The Hunger Angel Page 8

  Anton Kowatsch was a lathe operator in the factory, and in the camp orchestra he was a percussionist and played the drum for our pleated version of La Paloma. It pained him that no one in the camp orchestra could play big-band swing the way his partners had back in Karansebesch. He was also a tinkerer, and had fashioned his instruments at the lathe in the metal shop. He wanted the worldly cuckoo clock to conform to the Russian day-and-night discipline. By narrowing the voice aperture in the cuckoo mechanism he tried to give the cuckoo a short, hollow night sound that was one octave lower than its bright day sound, which he hoped to lengthen. But before he could get a handle on the habits of the cuckoo, someone tore it out of the clock. The little door was wrenched partly off its hinge. When the clockwork wanted to animate the bird to sing, the little door opened up halfway, but instead of the cuckoo all that came out of the housing was a small piece of rubber, like an earthworm. The rubber vibrated, and you could hear a pitiful rattling noise that sounded just like the coughing, throat-clearing, snoring, farting, and sighing we did in our sleep. In that way the rubber worm protected our nighttime rest.

  Anton Kowatsch became as excited about the worm as he was about the cuckoo, and especially about the sound it made. Each evening, when the loudspeaker anthem chased us into the barrack, Anton Kowatsch used a bent wire to switch the little piece of rubber to its nighttime rattle. He’d linger next to the clock, look at his reflection in the water bucket, and wait for the first rattle, as if hypnotized. When the little door opened, he’d hunch over a bit, and his left eye, which was slightly smaller than his right, would sparkle right on time. One evening, after the worm had rattled, he said to himself more than to me: Well well, it looks like our worm has picked up a little phantom pain from the cuckoo.

  I liked the clock.

  I didn’t like the crazy cuckoo, or the worm, or the speedy pendulum. But I did like the two fir-cone weights. They were nothing more than heavy, inert iron, but I saw the fir forests in our mountains at home. The dense black-green mantle of needles high overhead. And below, strictly aligned, as far as the eye can see, the trunks—wooden legs that stand when you stand and walk when you walk and run when you run. But not the way you do, more like an army. You feel afraid, your heart starts pounding beneath your tongue, and then you notice the shiny needle-fall underfoot, this bright calm scattered with fir cones. You bend over and pick up two and stick one in your pocket. The other you hold in your hand, and suddenly you’re no longer alone. The fir cones help you remember that the army is nothing but a forest, and that being lost in the forest is nothing more than going for a walk.

  My father took great pains to teach me how to whistle, and how to tell where a whistle was coming from, so you could find a person who was lost in the woods by whistling back. I understood the usefulness of whistling, but I didn’t understand the right way to blow the air through my lips. I did it backward, filling my chest with air instead of sending sound to my lips. I never learned to whistle. Every time he tried to show me, all I could think about was what I saw, how men’s lips glisten on the inside, like rose quartz. He said that sooner or later I’d realize how useful it was. He meant the whistling. But I was thinking about the glassy skin inside the lips.

  Actually the cuckoo clock belonged to the hunger angel. What was important in the camp was not our time, but rather the question: Cuckoo, how much longer will I live.

  Kati Sentry

  Katharina Seidel came from Bakowa in the Banat. Either someone from her village paid to be taken off the list and some scoundrel grabbed her instead, or the scoundrel was a sadist and she was on the list from the beginning. Kati was born feebleminded and all five years in the camp she had no idea where she was. A small version of a large woman, she had stopped growing while still a child, except in girth. She had a long brown braid, and her head was circled with a wreath of tightly curled hair. At first the women combed her hair every day, and later, after the lice plague began, every few days.

  Kati Sentry wasn’t suited for any type of work. She didn’t understand what a quota was, or a command, or a punishment. She disrupted the course of the shift. During the second winter, to keep her busy, they came up with a sentry job. She was to go from one barrack to the next, keeping watch.

