The Hunger Angel

Crescent Moon Madonna



When our hunger is at its peak, we talk about childhood and food. The women at greater length than the men. And no one talks at greater length than the women from the countryside. Each of their recipes takes three acts, like a play. The dramatic tension builds as opinions differ over ingredients. And it really heats up over a bread-bacon-and-egg stuffing, when a whole onion is called for, and a half just won’t do, when you need six and not just four cloves of garlic, and when the onions and garlic better be grated and not just minced. And when old rolls make better crumbs than bread, and caraway is better than pepper, and marjoram is better than anything including tarragon, which of course goes with fish but not duck. The play reaches its climax when the mixture clearly has to be inserted just under the skin to absorb the fat during roasting, or absolutely has to be spooned into the stomach cavity so it won’t soak up all the fat. Sometimes the Lutheran stuffed duck wins out, and sometimes the Catholic one.

And when the women from the country make soup noodles out of words, they spend at least half an hour thrashing out how many eggs are needed and whether the dough should be stirred with a spoon or kneaded by hand before it gets rolled out glassy thin but doesn’t tear and is left to dry on the noodle board. And then it’s another quarter hour before the dough gets rolled and cut, before the noodles move off the board and into the soup, before the soup is slowly stirred or quickly brought to a rolling boil and is finally served with either a good handful or just a pinch of freshly chopped parsley sprinkled on top.

The women from the city don’t argue about how many eggs to put in the dough but how few. Because they’re always scrimping on everything, their recipes aren’t even enough for a curtain-raiser.

Telling a recipe takes greater art than telling a joke. The punch line has to hit home even though it’s not funny. Here in the camp it’s already a joke as soon as you say: FIRST TAKE. The punch line is that there’s nothing to take. But no one bothers to say that. Recipes are the jokes of the hunger angel.

To get inside the women’s barracks you have to run a gauntlet. As soon as you step inside you have to say who you’re looking for, without waiting to be asked. Your best bet is to ask a question yourself: Is Trudi here. And while you’re asking you head for Trudi Pelikan’s bed, in the third row on the left. The beds are two-story iron bunks, just like in the men’s barracks. Some have blankets draped as a screen, for evening love. I’m never interested in going behind the blanket, though, all I’m after are recipes. The women think I’m too shy, because I once had books. They believe that reading makes you delicate and sensitive.

I never read the books I brought to the camp. Since paper is strictly forbidden, I kept my books hidden under some bricks behind the barracks until the middle of the first summer. Then I auctioned them off. For 50 pages of Zarathustra cigarette paper I received 1 measure of salt, and 70 pages fetched 1 measure of sugar. For the clothbound Faust in its entirety Peter Schiel made me my own lice comb out of tin. I consumed the lyrical anthology from eight centuries in the form of corn flour and lard and converted the slim volume of Weinheber into millet. That doesn’t make you delicate, just discreet.

Discreetly, after work, I look at the young Russians on duty taking a shower. I’m so discreet that I forget why I’m looking. They would kill me if I remembered.

Once again I was not steadfast. I ate all my bread in the morning. Once again I’m sitting next to Trudi Pelikan on the edge of her bed. The two Zirris sit opposite us, on Corina Marcu’s bed. She’s been at the kolkhoz for weeks. I look at the little golden hairs and the black wart on the emaciated fingers of the Zirris and, so as not to start right in on food, I talk about my childhood.

