The Hunger Angel

Cinder blocks



The cinder blocks used for walls are made of slag, cement, and lime slurry. They’re mixed in a revolving drum and shaped in a block press with a hand lever. The brickworks were located behind the coke plant, near the slag heaps on the other side of the yama. That area had enough room for drying thousands of freshly pressed blocks. They were laid out on the ground in narrow rows, close together like gravestones in a military cemetery. Where the ground was swollen or pockmarked with holes, the rows were wavy. The wet blocks were carried there on little boards that were also swollen, cracked, and pockmarked with holes.

Carrying the blocks involved a long balancing act, forty meters from the press to the drying area. The rows were never even, because each person had his own way of balancing and positioning his block. Also because the blocks weren’t set down in any order—some were placed in front, some in back, and some in the middle of a row, either to replace a ruined block or to use space that had been overlooked the previous day.

The freshly pressed mass weighed ten kilograms and was crumbly like wet sand. Carrying the board in front of you required nimble footwork—you had to coordinate your shoulders, elbows, hips, stomach, and knees with every step. The ten kilos weren’t yet a cinder block, and you couldn’t let them know you were carrying them. You had to trick them by rocking evenly back and forth, so the material wouldn’t wobble, and then let it slide off in one move at the drying area. Everything had to happen quickly and evenly, so that the new block made a smooth landing, scared but not jolted. For this you needed to squat, bending your knees until the board was under your chin, then spread your elbows like wings and let the block slip off just right. That was the only way you could place it close to the next block without damaging the edges of either. One false move and the block would collapse like so much dirt.

Carrying the blocks, and especially placing them, put a strain on your face as well. You had to keep your tongue straight and your eyes fixed squarely ahead. If anything went wrong you couldn’t even curse in anger. After a cinder-block shift, our eyes and lips were as stiff and square as the blocks. And on top of this we had the cement to cope with. The cement ran away, it flew through the air. More cement stuck to our bodies and to the drum and to the press than got mixed into the bricks. To press the cinder blocks you first set your board in the mold. Then you shoveled some mix into the form and pulled the lever. Then you pulled the lever again to raise both the board and the new block. After that you took the board and carried it off to the drying area, with nimble footwork and without losing your balance.

Cinder blocks were pressed day and night. In the mornings the mold was still cool and moist from the dew, your feet were still light, the sun had yet to hit the drying area. But it was already blazing on the peaks of the slag heaps, and by midday the heat was overpowering. Your feet lost their even gait, your knees shook, every nerve in your calves simmered. Your fingers were numb. You could no longer keep your tongue straight while placing the blocks. There was a lot of waste, and a lot of beating. In the evening a spotlight cast a beam of harsh light on the scene. Moths twirled around, and the mixing drum and the press loomed in the light like machines covered with fur. The moths weren’t drawn only to the light. The moist smell of the mix attracted them, like night-blooming flowers. They settled on the blocks that were drying, tapping with their threadlike legs and feeding tubes, even though much of the area was only half-lit. They also settled on the block you were carrying and distracted you from your balancing act. You could see the little hairs on their heads, the decorative rings on their abdomens, and you could hear their wings rustling, as though the block were alive. Occasionally two or three appeared at once and sat there as though they’d hatched out of the block itself. As though the wet mix on the board were not made of slag, cement, and lime slurry but was a square lump of larvae from which the moths emerged. They let themselves be carried from the press to the drying area, out of the spotlight into the layered shadows. The shadows were crooked and dangerous, they deformed the outlines of the blocks and distorted the rows. The block on its board no longer knew what it looked like. And you felt unsure, afraid you might mistake the edges of the shadows for the edges of the blocks. The flickering slag heaps a little way off added to the confusion. They glowed in countless places with yellow eyes, like nocturnal animals that create their own light, illuminating or burning off their lack of sleep. The slag heaps’ glowing eyes smelled sharply of sulfur.

Toward morning it turned cool, a milk-glass sky. Your feet felt lighter, at least in your head, because the shift was near its end and you wanted to forget how tired you were. The floodlight was tired, too, overcast and pale. The blue air settled evenly on each row and every block of our surreal military cemetery. A quiet justice unfolded, the only one that existed here.

The cinder blocks had it good, our dead had neither rows nor stones. But you couldn’t think about that, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to balance your load for several days or nights. If you thought about that even a little there would be a lot of waste, and a lot of beating.





The gullible bottle and the skeptical one



It was the skinandbones time, the eternity of cabbage soup. Kapusta when you get up in the morning, kapusta after roll call in the evening. KAPUSTA means cabbage in Russian, and cabbage soup in Russian means soup that often has no cabbage at all. If you take away the Russian and the soup, kapusta is just a word made of two things that have nothing in common—except this word. CAP is Romanian for head, and PUSTA is the Great Hungarian Plain. The camp is as Russian as the cabbage soup, but we think these things up in German. Nonsense like that is supposed to show we’re still clever. But no matter what you do with it, KAPUSTA doesn’t work as a hunger word. Hunger words make up a map, but instead of reciting countries in your head you list names of food. Wedding soup, mincemeat, spare ribs, pig’s knuckles, roast hare, liver dumplings, haunch of venison, hasenpfeffer, and so on.

All hunger words are also eating words, you picture the food in front of your eyes and feel the taste in your mouth. Hunger words, or eating words, feed your imagination. They eat themselves, and they like what they eat. You never get full, but at least you’re there for the meal. Every person with chronic hunger has his preferred eating words, some rare, some common, and some in constant use. Each person thinks a different word tastes best. Orach didn’t work as an eating word any more than kapusta, because we actually ate it. Had to eat it.

