The Hunger Angel: A Novel

by Herta Müller

  The first decision of the day was: Am I steadfast enough to not eat my entire portion at breakfast with my cabbage soup. Can I, in all my hunger, save a little piece for the evening. At midday there was nothing to decide, since we were at work and there was no meal. In the evening after work, assuming I’d been steadfast in the morning, came the second decision: Am I steadfast enough just to check that my saved bread is still under my pillow, only look and nothing more. Can I hold off eating it until I’m in the mess hall, after evening roll call, which could take another two hours, or even longer.

  If I hadn’t been steadfast in the morning, I had no leftover bread in the evening and no decision to make. Then I would fill my spoon just halfway and slurp deeply. I had learned to eat slowly, to swallow a little spit after every spoonful of soup. The hunger angel said: Spit makes the soup longer, and going to bed early makes the hunger shorter.

  I went to bed early but woke up constantly, because my throat was swollen and pulsing. Whether I kept my eyes open or closed, whether I tossed around or stared at the lightbulb, whether someone was snoring as if he were drowning, whether the rubber worm from the cuckoo clock was rattling or not—the night was boundlessly vast, and in the night Fenya’s bread cloths were endlessly large, and beneath them lay the abundant, unreachable bread.

  In the morning, after the anthem, hunger hurried off with me to breakfast, to Fenya. To the heroic first decision: Am I steadfast today, can I save a piece of bread for the evening, and on and on.

  But how far on.

  Each day the hunger angel gnawed at my brain. And one day he raised my hand. And with my hand I nearly struck Karli Halmen dead—because of the bread he had stolen.

  Karli Halmen had the day off. He had the barrack all to himself, since everyone was at work. He’d eaten his entire ration of bread at breakfast. And that evening, when Albert Gion came off his shift, he found his saved bread had disappeared. Albert Gion had been steadfast for five days in a row, he’d saved five little pieces of bread, a whole day’s ration. He had been on our shift the entire day and, like everyone else who’d saved his bread, he had spent the entire day thinking about eating it with his evening soup. Like everyone else, the first thing he did when he came off the shift was to look under his pillow. His bread was no longer there.

  Albert Gion’s bread wasn’t there, and Karli Halmen was sitting on his bed in his underwear. Albert Gion positioned himself in front of Karli Halmen and without saying a word punched him in the mouth three times. Without saying a word, Karli Halmen spat two teeth onto his bed. The accordion player dragged Karli by the neck to the water bucket and held his head under water. Bubbles came out of his mouth and nose, then gasping sounds, and after that it was quiet. The drummer then pulled Karli’s head out of the water and choked him until his mouth started twitching as hideously as Fenya’s. I pushed the drummer away, but then I pulled off my wooden shoe. And I raised my hand, so high I would have killed the bread thief. Up to that moment Paul Gast the lawyer had been watching from his upper bunk. He jumped on my back, tore the shoe out of my hand, and threw it against the wall. Karli Halmen had wet himself and was lying next to the bucket, spitting up bready slime.

  My bloodlust had swallowed my reason. And I wasn’t the only one, we were a mob. We dragged Karli in his bloody, piss-soaked underwear out into the night, next to the barrack. It was February. We stood him against the barrack wall, he staggered and fell over. Without any discussion, the drummer and I undid our pants, then Albert Gion and all the others. And because we were all getting ready for bed anyway, one after the other we pissed on Karli Halmen’s face. Paul Gast the lawyer joined in as well. Two watchdogs barked, and a guard came running after them. The dogs smelled the blood and growled, the guard cursed. The lawyer and the guard carried Karli to the sick barrack. We watched them leave and used the snow to wipe the blood off our hands. Everyone went back to the barrack in silence and crawled into bed. I had a spot of blood on my wrist, I turned it toward the light and thought, How bright red Karli’s blood is, like sealing wax, as if it came from the artery and not the vein. In the barrack it was dead silent, and I heard the rubber worm rattling in the cuckoo clock, sounding so close it could be inside my head. I no longer thought about Karli Halmen, or about Fenya’s endlessly white linen, or even about the unreachable bread. I fell into a deep, calm sleep.

