Our Christmas tree stood on the little table below the cuckoo clock. Paul Gast the lawyer hung two brown bread-balls as ornaments. At the time I didn’t ask myself how he had enough bread for ornaments, first because I was sure he’d eat them the next day, and also because as he was kneading the little balls, he told us a story from home:
Our high school in Oberwischau used to have an Advent wreath that hung right over the teacher’s desk. The candles were lit every morning, before our first-period class, which was Geography. Our teacher, Herr Leonida, was completely bald. One morning the candles were burning and we started singing: O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie grün sind deine Blä— And all of a sudden Herr Leonida let out a shriek: the pink wax had dripped onto his bald head. Blow out those candles, he screamed. Then he jumped over to his chair, grabbed his coat, and pulled out a small knife—a little silver fish. He looked right at me and yelled: Come here. He opened the little knife and lowered his head for me to scrape off the wax. I managed to do it without nicking him, but as soon as I was sitting at my desk, he came up and slapped me. When I tried to wipe the tears from my eyes, he screamed: Hands behind your back.
10 rubles
Bea Zakel had persuaded Tur Prikulitsch to give me a propusk—a pass—so I could go to the market. The chance of getting a pass is something you don’t mention to a hungry person. I didn’t mention it to anybody. I took my pillowcase and Herr Carp’s leather gaiters. As always, it was a matter of finagling the best deal for the most calories. At eleven o’clock I set off, that is to say we set off, my hunger and I.
The day was still hazy from the rain. Peddlers stood in the mud, showing their wares: men with rusty screws and gear wheels, and wrinkled old women with tin dishes and little piles of blue pigment for house paint. The puddles around the paint were blue. Right nearby were other piles, of sugar and salt, dried prunes, corn flour, millet, barley, and peas. Even corn-flour cakes with sugar-beet paste, set on green horseradish leaves. Women without teeth were selling thick sour milk in metal containers, and a one-legged boy with a crutch was standing by a bucket full of red raspberry water. A few young drifters ran around hustling bent knives, forks, and fishing rods. Little silver fish flitted like living safety pins inside empty tin cans from America.
I pushed through the crowd with my leather gaiters on my arm, pausing in front of an old man in uniform with bald patches on his head and a dozen war medals on his chest. He had two books displayed at his feet: one was about Popocatépetl, and the other had a cover showing two fat fleas. I skimmed through the flea book because it had lots of pictures. Two fleas on a seesaw, next to them the trainer’s hand wielding a tiny whip, a flea on the back of a rocking chair, a flea harnessed to a wedding coach fashioned from a nutshell, the chest of a boy with two fleas between his nipples and two parallel chains of fleabites of even lengths running from the fleas down to his navel.
The man in uniform reached out and grabbed my leather gaiters and held them up first to his chest, then to his shoulders. I showed him they were meant for the legs. He let out a hollow laugh, from his belly, the way Tur Prikulitsch sometimes did during roll call, like big turkeys do. His upper lip kept catching on the stump of a tooth. The peddler selling next to him came over and rubbed the leather laces of the gaiters between his fingers. Then a man appeared carrying a handful of knives, which he stuck in his coat pocket. He took the gaiters and held them up to his left hip and his right, then placed them on his bottom and hopped around like a fool, while the man in uniform made farting noises. And then another man came whose neck was all bundled up. He walked on a crutch with an armrest made from a broken scythe wrapped in rags. He slipped his crutch into one of the gaiters and hurled it into the air. I ran after it and picked it up. A little farther down the other gaiter came flying. I bent over to pick that one up and there, lying in the mud next to my gaiter, was a crumpled banknote.
Somebody’s lost that, I thought. With luck he hasn’t noticed it’s missing. Or maybe he’s already looking for it, maybe while that mob was teasing me one of them saw it or saw me bend over and is waiting to see what I’ll do next. They were still laughing at me and my gaiters, but the money was already in my fist.
