The Hunger Angel Read online

  fluttering

  hesitant

  impetuous

  pushy

  unsteady

  fallen

  dropped

  stacked

  threaded

  deceived

  threadbare

  crumbled

  confused

  lurking

  prickly

  uneasy

  repeated

  cheeky

  stolen

  thrown away

  left over

  missed by just a hair.

  Head happiness can have wet eyes, a craned neck, or shaky fingers. But it always bangs around in your forehead like a frog in a tin can.

  The very last happiness is the onedroptoomuchhappiness. That comes when you die. I still remember that when Irma Pfeifer died in the mortar pit, Trudi Pelikan opened her mouth like a great big zero, made a clicking sound, and said in one word:

  Onedroptoomuchhappiness.

  She was right, because whenever we cleared away the dead we could see the relief, we could tell that the tangled nest inside the skull, the dizzying swing in the breath, the rhythm-crazed pump in the breast, the empty waiting room in the stomach were finally leaving them in peace.

  There was never such a thing as pure head happiness, because hunger was in the mouths of everyone.

  Even sixty years after the camp, eating still excites me greatly. I eat with every pore of my body. When I eat with other people I become unpleasant. I behave as though my way of eating were the only way. The others don’t know mouth happiness, they eat sociably and politely. But when I eat, I think about the onedroptoomuchhappiness and how it will come to everyone as sure as we’re sitting there, and that we’ll have to give up the nest in our skull, the swing in our breath, the pump in our chest, the waiting room in our stomach. I love eating so much that I don’t want to die, because then I couldn’t eat anymore. For sixty years I have known that returning home was not enough to subdue my camp happiness. To this day its hunger bites the middle out of every other feeling. And what’s left in the middle of me is emptiness.

  Every day since I came back home, each feeling has a hunger of its own and expects me to reciprocate, but I don’t. I won’t ever let anyone cling to me again. I’ve been taught by hunger and am unreachable out of humility, not pride.

  We’re alive. We only live once

  During the skinandbones time, all I had inside my brain was a hurdy-gurdy droning day and night: hunger deceives, cold slashes, tiredness burdens, homesickness devours, bedbugs and lice bite. I wanted to work out a trade with things that aren’t alive but aren’t dead either. I wanted to make an emergency exchange, trading my body for the horizon line above and the dusty roads on the earth below. I wanted to borrow their endurance, exist without my body, and when the worst was over, slip back into my body and reappear in my fufaika. This had nothing to do with dying, quite the opposite.

  Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed. And we agree, absolute zero and I, that absolute zero itself is beyond discussion, except in the most roundabout way. The zero’s wide-open mouth can eat but not speak. The zero encircles you with its strangling tenderness. An emergency exchange has no tolerance for compromise. It is urgent and direct, like:

  1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

  During the skinandbones time my emergency exchange must have worked. Now and then I must have had the endurance of the horizon and the dusty roads. Otherwise with nothing but my skin and bones in the fufaika I wouldn’t have survived.

  Even now it’s a mystery to me how our bodies get nourished. Things are torn down and built up inside the body just like at a construction site. You see yourself along with all the others day in and day out, but you never know how much inside you is breaking apart or coming together. How the calories give and take remains a riddle. How they erase all traces when they take, and put them back, when they give. You can’t say exactly when things started to get better, but you know your strength has returned.

  In our last year of camp we were given cash for our work. We could buy things at the market. We ate dried prunes, fish, Russian pancakes with sweet or salty cheese, bacon and lard, corn-flour cakes with sugar-beet paste, oily sunflower halva. Within a few weeks we were completely renourished. Fat and full as a sponge—BAMSTI was the word in the camp. We became men and women again, as though we were experiencing a second puberty.

