The Hunger Angel

The ersatz-brother



At the beginning of November, Tur Prikulitsch summons me to his office.

I have a letter from home.

My mouth is smacking with joy so much I can’t close it. Tur opens one half of a cabinet and searches through a box. The closed half has a picture of Stalin pasted on the door: his cheekbones are high and gray like two slag heaps, his nose is as impressive as an iron bridge, his mustache looks like a swallow. The coal stove next to the table is clanging away, a tin pot of black tea is humming on top. Next to the stove is the bucket with anthracite. Tur says: Put in a little more coal while I look for your letter.

I pick through the bucket for three suitable chunks, the flame shoots up like a white hare jumping through a yellow hare. Then the yellow one jumps through the white one, the hares tear each other apart and whistle in two-part harmony: Hase-vey. The fire blows heat into my face and the waiting blows fear. I close the little feed door and Tur closes the cabinet. He hands me a Red Cross postcard.

The postcard has a photo that’s been sewn on with white thread, evenly stitched by machine. The photo is of a baby. Tur looks me in the face, and I look at the card, and the child sewn onto the card looks me in the face, and from the door of the cabinet Stalin looks all of us in the face.

Underneath the photo is written:

Robert, b. April 17, 1947.

My mother’s handwriting. The baby is wearing a crocheted bonnet with a bow under his chin. I read once again: Robert, b. April 17, 1947. Nothing else. The handwriting is like a stab, my mother’s practical thinking, saving space by abbreviating born with b. My pulse is throbbing in the card and not in the hand that’s holding it. Tur places the mail register and a pencil on the table, I’m supposed to find my name and sign. He goes to the stove, spreads out his hands, and listens to the tea water humming and the hares whistling in the fire. First the columns start to swim before my eyes, then the letters. Then I kneel at the edge of the table, drop my hands on the table and my face in my hands, and sob.

Do you want some tea, asks Tur. Do you want brandy. I thought you’d be happy.

Yes, I say, I’m happy, because we still have our old sewing machine at home.

I drink a glass of brandy with Tur Prikulitsch, and then another. Much too much for skinandbones people. The brandy burns in my stomach and the tears burn in my face. It’s been forever since I cried, I’ve taught my homesickness to be dry-eyed. I’ve even managed to make it ownerless. Tur presses a pencil into my hand and points to the proper column. My hand shakes as I write: Leopold. I need your full name, says Tur. You write the rest, I say, I can’t.

Then I step out into the snow, the sewn-on child tucked away in the pocket of my fufaika. Looking in at the office window, I can see the cushion used to stop the draft, the one Trudi Pelikan told me about. It’s very evenly stitched and stuffed. Corina Marcu’s hair couldn’t have been enough, there has to be other hair inside the cushion as well. Funnels of white start flowing from the lightbulbs, the rear watchtower is swinging back and forth in the sky. Zither Lommer’s white beans are strewn all across the snowyard. The snow slips farther and farther away, along with the camp wall. But on the path where I am walking, it rises up to my neck. The wind has a sharp scythe. I have no feet, I’m walking on my cheeks, and soon I have no cheeks. I have nothing but the sewn-on child, my ersatz-brother. My parents had a baby because they’ve given up on me. Just as my mother abbreviated born with b., she’ll abbreviate died with d. She’s already done so. Isn’t my mother ashamed of the space below the precisely stitched white thread, below the handwritten line, the space in which I can’t help but read:

As far as I’m concerned you can die where you are, we’ll have more room at home.





The white space below the line



My mother’s Red Cross postcard came in November. It had taken seven months to get to the camp. She’d sent it from home in April. By then the sewn-on child was already nine months old.

I stowed the postcard with my ersatz-brother in the bottom of my suitcase, next to the white handkerchief. My mother had written only one line on the card, and not a word in that line was about me. I didn’t even appear in the white space below the line.

