I taught my homesickness to be dry-eyed a long time ago. Now I’d like it to become ownerless. Then it would no longer see my condition here and wouldn’t ask about my family back home. Then my mind would no longer be home to people, only objects. Then I could simply shove them back and forth across the place where it hurts, the way we shove our feet when we dance the Paloma. Objects may be small or large, and some may be too heavy, but they are finite.
If I can manage all this, my homesickness will no longer be susceptible to yearning. It will merely be hunger for home as the place where I once was full.
Potato man
For two months in the camp I ate potatoes as a supplement to the mess-hall fodder. Two months of boiled potatoes, strictly rationed into three-day cycles of appetizer, entrée, and dessert.
The appetizers consisted of peeled potatoes, boiled with salt and sprinkled with wild dill. I saved the peels for the next day, when I treated myself to an entrée of diced potatoes with noodles. The saved peels mixed with the fresh peels were my noodles. Day three was dessert—unpeeled potatoes, cut into slices and grilled on the fire, then sprinkled with roasted wild oat kernels and a bit of sugar.
I had borrowed half a measure of sugar and half a measure of salt from Trudi Pelikan. Like all of us, after the third anniversary of the peace Trudi Pelikan had thought they’d soon let us go home, so she gave her bell-shaped coat with the beautiful fur cuffs to Bea Zakel, who traded it at the market for five measures of sugar and five measures of salt. That deal went better than the one with my silk scarf, which Tur Prikulitsch still wore to roll call. No longer all the time, though, and never in the heat of summer, just every few days, now that autumn was here. And every few days I asked Bea Zakel when I’d get something for my scarf, either from her or from Tur.
After one evening roll call without the silk scarf Tur Prikulitsch ordered me, my cellar companion Albert Gion, and Paul Gast the lawyer to his office. Tur reeked of sugar-beet liquor. Not only his eyes but his tongue seemed oiled. He crossed out some columns on his list and filled our names in elsewhere and explained that Albert Gion didn’t have to go to the cellar tomorrow and that I didn’t have to go to the cellar and the lawyer didn’t have to go to the factory. But what he wrote down was different from what he said. We were all confused. So Tur Prikulitsch started over, and this time he explained that Albert Gion had to go the cellar tomorrow as always, but with the lawyer, not with me. When I asked why not with me, he half-closed his eyes and said: Because tomorrow morning at six o’clock sharp you’re going to the kolkhoz. Don’t take anything, you’re coming back in the evening. When I asked how I was getting there, he said: What do you mean how, on foot. You pass three slag heaps on your right, then keep an eye out for the kolkhoz on your left.
I was convinced I was going for more than just one day. The people assigned to the kolkhoz died more quickly. They lived five or six steps below the earth, in holes they had dug out of the ground, with roofs made of twigs and grass. The rain dripped down from above, and the groundwater seeped up from below. They were given one liter of water daily for drinking and washing. They died of thirst in the heat instead of starving to death. And with all the filth and vermin, their wounds got infected with tetanus. Everyone in the camp was afraid of the kolkhoz. I was convinced that instead of paying me for the scarf, Tur Prikulitsch was sending me to the kolkhoz to die, and then he would have inherited the scarf from me.
At six o’clock I set off with my pillowcase in my jacket, in case there was something to steal at the kolkhoz. The wind whistled over the fields of cabbages and beets, the grasses swayed orange, the dew glistened in waves. I saw patches of fiery orach. The wind pushed against me, the entire steppe streamed into me, urging me to collapse because I was so thin and it was so greedy. I passed a cabbage field and a narrow swath of acacias and then the first slag heap, then grassland, and after that a cornfield. Then came the second slag heap. Steppe-dogs peered out over the grass. They stood on their hind legs, with brown furry backs and pale bellies and tails the length of a finger. They nodded and pressed their front paws together like human hands at prayer. Their ears were on the sides of their heads, like human ears. They nodded for one final second, then the empty grass rippled over their burrows, but very differently than in the wind.
Only then did it occur to me that the animals could sense I was walking through the steppe alone and unguarded. Steppe-dogs have keen instincts, I thought, what they’re praying for is flight, for escape. And I could escape, but where to. Maybe they think I’ve already made my escape and they’re trying to warn me. I looked back to see if I was being followed. Two figures were coming up far behind me, they appeared to be a man and a child, carrying two short-handled shovels, not rifles. The sky stretched out over the steppe like a blue net that seemed to grow out of the earth at the horizon, with no gap to slip through.
There had been three attempts to escape from the camp. All three men who tried came from the Carpatho-Ukraine, like Tur Prikulitsch. Despite the fact they spoke fluent Russian, all three were caught and paraded at roll call, their bodies disfigured from the beatings they’d received. After that they were never seen again, sent either to a penal camp or to their grave.
