The Hunger Angel

Cement



There was never enough cement. But always more than enough coal. Also enough cinder blocks, gravel, and sand. But the cement always ran out. It dwindled all by itself. You had to beware of the cement—it could become a nightmare. Not only did it disappear all by itself but also into itself. Then everything was full of cement and there was no cement left.

The brigade leader shouted: Take care with the cement.

The foreman shouted: Be sparing with the cement.

And when the wind was blowing: Don’t let the cement fly away.

And when it rained or snowed: Don’t let the cement get wet.

Cement sacks are made of paper. But the paper is too thin to hold a full sack. Whether carried by one person or two, by its belly or its four corners—it tears. If the sack tears, you can’t be sparing with the cement. If the torn sack is dry, half the cement winds up on the ground. If the torn sack is wet, half the cement sticks to the paper. There’s nothing to be done: the more you try to be sparing with the cement, the more it wastes itself. The cement is treacherous, just like dust on the road, and fog, and smoke—it flies into the air, crawls on the ground, sticks to the skin. It can be seen everywhere and grasped nowhere.

You have to be sparing with the cement, but what you really have to watch out for when it comes to cement is yourself. You carry the sack with care, but even so, the cement inside grows less and less. You get accused of destroying the economy, of being a Fascist, a saboteur, a cement thief. You stumble ahead, deaf to all the yelling. You shove the wheelbarrows full of mortar up a slanted board onto the scaffold. The board sways, you grip the wheelbarrow tightly. The swaying might send you flying into the sky, because your empty stomach is climbing into your head.

What are the cement guards worried about. A forced laborer has nothing but his quilted work clothes—his fufaika—on his body, and a suitcase and a bunk inside his barrack. Why would anyone steal cement. It’s not something we take because we’re stealing, it’s dirt that forces itself onto our bodies. Every day we feel this blind hunger, but cement cannot be eaten. We freeze and we sweat, but cement doesn’t warm and doesn’t cool. It stirs suspicion because it flies and crawls and sticks, because it loses all form, vanishes soft and gray for no reason, like a wild hare.

The construction site was behind the camp, next to a stable that hadn’t housed a horse in years, only empty troughs. Six houses were being built for Russians—six two-family dwellings, each with three rooms. So we were told, but we imagined there’d be at least five families in each house, because from going door-to-door we had seen how poor the people were, and the many emaciated schoolchildren. Both girls and boys had shaved heads and light-blue smocks. Always lined up in pairs, holding hands, singing patriotic songs as they marched through the mud beside the construction site. A silent, rotund schoolmistress traipsed back and forth, looking morose and swinging her buttocks like a ship.

Eight brigades were assigned to the site. They dug foundations, hauled cinder blocks and sacks of cement, stirred the lime slurry and the concrete, poured the foundations, mixed the mortar, carried it in hods, carted it to the scaffold in the wheelbarrow, made the plaster for the walls. All six houses were going up at the same time, people were constantly running here and there, it was utter mayhem and nothing got done. You could see the workers, and you could see the mortar and the bricks, but you couldn’t see the walls going up. That’s the funny thing about construction: you never actually notice the walls growing, even if you watch the whole day. And then three weeks later, all of a sudden, they’re up, so they must have been growing—perhaps during the night, all on their own, just like the moon. They grow every bit as inexplicably as the cement disappears.

The cement guards order you around, but no sooner do you start one thing than they chase you off to do another. You get slapped and kicked. You become dour and melancholy on the inside and slavish and cowardly on the outside. The cement eats away at your gums. When you open your mouth your lips tear like the cement-sack paper. So you keep your mouth shut and obey.

Mistrust grows higher than any wall. In our construction-site misery everyone suspects everyone else of taking advantage, of protecting himself, of carrying the lighter end of the cement sack. Everyone is humiliated by the shouting, deceived by the cement, betrayed by the construction site. If someone dies, the most the foreman says is: Zhalko, ochyen’ zhalko—What a pity. Right after that he changes his tone and barks: Vnimanye—Attention.

We slog away and hear our own heartbeats and: Take care with the cement. Be sparing with the cement. Don’t let the cement fly away. Don’t let the cement get wet. But the cement scatters on its own, it squanders itself, it could not be more miserly toward us. We live the way the cement wants us to. Cement is the thief, he has robbed us, not the other way around. Not only that: the cement makes you spiteful. It sows mistrust when it scatters itself, cement is a schemer.

