and cold for that. The music didn’t enter his soul—he just shooed the songs away, and they crawled into us. His accordion shuffled along, hollow and dull. Ever since Zither Lommer had supposedly boarded a ship in Odessa, to head somewhere in the direction of home, the orchestra was missing its warm bright tones. Maybe the accordion was as out of tune as the musician, maybe it questioned whether deportees pairing off and swaying on the Appellplatz like bushes really counted as dancing.

  Kati Sentry was sitting on the bench, swinging her feet in time to the music. If a man asked her to dance she would run off into the darkness. Now and then she danced with one of the women, craning her neck and gazing at the sky. She must have danced often in the past since she was able to follow changes of rhythm. When she sat on the bench she would throw pebbles if she saw the couples come too close together. It wasn’t a game, either, her face remained serious. Albert Gion told me that most people forget all about the Appellplatz on those nights, that they go so far as to say they’re dancing on the plaza. He also told me he was never going to dance with Zirri Wandschneider again, she was clinging to him like a leech and hell-bent on giving herself to him. Besides, it wasn’t him, it was the music doing the seducing, here in the darkness, he told me. During the winter Paloma, emotions stayed pleated like the ribs of the accordion, and locked up in the mess hall. The summer dance stirred up carelessness and spread it over our melancholy like hay. The barrack windows shimmered weakly, people felt rather than saw one another. Trudi Pelikan was of the opinion that homesickness trickled from the head to the belly when we were outside on the plaza. She saw the patterns of the couples shifting from one hour to the next—homesickness in pairs, was how she put it.

  I think the mixture of goodwill and guile that these couplings revealed was probably as varied and possibly as wretched as the different mixes of coal. You couldn’t mix what wasn’t there. You had to mix what you had. And I had to keep out of all the mixes and make sure no one had any idea why.

  The accordion player probably sensed why, there was something disdainful in his manner. I felt hurt even if I did find him repulsive. I couldn’t resist looking at his face each time the glow from the factory lit up the sky and for as long as the light lasted. Every quarter hour I saw his neck above the accordion and his doglike head and his frightening eyes, white and stony, staring off to the side. Then the sky was black night once again. And I waited a quarter hour until the dog’s head reappeared, as ugly as before. The summer Paloma on the Appellplatz always went like that. Only once did something different happen.

  It was late September, on one of our last dance nights outside. I was sitting the way I so often did, with my feet on the wooden bench and both knees tucked under my chin. Paul Gast the lawyer took a break from the dancing and sat down next to my feet and said nothing. Perhaps he really did think about his dead wife Heidrun Gast every now and then. Because the moment he leaned back, a star fell over the Russian village. He said:

  Leo, you have to wish for something, fast.

  The Russian village swallowed the falling star, and all the others glittered like coarse salt.

  I couldn’t think of anything, he said, how about you.

  I said: That we’ll come out alive.

  That was a lie, spread as carelessly as hay. I had wished that my ersatz-brother was no longer alive. I wanted to hurt my mother. After all, I didn’t even know him.

  On camp happiness

  Happiness is something sudden.

  I know mouth happiness and head happiness.

  Mouth happiness comes with eating and is shorter than your mouth, even shorter than the word mouth. It doesn’t even have time to climb into your head when you pronounce the word. Mouth happiness doesn’t want to be talked about. If I were to talk about mouth happiness I’d have to add SUDDENLY before each sentence. And after each sentence: DON’T TELL ANYONE, BECAUSE EVERYONE IS HUNGRY.

  I’ll say it just this once: Suddenly you pull down the acacia branch, pick flowers and eat. You don’t tell anyone, because everyone is hungry. You pick sorrel on the side of the path and eat. You pick wild thyme between the pipes and eat. You pick chamomile by the door to the cellar and eat. You pick wild garlic by the fence and eat. You pull down the branch an
d pick black mulberries and eat. You pick wild oats in the empty fields and eat. You don’t find a single potato peel behind the mess hall, but you do find a cabbage stalk, and eat.

  In winter you don’t pick a thing. You leave your shift and head home to the barrack and don’t know where the snow will taste best. Should you take a handful right from the stairs to the cellar or hold off for the coal heap that’s snowed under or wait until you’re at the camp gate. Without deciding, you take a handful off the white cap on the fencepost and freshen up your pulse and your mouth and your throat down to your heart. Suddenly you no longer feel tired. You don’t tell anyone, because everyone is tired.

  Barring disaster, each day is like the next. You want each day to be like the next. But with happiness it’s a little different, it’s a matter of luck. Five comes after nine, says Oswald Enyeter the barber, and if you think of it that way, luck is always a little balamuc. I must be lucky because my grandmother said: I know you’ll come back. I don’t tell anyone, either, because everyone wants to come back. To be happy you need a goal. I have to find a goal, even if it’s nothing more than the snow on the fencepost.

  Head happiness is easier to talk about than mouth happiness.

  Mouth happiness wants to be alone. It’s mute and introverted. But head happiness is gregarious and craves other people. It’s a happiness that wanders around, even if it’s limping along behind. It lasts longer than you can bear. Head happiness is fragmented and difficult to sort out, it mixes itself whatever way it wants and changes quickly from bright to

  dark

  blurred

  blind

  resentful

  hidden