The Hunger Angel

Black poplars



It was the night of December 31, New Year’s Eve, in our second year. Halfway through the night the loudspeakers summoned us to the Appellplatz. We were chased down the main street of the camp, flanked by eight guards with rifles and dogs, and followed by a truck hauling a trailer. In the tall snow behind the factory, where the empty fields began, we were told to line up in rows along the brick wall and wait. We thought: This is the night we will be shot.

I pushed into the front row so I could be one of the first. That way I wouldn’t have to load corpses onto the truck, which was already waiting off the road. Shishtvanyonov and Tur Prikulitsch had crawled into the cab, the motor was running to keep them warm. The guards paced up and down. The dogs huddled together, their eyes squeezed shut by the cold. Now and then they lifted a paw so it wouldn’t get frostbitten.

We stood there, our faces aged, our eyebrows covered with frost, our lips shivering. Some of the women mumbled prayers. This is the end, I told myself. My grandmother’s farewell was: I know you’ll come back. That, too, was in the middle of the night, but also in the middle of the world. At home they’ve already welcomed the New Year, maybe raised a glass to me, a midnight toast to my being alive. I hope they thought about me in the first hours of the New Year and then climbed into their warm beds. By now my grandmother’s wedding ring should be lying on the nightstand, she takes it off every evening because it’s too tight. And I am standing here, waiting to be shot.

I saw all of us standing in a giant box. Its top was made of sky, lacquered black by the night and decorated with sharply whetted stars. The bottom was lined knee-deep with cotton wool, so that we would fall into softness. And the sides of the giant box were draped with stiff, icy brocade, silken tangles of fringe, endless lace. Toward the back of the box, between the watchtowers, a catafalque of snow was lying on the wall of the camp. And on top of that, as tall as the towers, a stack of bunk beds reached to the sky, a tiered coffin with room for all of us to be laid out, just like in the barracks. And over the topmost tier was the black-lacquered cover of the night. From the towers at the head and foot of the catafalque, two honor guards dressed in black kept watch over the dead. At the head, nearest the camp gate, the guard lights shined like a candelabra. At the darker foot end, the snow-draped crown of the mulberry tree made a magnificent bouquet, with all our names on countless paper bows. Snow muffles sound, I thought, almost no one will hear the shooting. Our families are slumbering away, tipsy, unsuspecting, worn out from celebrating New Year’s Eve in the middle of the world. Maybe they’re dreaming about our enchanted burial in the New Year.

I had no desire to leave the box with the tiered coffins. Fear of death can become a kind of trance if you try to master it but don’t quite succeed. Even the icy cold that keeps you from moving softens the horror. Death by freezing lulled me into a state where I could surrender to death by shooting.

But then two of the heavily wrapped Russians from the trailer tossed shovels at our feet. Tur Prikulitsch and one of the Russians laid out four knotted ropes parallel to the factory wall, forming two corridors between the looming darkness and the snowy brightness. Shishtvanyonov had fallen asleep in the cab. Perhaps he was drunk. He slept with his chin on his chest, like a forgotten passenger left in the train at the last station. He slept the whole time we shoveled. No, we shoveled the whole time he slept, because Tur Prikulitsch had to wait for his instructions. The whole time he slept, we went on digging two ditches between the ropes, for our execution. I don’t know how long we dug, until the sky turned gray. And that’s how long I heard my shovel repeating: I know you’ll come back, I know you’ll come back. The shoveling had shaken me awake, I now preferred to go on starving and freezing and slaving away for the Russians rather than get shot. My grandmother was right: I will come back. Although I qualified that with: But do you know how hard this is.

Then Shishtvanyonov climbed out of the cab, rubbed his chin, and shook his legs, perhaps because they were still asleep. He waved the heavily wrapped guards over. They opened the tailgate and threw down pickaxes and crowbars. Shishtvanyonov spoke unusually briefly and quietly, gesticulating with his index finger. He climbed back inside and the empty truck drove away with him.

Tur had to give Shishtvanyonov’s mumbling the tone of a command and shouted: Dig holes for trees.

We searched for the tools in the snow as if they were presents. The earth was frozen hard as bone. The pickaxes bounced off the ground, the crowbars clanged like iron against iron. Nut-sized clods sprayed into our faces. I sweated in the cold, and froze as I sweated. I split into two halves, one ember, one ice. My upper body was scorched with fire, it bent and blazed away automatically for fear of the quota. My lower body was numb with frost, my legs pressed cold and dead into my gut.

By afternoon our hands were bloody, but the holes were only knuckle-deep. And that’s how we left them.