  The next morning Karli Halmen’s bed was empty. We went to the mess hall as always. The snow was empty as well, no longer red, fresh snow had fallen. Karli Halmen spent two days in the sick barrack. After that he was back with us in the mess hall just as before, except with pus-filled wounds, swollen eyes, and blue lips. The business with the bread was over, everyone acted the same as always. We didn’t hold the theft against Karli Halmen. And he never held his punishment against us. He knew he had earned it. The bread court does not deliberate, it punishes. It knows no mitigation, it needs no legal code. It is a law unto itself, because the hunger angel is also a thief who steals the brain. Bread justice has no prologue or epilogue, it is only here and now. Totally transparent, or totally mysterious. In any case, the violence meted out by bread justice is different from hungerless violence. You cannot approach the bread court with conventional morality.

  The bread court took place in February. By April, Karli Halmen was sitting on a chair in Oswald Enyeter’s barber room, his wounds had healed, his beard had grown like trampled grass. My turn was next, and I waited behind him in the mirror, the way Tur Prikulitsch usually waited behind me. The barber placed his furry hands on Karli’s shoulders and asked: Since when are we missing two front teeth. Karli Halmen answered, speaking not to me, nor to the barber, but to the barber’s furry hands: Since the case of the stolen bread.

  After his beard had been shaved off, I sat down on the chair. It was the only time that Oswald Enyeter ever whistled a kind of serenade as he shaved, and a spot of blood came spilling out of the lather. Not bright red like sealing wax, but dark red, like a raspberry in the snow.

  Crescent Moon Madonna

  When our hunger is at its peak, we talk about childhood and food. The women at greater length than the men. And no one talks at greater length than the women from the countryside. Each of their recipes takes three acts, like a play. The dramatic tension builds as opinions differ over ingredients. And it really heats up over a bread-bacon-and-egg stuffing, when a whole onion is called for, and a half just won’t do, when you need six and not just four cloves of garlic, and when the onions and garlic better be grated and not just minced. And when old rolls make better crumbs than bread, and caraway is better than pepper, and marjoram is better than anything including tarragon, which of course goes with fish but not duck. The play reaches its climax when the mixture clearly has to be inserted just under the skin to absorb the fat during roasting, or absolutely has to be spooned into the stomach cavity so it won’t soak up all the fat. Sometimes the Lutheran stuffed duck wins out, and sometimes the Catholic one.

  And when the women from the country make soup noodles out of words, they spend at least half an hour thrashing out how many eggs are needed and whether the dough should be stirred with a spoon or kneaded by hand before it gets rolled out glassy thin but doesn’t tear and is left to dry on the noodle board. And then it’s another quarter hour before the dough gets rolled and cut, before the noodles move off the board and into the soup, before the soup is slowly stirred or quickly brought to a rolling boil and is finally served with either a good handful or just a pinch of freshly chopped parsley sprinkled on top.

  The women from the city don’t argue about how many eggs to put in the dough but how few. Because they’re always scrimping on everything, their recipes aren’t even enough for a curtain-raiser.

  Telling a recipe takes greater art than telling a joke. The punch line has to hit home even though it’s not funny. Here in the camp it’s already a joke as soon as you say: FIRST TAKE. The punch line is that there’s nothing to take. But no one bothers to say that. Recipes are the jokes of the hu
nger angel.

  To get inside the women’s barracks you have to run a gauntlet. As soon as you step inside you have to say who you’re looking for, without waiting to be asked. Your best bet is to ask a question yourself: Is Trudi here. And while you’re asking you head for Trudi Pelikan’s bed, in the third row on the left. The beds are two-story iron bunks, just like in the men’s barracks. Some have blankets draped as a screen, for evening love. I’m never interested in going behind the blanket, though, all I’m after are recipes. The women think I’m too shy, because I once had books. They believe that reading makes you delicate and sensitive.

  I never read the books I brought to the camp. Since paper is strictly forbidden, I kept my books hidden under some bricks behind the barracks until the middle of the first summer. Then I auctioned them off. For 50 pages of Zarathustra cigarette paper I received 1 measure of salt, and 70 pages fetched 1 measure of sugar. For the clothbound Faust in its entirety Peter Schiel made me my own lice comb out of tin. I consumed the lyrical anthology from eight centuries in the form of corn flour and lard and converted the slim volume of Weinheber into millet. That doesn’t make you delicate, just discreet.