  For a while she’d come to our barrack, sit at the small table, cross her arms, screw up her eyes, and peer into the prickly light from the bulb. The chair was too high for her, her feet didn’t reach the floor. When she got bored she held on to the edge of the table and rocked back and forth. She could hardly stand that for more than an hour, then she’d be off to another barrack.

  By summer she had stopped going to any barrack but ours, because she liked the cuckoo clock, although she didn’t know how to tell time. She’d spend the night sitting under the light, arms crossed, waiting for the rubber worm to come out of his little door. When the worm started to rattle, she would open her mouth as if to join in, but wouldn’t make any sound. By the time the worm came out again she’d be asleep with her face on the table. Before falling asleep she always laid her braid on the table and held on to it all night long. Maybe that way she wasn’t so alone. Maybe she was afraid in this forest of beds for sixty-eight men. Maybe the braid helped her the way the fir cones helped me in the forest. Or perhaps she held her braid simply to make sure no one stole it.

  The braid did get stolen, but not by us. As punishment for falling asleep, Tur Prikulitsch had her taken to the sick barrack, where the female medic was told to shave Kati Sentry’s head. That evening Kati came to the mess hall with her cut-off braid and laid it on the table like a snake. She dunked the upper end in her soup and held it to her bare head so it would take root. Then she tried to feed the bottom end, and cried. Heidrun Gast took the braid away and told her it would be better to forget it. After dinner Heidrun Gast tossed the braid into one of the little fires in the yard and Kati Sentry looked on in silence as it burned.

  Even with a shaved head Kati Sentry liked the cuckoo clock, and even with a shaved head she fell asleep after the rubber worm’s first rattle, her hand clasping the missing braid. And she continued holding her hand that way even after her hair started growing back. But she also continued to fall asleep on duty, and several months later her head was shaved once again. After that her hair grew back so sparse that you saw more lice bites than hair. But that still didn’t stop her from falling asleep on duty, until Tur Prikulitsch finally understood that you can put any human being to the drill, no matter how wretched, but you can’t bend a feeble mind to your will. The sentry post was abolished.

  Once during roll call, before her head was first shaved, Kati Sentry was standing in the middle of a row. She took off her cap, placed it on the snow, and sat down. Shishtvanyonov shouted: Get up, Fascist! Tur Prikulitsch jerked her up by her braid, but when he let go she sat down again. He kicked her in the small of her back until she lay doubled up on the ground, holding her braid in her fist and her fist in her mouth. The end of her braid stuck out as though she’d bitten off half a little brown bird. She lay there until after the Appell, when one of us helped her up and took her to the mess hall.

  Tur Prikulitsch could order us around as he wished, but he disgraced himself with his coarse treatment of Kati Sentry. And when that backfired, he disgraced himself with his show of sympathy. Because she was beyond correction and beyond help, Kati Sentry showed how hollow his authority really was. In order to save face, Tur Prikulitsch softened. He had Kati Sentry sit next to him on the ground during roll call. For hours she would sit on her quilted cap and watch him in amazement as though he were a marionette. After roll call, her cap would be frozen to the snow and had to be pried off the ground.

  For three summer evenings in a row Kati Sentry disrupted the roll call. For a while she sat quietly next to Prikulitsch, then scooted close to his feet and started polishing his shoe with her cap. He stepped on her hand. She pulled it away and polished the other shoe. Then he stepped on her hand with his other foot. When he lifted his foot she ju
mped up and ran through the assembled ranks, fluttering her arms and cooing like a dove. We all held our breath, and Tur let out a hollow laugh like a big turkey-cock. Three times Kati Sentry managed to polish his shoes and become a dove. After that she was no longer allowed at roll call. Instead she had to mop the floors in the barracks. She took a bucket of water from the well, wrung out the rag, wrapped it around the broom, and changed the dirty water after every barrack. She worked without hesitation, her mind unclouded by any distraction. The floor was cleaner than ever before. She mopped thoroughly, without haste, perhaps out of habit from home.

