by Herta Müller
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.
In other versions we never even leave, they keep us here so long that the camp turns into a village without watchtowers, and we simply become villagers out of habit, though we still won’t be Russians or Ukrainians. Or they keep us here until we no longer want to leave, because we’re convinced that no one is waiting for us at home, that other people are living in our houses, and that our families have long since been driven out to who knows where, and no longer have a home of their own either. Or we wind up wanting to stay here because we no longer know what to make of our home and our home no longer knows what to make of us.
When you haven’t heard from that other world you know as home for so long, you wonder if you should even want to go back, or what you should wish for once you’re there. In the camp, all wishing was taken away from us. We didn’t have to decide anything, nor did we want to. It’s true, we wanted to go home, but we contented ourselves with looking back, and didn’t dare yearn ahead. People mistook memory for yearning. How can you tell the difference, if the same thing keeps churning in your head over and over and your world is so lost to you that you don’t even miss it.
What will become of me at home, I thought. Wandering in the valley between the mountain ridges, I’ll always be a returnee, wherever I go I’ll always be preceded by a tch-tch-tch, as though a train were pulling in. I’ll fall into my own trap, into a horrible intimacy. That’s my family, I’ll say, and I will mean the people from the camp. My mother will tell me I should become a librarian, because then I’d never be out in the cold. And you always wanted to read, she’ll say. My grandfather will tell me I should consider becoming a traveling salesman. Since you always wanted to travel, he’ll say. My mother may say this, and my grandfather may say that, but here it was the fourth year of peace and despite the new ersatz-brother, I had no idea whether they were still alive. In the camp, professions like traveling salesman were good for head happiness, because they gave you something to talk about.
Once on the board of silence in the cellar I talked about it with Albert Gion and even managed to coax him into speaking. Maybe I’ll become a traveling salesman later on, I said, with all kinds of stuff in my suitcase, silk scarves and pencils, colored chalk, salves, and stain-remover. I remember a shell from Hawaii that my grandfather brought my grandmother, as big as a gramophone funnel, with bluish mother-of-pearl on the inside. Or maybe I’ll become a builder, a master of blueprints, I said on the board of silence in the cellar, an ozalid-blue master. Then I’ll have my own office. I’ll build houses for people with money, and one of them will be completely round like this iron basket. First I’ll draw the plans on sandwich paper. In the center there’ll be a pole running from the cellar up to the cupola. The rooms will be like slices of a cake—four, six, or eight sections of a circle. I’ll set the sandwich paper in a frame on top of the blueprint paper and set the frame in the sun to be exposed for five to ten minutes. Then I’ll roll the blueprint paper into a tube and run some ammonia steam inside and just a few minutes later my plans will come out beautifully: pink, purple, cinnamon-brown.
Albert Gion listened to me and said: Blueprints, haven’t you had enough of steam by now, I think you’re overtired. The reason we’re in the cellar in the first place is because we don’t have a profession, much less a good one. Barber, cobbler, tailor—those are good professions. The best, at least here in the camp. But either you brought them from home or you didn’t. Those are professions that decide your fate. If we’d known we’d be sent to a camp someday we would all have become barbers or cobblers or tailors. Never traveling salesmen or master builders or master blueprinters.
Albert Gion was right. Is hauling mortar a profession. If you spend years carrying mortar or cinder blocks or shoveling coal or scratching potatoes out of the earth with your hands or cleaning up the cellar, you know how to do something, but that doesn’t count. Hard labor is not a profession. And labor was all what was demanded of us, never a profession. Fetch and carry is all we did, and that’s no profession.
We no longer felt the savage hunger, and the orach still grew silver-green. Soon it would turn woody and flaming red. But because we knew what hunger was, we didn’t pick it, we bought fatty foods at the market and wolfed them down without restraint. We fattened up our old homesickness, it soaked up the hasty new meat. But even with the new meat, I fed myself the same old dream: Someday even I will stroll down elegant lanes. Even I.
Fundamental, like the silence
After the skinandbones time and the emergency exchange were all behind me—when I had balletki, cash, food, new flesh on my bones, and new clothes in my new trunk—we were released. It was hard to accept. For my five years in the camp I have five things to say:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed.
The emergency exchange is a visitor from the other side.
Inside the camp, the we-form is singular.
Perimeters run deep.
But all five things have one truth in common: they are fundamental, like the silence that exists between them, and not the silence in front of witnesses.
The disabler
I came home from the camp at the beginning of January 1950. Once again I was in a living room, sitting in a deep square underneath a ceiling of white stucco, like snow. My father was painting the Carpathians, every few days a new watercolor, with gray-toothed mountains and fir trees smudged with snow, almost always in the same arrangement. Rows of firs at the foot of the mountain, groups of firs on the slope, pairs and single fir trees on the ridge, with birches sticking out here and there like white antlers. Evidently clouds were the most difficult to paint, they always wound up looking like gray sofa cushions. And the Carpathians always looked sleepy.
My grandfather had died, and my grandmother was sitting in his plush chair doing crossword puzzles. Now and then she asked for help: sofa in the orient, part of a shoe beginning with t, breed of horses, roof made of sailcloth.