Every summer we used to take a long vacation in the country—we, meaning my mother, myself, and the servant girl Lodo. We had a summerhouse in the Wench highlands, across from Schnürleibl Mountain. We stayed for eight weeks. During these eight weeks we always took one day-trip to Schässburg, the nearest town. We had to go down into the valley to catch the train. Our station was called Hétur in Hungarian, and Siebenmänner in German. When the bell rang on the roof of the station attendant’s hut, we knew that the train had left Danesch and would be arriving in five minutes. We had to board right from track level, because there was no platform, so when the train pulled up, the door was as high as my chest. Before we climbed on I inspected the car from underneath, the black wheels with the shiny rims, the chains, hooks, and buffers. Then we rode past our swimming place, past Toma’s house and past the field that belonged to old Zacharias—to whom we gave two packs of tobacco each month for letting us walk through his barley to get to the river. Next came the iron bridge, with the yellow water rolling below. Then the eroded sand cliffs, topped by Villa Franca. And then we were in Schässburg, where we always went straight to the elegant Café Martini on the market square. We stood out a little among the guests because we were dressed a bit too casually—my mother in culottes and I in my shorts with knee-high socks, gray so they wouldn’t show dirt so quickly. Only Lodo wore the Sunday clothes she’d brought from her village, a white peasant blouse and a black headscarf with a border of roses and a green silk fringe. Red-shaded roses, as big as apples, bigger than real roses. On that day we could eat whatever we wanted, and as much as we could. We could choose among marzipan truffles, chocolate cake, savarins, cream cake, nut cake roll, Ischler tartlet, cream puffs, hazelnut crisps, rum cake, napoleons, nougat, and doboschtorte. And ice cream—strawberry ice cream in a silver dish or vanilla ice cream in a glass dish or chocolate ice cream in a porcelain bowl, always with whipped cream. And, finally, if we were still able, sour-cherry cake with jelly. My arms felt the cool touch of the marble tabletop and the backs of my knees felt the soft plush of the chair. And up on the black buffet, teetering in the wind of the fan, wearing a long red dress, standing on her tiptoes atop a very thin moon, was the Crescent Moon Madonna.

After I’d finished telling that, all our stomachs started to teeter. Trudi Pelikan reached behind me and took her saved bread from under her pillow. The women picked up their metal bowls and stuck their spoons inside their jackets. I had mine on me, together we went to supper. We took our place in the line in front of the soup kettle. No one said a thing. From the end of the table Trudi Pelikan asked over the clatter of tin: Leo, what was that café called.

Café Martini, I shouted.

Two or three spoonfuls later she asked: And what was that woman on her tiptoes called.

I shouted: Crescent Moon Madonna.





On the bread trap



Everyone gets caught in the bread trap.

In the trap of being steadfast at breakfast, the trap of swapping bread at supper, the trap of saved bread under your pillow at night. The hunger angel’s worst trap is the trap of being steadfast: to be hungry and have bread but decline to eat it. To be hard against yourself, harder than the deep-frozen ground. Every morning the hunger angel says: Think about the evening.

In the evening, over cabbage soup, bread gets swapped, because your own bread always appears smaller than the other person’s. And this holds true for everyone.

Before the swap you feel light-headed, right after the swap you feel doubt. After swapping, the bread I traded seems bigger in the other person’s hand than it did in mine. And the bread I got in return has shrunk. Look how quickly he’s turning away, he has a better eye, he’s come out on top, I better swap again. But the other person feels the same way, he thinks that I’ve come out on top, and now he’s on his second trade as well. Once more the bread shrinks in my hand. I look for a third person and swap with him. Some people are already eating. If my hunger can just hold out a little longer, there’ll be a fourth swap, and a fifth. And if nothing works, I’ll make one more swap and wind up back with my own bread.

Trading bread is something we need to do. The exchange happens fast and never hits the mark. Bread deceives you like the cement. And just as you can become cement-sick, bread can make you swap-sick. The evening hubbub is all about swapping bread, a business of glinting eyes and jittery fingers. In the mornings it’s the beaks on the scales that weigh the bread, in the evening it’s your eyes. To make your trade you not only have to find the right piece of bread, you have to find the right face. You size up the mouth of the other person. The best mouths are long and thin like a scythe. You size up the hollows of the cheeks, to see if the hunger-fur is growing, if the fine white hairs are long and thick enough. Before someone dies of hunger, a hare appears in his face. You think: Bread is wasted on that one, it doesn’t pay to nourish him anymore since the white hare is already on its way. That’s why we call the bread from someone with the white hare cheek-bread.

In the morning there’s no time, but there’s also nothing to trade. The freshly cut slices look alike. By evening, though, each slice has dried differently, either straight and angular or crooked and bulging. The shifting appearance of your bread as it dries gives rise to the feeling that your bread is deceiving you. Everyone has this feeling, even if they don’t swap. And swapping only heightens the feeling. You move from one optical illusion to another. Afterward you still feel cheated, but tired. The swapping that takes you from your own bread to cheek-bread stops the way it began, suddenly. The commotion is over, your eyes move on to the soup. You hold your bread in one hand and your spoon in the other.