  Nor was she all that crazy. For roll call, instead of Appell she said APFEL—apple. When the little bell rang at the coke batteries she thought it was time for mass. She didn’t have to invent illusions, because her mind wasn’t in the camp to begin with. The way she behaved didn’t conform to camp regulations, but it did fit the circumstances. There was something elemental about her that we envied. Even the hunger angel was baffled when faced with her instincts. He visited her as he did all of us, but he did not climb into her brain. Kati performed the most basic tasks without thinking, abandoning herself to whatever came her way. She survived the camp without going door-to-door. She was never seen rummaging through the kitchen waste behind the mess hall. She ate what could be found in the yard and on the factory grounds. Seeds, leaves, and flowers in the weeds. And all kinds of insects—worms and caterpillars, maggots and beetles, spiders and snails. And in the snowy yard inside the camp the frozen excrement of the watchdogs. We were amazed at how the dogs trusted her, as if this human were one of them as she tottered about, her cap flapping over her ears.

  Kati Sentry’s madness never went beyond what we could put up with. She was neither clinging nor aloof. Through all the years in the camp she seemed as much at home as a house pet. There was nothing alien about her. We liked her.

  One September afternoon after my shift, the sun was still blazing hot in the sky. I drifted along the overgrown paths behind the mouth of the coal silo. Singed by the summer, the skeletons of wild oats shimmered like fish bones as they swayed among the fiery orach, which had long since turned inedible. Inside the hard husks, the kernels were still milky. I ate. On my way back I didn’t want to swim through the weeds again and so I decided to go a different way. Kati Sentry was sitting by the zeppelin. Her hands were on an anthill swarming with black ants. She was licking them off and eating them. I asked: Kati, what are you doing.

  She said: I’m making gloves for myself, they tickle.

  Are you cold, I asked.

  She said: Not today, tomorrow. My mother baked poppy-seed rolls, they’re still warm. Don’t step on them with your feet, you can wait, you’re not a hunter. When the rolls are all gone the soldiers will be counted at the apple. Then they’ll go home.

  By then her hands were swarming black again. Before she licked off the ants, she asked: When is the war over.

  I said: The war’s been over for two years. Come, let’s go back to the camp.

  She said: Can’t you see I don’t have any time now.

  The case of the stolen bread

  Fenya never wore a fufaika, she wore a white work apron, and a crocheted wool sweater over that—a different sweater every day. One was nut brown, another a dirty purple, like unpeeled beets, one was muddy yellow and another speckled with whitish gray. Each was too loose in the sleeve and too tight at the stomach. We never knew which sweater was meant for which day, or why Fenya wore them at all, or why she wore them over the apron. They couldn’t have kept her warm, they had more holes than wool. The wool was from before the war, repeatedly knitted and unraveled, but still good for crocheting. The yarn may have been salvaged from all the worn-out sweaters of a single large family, or else inherited from everyone in it who had died. We knew nothing about Fenya’s family, or whether she even had one, before or after the war. None of us was interested in Fenya personally. But we were all devoted to her, because she doled out the bread. She was the bread, the mistress from whose hands we ate, like dogs, day after day.

  Our eyes clung to her, as though she might create the bread for us. Our hunger examined everything about her very closely. Her eyebrows like two toothbrushes, her face with its powerful chin, her too-short horse lips that didn’t quite cover her gums, her gray fingernails gripping the large knife she used to fine-tune the rations, her kitchen scale with its two beaks.

  Most of all, her heavy eyes, as lifeless as the wooden beads on the abacus she rarely touched. The fact that she was repulsively ugly was something we couldn’t admit even to ourselves. We were afraid she might see what we were thinking.

  As soon as the beaks of her scale started moving up and down, I followed them with my eyes. My tongue twitched along with the beaks. I closed my mouth, but parted my lips so Fenya could see my toothy smile. We smiled out of necessity and out of principle, our smiles were genuine and false, helpless and underhanded at the same time, so as not to lose Fenya’s favor. So as not to challenge her sense of justice but encourage it, and if possible even increase it by a few grams.