My mother was knitting one pair of woolen socks after the other for her ersatz-child Robert. The first pair was green, the second white, and after that came brown, red flecked with white, blue, gray. My confusion started with the white pair—I saw my mother knitting clumps of lice, and with each new sock I saw our knitted garden between the barracks, the sweater tips at daybreak. I lay on the sofa, the ball of wool lay in the tin dish beside my mother’s chair, it was livelier than I was. The yarn climbed and hovered and dropped. Two fist-sized balls of wool were needed for each sock, but it was impossible to tell how much that would be if laid out in a single strand, the total length for all the socks might cover the distance from the sofa to the train station, which was a neighborhood I avoided. At last my feet felt warm, they only itched on the instep, which was always where the footwraps first froze to the skin. The winter days turned gray as early as four o’clock. My grandmother switched on the light. The lampshade was a pale-blue funnel trimmed with dark-blue tassels. The lamp didn’t cast much light on the ceiling, which stayed gray as the stucco-snow began to melt. The next morning it was once again white. I imagined that it froze during the night, while we were sleeping in the other rooms, like the icy lace in the empty field behind the zeppelin. The clock ticked away beside the wardrobe. The pendulum flew, s
hoveling our time in between the furniture: from the wardrobe to the window, from the table to the sofa, from the stove to the plush chair, from the day into the evening. On the wall, the ticking was my breath-swing, in my breast it was my heart-shovel, which I missed very much.
Early one morning at the end of January, Uncle Edwin came by to take me to the crate factory and introduce me to his boss. Out on the street, I saw a face in the window at Herr Carp’s, who lived next door in the Schulgasse. The face was cut off at the neck by the frost pattern on the windowpane. Strands of icy hair twined around a forehead, a sliding greenish eye, and there was Bea Zakel in a white-flowered robe, her braid now heavy and gray. Herr Carp’s cat was sitting in the window the way it always did, but I felt sorry for Bea, that she had aged so quickly. I knew the cat could only be a cat, that the telegraph pole wasn’t a guard, that the blazing white of the snow wasn’t the camp street but the Schulgasse. I knew that nothing here could be anything other than itself, because everything had stayed at home. Everything except me. Among all these home-sated people, I was dizzy with freedom. I was jumpy, my spirit conditioned for catastrophe, trained in doglike fear, my brain geared to submission. I saw Bea Zakel in the window waiting for me, and I’m sure she saw me walk by. I should have greeted her, at least nodded or waved. But that didn’t occur to me until it was too late, we were already two houses farther down. When we reached the end of the street and turned the corner, my uncle hooked his arm into mine. I was walking close to him but he must have sensed how far away I was. He was probably just hooking his arm into his old coat, which I was wearing. His lungs were whistling. There was a long silence, and then he said something I felt he didn’t really want to say. His lungs seemed to be forcing him to speak, which is why he had two voices when he said: I hope they take you on at the factory. It seems things are a bit grouchy at home. He was referring to the disabler.
Right where his fur cap touched his left ear, the crease of skin above his lobe flattened out just like mine. I wanted to see his right ear too. I unhooked my arm and crossed to his right side. His right ear was even more like mine than his left. There the crease smoothed out farther down, the lobe looked longer and wider, as if ironed flat.
They took me on at the crate factory. Every day I left the disabler at home and returned to him after work. Each time I came home, my grandmother asked:
Are you back.
And I said: I’m back.
Each time I left the house she asked:
Are you leaving.
And I said: I’m leaving.
When she asked me these questions she took a step toward me and placed three fingers on her forehead as though she couldn’t believe what I was saying. Her hands were transparent, nothing but skin with veins and bones, two silk fans. I wanted to fling my arms around her neck when she asked me that. The disabler stopped me.
Little Robert heard my grandmother’s daily questions. When it occurred to him, he imitated her, he took a step toward me, placed his fingers to his forehead, and asked all at once:
Are you back, are you leaving.
Each time he touched his forehead I saw the folds of fat at his wrists. And each time he asked, I wanted to squeeze my ersatz-brother’s neck. The disabler stopped me.
One day I came back from work and noticed a tip of white lace peeking out from the cover of the sewing machine. Another day an umbrella was hanging from the handle of the kitchen door, and a broken plate was lying on the table in two even pieces as though it had been cut down the middle, and my mother had a handkerchief tied around her thumb. One day Father’s suspenders were lying on the radio and Grandmother’s glasses in my shoe. Another day Robert’s stuffed dog Mopi was tied to the teapot handle with my shoelaces, and a crust of bread was in my cap. Maybe they moved the disabler out when I wasn’t home. Maybe then everything came to life. The disabler at home was like the hunger angel in the camp. It was never clear whether there was one for all of us or if each of us had his own.
They probably laughed when I wasn’t there. They probably felt sorry for me or cursed me. They probably kissed little Robert. They probably said they needed to be patient with me because they loved me, or else they just thought it to themselves and went about their business. Probably. Maybe I should have laughed when I came home. Maybe I should have felt sorry for them or cursed them. Maybe I should have kissed little Robert. Maybe I should have said I needed to be patient with them because I loved them. Except how could I say that if I couldn’t even think it to myself.