I had to quickly make myself scarce and so I pressed into the crowd. I clutched the gaiters tightly under my arm and smoothed out the bill, it was 10 rubles.
10 rubles was a fortune. Don’t waste time calculating, just eat, I thought, what doesn’t get eaten can go in the pillowcase. I’d had enough of the gaiters—those embarrassing leftovers from another universe, they only made me stick out. So I just dropped them on the ground and flitted off with my 10 rubles like a little silver fish.
My throat was throbbing, I was sweating with fright and paid two rubles for two cups of red raspberry water, which I drank down in one gulp. Then I bought two corn-flour cakes with sugar-beet paste. I even ate the horseradish leaves, thinking that because they were bitter, they must be good for the stomach, like medicine. Then I bought four Russian pancakes with cheese filling. Two for me and two for the pillowcase. After that I drank one small canful of thick sour milk and bought two pieces of sunflower-seed cake, both of which I ate. Then I saw the one-legged boy again and drank another cup of red raspberry water. After that I counted how much money I had left: 1 ruble and 6 kopeks, not enough for sugar, or even salt. While I was counting, I could feel the woman with the dried prunes watching me. She had one brown eye and one eye that was completely white and without a pupil, like a bean. I showed her my money. She pushed my hand away, saying no and waving her arms as if she were shooing flies. I stayed rooted where I was and kept holding up my money. I started to shiver, then crossed myself and mumbled as if praying: Our Father, save me from this goddamned hideous hag. Lead her into temptation and deliver me from evil. As I mumbled, I thought about Fenya’s cold saintliness, and when I was done I said a hard, clear AMEN, to give some form to my prayer. The woman was moved and fixed me with her bean eye. Then she took my money and filled an old green Cossack cap with prunes. I dumped half of them in my pillowcase and the rest in my quilted cap, to eat right away. And after I finished the prunes in the cap, I ate the two pancakes I had left. And then there was nothing in the pillowcase except a handful of prunes.
The wind flew warmly through the acacias, the mud in the puddles curled up into gray cups. On the path that ran beside the road to the camp a goat was tethered to a stake. Its neck was rubbed raw from constantly chafing against the rope, which had circled the stake so many times the goat could no longer reach the grass. The goat had a sidelong gaze like Bea Zakel and a tormented quality like Fenya. It tried to follow me. I thought about the blue, dry-frozen goats that had been split in two and tossed into the cattle car and which we had used for heating. I was only halfway to the camp, I was going to be late, and on top of that I’d be showing up with prunes in my pillowcase. To keep them away from the guards I ate the rest. Through the poplars behind the Russian village I could already see the cooling tower. Above its white cloud the sun grew square and slipped into my mouth. My throat was walled shut, I gasped for air. My stomach ached, my intestines rumbled and twisted in my belly like scimitars. My eyes teared up, and the cooling tower began to spin. I leaned against a mulberry tree, and the earth beneath it began to spin. A truck began to flutter on the road, and on the path three stray dogs began to blur together. I threw up all over the tree, and I felt so bad about wasting all the expensive food that I cried even as I threw up.
Then it all lay glistening beside the mulberry tree.
All of it, all of it.
I leaned my head against the trunk and stared at the glistening chewed-up food, as if I could eat it all over again with my eyes. Then I passed under the first watchtower in the empty wind, with an empty pillowcase and an empty stomach. The same as before, except without my leather gaiters. My lucky gaiters. The guard was spitting sunflower-seed husks from the tower, they sailed through the air like flies. The emptiness inside me was bitter as gall, I felt sick. But the
minute I was in the yard I was already wondering if there was any cabbage soup left in the mess hall. The mess hall was closed. And I chanted to the drumming clatter of my wooden shoes:
The Matron with her white cloud is real. My shovel is real. My bunk in the barrack is real. And I’m sure there’s a gap between being hungry and dropping dead. I just have to find it, since the urge to eat is stronger than I am. Fenya limps but thinks straight. Her chilly saintliness is just. She gives me my share of food. Why go to the market, the camp keeps me locked up for my own good. I can only be made a laughingstock where I don’t belong. I’m at home in the camp. The guard from this morning recognized me, he waved me through the gate. And his dog knows me too, he didn’t budge from the warm pavement. And the roll-call grounds know me, and I can find my way to my barrack even with my eyes closed. I don’t need a day pass, I have the camp, and the camp has me. All I need is a bunk and Fenya’s bread and my tin bowl.
