But what are reasons, really. To this day I don’t know why I filled the bottles with cabbage soup. Did it have something to do with my grandmother’s sentence: I know you’ll come back. Was I really so naïve as to think I’d come home and present the cabbage soup to my family as though I were bringing them two bottles of life in the camp. Or was I still clinging to the notion, despite the hunger angel, that whenever you go on a trip you bring back a souvenir. From her one and only voyage on a ship my grandmother had brought me a sky-blue, thumb-sized Turkish slipper from Constantinople. But that was my other grandmother, who hadn’t said anything about coming back, who lived in a different house and hadn’t even been at ours to say good-bye. Did I think the bottles would be some kind of witness for me at home. Or was one bottle gullible and the other skeptical. Was the screw-top bottle filled with my trip home and the stoppered bottle filled with my staying here forever. Could it be that they were opposites, just like diarrhea and constipation. Did Tur Prikulitsch know more about me than he should. Was talking to Bea Zakel doing me any good.
Was going home even the opposite of staying here. I probably wanted to be up to both possibilities, if it came to that. I probably wanted to make sure that my life here, my life in general, wouldn’t stay trapped in yearning to go home every day and never being able to. The more I wanted to go home, the more I tried not to want it so much that I’d be destroyed if they never let me. I never lost my yearning to go home, but in order to have something besides that, I told myself that even if they kept us here forever, this would still be my life. After all, the Russians have their lives. I don’t want to struggle so hard against settling here. All I have to do is stay the way the stoppered half of me already is. I can reeducate myself, I don’t yet know how, but the steppe will see to it. The hunger angel had taken possession of me, my scalp was fluttering. My hair had just been clipped on account of lice.
Once during the previous summer, Kobelian had unbuttoned his shirt in the open air, and as it fluttered, he’d said something about the grassy soul of the steppe and his Ural heart. That could beat in my breast as well, I thought.
On daylight poisoning
That morning the sun rose very early like a red balloon, so big and round that it made the sky over the coke plant look flat.
Our shift had begun during the night. We were standing under the floodlight inside the pek basin, a settling tank two meters deep and two barracks long and wide. The basin was coated with an ancient, vitrified layer of pitch one meter thick. Our job was to clean out the basin with crowbars and pickaxes, chip away the pitch, and load it into wheelbarrows. Then push the wheelbarrows up a rickety plank that led out of the basin to the tracks, and up another plank to dump the pieces in the freight car.
We chipped away at the black glass: fluted, curved, and jagged shards whizzed by our heads. There was no sign of dust. But then, when I came back down the rickety plank, pushing my empty wheelbarrow out of the black night and into the white funnel of light, the air shimmered like an organza cape made of glass dust. As soon as the wind shook the floodlamp, the cape turned into a shiny chrome birdcage that hovered in the exact same spot.
At six a.m. the shift was over, it had been light outside for an hour. The sun was now shriveled but angry, its globe tight like a pumpkin. My eyes were on fire, every suture in my skull was throbbing. On the way home to the camp everything was glaring. The veins in my neck were ticking away, about to explode, my eyeballs were boiling inside my head, my heart was drumming in my chest, my ears were crackling. My neck swelled like hot dough and stiffened. Head and neck became one. The swelling spread to my shoulders, neck and upper body became one. The light drilled through me, I had to hurry into the darkness of the barrack. But it wasn’t dark enough, even the light from the window was deadly. I covered my head with my pillow. Relief came toward evening, but so did the night shift, and I had to go back to the floodlight at the pitch basin. On the second night, the nachal’nik came by with a bucket of lumpy, gray-pink paste that we smeared on our faces and necks before entering the site. The paste dried right away and then flaked off.
When the sun rose the next morning, the tar was raging inside my head even worse than before. I lurched into camp like a cat on its last legs and went directly to the sick barrack. Trudi Pelikan stroked my forehead. The medic drew a head in the air that was even more swollen than mine and said SOLNTSYE and SVYET and BOLIT. And Trudi Pelikan cried and explained something about photochemical mucosal reactions.