Every evening on the way home, as soon as the work site was far enough behind me and I had enough distance from the cement, I realized that we weren’t betraying one another. We were all being betrayed by the Russians and their cement. But even though I knew this, the very next day I suspected everybody all over again. And they felt it. They suspected me, too. And I felt it. The cement and the hunger angel are accomplices. Hunger pulls open your pores and crawls in. Once it’s inside, the cement seals them back shut and there you are, cemented in.

In the cement tower the cement can turn deadly. The structure is 40 meters high, with no windows. Considering the height, there isn’t much inside, but there is enough to drown in. The cement is loose, not in sacks. We use our bare hands to scoop it into buckets. This cement is old but spry, nasty, and alert. It lies in wait for us, slides onto us, gray and silent, faster than we can jerk back and run away. Cement can flow, and when it does it runs faster and smoother than water. It can carry you off and drown you.

I became cement-sick. For weeks I saw cement everywhere: the clear sky was cement that had been smoothed out, the cloudy sky was rough cement. Rain tied threads of cement to the earth. My metal bowl flecked with gray was made of cement. The watchdogs had cement fur, as did the rats in the kitchen waste behind the mess hall. The lizards crawling between the shacks were clad in cement. The mulberry trees were covered with tentworm nests, funnels of silk and cement. I tried wiping them out of my eyes when the sun was glaring but that’s not where they were. And in the evenings a cement bird perched on the edge of the well at the roll-call grounds. His song was scratchy, a cement song. Paul Gast the lawyer recognized the bird from back home—a calandra lark. I asked: Is it made of cement there, too. He hesitated before saying: Back home it comes from the south.

I didn’t ask him the other question, because you could see it in the pictures in the barracks and hear it from the loudspeakers: Stalin’s cheekbones and voice may have been made of steel, but his mustache was pure cement.

In the camp every type of work made you dirty. But nothing was as relentless as the cement. Cement is as impossible to escape as the dust of the earth, you can’t tell where it comes from because it’s already there. And apart from hunger, the only thing in our minds that’s as quick as cement is homesickness. It steals from you the same way cement does, and you can drown in it as well. It seems to me there’s only one thing in our minds quicker than cement, and that’s fear. And that’s the only explanation I can give for why, as early as the beginning of the first summer, I had to jot this down in secret on a piece of thin brown cement-sack paper:



SUN HIGH IN THE HAZE

YELLOW CORN, NO TIME

I didn’t write more because cement has to be spared. Actually I wanted to write something completely different:



Deep and crooked and lurking reddish

the half-moon stands in the sky

already setting

But I didn’t write that, just said it quietly under my breath, where it shattered, the cement grinding in my teeth. Then I was silent.

You have to be sparing with paper, too. And keep it well hidden. Anyone caught writing on paper was sent to detention—a concrete box, eleven steps belowground, so narrow all you can do is stand. Stinking of excrement and full of vermin. Iron bars at the top.

In the evening, in the shuffle of footsteps on the way home, I often thought: There’s less and less cement, it can disappear all by itself. I’m made of cement, too, and there’s less and less of me. So why can’t I disappear.





The lime women



The lime women are one of eight brigades at the site. First they haul the wagon with the lumps of lime up the steep hill next to the stable, then down to the edge of the construction site, where the slaking pit is located. The wagon consists of a large trapezoidal wooden box on wheels. On each side of the shaft, five women are harnessed with leather straps around their shoulders and hips. A guard walks alongside. The women’s eyes are thick and wet from the strain of pulling, and their mouths are half open.

Trudi Pelikan is one of the lime women.

When rain spills over the steppe for weeks and the mud around the slaking pit dries into furry flowers, the alderflies become unbearable. Trudi Pelikan says they smell the salt in your eyes and the sweetness in your mouth. And the weaker you are, the more your eyes tear up and the more sugar is in your spit. Trudi Pelikan was harnessed in the rearmost position, because she was too weak for the front. The alderflies didn’t alight on the corners of her eyes but right on her pupils, and not on her lips but right inside her mouth. Trudi Pelikan stumbled. When she fell, the wagon rolled over her toes.