In the Russian village I’d learned to beg for food. But I wasn’t going to beg my mother to mention my name. For the two years that followed I forced myself not to answer her card. Over the past two years the hunger angel had taught me how to beg, and in the two that followed he taught me tough pride, as rough and raw as being steadfast with bread. He tormented me cruelly. Day after day he showed me my mother forgetting all about me so that she could feed her ersatz-child. Tidy and well nourished, she pushed her white baby carriage back and forth inside my head. And I watched her from all sides, from every place I didn’t appear, including the white space below the line.





Minkowski’s wire



Everyone in the camp has his own here and now. Everyone touches the ground in rubber galoshes or wooden shoes, even if he’s twelve meters below the earth, sitting on the board of silence.

When Albert Gion and I aren’t working, we sit on a bench made of two stones and a board. The lightbulb burns in its wire cage, and a coke fire burns in the iron basket. We rest and don’t speak. I often ask myself, Can I still do arithmetic. Given that we’re now in our fourth year of camp, and our third year of peace, there must have also been a first and second peace year here in the cellar, just like there must have been a time before the peace, without me. And the number of day and night shifts must correspond to the number of layers in the earth. I should have counted my shifts with Albert Gion, but can I still do arithmetic.

Can I still read. My father gave me a book for Christmas: Physics and You. According to the book, each and every thing—every person and every event—has its own place and its own time. This is a law of nature. It follows that each and every thing has its reason for being in the world, and also a wire that connects it to everything else that exists, the MINKOWSKI-WIRE. As I sit here, I have a Minkowski-wire running straight up from my head. When I bend, it bends, and when I move, it moves with me. So I’m not alone. Every corner in the cellar also has its wire, as does every person in the camp. And no wire touches another. Above all our heads is a strictly ordered forest of wires. Every person is in his place and breathes with his wire. The cooling tower breathes double, since the cooling-tower cloud likely has a wire of its own. But the book doesn’t account for all the things inside a labor camp. For instance, the hunger angel must have a Minkowski-wire of his own, only it’s not clear from the book if the hunger angel’s wire always stays attached to us, which is why he never really goes away when he says he’s coming back. Maybe the book would have impressed the hunger angel. I should have brought it along.

I almost always sit in silence on the cellar bench and peer into my head as if through a bright crack in a door. The book also said that every person is moving through his own film at every moment and in every place, and that the reels all spin at sixteen frames per second. PROBABILITY OF PRESENCE was another memorable phrase in Physics and You. As if there were a chance I might not really be here. Then I could be elsewhere without even having to want to leave here. And that’s because as a body in a specific place, in this case the cellar, I am a particle, but because of my Minkowski-wire I am also a wave. And as a wave I can also be in another place, and someone who isn’t here can be here with me. I can pick out anyone I want. But instead of a person I’d rather it be an object, that would go better with the layers of earth in the cellar. For instance, the DINOSAUR, which was the name of the long-distance bus that ran between Hermannstadt and the spa town ten kilometers away: very elegant, dark red, with chrome bumpers. My mother and Aunt Fini used to take the DINOSAUR to the baths. When they came back they let me lick their bare arms to taste the salt from the baths. And they told me how the salt collected in pearly scales on the grass stalks in the meadow. Through the bright door-crack in my head I cause the DINOSAUR to run between me and the cellar. It has its own bright door-crack and its own Minkowski-wire. Our wires never touch, but our bright door-cracks join below the lightbulb, where the fly ash is swirling around with its Minkowski-wire. And on the bench beside me Albert Gion sits quietly with his Minkowski-wire. The bench is the board of silence, because Albert Gion can’t tell me which film he’s in at the moment, just like I can’t tell him that I have a dark-red long-distance bus with chrome bumpers right here in the cellar. Every shift is a work of art. But its Minkowski-wire is nothing but a steel cable with little carts moving up and down. And every cart with its wire is nothing but a load of slag twelve meters below the earth.