During my first month back home I kept the light on all night, because I was afraid without the old barrack light. I believe we don’t dream at night unless the day has made us tired. I didn’t start dreaming again until I was working at the crate factory.
Grandmother and I are sitting together on the plush chair, Robert is on a chair next to us. I’m as little as Robert, and Robert is as big as I am. Robert climbs on his chair next to the clock and pulls some stucco off the ceiling. He gets down and drapes it around my grandmother and me like a white shawl. Father kneels on the carpet in front of us with his Leica, and my mother says: Why don’t you smile at each other, let’s get one last picture before she dies. My legs barely reach over the edge of the chair. From his position my father can only photograph my shoes from below, with the soles in the foreground, pointing toward the door. Because of my short legs, my father has no choice, even if he’d prefer another angle. I brush the stucco off my shoulder. My grandmother hugs me, puts the stucco back around my neck, and holds it in place with her transparent hand. My mother uses a knitting needle to conduct my father in a countdown: three, two, and then, at one, he clicks. My mother sticks the knitting needle in her hair and brushes the stucco off our shoulders. And Robert climbs on his chair and puts the stucco back on the ceiling.
Do you have a child in Vienna
For months my feet had been at home, where no one knew what I had seen. Nor did anybody ask. The only way you can talk about something is by again becoming the person you’re talking about. I was glad that no one asked anything, although I was also secretly offended. My grandfather would have asked, but he’d been dead for two years. He died of kidney failure the summer after my third peace, but unlike me he stayed with the dead.
One evening our neighbor Herr Carp came over to return the level he’d borrowed. He couldn’t help stammering when he saw me. I thanked him for his yellow leather gaiters and lied that they’d kept me warm in the camp. Then I added that they’d brought me good luck, that thanks to them I’d once found 10 rubles at the market. He was so excited, his pupils slid from side to side like cherry pits. He rocked back and forth on his toes, crossed his arms and stroked them with his thumbs, and said: Your grandfather never stopped waiting for you. On the day he died the mountains disappeared into the clouds, flocks of clouds drifted into town from faraway places like suitcases from all corners of the globe. They knew that your grandfather had traveled the world. One of the clouds was definitely from you, even if you didn’t know it. The funeral was over at five o’clock and right afterward it rained quietly for half an hour. I remember it was on a Wednesday, I still had to go into town to buy glue. On my way home I saw a rat without hair right in front of your house. It was cowering next to your wooden door, all wrinkled and shivering. I was surprised the rat didn’t have a tail, or maybe the tail was under its belly. As I was standing there I noticed a toad covered with warts. The toad looked straight at me and started puffing out two white sacs attached to its throat, first one and then the other. The whole thing looked hideous. At first I wanted to shove the toad away with my umbrella, but I didn’t dare. Better not, I thought, after all it’s a toad, and he’s sending some kind of signal, obviously something to do with Leo’s death. People thought you were dead, you know. Your grandfather kept waiting for you. Especially at first. Less so toward the end. But everyone thought you were dead. You didn’t write, that’s why you’re alive now.
One thing has nothing to do with the other, I said
.
My breath was trembling because I could tell Herr Carp didn’t believe me, he just chewed on his frayed mustache. My mother squinted out the veranda window at the courtyard, where there was nothing to see except a bit of sky and the tarpaper roof on the shed. Watch what you’re saying, Herr Carp, my grandmother spoke up. You told me something different back then, you said that those white sacs had to do with my dead husband. You said the toad was sending a greeting from my dead husband. What I’m telling you now is the truth, Herr Carp mumbled, more to himself than anyone else. Back then I couldn’t exactly bring up poor dead Leo, not right after your husband died.
Little Robert dragged the bubble level across the floor and went tch-tch-tch. He put Mopi on the roof of his train, tugged Mother by the dress, and said: All aboard, we’re going to the Wench. The sliding green eye moved left and right inside the level. Mopi sat on the roof of the train, but inside the level Bea Zakel stared out the window at Herr Carp’s toes. Herr Carp hadn’t said anything new, he’d merely expressed what everyone else had been too polite to say out loud. I knew they’d been more frightened than surprised when I came back—there had been relief but no joy. By staying alive I had betrayed their mourning.
Ever since I came back, everything had eyes. And all the things saw that my ownerless homesickness was not going away. The old sewing machine with its wooden cover and its bobbin and that damned white thread still sat in front of the biggest window. The gramophone was back inside my worn-out suitcase and in its old spot on the corner table. The same green and blue curtains hung in the windows, the same flowery pattern snaked through the carpets, which were bordered by the same frayed fringe, the cupboards and doors squeaked as always when they were opened or closed, the floorboards creaked in the same places, the railing of the veranda stairs was cracked in the same spot, every stair still sagged from use, the same flowerpot dangled inside its wire basket on the landing. Nothing had anything to do with me. I was locked up inside myself and evicted from myself. I didn’t belong to them and I was missing me.