A motley crew



Trudi Pelikan and I, Leopold Auberg, came from Hermannstadt. We didn’t know each other before we had to climb inside the cattle car. Artur Prikulitsch and Beatrice Zakel—Tur and Bea—had known each other since they were children. They came from the village of Lugi in the mountains, in the Carpatho-Ukraine, where three lands meet. Oswald Enyeter came from the same region, from Rachiv. And so did the accordion player Konrad Fonn, from the little town of Sucholol. My truck companion Karli Halmen came from Kleinbetschkerek, and Albert Gion, with whom I was later in the slag cellar, came from Arad. Sarah Kaunz with the silky hairs on her hands came from Wurmloch, and Sarah Wandschneider with the wart on her ring finger came from Kastenholz. They didn’t know each other before the camp, yet they looked as if they could be sisters. In the camp they were nicknamed the two Zirris. Irma Pfeifer came from the small town of Deta, and deaf Mitzi—Annamarie Berg—from Mediasch. Paul Gast the lawyer and his wife Heidrun Gast were from Oberwischau. Anton Kowatsch the drummer came from the Banat mountain region, from Karansebesch. Katharina Seidel, whom we called Kati Sentry, came from Bakowa. She was feebleminded and for all five years didn’t realize where she was. The mechanic Peter Schiel, who died from drinking coal alcohol, came from Bogarosch. Ilona Mich—Singing Loni—came from Lugosch. Herr Reusch, the tailor, from Guttenbrunn. And so on.

We were all Germans and had been rounded up at home. All except Corina Marcu, who arrived at the camp with bottle curls, a fur coat, patent-leather shoes, and a cat brooch on her velvet dress. She was Romanian; the transport guards had picked her up the night we stopped in Buzău and stuck her in the cattle car. Presumably they had to fill a gap in the list, replace a woman who had died during the trip. Corina Marcu froze to death in the third year while shoveling snow on a railroad embankment. And David Lommer, known as Zither Lommer because he played the zither, was Jewish. Because his tailor shop had been expropriated, he traveled around the country, plying his trade, stopping at the better homes. He had no idea how he wound up as a German on the Russians’ list. His home was in Dorohoi, in Moldavia. His parents and his wife and four children had fled the Fascists. He didn’t know where they were, and they didn’t know where he was, even before he was deported. He was sewing a woolen suit for an officer’s wife in Grosspold when he was picked up.

None of us were part of any war, but because we were Germans, the Russians considered us guilty of Hitler’s crimes. Even Zither Lommer. He had to spend three and a half years in the camp. One morning a black car pulled up in front of the construction site. Two strangers wearing fine karakul caps climbed out and spoke with the foreman. Then they took Zither Lommer away. From that day on, his bed in the barrack was empty. Bea Zakel and Tur Prikulitsch probably sold his trunk and his zither at the market.

Bea Zakel said the men in the karakul hats were high-ranking party officials from Kiev. They supposedly took Zither Lommer to Odessa, and from there shipped him back to Romania.

Because he came from the same region as Tur Prikulitsch, Oswald Enyeter could get away with asking why Odessa. Tur said: Lommer had no business being here, and from Odessa he can go wherever he wants. Addressing the barber, and not Tur, I said: But where is he supposed to go. There’s no one left for him at home. At that point Tur Prikulitsch was holding his breath, to keep still while Oswald Enyeter pruned his nose hairs with a rusty pair of scissors. The barber finished the second nostril and brushed the snippets of hair off Tur’s chin like so many ants, then turned away from the mirror so Prikulitsch couldn’t see that he was winking. Are you satisfied, he asked. Tur said: With my nose, yes.

Outside in the yard the rain had stopped. The bread cart came clattering up the drive, through the puddles. Every day the same man pulled the cart with the large loaves through the camp gate to the yard behind the mess hall. The loaves were always covered with a white linen cloth, like a pile of corpses. I asked what rank the bread man had. The barber said none at all, that he had either inherited or stolen the uniform. With so much bread and so much hunger he needed the uniform to gain some authority.