To my left I now saw a little hut made of boards, and a guard wearing a pistol on his belt, a thin young man, half a head shorter than me. He’d been waiting for me and waved me over. I didn’t get a chance to catch my breath, he was in a rush, we hurried past the fields of cabbage. He was chewing sunflower seeds, popping two in his mouth at the same time. He bit down once, then spat both husks out of one corner of his mouth while snapping up the next seeds in the other, after which the empty husks went flying out again. We walked as quickly as he snapped. Maybe he’s mute, I thought. He didn’t speak, he didn’t sweat, his mouth acrobatics never lost their rhythm. He walked as though the wind were pulling him forward, cracking his seeds like a husking machine, without saying a word. Then he grabbed my arm and we stopped. Scattered across the field were some twenty women. They had no tools, they were digging potatoes with their bare hands. The guard assigned me to a row. The sun was standing in the middle of the sky like a glowing ember. I shoveled with my hands, the ground was hard. My skin cracked, the dirt burned in the cuts. When I lifted my head, swarms of little specks flickered before my eyes. The blood froze inside my brain. Out here, this young man with the pistol was not only our guard but also nachal’nik, foreman, and inspector all in one. When he caught the women talking he whipped them in the face with a potato plant or stuffed a rotten potato in their mouths. And he wasn’t mute. I couldn’t understand what he was screaming, but it wasn’t coal curses, construction-site commands, or cellar words.
It slowly dawned on me that Tur Prikulitsch had something else in mind. That he had made an agreement with the young man, who was supposed to work me all day long and then shoot me in the evening, as I attempted to escape. Or else he was supposed to stick me in my own private hole for the night, since I was the only man here. And probably not just for tonight, but for every night from now on, and I’d never make it back to the camp.
When evening came, our guard, nachal’nik, foreman, and inspector also became camp commandant. The women lined up to be counted. They stated their names and numbers, opened their fufaikas to the left to show their pockets, and held out their hands with two potatoes in each. They were allowed to take four middle-sized ones. If a potato was too big it was exchanged. I was the last person in line and held out my pillowcase. It was filled with twenty-seven potatoes, seven middle-sized and twenty larger ones. I, too, was allowed to keep four middle-sized potatoes, the others I had to take out. The pistol man asked my name. I said: Leopold Auberg. As if in response to my name, he took a middle-sized potato and kicked it over my shoulder. I ducked. The next one he’s not going to kick with his foot, I thought, he’ll throw it at my head and shoot it in midair with his pistol and blow it to shreds along with my brains. He didn’t take his eyes off me as I was thinking that, and whe
n I stuck my pillowcase in my pants pocket he grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the line, and, as if he were once again mute, pointed me in the direction I had come from that morning, at the evening, and at the steppe. Then he left me standing there. He commanded the women to march and set off behind them, in the opposite direction. I stood at the edge of the field and watched him march away with the women. I was certain that he’d leave his brigade any minute and come back, that he’d fire his pistol just once, that there’d be no witnesses, only the verdict: Shot while attempting to escape.
The brigade moved off into the distance like a brown snake, smaller and smaller. I stood rooted in front of the big pile of potatoes and now began to think Tur Prikulitsch’s agreement wasn’t with the guard but with me. That this pile of potatoes was the agreement, and Tur wanted to pay for my scarf with potatoes.
I stuffed my clothes with potatoes of all sizes, all the way up to my cap. I counted 273. The hunger angel helped me—he was, after all, a notorious thief. But after he’d helped me, he was once again a notorious tormentor and left me to fend for myself on the long way home. The potatoes were heavier than I was.
I set off. Soon I was itching everywhere: the head louse, the neck-and-throat louse, the armpit louse, the chest louse, and the pubic louse. My toes already itched from the footwraps in the galoshes. To scratch anywhere I would have had to lift my arm, which I couldn’t do with my overstuffed sleeves. To walk normally I would have had to bend my knees, which I couldn’t do with my overstuffed pant legs. I shuffled past the first slag heap. The second heap didn’t come and didn’t come, or maybe I’d missed it, and now it was much too dark to make out the third slag heap. Stars were strung out across all parts of the sky. I knew the Milky Way ran north and south, because Oswald Enyeter the barber had explained it to me after the second one of his countrymen tried to escape and failed, and was put on display at the roll-call grounds. To travel west, he said, you have to cross the Milky Way and turn right, then go straight, always keeping the Big Dipper on your right. But I couldn’t even find the second and third slag heaps that now, on my way back, should be coming up on my left. Better to be guarded all around than lost all around. The acacias, the corn, even my steps were cloaked in black. The cabbages followed me like human heads in a fantastic assortment of caps and hairstyles. The moon wore a white bonnet and touched my face like a nurse. Maybe I no longer need the potatoes at all, I thought, maybe I’m going to die from the poison in the cellar and just don’t know it yet. I heard halting birdcalls from the trees and a sad, gurgling lament in the distance. The night silhouettes flowed around me. I can’t allow myself to be afraid, I thought, or else I’ll drown. I talked to myself, so as not to pray:
The things that last never squander themselves, they need only one unchanging connection to the world. The steppe connects to the world through lurking, the moon through giving light, the steppe-dogs through fleeing, and the grass through swaying. And my connection to the world is through eating.