What’s that.
Daylight poisoning, she said.
She handed me a horseradish leaf with a dollop of salve they’d concocted out of marigolds and lard, for rubbing into the raw skin so it wouldn’t crack. The medic told me I was too sensitive to work at the pitch basin, she said she might talk to Tur Prikulitsch and that in the meantime she’d write a note saying I needed three days to recover.
I spent three days in bed. Half asleep, half awake, I floated back home on waves of fever, to summer mornings in the Wench. The sun rises very early behind the fir trees, like a red balloon. I peek through the crack of the door, my parents are still asleep. I go into the kitchen, on the kitchen table there’s a shaving mirror propped against the milk can. My Aunt Fini, who’s as thin as a nutcracker, is wearing a white organza dress. She’s running with a curling iron back and forth between the gas stove and the mirror, putting a wave in her hair. Then she combs my hair with her fingers and uses her spit to slick down my cowlick. She takes me by the hand, we go outside to pick daisies for the breakfast table.
The dewy grass comes up to my shoulders, the meadow rustles and buzzes, it’s full of white-fringed daisies and bluebells. The only thing I pick is ribwort, we call it shoot-weed, because you can use the stem as a sling and shoot the seed spike pretty far. I shoot at the glaring white organza dress. All of a sudden a living chain of locusts appears between the organza and Aunt Fini’s equally white slip, hooked claw to claw and wrapped around her lower body. She drops her daisies, holds out her arms, and freezes in place. And I slip under her dress and shovel away the locusts with my hands, faster and faster. They’re cold and heavy like wet screws. They pinch, I feel afraid. I look up and, instead of Aunt Fini with her freshly waved hair, I see a locust colossus on two skinny legs.
Under the organza dress was the first time I ever had to shovel in desperation. Now I was lying in a barrack for three days, rubbing myself with marigold salve, while everyone else went on working at the pitch basin site. But because I was too sensitive, Tur Prikulitsch reassigned me to the slag cellar.
Which is where I stayed.
Every shift is a work of art
There are two of us, Albert Gion and myself, two cellar-people working below the boilers of the factory. In the barrack Albert Gion is quick-tempered. In the dark cellar he is deliberate but decisive, the way melancholy people are. Maybe he wasn’t always like that, maybe he became like that in the cellar, the way cellars are. He’s been working here a long time. We don’t say much, only what’s necessary.
Albert Gion says: I’ll flip three carts, then you flip three.
I say: After that I’ll straighten the mountain—as we called the pile of slag.
He says: Right, then you go push.
Between flipping and pushing, the shift goes back and forth, until we’re halfway through, until Albert Gion says:
Let’s sleep for thirty minutes under the board, below number seven, it’s quiet there.
And then we start the second half.
Albert Gion says: I’ll flip three carts, then you flip three.
I say: After that I’ll straighten the mountain.
He says: Right, then you go push.
I say: I’ll push when number nine is full.
He says: No, you flip now, I’ll push, the bunker’s already full.
At the end of the shift one of us says: Come on, let’s make sure the cellar’s nice and clean for the next shift.
After my first week in the cellar, Tur Prikul
itsch was once again standing behind me in the barber’s mirror. I was half-shaved, and he raised his oily eyes and spotless fingers and asked:
So how are things in the cellar.
Cozy, I said, every shift is a work of art.
He smiled over the barber’s shoulder, but had no idea how true this really was. You could hear the thin hatred in his tone, his nostrils had a pink shine, his temples were veined with marble.
Your face was pretty filthy yesterday, he said, and your cap was so full of holes its guts were hanging out.
Doesn’t matter, I said, the coal dust is finger-thick and furry. But after every shift the cellar’s nice and clean, because every shift is a work of art.
When a swan sings
After my first day in the cellar, Trudi said in the mess hall: No more pitch—you’re a lucky man. It’s nicer below ground, isn’t it.
Then she told me that when she was hauling the lime wagon during her first year in camp, she’d often close her eyes and dream. Now she takes naked corpses out of the dying room to the back of the courtyard and lays them on the ground like freshly stripped logs. She said that now, too, when she carries the corpses to the door, she often closes her eyes and has the same dream as when she was harnessed to the lime wagon.