The cart had two high wooden wheels and two long wooden arms. It resembled the big cart the scissor-grinders rolled through the streets from town to town, all summer long. As soon as the bread man stepped away from the cart, he limped. According to the barber, he had a wooden leg made of shovel handles that had been nailed together. I envied the bread man; it’s true he had one leg too few, but he had more than enough bread. Like me, Oswald Enyeter the barber also watched the bread cart pass by. But he only knew half-hunger; he probably made deals with the bread man every now and then. Even Tur Prikulitsch, whose stomach was full, watched the bread man, either to monitor his movements or simply out of absentmindedness. I didn’t know why, but I had the impression that the barber wanted to call Tur Prikulitsch’s attention away from the bread cart. Otherwise why would he have said, just as I sat on the stool: What a motley crew we are here in the camp. Everybody coming from someplace else, just like a hotel you live in for a while.

That was in the time of the construction site. But what did words like MOTLEY CREW, HOTEL, and A WHILE have to do with us. The barber was not an accomplice of the camp administration, but he was privileged. He was allowed to live and sleep in his barber room, while we were stuck in our barracks, our brains clogged with cement. Of course, during the day, Oswald Enyeter didn’t have the place to himself, since we were always coming and going. He had to cut and shave every wretch who stepped inside, and some men cried when they saw themselves in the mirror. Month after month he had to watch us coming through his door looking seedier and seedier. Throughout the five years he knew exactly who was still coming but whose body was already half wax. And who was no longer coming because he was too exhausted, or homesick, or dead. I don’t think I could have put up with that. On the other hand, Oswald Enyeter didn’t have to put up with work brigades or days cursed with cement, or night shifts in the cellar. He was besieged by our misery, but not betrayed by the cement. He had to console us, and we took advantage of him, because we couldn’t help it. Because we were blinded by hunger and sick for home, withdrawn from time and outside ourselves and done with the world. Just as the world was done with us.

That day I jumped up from the chair and shouted that unlike him I didn’t have a hotel room, just cement sacks. Then I kicked the stool so hard it nearly fell over, and said: And believe me, Herr Enyeter, I’m not one of the owners of this hotel, like you are.

Leo, sit down, he said, I thought we were on a first-name basis. You’re wrong, the owner is Tur Prikulitsch. And Tur stuck the pinkish-red tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and nodded. He was so stupid he felt flattered. Then he checked himself in the mirror, combed through his hair, and blew through the comb. After that, he placed the comb on the table and the scissors on the comb, then the scissors next to the comb and the comb on top of the scissors. Then he left. Once Tur Prikulitsch was outside, Oswald Enyeter said: Did you see that, he’s the owner, he’s the one who keeps us in check, not me. Sit back down. You know, you don’t have to say anything to the cement sacks, but I have to say something to everybody. Be happy you still know what a hotel is. By now everything people think they remember has long since changed into something else. Everything except the camp, I said.

That day I didn’t sit back down on the stool. I held firm and walked away. Back then I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I was just as vain as Tur Prikulitsch. I felt flattered that Enyeter had become conciliatory, though he didn’t need to be. The more he pleaded with me to stay, the more determined I was to leave unshaven. With stubble on my face, the cement was even more unrelenting. It wasn’t until four days later that I went back and sat down on the stool, as if nothing had happened. I was so tired from the construction work, I couldn’t care less about his hotel. He didn’t mention it either.

Weeks later, when the bread man pulled the empty cart up to the gate, I remembered about the HOTEL. By then I liked the idea. I used it against the dreariness. Coming back from unloading cement on the night shift, I trotted like a calf through the morning air. In our barrack, three people were still asleep. As dirty as I was, I lay down on my bed and said to myself: At least nobody needs a key in this hotel. There’s no key check, either, no locks, it’s all open living, just like in Sweden. My barrack and my trunk are always open. My valuables are sugar and salt. Under my pillow is the dried bread I’ve rescued from my mouth. It’s a treasure and guards itself. I am a calf in Sweden and a calf always does the same thing upon entering its hotel room—before anything else, it looks under the pillow to make sure the bread is still there.

For half a summer I was assigned to the cement, and trotted around like a calf in Sweden. I came off the day or night shift and played hotel in my head. Some days I had to laugh to myself. And some days the HOTEL just caved in completely, in me, that is, and tears came to my eyes. I wanted to right myself, but I no longer knew who I was. HOTEL was a cursed word we couldn’t inhabit because we were living inside another word, one that sounded close but was very far away: APPELL.