  The new vanity began with the women. The men went on shuffling into the day wearing their quilted work clothes, still content with how they looked, and pleased merely to supply the women with material for their vanity. The hunger angel developed a taste for clothes, for the new camp fashion. The men brought one-meter lengths of snow-white cotton rope from the factory. The women unraveled the rope, knotted the threads together, and used iron hooks to crochet bras, stockings, blouses, and vests. The stitches were always pulled to the inside, so you didn’t see a single knot on the finished product. The women even fashioned hair ribbons and brooches out of the cotton threads. Trudy Pelikan wore a crocheted water-lily brooch like a demitasse pinned to her breast. One of the Zirris wore a lily-of-the-valley brooch with white thimbles affixed with wire, Loni Mich wore a dahlia dyed with red brick dust. During the first phase of this cotton transfer, I, too, was still content with how I looked. But I soon wanted to spruce myself up. I spent several long hours painstakingly sewing a newsboy cap out of my torn coat with the velvet collar. I had worked out the pattern in my head, a difficult, sophisticated construction. I took a band of tire rubber big enough so that the cap could be raked over the ear, and wrapped it in material. I used roofing felt for the bill, stiffened the oval upper part with cement-sack paper, and lined the whole cap with usable remnants from a tattered undershirt. The inner lining mattered to me, I felt my old vanity resurfacing, my need to look good even in places other people never see. It was a cap of expectation, a cap for better times.

  A store in the Russian village further enhanced the women’s crocheted camp fashion with toilet soap, powder, and rouge. All were the same brand: KRASNIY MAK—Red Poppy. The powder was pink and had a sharp, sweet aroma. The hunger angel was amazed.

  The BALLETKI were the first fashion craze that caught on with men as well as women. I took half a rubber tire to the cobbler, others managed to get some rubberized material from the conveyor belt in the factory. The cobbler fashioned light summer shoes with very thin pliable soles, perfectly fitted to every foot. Handmade on the last, very elegant, good for stepping out. The hunger angel became light-footed. The Paloma grew giddy with excitement, everyone went to the plaza and danced until shortly before midnight, when the anthem sounded.

  The women wanted to look nice for themselves and for the other women, but they also wanted to appeal to the men. And the men, eager to get at the crocheted underwear behind the blankets, worked a little harder on their own appearance. So in the wake of the balletki, men’s fashion moved beyond the shoe. New fashions, new loves, mating season at the animal crossing, pregnancies, abortions in the local hospital. But also more and more babies behind the wooden screen in the sick barrack.

  I paid a visit to Herr Reusch, who came from Guttenbrunn in the Banat. I only knew him from the Appell. By day he cleaned rubble out of the bombed-out factory. In the evening he repaired torn fufaikas in exchange for tobacco. He was a master tailor, and when the hunger angel started running around so recklessly, Herr Reusch’s expertise was very much in demand. He rolled out a thin scrap of ribbon marked with centimeters, and measured me from my neck to my ankles. Then he said, one and a half meters of material for the pants and three meters for the jacket. Plus three big buttons and six small ones. He said he’d take care of the jacket lining himself. For the jacket I also wanted a belt with a buckle. He suggested a buckle with two metal rings and an inverted box pleat for the back of the jacket. He said that was the latest thing in America.

  I ordered two metal rings from Anton Kowatsch and took all my cash to the store in the Russian vil
lage. The material for the pants was a muted blue with a bright-gray nap. The material for the jacket was a plaid of sandy beige and cement-sack brown, the squares stood out as if in relief. I also bought a ready-made tie, moss green with slanted diamonds. And three meters of repp fabric for a shirt, in light gray-green. Then some larger buttons for the pants and jacket and twelve very small ones for the shirt. That was in April 1949.

  Three weeks later I had the shirt and the suit with the inverted box pleat and the iron buckle. Now at last the burgundy silk scarf with its matte and shiny checked pattern would have suited me perfectly. Tur Prikulitsch hadn’t worn it for a long time, he’d probably thrown it away. The hunger angel was no longer inside our brains, but he was still perched on our necks. And he had a good memory, though he didn’t need it, since our camp fashion was just another kind of hunger—eye hunger. The hunger angel said: Don’t waste all your money, who knows what’s yet to come. And I thought: Everything that’s yet to come is already here.