Utterly alone inside the pack, each person tries to make his soup go further. The spoons, too, are a pack, as are the tin plates and the slurping and the shoving of feet under the table. The soup warms, it comes alive in your throat. I slurp out loud, I have to hear the soup. I force myself not to count the spoonfuls. Uncounted, there’ll be more than sixteen or nineteen—numbers I have to forget.

One evening the accordion player Konrad Fonn swapped bread with Kati Sentry. She gave him her bread, but he handed her a rectangular piece of wood. She bit into it, was stunned, and swallowed air. No one but the accordion player laughed. And Karli Halmen took the little piece of wood away from Kati Sentry and dropped it in the accordion player’s cabbage soup. Then he returned Kati’s bread to her.

Everyone gets caught in the bread trap. But no one is allowed to take Kati Sentry’s cheek-bread. This, too, is part of the bread law. In the camp we’ve learned to clear away the dead without shuddering. We undress them before they turn stiff, we need their clothes so we won’t freeze to death. And we eat their saved bread. Their death is our gain. But Kati Sentry is alive, even if she doesn’t know where she is. We realize this, so we treat her as something that belongs to all of us. We make up for what we do to one another by standing up for her. We’re capable of many things, but as long as she is living among us, there’s a limit to how far we actually go. And this probably counts for more than Kati Sentry herself.





On coal



There’s as much coal as there is earth, more than enough.

FAT COAL comes from Petrovka. It’s full of gray rock, heavy, wet, and sticky. It has a sour, burnt smell and flaky lumps like graphite. Large amounts of waste rock remain after it is ground in the molina and washed in the moika.

SULFUR COAL comes from Kramatorsk, and generally arrives around noon. The yama is a kind of pit that serves as a giant underground coal silo, covered with a screening grate and protected by an open-air roof. The coal cars are driven onto the grate one by one. Each coal car is a sixty-ton Pullman freight wagon with five bottom chutes. The chutes are opened with hammers, and when each strike hits its mark it sounds like the gong at the cinema. If all goes well, you don’t have to go inside the car at all, the coal comes rattling out in one swoop. The dust makes everything go dark, the sun turns gray in the sky like a tin dish. You breathe in and swallow more dust than air, it grinds in your teeth. Unloading sixty tons of coal takes only fifteen minutes. All that’s left on the grate are a few oversized chunks. Sulfur coal is light, brittle, and dry. It has a crystalline sheen like mica, and consists of lumps and dust, nothing that classifies as nut- or grain-sized. Its name comes from its sulfur content but it has no odor. The sulfur doesn’t show until much later, and then as yellow deposits in the sludge puddles in the factory yard. Or at night, as yellow eyes on the slag heap, glowing like carved-up bits of moon.

MARKA-K-COAL, used for coking, comes from the nearby Rudniy mine. It is neither fat nor dry, not stony, not sandy, not granular. It is everything at once and nothing special and utterly despicable. True, it has a lot of anthracite, but no character. Supposedly it’s the most valuable grade of coal. Anthracite was never a friend to me, not even an annoying one. It was sneaky and difficult to unload, as if you were jabbing your shovel into a knot of rags or a tangle of roots.

The yama is like a train station, only half-covered and just as drafty. Biting wind, piercing cold, short days, electric light even at midday. Coal dust and snow dust mixed together. Or wind and rain slanting into your face, with thicker drops coming through the roof. Or singeing heat and long days with sun and coal until you drop. Marka-k-coal is as difficult to pronounce as it is to unload. The name can only be stuttered, not whispered like the name for gas coal: gazoviy.

GAS COAL is agile. It comes from Yasinovataya. The Ukrainian nachal’nik softens it into HAZOVIY. But to us it sounds like: hase-vey. And that sounds like a hare in pain. Which is why I like it. Every car contains walnuts, hazelnuts, corn kernels, and peas. The five chutes open easily, with the mere swipe of a glove, so to speak. The hazoviy rustles five times, very easy, slate-gray, clean, no waste rock. You watch and think: this hazoviy has a soft heart. Once it’s unloaded, the grate is as clean as if nothing had passed through. We stand overhead on the grate. Below, in the belly of the yama, must be whole mountain ranges and chasms of coal. The hazoviy gets deposited there as well.

