The Hunger Angel

On the heart-shovel



There are many shovels, but the heart-shovel is my favorite. It’s the only one I named. The heart-shovel can’t do anything except load or unload coal, and only loose coal at that.

The heart-shovel has a blade as big as two heads side by side. It’s shaped like a heart, with a large scoop deep enough for five kilos of coal or the hunger angel’s entire backside. The blade has a long, welded neck where it joins the handle. For such a big blade, the heart-shovel’s handle is short. It has a wooden crossbar at the top.

With one hand you hold the neck and with the other you clasp the crossbar at the top. Actually I should say at the bottom, because I think of the blade as being the top, the handle isn’t so important, it can be held closer to the ground or off to the side. So, I grip the heart-blade high on its neck, and the crossbar low on the handle. I keep the two ends in balance, the heart-shovel teeters in my hand like a seesaw, the way my breath teeters inside my chest.

The heart-shovel has to be broken in, until the blade is completely shiny, until the weld on its neck feels like a scar on your hand and the shovel becomes an extension of your arm, its weight in balance with your body.

Unloading coal with the heart-shovel is completely different from loading bricks. With the bricks all you have are your hands, it’s a matter of logistics. But when it comes to coal, the tool you use—the heart-shovel—turns logistics into artistry. Unloading coal is an elegant sport, more so than riding, high diving, or even the noble game of tennis. It’s like figure skating. Or perhaps pair skating, with the shovel as your partner. A single encounter with a heart-shovel is enough for anyone to get swept away.

Unloading coal begins like this: when the dump gate comes crashing open, you stand off to the left and jab your shovel in at a slant, with one foot on the heart-blade as though it were a spade. You clear a good two feet of room and then climb onto the wooden bed. Now you can start shoveling. All your muscles work together to create a swaying, swinging motion. You hold the crossbar with your left hand and the neck of the blade with your right, so that your fingers rest on the seam of the weld. Then you jab underneath the coal and swing your shovel in an arc, toward the back of the truck. As you turn, your weight shifts, and you let the length of the handle slide through your right hand, out over the edge of the gate, so you can dump the coal into the deep. Then you bring the empty shovel back up. Then you plunge the shovel back inside for another load, another swing, another dump.

Once most of the coal has been unloaded and what’s left is too far from the gate, this rotating swing is no longer effective. Now you need to take up a fencing position, with your right foot set gracefully forward, while your left serves as a supporting axis in back, toes gently turned out. You hold the crossbar with your left hand, but this time you don’t hold on to the metal seam with your right hand, you just let the handle slide up and down as you balance the load. You plunge the shovel in, shifting your weight onto your left leg as you add a little push from your right knee. Then you pull the shovel back out, carefully, so that not one piece of coal falls off the heart-blade. You step back onto your right foot, continuing to turn with your whole body. This brings you to a new, third, position, with your left foot gracefully poised, its heel lifted as though dancing, so nothing but the tip of your big toe has any purchase—ready to lunge forward as you fling the coal off the heart-blade into the clouds. For a second the shovel hangs horizontally in the air, only the crossbar is still attached to your left hand. The movements are as beautiful as a tango, a series of ever-changing acute angles against a constant rhythm. And if the coal has to fly even farther, the fencing gives way to waltzing: you move in a triangle, your weight shifting from one leg to the other, and you bend as low as 45 degrees. You fling your coal and it scatters in flight like a flock of birds. And the hunger angel flies as well. He is in the coal, in the heart-shovel, in your joints. He knows that nothing warms the whole body more than the very shoveling that wears it down. But he also knows that hunger devours nearly all the artistry.

Unloading was always a job for two or three people. Not counting the hunger angel, because we weren’t sure whether there was one hunger angel for all of us or if each of us had his own. The hunger angel approached everyone, without restraint. He knew that where things can be unloaded, other things can be loaded. In terms of mathematics, the results could be horrifying: if each person has his own hunger angel, then every time someone dies, a hunger angel is released. Eventually there would be nothing but abandoned hunger angels, abandoned heart-shovels, abandoned coal.





On the hunger angel



Hunger is always there.

Because it’s there, it comes whenever and however it wants to. The causal principle is the work of the hunger angel.

When he comes, he comes with force.