Sometimes I’m convinced I died a hundred years ago, and that the soles of my feet are transparent. When I look through the bright crack in my head, what I’m really searching for is this stubborn shy hope that at some time and in some place someone is thinking of me. Even if that person cannot know where I am at any given moment. It may be that I’m the old gap-toothed man in the upper-left corner of a wedding photo that doesn’t exist, and simultaneously a skinny child in a schoolyard that also doesn’t exist. Likewise, I am both the rival and the brother of my ersatz-brother, and he is also my rival because we both exist at the same moment. But we exist at different moments, too, since we have not seen each other ever, that is, at any one point in time.

And at the same moment I know that the hunger angel sees me dead, but the death that he sees has not happened to me, not yet.





Black dogs



I step out of the cellar into the blinding morning snow. Four statues made of black slag are standing on the watchtowers. They’re not soldiers, but four black dogs. The first and the third statues move their heads, while the second and fourth stay frozen. Then the first dog moves its legs, the fourth moves its rifle, and the second and third stay frozen.

The snow on the roof of the mess hall is a white linen sheet. Why did Fenya put the bread cloth on the roof.

The cooling-tower cloud is a white baby carriage rolling toward the white birches in the Russian village. One day, when the white batiste handkerchief was in its third winter inside my suitcase, I went out begging again. I knocked on the door of the old Russian woman. A man my age opened. I asked if his name was Boris. He said NYET. I asked if an old lady lived here. He said NYET.

In the mess hall the bread is on its way. Someday when I’m alone at the bread counter, I’ll screw up my courage and ask Fenya: When am I going home, I’m practically a statue made of black slag. Fenya will say: Well, you have tracks in the cellar, and you have a mountain. The little carts are always going home, you should go with them. You used to like taking the train into the mountains. And I’ll say: But that was when I was still at home. Well, she’ll say, so everything will be just like it was at home.

But then I enter the mess hall and take my place in line. The bread is covered with white snow from the roof. I could work things out so I’m the last one in line, so I could be alone with Fenya when she administers my bread. But I don’t dare, her saintliness is too cold, and her face has the same three noses it always does—two of them being the beaks of her scales.





A spoon here, a spoon there



It was Advent once again, and I was amazed to see my little wire tree with the green fir-wool set up on the table in the barrack. Paul Gast the lawyer had kept it in his suitcase, and this year he decorated it with three bread-ball ornaments. Because we’ve been here three years, he said. He could afford to treat us to the bread ornaments because he stole the bread from his wife, but he didn’t think we knew that.

Heidrun Gast lived in one of the women’s barracks, as married couples weren’t allowed to live together. She already had the dead-monkey face, the slit mouth running from one ear to the other, swollen eyes, and the white hare in the hollows of her cheeks. Since summer she’d been working in the garage, where she had to fill the truck batteries. Her face was more pockmarked than her fufaika, from all the sulfuric acid.

Every day in the mess hall we saw what the hunger angel could do to a marriage. The lawyer searched for his wife like a watchdog. If she was sitting at a table between other people, he gave her arm a tug, then squeezed in close to her so that her soup was next to his. When she looked away for a second he dipped his spoon in her bowl. If she noticed what he was doing he said: A spoon here, a spoon there.

January had barely begun. The little tree with the bread ornaments was still on the table in our barrack when Heidrun Gast died. And the bread ornaments were still hanging on the little tree when Paul Gast started wearing his wife’s coat with the small rounded collar and the tattered pocket flaps made of rabbit fur. He also started to get shaved more often than he used to.

By the middle of January our singer Loni Mich was wearing the coat. And the lawyer was allowed behind her blanket. Around this time the barber asked: Anyone here have children back home.

The lawyer said: I do.

How many, asked the barber.

Three, said the lawyer.

His eyes stared out of the shaving lather and fixed on the door, where my padded cap with the earflaps hung on a hook like a duck that had been shot out of the sky. The lawyer heaved a deep sigh, blowing a gob of foam off the back of the barber’s hand onto the ground. It landed between the chair legs, right next to the lawyer’s rubber galoshes. Wrapped around the soles of his galoshes and tied off at the ankles were two brand-new, glistening pieces of copper wire.