  But nothing helped, she was always in a foul mood. Her right leg was so much shorter than her left that we said she was lame, and this limp seemed to cause the right corner of her mouth to twitch up and down, while twisting the left into a permanent grimace. When she hobbled up to the bread counter, her bad mood appeared to come from the dark bread, and not from her short leg. Her mouth gave her face an agonized appearance—especially the right half.

  And because she was the one who gave us our bread, her limping and her tormented face struck us as something fateful, like the staggering gait of history. Fenya seemed to exude a Communist saintliness. She was undoubtedly a loyal member of the camp’s administrative cadre, otherwise she would never have become mistress of the bread and accomplice of the hunger angel.

  All alone she stood behind the counter in her whitewashed chamber, between abacus and scales, wielding the large knife. She must have carried lists in her head. She knew exactly who should get six hundred grams, who eight hundred grams, and who was to receive the thousand-gram ration.

  I was overcome by Fenya’s ugliness. But in time I came to see that it was beauty turned inside out, and that made her the object of my veneration. Disgust would have made me bitter and would have been risky in view of her scales. I scraped and bowed, and often hated myself for doing so, but only after I’d savored her bread and felt halfway sated for a few minutes.

  Today I imagine Fenya having administered all the bread I ever ate. First was the daily bread from Transylvania, the in-the-sweat-of-thy-face sour bread of the Lutheran God. Second was the wholesome brown bread from Hitler’s golden ears of grain in the German Reich. Third was the ration of khlyeb on the Russian scales. I believe the hunger angel knew of this trinity of the bread, and that he exploited it.

  The bread factory made the first deliveries at dawn. By the time we arrived at the mess hall, between six and seven, Fenya had already measured out the portions. She placed each person’s ration back on the scales and balanced it against the weight, adding a bit more or cutting off a corner. Then she pointed her knife at the beaks, cocked her heavy chin, and looked at you as if she were seeing you for the first time in four hundred days.

  Early on—around the time of the stolen bread—it dawned on me that Fenya’s saintliness, cold and cruel, had crept inside the bread, which is why we were capable of killing in the name of hunger.

  By reweighing the bread like that, Fenya showed us that she was just. The ready portions lay on the shelves, covered with linen sheets. Before doling out a ration she would lift the cloth a little bit and then put it back, exactly as the practiced beggars did with their coal when going door-to-door. In her whitewashed chamber, with her white apron and white sheets, Fenya was like a priestess celebrating bread hygiene as a pillar of camp civilization. Of world civilization. The flies had no choice but to land on the fabric instead of the bread. They couldn’t get to the bread until we were h
olding it. And if they didn’t fly away quickly enough we ate their hunger along with our bread. At the time, I never thought about the flies’ hunger, or even about the hygienic rites with the white bread linens.

  Fenya’s sense of justice, this combination of bitter resentment and accurate weighing, made me utterly submissive. There was perfection in her very repulsiveness. Fenya was neither good nor bad, she was not a person but the law in a crocheted sweater. It never would have occurred to me to compare her to other women, because no other woman was so agonizingly disciplined and so immaculately ugly. She was like the rationed loaves we coveted—appallingly wet, sticky, and disgracefully nourishing.

  Each morning we received our ration for the whole day. Like most people, I belonged to the eight-hundred-gram group—that was the normal ration. Six hundred was for light work inside the camp: moving waste from the latrines into cisterns, sweeping snow, spring and fall cleaning, whitewashing the rocks along the main street. Only a few people were given a thousand grams, that was the exceptional ration for the heaviest labor. Even six hundred grams sounds like a lot, but the bread was so heavy that a single slice as thick as the length of your thumb weighed eight hundred grams, if cut from the center of the loaf. If you were lucky enough to get the heel, with the dry crusty corners, the slice was two thumbs thick.