I don’t even need Leo Auberg.
On the hunger angel
Hunger is an object.
The angel has climbed into my brain.
The angel doesn’t think. He thinks straight.
He’s never absent.
He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction.
He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me.
He knew all of this before he met me, and he knows my future.
He lingers in every capillary like quicksilver. First a sweetness in my throat. Then pressure on my stomach and chest. The fear is too much.
Everything has become lighter.
The hunger angel leans to one side as he walks with open eyes. He staggers around in small circles and balances on my breath-swing. He knows the homesickness in the brain and the blind alleys in the air.
The air angel leans to the other side as he walks with open hunger.
He whispers to himself and to me: where there is loading there can also be unloading. He is of the same flesh that he is deceiving. Will have deceived.
He knows about saved bread and cheek-bread and he sends out the white hare.
He says he’s coming back but stays where he is.
When he comes, he comes with force.
It’s utterly clear:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
Hunger is an object.
Latin secrets
After wolfing down our food in the mess hall, we shove the long wooden tables and the benches against the wall. Now and then on Saturday nights we’re allowed to dance until a quarter before midnight, then we have to put everything back. At twelve on the dot, when the loudspeaker plays the Russian anthem, everyone has to be in his barrack. On Saturdays the guards are feeling happy from drinking sugar-beet liquor and their fingers can be light on the trigger. If someone’s found dead in the yard on Sunday morning the word is: attempted escape. The fact that he had to run to the latrine in his underwear because his guts were worn out and could no longer digest the cabbage soup is no excuse. Even so, we shuffle out a tango now and then on our mess-hall Saturdays. When you dance you’re like the Crescent Moon Madonna at Café Martini, living on your tiptoes in the world you come from—the world of ballrooms and garlands and Chinese lanterns, of evening dresses, brooches, ties, pocket squares, and cuff links. My mother is dancing. She has her hair in a bun braided like a little basket, with two curls spiraling down her cheeks. She’s wearing light-brown sandals with high heels and straps as thin as pear peels, a green satin dress, and a brooch right over her heart—four emeralds in the shape of a lucky clover. And my father is wearing his sand-gray suit with a white square in his pocket and a white carnation in his buttonhole.
But I’m wearing lice in my fufaika and footwraps that stink inside my rubber galoshes, I’m a forced laborer getting dizzy from the ballroom back home and the emptiness in my stomach. I dance with Zirri Kaunz, the one with the silky hair on her hands. The other Zirri, with the olive-sized wart under her ring finger, is Zirri Wandschneider. While we’re dancing, Zirri Kaunz assures me that she comes from the village of Kastenholz—or Boxwood—and not from Wurmloch—Wormhole—like the other Zirri. And that her father came from Wolkendorf—or Cloudville. That before she was born her parents moved to Kastenholz because her father bought a large vineyard there. I tell her there’s also a village called Liebling—Darling—and a town called Gross-Scham or Big-Shame, but they’re in the Banat, not Transylvania. I don’t understand the first thing about the Banat, says Zirri. I don’t either, I say, spinning around her in my sweaty fufaika, while her sweaty fufaika spins around me. The whole mess hall is spinning. There’s nothing to understand when everything is spinning. And then I mention the wooden cabins behind the camp, which for some reason are called Finnish cabins though the people who live there are Russian Ukrainians. There’s nothing to understand about that either, I say.