What is it, I asked.
That a rich, handsome, young American—he doesn’t really have to be handsome or young, an old canned-pork tycoon would do—that a rich American falls in love with me. Actually, he doesn’t even have to fall in love, he just has to be rich enough to pay my way out of here and marry me. Now, that would be a stroke of luck, she said. And if on top of that he had a sister for you.
She doesn’t really have to be beautiful or young, and she doesn’t even have to fall in love, I echoed. At that Trudi Pelikan laughed hysterically. The right corner of her mouth started fluttering and left her face, as though the thread connecting laughter to skin had torn in two.
That’s why I kept things short when I told Trudi Pelikan about my recurring dream of riding home on the white pig. Just one sentence, and without the white pig:
You know, I said, I often dream that I’m riding home through the sky on a gray dog.
She asked: Is it one of the guard dogs.
No, a village dog, I said.
Trudi said: Why ride, it’s faster to fly. I only dream when I’m awake. When I’m taking the corpses out to the courtyard, I wish I could fly away to America, like a swan.
I wondered if she knew about the swan on the oval sign at the Neptune Baths. I didn’t ask her, but I did say: You know why a swan sounds hoarse when it sings, because its throat is always hungry.
On slag
In the summer I saw an embankment of white slag in the middle of the steppe and thought about the snowy peaks of the Carpathians. Kobelian said the embankment was originally supposed to become a road. The white slag was baked solid, with a grainy composition, like you find in lime-sinks or shell-sand. Here and there the white was streaked with pink that was often so dark it turned gray at the edge. I don’t know why pink aging into gray is so heart-stoppingly beautiful, no longer like a mineral, but weary-sad, like people. Does homesickness have a color.
The other white slag was deposited in a series of man-high heaps beside the yama. That slag wasn’t baked solid, the piles were edged with grass. If it rained hard while we were shoveling coal we took shelter in these heaps. We burrowed into the white slag, and it trickled back on top of us, covering us up. In winter, steam rose off the snow on top of the pile, while we warmed ourselves in our holes and were three times hidden: under the snow blanket, inside the slag, and wrapped in our fufaikas. The steam passed through every layer, and there was a cozy, familiar smell of sulfur. We sat buried up to our noses, which stuck out of the ground and broke through the melting layer of snow like bulbs that have sprouted too early. When we crawled out of the slag heaps, our clothes were riddled with holes from the tiny embers, and the padding came spilling out of our jackets.
From all my loading and unloading I was well acquainted with the rust-colored, ground-up slag from the blast furnace. That slag has nothing to do with the white kind, it’s composed of reddish-brown dust that ghosts through the air with every swing of the shovel and slowly settles like falling folds of cloth. Because it’s as dry as the hot summer and thoroughly aseptic, the blast-furnace slag has no bearing on homesickness.
Then there’s the solidly baked greenish-brown slag in the overgrown meadow, in the wasteland behind the factory. Under the weeds it looked like broken lumps of salt lick. That slag and I had nothing to do with each other, it let me pass without making me think of anything in particular.
But my one-and-only slag, my daily slag, the slag of my day and night shift was the clinker-slag from the boilers at the coal furnaces, the hot and cold cellar slag. The furnaces stood above us, in the world of the living, five to a row, each several stories tall. They provided heat to the boilers, producing steam for the entire plant and hot and cold slag for us in the cellar. They also provided all our work, the hot phase and the cold phase of every shift.
Cold slag can only come from hot slag, it’s nothing more than the dusty residue left when hot slag cools. Cold slag only has to be emptied once per shift, but the hot clinker-slag requires constant removal, following the rhythm of the furnaces. It has to be shoveled onto countless little rail-carts, then pushed to the top of the mountain of slag at the end of the tracks and dumped.