The holes didn’t get finished until late spring, when two long rows of trees were planted. They grew quickly. These trees didn’t grow anywhere else, not on the steppe, not in the Russian village, nowhere nearby. Throughout our time in the camp no one knew what they were called. The taller they grew, the whiter their branches and trunks became. Not delicate and wax-white translucent like birches, but robust, with dull skin like plaster paste.

During my first summer home, I saw these plaster-white camp trees in the Alder Park, old and huge. Uncle Edwin looked in his tree atlas and found: Stout and sturdy, this rapid-growing tree can shoot up to a height of 35 meters, with a trunk reaching two meters in diameter. Specimens can attain an age of 200 years.

Uncle Edwin had no idea how correct, or rather, how fitting the description was, when he read out the word SHOOT. He said: This tree doesn’t seem to need a lot of care and it’s quite beautiful. But its name is a royal lie. Why is it called BLACK POPLAR when its trunk is so white.

I didn’t contradict him. I only thought to myself: If you’ve spent half the night under a black-lacquered sky, waiting to be shot, the name isn’t a lie at all.





Handkerchief and mice



In the camp there were many kinds of cloth. Life moved from one cloth to the next. From the footwrap to the hand towel, to the bread cloth, the orach pillowcase, the door-to-door begging cloth, and even to a handkerchief, if you happened to have one.

The Russians in the camp had no need of handkerchiefs. They pressed one nostril shut with their index finger and blew the snot out through the second like dough, right onto the ground. Then they shut the cleaned nostril and the snot sprayed out the other. I practiced this but without success. No one in the camp used a handkerchief to wipe his nose. Whoever had one used it for sugar and salt, and when it was all in tatters, as toilet paper.

One time a Russian woman gave me a handkerchief as a present. It was after work, very cold. Hunger had driven me back to the Russian village. I went door-to-door with a piece of anthracite coal, which people used for heating. I knocked at one dwelling. An old Russian woman answered, took my coal, and let me in. The room was low, the window set in the wall at the level of my knee. Two scrawny, gray-white spotted chickens were perched on a stool. One of them had a comb hanging over its eyes. It flipped its head like a person without hands whose hair has fallen into his face.

The old woman spoke for some time. I only understood a word here and there but could sense what it was about. She was afraid of her neighbors, she’d been living all alone for a long time with just her two chickens, yet she’d rather talk to them than to her neighbors. She had a son my age named Boris who was as far from home as I was, but in the opposite direction, in a camp in Siberia, a penal battalion, because a neighbor had denounced him. Perhaps you and my son Boris will be lucky, she said, and you’ll be able to go home soon. She pointed to the chair, and I sat down at the end of the table. She took the cap off my head and laid it on the table. She set a wooden spoon next to the cap. Then she went to the stove and ladled potato soup out of a pot into a tin bowl. She must have given me a whole liter. I spooned away; she stood over my shoulder and watched.

The soup was hot, I slurped it down, watching her out of the corner of my eye. And she nodded. I wanted to eat slowly, because I wanted the soup to last. But my hunger crouched in front of the bowl like a ravenous dog. The two chickens had fluffed out their feathers, pulled in their feet, and were asleep. The soup heated me down to my toes. My nose was dripping. Podozhdi, wait, said the Russian woman, then went into the next room and came back with a snow-white handkerchief. She placed it in my hand and closed my fingers around it as a sign I should keep it. It was a gift. But I didn’t dare blow my nose. What happened in that moment went beyond going door-to-door, beyond me and her and a handkerchief. It was about her son. And it made me feel good and it didn’t, because she or I or both of us had gone slightly too far. She had to do something for her son because I was there, and because he was as far away from home as I was. I felt bad that I was there, that I wasn’t him. And I was embarrassed that she felt the same way but couldn’t show it because she could no longer bear worrying about him. And I could no longer bear being two people at once, two people who had been deported—that was too much for me. That wasn’t as simple as two chickens roosting next to each other on a stool. I was already one burden too many for myself.

Afterward, back on the street, I used my coarse, dirty coal cloth as a handkerchief. After blowing my nose I wrapped it around my neck, it became my scarf. As I went on, I used the two ends of the scarf to wipe my eyes, several times and very quickly, so no one would notice. Of course no one was watching me, but I didn’t want to notice it either. I was all too aware that there’s an unspoken law that you should never start to cry if you have too many reasons to do so. I told myself that my tears were due to the cold, and I believed myself.