The wind hummed, I heard my mother’s voice. In that last summer at home my mother should not have said: Don’t stab the potato with your fork because it will fall apart, use your spoon, the fork is for meat. But my mother couldn’t have imagined that the steppe would know her voice, that one night on the steppe the potatoes would pull me into the earth and all the stars would stab me from above. No one could have guessed, back then at the table, that I would be hauling myself like a big trunk through fields and grassland all the way to the camp gate. That only three years later I would be alone in the night, a man made of potatoes, and that what I would call my way home was a road back to a camp.
At the gate, the dogs barked in their soprano night-voices that always sounded like crying. Perhaps Tur Prikulitsch had also made an agreement with the guards, because they waved me through with no inspection. I heard them laughing behind me, their shoes tapping on the ground. With my clothes stuffed so full, I couldn’t turn around, presumably one of the guards was aping my stiff gait.
The next day I took three middle-sized potatoes to Albert Gion on our night shift, thinking he might want to roast them in peace and quiet over the fire in back, in the open iron basket. He didn’t. He studied them one at a time and put them in his cap. He asked: Why exactly 273.
Because minus 273 degrees Celsius is absolute zero, I said, it doesn’t get colder than that.
You’re very scientific today, he said, but I’m sure you miscounted.
I couldn’t have, I said, the number 273 watches out for itself, it’s a given.
What’s given, said Albert Gion, is that you should have thought of something else. My God, Leo, you could have run away.
I gave Trudi Pelikan twenty potatoes, to pay her back for the sugar and salt. Within two months, just before Christmas, all 273 potatoes were gone. The last ones sprouted blue-green sliding eyes like Bea Zakel’s. I wondered whether I should tell her that someday.
Sky below earth above
Deep in the fruit garden, at our summerhouse in the Wench, stood a wooden bench without a back. We called it Uncle Hermann. We called it that because we didn’t know anybody by that name. Uncle Hermann had two round feet made of tree trunks stuck into the earth. The top of his seat was smooth, but the underside was still rough timber, with bark. When the sun was blazing, Uncle Hermann sweated drops of resin. If you plucked them off they grew back the next day.
Higher up on the grass hill stood Aunt Luia. She had a back and four legs and was smaller and slimmer than Uncle Hermann. She was older as well, Uncle Hermann had come after her. I climbed up to Aunt Luia and rolled down the hill. Sky below earth above and grass in between. The grass always held me firmly by the feet so I wouldn’t fall into the sky. And I always saw Aunt Luia’s gray underbelly.
One evening my mother was sitting on Aunt Luia, and I was lying on my back in the grass at her feet. We were looking up at the stars, which were all out. And Mother pulled the collar of her jacket over her chin, until the collar had lips. Until not she, but the collar said:
Heaven and earth make up the world. The reason the sky’s so big is because there’s a coat hanging there for every human. And the reason the earth is so big is because the world’s toes are so far away. So far away you have to stop thinking, because distances like that make you feel hollow and sick to your stomach.
I asked: Where is the farthest place in all the world.
At the end of the world.
At its toes.
Yes.
Does it also have ten.
I think so.
Do you know which coat is yours.
I’ll know when I’m up in heaven.
But that’s where the dead people are.
Yes.
How do they get there.
They travel there with the soul.
Does the soul have toes, too.
No, wings.
Do the coats have sleeves.
Yes.
Are the sleeves their wings.
Yes.
Are Uncle Hermann and Aunt Luia a couple.
If wood gets married, then yes.
Then Mother stood up and went into the house. And I sat down on Aunt Luia in the exact spot where she had been sitting. The wood was warm. The black wind quivered in the fruit garden.
On boredom
Today I don’t have to work the early-morning shift, the afternoon shift, or the night shift. After the last night shift of a given rotation we have a free Wednesday, which counts as my Sunday, and lasts until two p.m. on Thursday. I’m drowning in all this free air, I ought to trim my nails, but last time it felt as though the nails I was trimming belonged to someone else. I don’t know who.
From the barrack window I can see across the camp to the mess hall. The two Zirris are coming up the camp street carrying a heavy bucket, it must be coal. They pass the first bench and sit down on the second because it has a back. I could open the window and wave or else go out to them. I quickly slip into my galoshes but then I just stay there, sitting
on my bed.
There’s the boredom of the rubber worm with its delusions of grandeur, the black knee of the stovepipe, the shadow of the dilapidated little table—a new one appears every time the sun moves. There’s the boredom of the water level in the bucket and the water in my swollen legs. There’s the boredom of my frayed shirt seam and the borrowed sewing needle, and the shaky boredom of sewing, when my brain slides over my eyes, and there’s the boredom of the bitten-off thread.
Among the men there’s the boredom of vague depressions during grumpy card games that lack all passion. Someone with a good hand ought to want to win, but the men break off the game before anyone wins or loses. And among the women there’s the boredom of singing homesick songs while picking nits in the boredom of solid lice combs made of horn and Bakelite. And there’s the boredom of the jagged metal combs that are of no use. There’s the boredom of having your head shaved and the boredom of skulls that look like porcelain jars decorated with pus blooms and garlands of lice bites, both fresh and fading. There’s also the mute boredom of Kati Sentry. Kati Sentry never sings. I asked her: Kati, can’t you sing. She said: I’ve already combed my hair. See, the comb scratches when there isn’t any hair.