The hot slag changes from day to day, depending on the mix of coal, which can be kind or malicious. If it’s a good mix, the glowing slabs that drop onto the transfer grate are four to five centimeters thick. Having expended their heat, they are brittle and break into pieces that fall easily through the hatch, like toasted bread. The hunger angel is amazed to see how quickly the little carts get filled even when we’re weak from shoveling. But if the mix is bad, then the slag doesn’t form clinkers and comes out like sticky, white-hot lava. It doesn’t fall through the grate on its own but gets clogged in the furnace hatches. You have to use a poker to tear off clumps that stretch like dough. You can’t get the oven empty or the cart full. It’s an agonizing, time-consuming job.
If the mix is catastrophic, then the furnace gets a real case of diarrhea. Diarrhea slag doesn’t wait for the hatch to open, it spurts out of the half-opened doors like shitted-out corn kernels. This slag is dangerous, it glows red and white and shouldn’t be looked at, and it can find its way through every hole in your clothes. The flow can’t be stopped, so the cart gets buried underneath. Somehow—the devil only knows how—you have to close the hatch, protect your legs, galoshes, and footwraps from the blazing flood, douse the blaze with the hose, dig out the little cart, push it up the mountain, and clean up after the accident—all at the same time. And if on top of everything else, this happens toward the end of your shift, then it’s an absolute disaster. You lose an endless amount of time, and the other furnaces aren’t going to wait for you, they need emptying, too. The rhythm becomes frantic, your eyes are swimming, your hands are flying, your feet are shaking. To this day I hate the diarrhea slag.
But I love the once-per-shift slag, the cold slag. It treats you decently, patiently, and predictably. Albert Gion and I needed each other only for the hot slag. For the cold slag we each wanted to be by ourselves. The cold slag is tame and trusting, almost in need of affection—a violet sand-dust that you can easily be left alone with. The cold slag comes from the last row of furnaces at the very back of the cellar, it has its own special hatches and its own little tin-bellied cart without bars.
The hunger angel knew how happy I was to be left alone with the cold slag. That it wasn’t really cold but lukewarm and smelled a little like lilacs or fuzzy mountain peaches and late-summer apricots. But mostly the cold slag smelled of quitting time, because the shift would be over in fifteen minutes and the danger of a disaster was past. The cold slag smelled of going home from the cellar, of mess-hall soup, and of rest. It even smelled of civilian life, and th
at made me cocky. I imagined that I wasn’t going from the cellar to the barrack in a padded suit, but that I was all decked out in a Borsalino, a camel-hair coat, and a burgundy silk scarf, on my way to a café in Bucharest or Vienna where I was about to sit down at a little marble-top table. So easygoing was the cold slag that it helped feed the delusions you needed in order to steal your way back into life. Drunk on poison, you could find true happiness with the cold slag, dead-sure happiness.
Tur Prikulitsch had reason to think I would complain. That’s why he asked me every few days at the barber’s:
Well, how is it down there in the cellar.
How are things going in the cellar.
How’s the cellar doing.
Are things all right in the cellar.
Or just: And in the cellar.
And because I wanted to beat him at his own game, I always stuck to the same answer: Every shift is a work of art.
If he’d had the slightest idea about the mix of hunger and coal gases, he would have asked me where I spent my time in the cellar. And I could have said, with the fly ash, because fly ash is another type of cold slag, it drifts everywhere and coats the entire cellar with fur. You can find true happiness with fly ash, too. It isn’t poisonous, and it flutters about, mouse-gray and velvety. The fly ash doesn’t smell. It’s made up of minuscule pieces, tiny scales, that constantly flit around, attaching themselves to everything, like frost crystals. Every surface gets furred. The fly ash turns the wire mesh around the lightbulb into a circus cage complete with fleas, lice, bedbugs, and termites. Termites have wedding wings, I learned in school, and they live in camps. They have a king, a queen, and soldiers. And the soldiers have big heads. There are jaw soldiers, nozzle soldiers, and gland soldiers. And they’re all fed by the workers. And the queen is thirty times bigger than the workers. I imagine that’s also the difference between the hunger angel and me. Or Bea Zakel and me. Or Tur Prikulitsch and me.