It’s utterly clear:

1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

I myself could do without the heart-shovel. But my hunger depends on it. I wish the heart-shovel were my tool. But the shovel is the master, and I am the tool. I submit to its rule. Nevertheless it’s my favorite shovel. I’ve forced myself to like it. I submit because it is a better master when I’m compliant, when I don’t hate it. I ought to thank it, because when I shovel for my bread I am distracted from my hunger. Since hunger never goes away, the heart-shovel makes sure that shoveling gets put ahead of hunger. Shoveling takes priority when you are shoveling, otherwise your body can’t manage the work.

The coal gets shoveled away, but fortunately there’s never any less of it. New shipments arrive every day from Yasinovataya, so it says on the coal cars. Every day the head becomes possessed by shoveling. The body, steered by the head, becomes the tool of the shovel. And nothing more.

Shoveling is hard. Having to shovel and not being able to is one thing. Wanting to shovel and not being able to brings a double despair—first bowing to the coal and then buckling under. I’m not afraid of the shoveling, but of myself. Afraid my mind might wander while I’m shoveling. That sometimes happened to me early on, sapping the strength I needed for shoveling. The heart-shovel notices right away if I’m not there exclusively for it. Then a thin cord of panic begins to choke me. The double stroke beats away in my temples, stark and severe, it picks up my pulse and becomes a jangle of horns. I’m on the verge of breaking down, my throat swells. The hunger angel climbs to the roof of my mouth and hangs his scales. He puts on my eyes and the heart-shovel goes dizzy, the coal starts to blur. He wears my cheeks over his chin. He sets my breath to swinging, back and forth. The breath swing is a delirium—and what a delirium. I look up, the sky is filled with summer cotton wool, embroidered clouds, very still. My brain twitches, pinned to the sky with a needle, at the only fixed point it has left, where it fantasizes about food. I can see the tables in the air, decked in white, and the gravel crunches beneath my feet. And the sunlight comes stabbing through the middle of my brain. The hunger angel looks at his scales and says:

You’re still not light enough for me. Why don’t you just let go.

I say: You’re deceiving me with my own flesh. It has become your slave. But I am not my flesh. I am something else and I won’t let go. Who I am is no longer the question, but I won’t tell you what I am. What I am is what’s deceiving your scales.

The second winter in the camp was often like that. Early in the morning I come back from the night shift, dead tired, thinking: It’s my time off, I ought to sleep. And I lie down, but I can’t sleep. All 68 beds in the barrack are empty, everyone else is at work. I’m drawn outside into the empty yard of the afternoon. The wind tosses thin snow that crackles against my neck. With open hunger the angel leads me to the garbage pile behind the mess hall. I stumble after him, trailing a little way behind, dangling from the roof of my mouth. Step after step, I follow my feet, assuming they aren’t his. Hunger is my direction, assuming it isn’t his. The angel lets me pass. He isn’t turning shy, he just doesn’t want to be seen with me. Then I bend my back, assuming it isn’t his. My craving is raw, my hands are wild. They are definitely my hands: the angel does not touch garbage. I shove the potato peelings into my mouth and close both eyes, that way I can taste them better, the frozen peels are sweet and glassy.

The hunger angel looks for traces that can’t be erased, and erases traces that can’t be saved. Fields of potatoes pass through my brain, the farm plots angled between the grassy meadows in the Wench, mountain potatoes from back home. The first pale, round, new potatoes, the gnarled glass-blue late potatoes, the fist-sized, leather-shelled, yellow-sweet flour potatoes, the slender, smooth-skinned oval rose-potatoes that stay firm when boiled. Their flowers in the summer: yellow-white, pinkish-gray, or waxy purplish clusters on bitter-green plants with angular stalks.

How quickly I devour the frozen potato peels, spread my lips and shove them into my mouth, one after the other, without stopping, just like the hunger. All of them, so that they form a single long ribbon of potato peel.

All of them, all of them.

Evening comes. And everyone comes home from work. And they all climb into their hunger. Hunger is a bunk, a bed frame, when one hungry person is watching the others. But that is deceptive, I can sense in myself that hunger is climbing into us. We are the frame for the hunger. All of us eat with closed eyes. We feed the hunger all night long. We fatten him up, for the shovel.