  Discreetly, after work, I look at the young Russians on duty taking a shower. I’m so discreet that I forget why I’m looking. They would kill me if I remembered.

  Once again I was not steadfast. I ate all my bread in the morning. Once again I’m sitting next to Trudi Pelikan on the edge of her bed. The two Zirris sit opposite us, on Corina Marcu’s bed. She’s been at the kolkhoz for weeks. I look at the little golden hairs and the black wart on the emaciated fingers of the Zirris and, so as not to start right in on food, I talk about my childhood.

  Every summer we used to take a long vacation in the country—we, meaning my mother, myself, and the servant girl Lodo. We had a summerhouse in the Wench highlands, across from Schnürleibl Mountain. We stayed for eight weeks. During these eight weeks we always took one day-trip to Schässburg, the nearest town. We had to go down into the valley to catch the train. Our station was called Hétur in Hungarian, and Siebenmänner in German. When the bell rang on the roof of the station attendant’s hut, we knew that the train had left Danesch and would be arriving in five minutes. We had to board right from track level, because there was no platform, so when the train pulled up, the door was as high as my chest. Before we climbed on I inspected the car from underneath, the black wheels with the shiny rims, the chains, hooks, and buffers. Then we rode past our swimming place, past Toma’s house and past the field that belonged to old Zacharias—to whom we gave two packs of tobacco each month for letting us walk through his barley to get to the river. Next came the iron bridge, with the yellow water rolling below. Then the eroded sand cliffs, topped by Villa Franca. And then we were in Schässburg, where we always went straight to the elegant Café Martini on the market square. We stood out a little among the guests because we were dressed a bit too casually—my mother in culottes and I in my shorts with knee-high socks, gray so they wouldn’t show dirt so quickly. Only Lodo wore the Sunday clothes she’d brought from her village, a white peasant blouse and a black headscarf with a border of roses and a green silk fringe. Red-shaded roses, as big as apples, bigger than real roses. On that day we could eat whatever we wanted, and as much as we could. We could choose among marzipan truffles, chocolate cake, savarins, cream cake, nut cake roll, Ischler tartlet, cream puffs, hazelnut crisps, rum cake, napoleons, nougat, and doboschtorte. And ice cream—strawberry ice cream in a silver dish or vanilla ice cream in a glass dish or chocolate ice cream in a porcelain bowl, always with whipped cream. And, finally, if we were still able, sour-cherry cake with jelly. My arms felt the cool touch of the marble tabletop and the backs of my knees felt the soft plush of the chair. And up on the black buffet, teetering in the wind of the fan, wearing a long red dress, standing on her tiptoes atop a very thin moon, was the Crescent Moon Madonna.

  After I’d finished telling that, all our stomachs started to teeter. Trudi Pelikan reached behind me and took her saved bread from under her pillow. The women picked up their metal bowls and stuck their spoons inside their jackets. I had mine on me, together we went to supper. We took our place in the line in front of the soup kettle. No one said a thing. From the end of the table Trudi Pelikan asked over the clatter of tin: Leo, what was that café called.

  Café Martini, I shouted.

  Two or three spoonfuls later she asked: And what was that woman on her tiptoes called.

  I shouted: Crescent Moon Madonna.

  On the bread trap

  Everyone gets caught in the bread trap.

  In the trap of being steadfast at breakfast, the trap of swapping bread at supper, the trap of saved bread under your pillow at night. The hunger angel’s worst trap is the trap of being steadfast: to be hungry and have bread but decline to eat it. To be hard against yourself, harder than the deep-frozen ground. Every morning the hunger angel says: Think about the evening.

  In the evening, over cabbage soup, bread gets swapped, because your own bread always appears smaller than the other person’s. And this holds true for everyone.

  Before the swap you feel light-headed, right after the swap you feel doubt. After swapping, the bread I traded seems bigger in the other person’s hand than it did in mine. And the bread I got in return has shrunk. Look how quickly he’s turning away, he has a better eye, he’s come out on top, I better swap again. But the other person feels the same way, he thinks that I’ve come out on top, and now he’s on his second trade as well. Once more the bread shrinks in my hand. I look for a third person and swap with him. Some people are already eating. If my hunger can just hold out a little longer, there’ll be a fourth swap, and a fifth. And if nothing works, I’ll make one more swap and wind up back with my own bread.