Once my hunger angel was a lawyer



Don’t ever tell this to my husband, said Heidrun Gast. She was sitting between Trudi Pelikan and me, because Paul Gast the lawyer hadn’t come to eat that day, he had an abscessed tooth. So Heidrun Gast was able to talk.

And what she told us was this: The garage where she worked was housed in a bombed-out factory. The ceiling over the repair bay had a hole as big as a tree canopy. She could look up through the hole and see people clearing rubble from the next level of the factory. Now and then a potato was lying on the floor of the repair bay, which a man had tossed down especially for Heidrun Gast. Always the same man. Heidrun Gast looked up at him, and he looked down at her. They couldn’t talk, he was surrounded by guards up in the factory just as she was down in the garage. The man wore a striped fufaika, he was a German prisoner of war. The last potato was a very small one, Heidrun Gast found it lying among the toolboxes. It’s possible that the potato had been there one or two days and she just hadn’t seen it. Either the man had tossed it down in more of a hurry than usual or else the potato had rolled farther than usual because it was so small. Or he had deliberately tossed it in a different spot. At first Heidrun Gast wasn’t sure the potato had really come from the man above and hadn’t been placed there by the nachal’nik as a trap. She nudged it halfway under the stairs with the tip of her shoe, so the potato couldn’t be seen unless you knew it was there. She wanted to make sure the nachal’nik wasn’t spying on her. She waited until just before quitting time, and when she picked up the potato she noticed there was a thread tied around it. As always, Heidrun Gast had looked up through the hole as often as she could that day, but there was no sign of the man. Back in her barrack that evening she bit off the thread. The potato had been sliced in two, and a scrap of cloth placed between the two halves. She could make out some writing: ELFRIEDE RO, ERSTRASS, ENSBU, and, on the bottom, ERMAN. The other letters had been eaten away by the potato starch. After the lawyer had finished his soup in the mess hall and returned to his barracks, Heidrun Gast went out to the yard, found a late fire, tossed in the scrap of cloth, and roasted the two potato halves. I realize that I ate a message, she told us, and that was sixty-one days ago. I know he didn’t go home, and I’m sure he didn’t die, he was still healthy. He just vanished from the face of the earth, she said, like the potato in my mouth. I miss him.

A thin film of ice quivered in her eyes. The hollows of her cheeks were furred in white and clinging to her bones. Her hunger angel had to see there was nothing more to be gotten from her. I felt queasy, it seemed that the more Heidrun Gast confided in me, the sooner her hunger angel was likely to leave her. As if her hunger angel were looking to move in with me.

Only the hunger angel could forbid Paul Gast from eating his wife’s food. But the hunger angel is a thief himself. All the hunger angels know each other, I thought, just as we all know each other. And they have the same professions we do. Paul Gast’s hunger angel is a lawyer just like he is. And Heidrun Gast’s hunger angel fetches and carries for her husband’s. Mine also fetches and carries, but I have no idea for whom.

I said: Heidrun, eat your soup.

I can’t, she said.

I reached for her soup. Trudi Pelikan was also eyeing it furtively. And Albert Gion from across the table. I began spooning away, without counting. I didn’t slurp, because slurping takes longer. I ate for myself, without Heidrun Gast or Trudi Pelikan or Albert Gion. I forgot everything around me, the entire mess hall. I sucked the soup into my heart. Faced with this bowl of soup, my hunger angel ceased being a servant and became a lawyer.

I shoved the empty dish over to Heidrun Gast, until it touched the little finger of her left hand. She licked her unused spoon and wiped it dry on her jacket, as if she and not I had eaten the soup. Either she could no longer tell whether she was eating or watching, or she was acting as though she had eaten. One way or the other, you could see her hunger angel stretched out inside her slit mouth, mercifully pale on the outside and dark blue inside. He may have even been able to stand in a horizontal position. And it was clear that he was counting her days in the thin cabbage soup. But it’s also possible that he had forgotten Heidrun Gast and was calibrating the scale in the back of my throat. Or that as we were eating he was figuring out how much he could get from me and how long it would be before he got it.