I believe that in hunger there is no difference between blindness and sight, blind hunger sees food best. There are silent hunger words and loud ones, just as hunger has its secret side and its public side. Hunger words, or eating words, dominate every conversation, but even so, you’re still alone. Everyone eats his words by himself although we’re all eating together. There’s no thought for the hunger of others, you can’t hunger together. Cabbage soup was our main food, but it mainly took the meat from our bones and the sanity from our minds. The hunger angel ran around in hysterics. He lost all proportion, growing more in a single day than grass in an entire summer or snow in an entire winter. Perhaps as much as a tall, pointed tree grows in its entire life. It seems to me the hunger angel didn’t just grow in size but also in number. He provided each of us with our own individual agony, and yet we were all alike. Because in the trinity of skin, bones, and brown water, men and women lose all difference, and lose all sexual drive. Of course you go on saying HE or SHE but that’s merely a grammatical holdover. Half-starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects.

No matter where I was, in my bunk or between the barracks, at the yama on a shift or with Kobelian on the steppe, near the cooling tower, or washing up in the banya, or going door-to-door—everything I did was hungry. Everything matched the magnitude of my hunger in length, width, height, and color. Between the sky overhead and the dust of the earth, every place smelled of a different food. The main street of the camp smelled like caramel, the entrance to the camp like freshly baked bread, crossing the street to the factory smelled like warm apricots, the wooden fence of the factory like candied nuts, the factory gate like scrambled eggs, the yama like stewed peppers, the slag heaps like tomato soup, the cooling tower like roasted eggplant, the labyrinth of steaming pipes like strudel with vanilla sauce. The lumps of tar in the weeds smelled like quince compote and the coke ovens like cantaloupe. It was magic and it was agony. Even the wind fed the hunger, spinning food we could literally see.

Because the skinandbones people were sexless to each other, the hunger angel coupled with everyone. He also betrayed the flesh he had just stolen from us, dragging more and more lice and bedbugs into our beds. The skinandbones time meant the weekly delousing parade in the yard after work. Every person and every thing had to be taken outside to be deloused—suitcases, clothes, bunks, and ourselves.

It was the third summer, the acacias were blooming, the evening breeze smelled like warm café au lait. I had taken everything outside. Then Tur Prikulitsch came over with the green-toothed Tovarishch Shishtvanyonov, who was carrying a freshly peeled willow cane, twice as long as a flute, flexible enough for beating, with a sharpened tip for rummaging around. Disgusted by our misery, he would skewer things in our suitcases and fling them out onto the ground.

I had positioned myself as close as possible to the middle of the delousing parade, because the searches at the front and near the end were merciless. But this time Shishtvanyonov decided he wanted to bring some rigor to the middle. His cane drilled through the clothes in my gramophone box and hit my toilet kit. He put down the cane, opened my toilet kit, and discovered my secret cabbage soup. For three weeks I’d been storing cabbage soup in the two beautiful bottles I couldn’t throw away just because they were empty. And so, because they were empty I filled them with cabbage soup. One was a round-bellied bottle of rippled glass, with a screw top, the other had a flat belly and a wider neck, for which I’d even whittled a decent wooden stopper. To keep the cabbage soup from spoiling, I sealed it airtight the way we sealed stewed fruit at home. Trudi Pelikan lent me a candle from the sick barrack, and I dripped some stearine around the stopper.

Shto eto, asked Shishtvanyonov.

Cabbage soup.

What for.

He shook the little bottle so that the soup foamed up.

Na pamyat’, I said.

Kobelian had taught me that Russians considered memento a good word, that’s why I said it. But Shishtvanyonov was probably wondering what I needed this memento for. Who could be dumb enough to need little bottles of cabbage soup to remind him of cabbage soup when cabbage soup is served here twice a day.

For home, he asked.

I nodded. That was the worst thing possible, that I intended to take cabbage soup home in little bottles. He would have beaten me on the spot, and I could have put up with it, but he was only halfway through his parade and didn’t want to fall behind. He confiscated my bottles and ordered me to report to him.

The next morning Tur Prikulitsch escorted me out of the mess hall to the officers’ room. He marched down the camp street like a driven man, and I followed like a condemned man. I asked him what I should say. Without turning around he waved his hand dismissively as if to say, I’m not getting involved. Shishtvanyonov roared at me. Tur could have saved himself the trouble of translating, by now I knew it all by heart. I was a Fascist, a spy, a saboteur, and a pest, I had no culture, and by stealing cabbage soup I was committing treason against the camp, against Soviet authority, and against the Soviet people.

The cabbage soup was thin enough in the camp, but in these bottles with their narrow necks, it was almost completely clear. And as far as Shishtvanyonov was concerned, the few strands of cabbage floating in the bottles were a clear denunciation. My situation was precarious. Then Tur held up his finger, he had an idea: medicine. For the Russians, though, medicine was only a half-good word. Tur realized that just in time, so he twirled his index finger against his forehead as if he were drilling a hole and said, with a hint of meanness in his voice: Obscurantism.

That made sense. Tur explained that I’d only been in the camp for three years, that I wasn’t yet reeducated, that I still believed in magic potions against disease, and so I kept the bottle with the screw top against diarrhea, and the one with the stopper against constipation. Shishtvanyonov pondered what Tur was saying, and not only believed him but even went so far as to note that while obscurantism was admittedly not good in the camp, it wasn’t such a bad thing in life. He examined both bottles one more time, shook them until the foam rose in their necks, then moved the one with the screw top a little to the right and the one with the wooden stopper exactly the same distance to the left so that the two bottles were touching each other. By then Shishtvanyonov’s mouth had softened and his gaze had mellowed, thanks to the bottles. Tur had another good idea and said:

Get lost. Now.

I suspect that Shishtvanyonov didn’t simply throw the bottles away, for some inexplicable—or even explicable—reason.

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 Prikulitsch 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.