The snow-white handkerchief was made of the most delicate batiste. It was old, a nice piece from the time of the tsars, with a hand-embroidered silk ajour border. The openwork between the stitches was very precise, and there were little rosettes in the corners. I hadn’t seen anything that beautiful in a long time. At home, the beauty of normal everyday objects wasn’t worth mentioning. And in the camp it was better to forget such beauty. But the beauty of this handkerchief got to me. It made my heart ache. Would he ever come home, this old Russian woman’s son, this man who was himself but also me. To keep these thoughts at bay I started singing. For the sake of both of us, I sang the Cattle Car Blues:



The daphne’s blooming in the wood

The ditches still have snow

The letter that you sent to me

Has filled my heart with woe

The sky was running by—plump, cushiony clouds. Then the early moon looked at me with the face of my mother. The clouds moved one cushion underneath her chin and another one just behind her right cheek. Then they pulled that cushion back out through her left cheek. And I asked the moon: Is my mother now so frail. Is she sick. Is our house still there. Is she still at home, or is she in a camp as well. Is she even still alive. Does she know that I’m alive, or is she already weeping for her dead son whenever she thinks of me.

That was my second winter in the camp, we weren’t allowed to write letters home, or send any sign of life. The birch trees in the Russian village were bare, under their branches the snowy rooftops looked like crooked beds in an open-air barrack. And in the early twilight, the birch skin showed a different paleness than during the day, and a different whiteness from the snow. I saw the wind swimming gracefully through the branches. A small, wood-brown dog came trotting toward me down the path along the woven willow fence. He had a triangular head and long legs, straight and thin as sticks. White breath came flying out of his mouth as though he were eating my handkerchief while drumming with his legs. The little dog ran past me as if I were nothing more than the shadow of the fence. And he was right: on my way home to the camp I was just another ordinary Russian object in the twilight.

No one had ever used the white batiste handkerchief, and I didn’t either. I kept it in my suitcase to the last day, as a kind of relic from a mother and a son. And eventually took it home.

A handkerchief like that has no business in the camp. Each year I could have traded it at the market for something to eat, for sugar or salt, or even millet. The temptation was there, and the hunger was blind enough. What kept me from doing so was the belief that the handkerchief was my fate. And once you let your fate pass out of your hands, you’re lost. I was convinced that my grandmother’s parting sentence I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK had turned into a handkerchief. I’m not ashamed to say that the handkerchief was the only person who looked after me in the camp. I’m certain of that even today.

Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don’t expect from them.

At the head of my bed, behind my pillow, is my trunk, and underneath my pillow, wrapped in the bread cloth, is the bread I’ve saved from my mouth, precious beyond belief. One morning I heard a squeal inside the pillow, right under my ear. I lifted my head and looked in wonder: between the bread cloth and the pillow was a bright pink tangle the size of my ear. Six blind mice, each smaller than a child’s finger. With skin like silk stockings that twitch because they’re living flesh. Mice born out of nothingness, a gift for no reason. All of a sudden I felt proud of them, as if they, too, might feel proud of me. Proud because my ear had had children, because out of all the 68 beds in the barrack these mice were born in mine, and out of all people they wanted me as their father. They lay there by themselves, I never saw a mother. They made me ashamed, because they trusted me so fully. I immediately felt that I loved them and I knew that I had to get rid of them right away, before they ate up the bread and before anyone else woke up and noticed.

I lifted the tangle of mice onto the bread cloth, cupping my fingers like a nest in order not to hurt them. I crept out of the barrack and carried the nest across the yard. My legs shook as I hurried to keep from being spotted by a guard or smelled by a dog. But my eyes never left the cloth, so that I wouldn’t drop a single mouse. Then I stood in the latrine and shook the cloth out over the hole. The mice splashed into the pit. Not a peep. I took a deep breath. Done.

When I was nine I found a newborn gray-green kitten on an old carpet in the farthest corner of our washroom. Its eyes were stuck together. I picked it up and stroked its belly. It hissed and bit my little finger and wouldn’t let go. I saw blood. I squeezed back with my thumb and index finger—I think I squeezed as hard as I could, around its neck. My heart was pounding, like after a fight. Because it died, the kitten caught me in the act of killing. The fact that it wasn’t intentional only made it worse. Monstrous tenderness gets tangled in guilt differently from intentional cruelty. More deeply. And for longer.

What that kitten has in common with the mice: not a peep.

And what sets the kitten apart from the mice: with the mice it was all about intent and compassion. With the kitten it was resentment: wanting to pet and winding up bitten. That’s one thing. The other is compulsion. Once you start to squeeze, there’s no going back.