  I wanted some fancy clothes for going out, for the camp street, for the Paloma plaza, and even for the path to my cellar through the weeds, rust, and rubble. I changed clothes in the cellar before my shift. The hunger angel warned: Pride comes before a fall. But I told him: We’re alive. We only live once. The orach never leaves here either, and yet it puts on red jewelry and tailors itself a new glove with a different thumb for every leaf.

  Meanwhile my gramophone box had its new key, but was gradually becoming too small. I had the carpenter build me a solid wooden trunk for my new clothes. And I commissioned a substantial lock for the trunk from Paul Gast in the metal shop.

  When I presented my new clothes on the plaza for the first time, I thought: Everything that’s yet to come is already here. If only everything would stay the way it is.

  Someday I’ll stroll down elegant lanes

  The orach still grew whistling-green in the fourth year of peace, but we didn’t pick it, we no longer felt the savage hunger. After four years of being starved, we were convinced that we were now being fattened up, not to go home but to stay here and work. Every year, the Russians waited expectantly for what was coming, while we were afraid of what might be in store. To us, the old time was a hurdle to overcome, for them a new time was flowing into their giant land.

  There was a rumor that for years Tur Prikulitsch and Bea Zakel had been hoarding clothes meant for us, that they’d sold them at the market and divided the money with Shishtvanyonov. As a result, many people had to freeze to death who, even according to the rules of the camp, had a right to underwear, fufaikas, and shoes. We no longer counted how many. But I knew that 334 dead internees were resting in peace according to the registry Trudi Pelikan kept in the sick barrack, and I knew which peace they were resting in—the first, second, third, or fourth. For weeks I wouldn’t think about them, but then they’d pop up like a rattle inside my brain and stay with me all day long.

  Often, when I heard the little bells from the coke batteries, I had the sense they were ringing in a new year. And I thought: Someday I’d like to see a bench in a park instead of on the camp street, a bench with someone on it who’s footloose and free, who’s never been in a camp. On the plaza one evening the words CREPE SOLES made the rounds. Our singer Loni Mich asked what crepe was. And Karli Halmen winked at Paul Gast the lawyer and said, crepe comes from krepieren, to kick the bucket, we’ll all be wearing crepe soles when we kick the bucket and go to the great sky over the steppe. After crepe soles the talk was of MUTTON CHOPS, which were supposed to be the latest thing in America. Loni Mich now asked what mutton chops were. The accordion player Konrad Fonn told her it meant hair cut like shaggy wool around your ears.

  Every two weeks the cinema in the Russian village showed films and newsreels for us, the people from the camp. Mostly Russian films, but also some from America and even requisitioned German films from Berlin. In one of the American newsreels we saw confetti flying between the skyscrapers like snow and singing men with crepe soles and sideburns down to their chin. After the film the barber Oswald Enyeter said that these sideburns were the mutton chops. See, here we’ve gone completely Russian and it turns out we’re following the latest American fashion, he said.

  I didn’t know what mutton chops were, either. I seldom went to the cinema. Because of my shift I was always working in the cellar or else too tired from working in the cellar when they showed the films. But I had my balletki for the summer, Kobelian had given me half a tire. And I could lock my gramophone suitcase, Paul Gast had made me a key with three fine bits like mouse teeth. From the carpenter I had a new wooden trunk with a good lock. I was outfitted with new clothes. I had no need of crepe soles in the cellar, and while I could grow mutton chops if I wanted to, they sounded more like something for Tur Prikulitsch. To me they looked downright apish.

  Now it was easy for me to imagine running into Bea Zakel or Tur Prikulitsch in some other place, where we’d be on equal terms, perhaps at a train station with cast-iron pilasters and hanging baskets of petunias like at a spa. For instance: I’ll climb aboard the train and Tur Prikulitsch will be sitting in the same compartment. I’ll say a brief hello and sit diagonally across from him, that’s all. At least I’ll act as if that’s all, I won’t ask if he married Bea Zakel, even though I’ll see his wedding ring. I’ll unpack my sandwich and set it on the little folding table. White bread thickly spread with butter and slices of pink boiled ham. I won’t enjoy the sandwich, but I’ll make sure he doesn’t notice that. Or perhaps I’ll run into Zither Lommer and he’ll be with the singer Loni Mich. Neither will recognize me, but I’ll notice that her goiter has gotten bigger. The two of them will offer to take me to a concert in the Athenaeum. I’ll decline and let them go their way. Then I’ll appear as an usher in the Athenaeum and stop them at the entrance and point and say: Let’s see your tickets, even-numbered seats on the right and odd on the left, I see you have 113 and 114 so you’re sitting apart. And only when I laugh will they recognize me. But maybe I won’t laugh.