After the break comes La Paloma. I dance with the other Zirri. Loni Mich, our singer, stands half a step in front of the musicians. For La Paloma she takes another half step forward, because she wants to have the song all to herself. She keeps her arms and legs completely still, but her eyes roll and her head sways. Her small goiter trembles, her voice turns raw like the undertow of deep water:
A ship can go down very fast
And all of us sooner or later
Will breathe our last
So it’s anchors aweigh
We all reach the day
When we’re claimed by the sea
And what the waves take away
Never comes back
Everyone has to keep silent while dancing our pleated Paloma. You go mute and think what you have to think, even if you don’t want to. We shove our homesickness across the floor like a heavy crate. Zirri lets her feet drag, I press my hand against the small of her back until she regains the rhythm. She’s had her head turned away from me for some time, so I can’t see her face. But her back is quivering, and I can tell that she’s crying. The shuffling is loud enough so that I don’t have to say anything. What could I say other than she shouldn’t cry.
It’s impossible to dance without toes, so Trudi Pelikan sits on a bench off to the side, and I sit down next to her. In the first winter her toes froze. The following summer they were squashed by the lime wagon. That fall they were amputated because worms got under the bandage. Since then Trudi Pelikan has walked on her heels, so she compensates by tilting her shoulders forward. That makes her back a little hunched, and her arms as stiff as shovel handles. She couldn’t work at the construction site or in a factory or in the garage, and during the second winter she was assigned to the sick barrack.
We talk about the sick barrack, that it’s nothing more than a place to die. Trudi Pelikan says: Ichthyol salve is the only thing we have that’s of any use. Even the Russian medic has remarked that the Germans die in waves. The winter wave is the biggest. The second biggest comes in summer, when the diseases spread. The autumn wave comes when the tobacco ripens. People poison themselves with tobacco broth, it costs less than coal alcohol. And it doesn’t cost a thing to open your vein with a shard of glass, or to slice off your hand or foot. It doesn’t cost anything to run headfirst into a brick wall until you collapse, either, although that’s a little harder to do, says Trudi Pelikan.
Most people only knew each other by sight, from the mess hall or the Appell. I realized many were missing. But unless they’d collapsed right in front of me I didn’t consider them dead. And I took care not to ask where they might be. Still, when the evidence is staring you in the face, when you know so many have died, fear becomes a powerful thing, even overpowering after a while—and therefore remarkably similar to indifference. This is what allows you to act so fast when you’re the first to discover a dead person. You have to undress him quickly, before the body gets too stiff to bend, and before someone else makes off with his clothes. You have to take his saved bread out of his pillowcase before someone else beats you to it. Clearing away the dead person’s things is our way of mourning. When the stretc
her arrives in the barrack, there should be nothing to haul away but a body.
If you don’t know the dead person, then you only stand to gain. There’s nothing wrong with clearing things away: if the situation were reversed, the corpse would do the same to you, and you wouldn’t begrudge him that, either. The camp is a practical place. You can’t afford to feel shame or horror. You proceed with steady indifference, or perhaps dejected contentment. And this has nothing to do with schadenfreude. I believe that the less skittish we are around the dead, the more we cling to life. And the more we fall prey to illusions. You convince yourself that the missing people have simply been moved to another camp. It doesn’t matter what you know, you believe the opposite. Just like the bread court, the act of clearing away happens only in the present moment. But there is no violence, everything proceeds matter-of-factly and peacefully.
Outside my father’s house there stands a linden
Outside my father’s house there is a chair
And if I find my way back home again
Then I will spend my whole life there
So sings our singer Loni Mich, the sweat beading up on her forehead. David Lommer has his zither on his knees, the metal ring on his thumb. After each line he plucks a quiet echo and sings along. And Anton Kowatsch inches his drum forward until he can squint at Loni’s face through his drumsticks. The couples stumble awkwardly through the song, hopping like birds trying to land in a heavy wind. Trudi Pelikan says we’re no longer capable of walking anyway, all we can do is dance, we’re nothing but quilted jackets filled with sloshing water and clattering bones, weaker than the drumbeats. To prove her point she offers me a list of Latin secrets from the sick barrack.