I eat a short sleep, then wake up and eat the next short sleep. One dream is like the next, each involves eating. Our compulsion to eat finds a merciful outlet in our dreams, though that, too, is a torment. I eat wedding soup and bread, stuffed peppers and bread, baumtorte. Then I wake up in the barrack, peer at the shortsighted lightbulb. I fall back asleep and eat kohlrabi soup and bread, hasenpfeffer and bread, strawberry ice cream in a silver bowl. Then hazelnut noodles and fancy kipfel pastries. And then sauerkraut stew and bread, rum cake. Then boiled pig’s head with horseradish and bread. And just when I’m about to start in on a haunch of venison with bread and apricot compote, the loudspeaker begins to blare away, and it’s already morning. I eat and eat, but my sleep stays thin, and my hunger shows no sign of tiring.

When the first three of us died of hunger, I knew exactly who they were and the order of their deaths. I thought about each of them for several long days. But three never stays three. One number leads to another. And the higher the number gets, the more hardened it becomes. When you’re nothing but skin and bones and in bad shape yourself, you do what you can to keep the dead at a distance. The mathematical traces show that by March of the fourth year 330 people had died. With numbers like that you can no longer afford separate feelings. We thought of the dead only briefly.

Before it even had a chance to settle, we cast off the dreary mood, chased away the weary sadness. Death always looms large and longs for all. You can’t give him any of your time. He has to be driven away like a bothersome dog.

Never was I so resolutely opposed to death as in the five years in the camp. To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.

The first three deaths in the camp were:

Deaf Mitzi crushed by two coal cars.

Kati Meyer buried alive in the cement tower.

Irma Pfeifer drowned in the mortar.

And in my barrack, the first to die was the machinist Peter Schiel, from coal alcohol poisoning.

In every case the cause of death was different, but hunger was always part of it.

In pursuit of the mathematical traces, I once looked at Oswald Enyeter, the barber, in the mirror and said: Everything simple is pure result, and every one of us has a mouth with a roof. The hunger angel places everyone on his scales, and when someone lets go, he jumps off the heart-shovel. Those are his two laws: causality and the lever principle.

Of course you can’t ignore them, the barber said, but you can’t eat them either. That’s also a law.

I looked in the mirror and said nothing.

Your scalp is covered with little flowers, the barber said. We’ll have to use the clippers, that’s the only thing that can help.

What kind of flowers, I asked.

Little pus flowers, he said.

It was a blessing when he started to clip my hair close to the scalp.

One thing is certain, I thought: the hunger angel knows who his accomplices are. He pampers them and then drops them. Then they shatter. And he with them. He’s made of the same flesh that he’s deceiving. This is consistent with his lever principle.

And what am I to say to that now. Everything that happens is always simple. And there’s a principle to how things proceed, assuming that they last. And if things last for five years you can no longer discern or even notice any principle. And it seems to me that if someone is inclined to talk about it later, there’s nothing that can’t be included: the hunger angel thinks straight, he’s never absent, he doesn’t go away but comes back, he knows his direction and he knows my boundaries, he knows where I come from and what he does to me, he walks to one side with open eyes, he never denies his own existence, he’s disgustingly personal, his sleep is transparent, he’s an expert in orach, sugar, and salt, lice and homesickness, he has water in his belly and in his legs.

All you can do is list.

If you don’t let go, things will be only half as bad, you think. To this day, the hunger angel speaks out of your mouth. But no matter what he says, this remains utterly clear:

1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

Except you’re not allowed to talk about hunger when you’re hungry. Hunger is not a bunk or a bed frame, otherwise it could be measured. Hunger is not an object.





Coal alcohol



During a ransacked night, when there was no thought of sleep, no merciful outlet for our hunger, because the lice would not stop their torture, during such a night Peter Schiel noticed that I wasn’t sleeping either. I sat up in my bed and he sat up in his bed diagonally opposite and asked:

What does give-and-take mean.

I said: Sleep.

Then I lay back down. He stayed sitting up, and I heard a gurgling sound. Bea Zakel had traded Peter Schiel’s wool sweater at the market for some alcohol made from anthracite. He drank it. And didn’t ask me any more questions.

The next morning Karli Halmen said: He asked a few more times what give-and-take meant. You were sound asleep.