  Trading bread is something we need to do. The exchange happens fast and never hits the mark. Bread deceives you like the cement. And just as you can become cement-sick, bread can make you swap-sick. The evening hubbub is all about swapping bread, a business of glinting eyes and jittery fingers. In the mornings it’s the beaks on the scales that weigh the bread, in the evening it’s your eyes. To make your trade you not only have to find the right piece of bread, you have to find the right face. You size up the mouth of the other person. The best mouths are long and thin like a scythe. You size up the hollows of the cheeks, to see if the hunger-fur is growing, if the fine white hairs are long and thick enough. Before someone dies of hunger, a hare appears in his face. You think: Bread is wasted on that one, it doesn’t pay to nourish him anymore since the white hare is already on its way. That’s why we call the bread from someone with the white hare cheek-bread.

  In the morning there’s no time, but there’s also nothing to trade. The freshly cut slices look alike. By evening, though, each slice has dried differently, either straight and angular or crooked and bulging. The shifting appearance of your bread as it dries gives rise to the feeling that your bread is deceiving you. Everyone has this feeling, even if they don’t swap. And swapping only heightens the feeling. You move from one optical illusion to another. Afterward you still feel cheated, but tired. The swapping that takes you from your own bread to cheek-bread stops the way it began, suddenly. The commotion is over, your eyes move on to the soup. You hold your bread in one hand and your spoon in the other.

  Utterly alone inside the pack, each person tries to make his soup go further. The spoons, too, are a pack, as are the tin plates and the slurping and the shoving of feet under the table. The soup warms, it comes alive in your throat. I slurp out loud, I have to hear the soup. I force myself not to count the spoonfuls. Uncounted, there’ll be more than sixteen or nineteen—numbers I have to forget.

  One evening the accordion player Konrad Fonn swapped bread with Kati Sentry. She gave him her bread, but he handed her a rectangular piece of wood. She bit into it, was stunned, and swallowed air. No one but the accordion player laughed. And Karli Halmen took the little piece of wood away from Kati Sentry and
dropped it in the accordion player’s cabbage soup. Then he returned Kati’s bread to her.

  Everyone gets caught in the bread trap. But no one is allowed to take Kati Sentry’s cheek-bread. This, too, is part of the bread law. In the camp we’ve learned to clear away the dead without shuddering. We undress them before they turn stiff, we need their clothes so we won’t freeze to death. And we eat their saved bread. Their death is our gain. But Kati Sentry is alive, even if she doesn’t know where she is. We realize this, so we treat her as something that belongs to all of us. We make up for what we do to one another by standing up for her. We’re capable of many things, but as long as she is living among us, there’s a limit to how far we actually go. And this probably counts for more than Kati Sentry herself.

  On coal

  There’s as much coal as there is earth, more than enough.

  FAT COAL comes from Petrovka. It’s full of gray rock, heavy, wet, and sticky. It has a sour, burnt smell and flaky lumps like graphite. Large amounts of waste rock remain after it is ground in the molina and washed in the moika.

  SULFUR COAL comes from Kramatorsk, and generally arrives around noon. The yama is a kind of pit that serves as a giant underground coal silo, covered with a screening grate and protected by an open-air roof. The coal cars are driven onto the grate one by one. Each coal car is a sixty-ton Pullman freight wagon with five bottom chutes. The chutes are opened with hammers, and when each strike hits its mark it sounds like the gong at the cinema. If all goes well, you don’t have to go inside the car at all, the coal comes rattling out in one swoop. The dust makes everything go dark, the sun turns gray in the sky like a tin dish. You breathe in and swallow more dust than air, it grinds in your teeth. Unloading sixty tons of coal takes only fifteen minutes. All that’s left on the grate are a few oversized chunks. Sulfur coal is light, brittle, and dry. It has a crystalline sheen like mica, and consists of lumps and dust, nothing that classifies as nut- or grain-sized. Its name comes from its sulfur content but it has no odor. The sulfur doesn’t show until much later, and then as yellow deposits in the sludge puddles in the factory yard. Or at night, as yellow eyes on the slag heap, glowing like carved-up bits of moon.