My head has deposits of its own. The summer air trembles over the yama just like at home, and the sky is silky just like at home. But no one at home knows I’m still alive. At home Grandfather is eating cold cucumber salad and thinks that I am dead. Grandmother is clucking to the chickens, scattering their feed in the room-sized shade beside the shed, and thinks that I am dead. Mother and Father may be at the summerhouse in the Wench. Mother is wearing her homemade sailor suit. She’s lying in the tall grass of a mountain meadow and thinks that I’m already in heaven. And I can’t shake her and say: So, do you love me. See, I’m still alive. And Father is sitting in the kitchen, slowly filling his shells with shot, tiny balls of tempered lead for hunting hares in the waning summer. Hase-vey.





How the seconds drag



I went hunting.

Kobelian had left me alone out on the steppe, in the second waning summer, and I killed a steppe-dog with my shovel. It let out a short whistle, like a train. How the seconds drag, when a forehead has been split in two, right over the snout. Hase-vey.

I wanted to eat it.

There’s nothing here but grass. But you can’t stake things with grass, and you can’t skin things with a shovel. I didn’t have the tools, and I didn’t have the heart.

Or the time. Kobelian was back, he’d seen what I had done. I left the animal just the way it was, how the seconds drag, when a forehead has been split in two, right over the snout. Hase-vey.

Father, once you wanted to teach me how to whistle back to find someone who is lost.





On yellow sand



Sand can be any shade of yellow, from peroxide blond to canary, or even with a tinge of pink. Yellow sand is tender, it makes you sad to see it get mixed in the gray cement.

It was late in the evening, once again Kobelian was taking Karli Halmen and me out for a private delivery, this time of yellow sand. He said: We’re going to my house. I’m not building anything, but the holiday’s coming up and, after all, people aren’t animals, you have to have a little beauty, a little culture.

Karli Halmen and I understood that yellow sand meant culture. Even in the camp yard and at the factory they strewed it along the pathways after spring and fall cleaning. The ornamental spring sand was for the end of the war and the ornamental fall sand was for the October Revolution. May 9 was the first anniversary of the peace. But neither the peace nor the anniversary was of any use to us, here in our second year in camp. Then came October. The ornamental spring sand was long gone, carried off by the wind on dry days, and washed away by the torrents of rain. Now the yard was strewn with fresh yellow fall sand, like sugar crystals. Sand to beautify the great October, but by no means a sign that we’d be allowed to go home.

Not all our deliveries were made for beautification. We hauled yellow sand by the ton, the construction sites devoured it. The sand quarry was called the kar’yer. It was inexhaustible, at least three hundred meters long and twenty to thirty meters deep, nothing but sand everywhere. An arena of sand inside an open quarry of sand. Enough to serve the entire district. And the more sand that was hauled, the higher the arena grew, as the quarry ate deeper and deeper into the earth.

If you were khitriy, or clever, you steered the truck so it backed right into the slope, then you didn’t have to shovel the sand upward, but could casually load it on the same level, or even comfortably scoop it down into the bed.

The kar’yer was fascinating, like the imprint of some giant toe. Pure sand, not a crumb of earth. Layers of sand, straight and level, one on top of the other: wax-white, skin-pale, pallid-yellow, bright-yellow, ochre, and pink. Cool and moist. As you shoveled, the sand fluffed up, drying as it flew through the air. It practically shoveled itself. The truck was quickly filled. And because it was a dump truck, it unloaded itself as well. So Karli Halmen and I stayed behind in the quarry until Kobelian came back for the next load.

When he did return, he lay down in the sand and stayed that way while we loaded up. He even closed his eyes, perhaps he fell asleep. Once the truck was full, we gently nudged his shoe with the tip of a shovel. He jumped up and stomped over to the cab. The imprint of his body stayed in the sand, as if there were two Kobelians, a hollow one lying down and another standing by the cab, with damp trousers. Before he climbed inside he spat twice into the sand, grabbed the steering wheel with one hand, and rubbed his eyes with the other. Then he got in and drove off.

Now Karli and I let ourselves drop into the sand and listened to it trickling around us, felt it clinging to our bodies. The sky curved overhead, a grassy scar marked where it met the sand. Time was still and smooth, a microscopic twinkling all around. Faraway places came to mind, as if we’d escaped and belonged to any sand anywhere in the world but not here in this place of forced labor. We fled by lying still. I looked all around: I had managed to slip below the horizon without danger and without consequences. The sand cradled my back from below, and the sky drew my face upward. Soon the sky became blind, and my eyes pulled it back down and my head was filled with its motionless blue through and through. I was blanketed by the sky and no one had any idea where I was. Not even homesickness could find me. In the sand, heaven did not set the time in motion, but neither could heaven turn back the time, just as the yellow sand couldn’t make the peace mean more than it did, not after three years, and not after four. We were in the camp after the fourth peace anniversary as well.