  I imagined a second meeting with Tur Prikulitsch, in a big city in America. This time he doesn’t have a wedding ring, he’s coming up the stairs with one of the Zirris on his arm. The Zirri won’t recognize me but Tur will wink like Uncle Edwin the time he said: Quite the ladies’ man, aren’t I. But I’ll just go on my way and that will be that.

  Maybe I’ll still be relatively young when I get out of the camp, in the prime of my life, as they say, like in Loni Mich’s song: I WAS SCARCELY THIRTY. Maybe I’ll meet Tur Prikulitsch a third and fourth time and on numerous occasions after that, in a third, fourth, sixth, or even eighth future. One day I’ll look out of a third-floor hotel window and it will be raining. And on the street below a man will be opening his umbrella. He’ll take a long time and will get wet because his umbrella won’t open. I’ll see that his hands are Tur’s hands, but he won’t know that. If he realized that, I’ll think to myself, he wouldn’t take so long trying to open his umbrella, or else he’d put on gloves, or else he wouldn’t venture out on this street in the first place. If it weren’t Tur Prikulitsch but just a man with Tur’s hands, I’d call out from my window: Hey, why don’t you go across the street, you won’t get wet under the marquee. If the man looks up he might say: Do we know each other. And I would say: I don’t know your face but I know your hands.

  Someday, I thought, I’ll stroll down elegant lanes, where people have a different way of life than in the small town where I was born. The elegant lane will be a promenade by the Black Sea. The water will be white with foam, with rocking waves like I’ve never seen. Neon signs will light up the promenade, saxophones will play. I’ll run into Bea Zakel and recognize her by her slowly drifting eyes. I won’t have a face, because she won’t recognize me. She’ll still have her heavy hair, but it won’t be braided, it will flutter around her temples, bleached flour-white, like seagull wings. She’ll also still have her high cheekbones, which will cast two hard-edged shadows, the way buildings do at high noon. The right angles of t
he shadows will make me think about the settlement behind the camp.

  A new Russian settlement had gone up behind the camp in the third fall—rows of little houses known as Finnish cabins because they were built from prefabricated wooden parts that came from Finland. Karli Halmen told me that the parts had been precisely cut and that they came with detailed construction plans. And that all the parts got mixed up when they were unloaded, so that no one knew what went where. The construction was a disaster, with too few parts here and too many there, and sometimes the wrong parts altogether. In all my years in the camp, the construction supervisor was the only person who saw the deportees as people from civilized countries, where a right angle really did have ninety degrees. He considered us thinking human beings and not just forced laborers, which is why I remember him so well. Once during a cigarette break at the construction site he gave a speech about socialism and its good intentions being wrecked by people who didn’t know what they were doing. He concluded with the remark: The Russians know what a right angle is, but they can’t manage to build one.

  Someday, I thought to myself, who knows in which year of peace and in which future, I’ll come to the land with the mountain ridges, the place I travel to in my dreams when I ride through the sky on the white pig, the place people say is my homeland.

  There were many variations on the theme of going home, different scenarios circulated through the camp. According to one, our best years would be behind us by the time we made it back, and we’d suffer the same fate as the prisoners of war from the First World War—a return journey lasting decades. Shishtvanyonov orders us to our last and shortest roll call and proclaims:

  I hereby disband the camp. Get lost.

  And everyone heads out on his own, farther east, in the wrong direction, because all roads west are closed. Over the Urals, all the way across Siberia, past Alaska, America, and then Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. Then, twenty-five years later, we’ll arrive at our home in the west, assuming it’s still there and not already part of Russia.