Karli Halmen lay facedown in his own hollow. The scars left from the bread theft shimmered like wax through his short hair. The sunlight lit up his ear, revealing the red silk of tiny veins. I thought about my last rendezvous in the Alder Park and the Neptune Baths with the twice-my-age married Romanian. How long had he waited for me that first time I didn’t appear. And how often did he wait before he realized that I wasn’t coming back the next time, or the time after that, or ever again. It would be at least half an hour before Kobelian came back.

And once again something raised my hand, I wanted to caress Karli Halmen. Luckily he helped me out of my temptation. He raised his face—he had bitten into the sand. He chewed the sand, it grated in his mouth, and he swallowed. I froze, and he filled his mouth a second time. The grains spilled from his cheeks as he ate. And the sand left the imprint of a sieve on his cheeks and nose and on his forehead. And the tears on both cheeks left a pale brown string.

As a child I’d take a peach and bite into it, he said, then I’d drop it on the ground so it would land where I’d bitten. Then I’d pick it up and eat the sandy spot and drop it again. Until all that was left was the pit. My father took me to the doctor because I wasn’t normal, because I liked the taste of sand. Now I have more than enough sand and can’t remember what a peach looks like at all.

I said: Yellow, with delicate fuzz and a little red silk around the pit.

We heard the truck coming and got up.

Karli Halmen began shoveling. Tears were running down his face as he filled his shovel. When he sent the sand flying, the tears ran left, into his mouth, and right, into his ear.





The Russians have their ways, too



Karli Halmen and I were once again riding across the steppe in the Lancia. Steppe-dogs darting off in all directions. Tire tracks everywhere, flattened bundles of grass, lacquered reddish-brown with dried blood. Everywhere swarms of flies, parading over squashed fur and spilled entrails, some with a fresh blue-white sheen like coiled strings of pearls, others bluish red and half gone to rot, and others withered, like dried flowers. Some dogs had been hurled to the side of the tire tracks, seemingly untouched by the wheels, as though asleep. Karli Halmen said: When they’re dead they look like flatirons. In no way did they look like flatirons. How did that ever occur to him, I’d already forgotten the word flatiron.

There were days when the steppe-dogs didn’t fear the wheels as much as they should. Perhaps on those days the wind whooshed like the truck, and the similarity confused their instincts. As the wheels approached they’d start to run, but in a daze, not at all as if their life depended on it. I was certain that Kobelian never took the trouble to avoid hitting a steppe-dog. And equally certain that he had never hit one, never caused one to whistle underneath his wheels. Not that you would have heard its high-pitched squeal—the Lancia was too loud.

Even so, I know how a steppe-dog whistles when it gets hit by a truck, because I hear it in my mind on every trip. A short, heartbreaking sound, three syllables in a row: ha-se-vey. Exactly like when you kill one with the shovel, because it happens just as quickly. And I also know how at that spot the earth trembles in fright and sends out ripples, like a fat stone falling into water. And I know how your lip burns right afterward, because you bite into it when you strike with all your strength and kill with one blow.

Ever since I left that one dog lying there, I’ve been telling myself that you can’t eat steppe-dogs, even if you don’t feel a trace of compassion for the living ones or the slightest disgust for the dead. If I felt either, it wouldn’t be about the steppe-dogs but about me. The disgust would be with myself, for hesitating out of compassion.

But if we have time on our next trip, if Kobelian lets Karli and me out of the truck even for a little while, just for as long as it takes him to stuff three or four sacks full of young grass for his goats. Only I don’t think Karli Halmen would do it, not with me there. I’d end up wasting several minutes trying to talk him into it, and then it would be too late, even if we did have enough time. I’d have to tell him: There’s no reason to be ashamed in front of a steppe-dog, or in front of the steppe. I think he’d be embarrassed in front of himself, at least more than I would be in front of myself. And more than I would be in front of Kobelian. I’d probably have to ask him why he was making Kobelian out to be some kind of standard, and tell him that if Kobelian were as far from home as we are, he’d undoubtedly eat steppe-dogs too.

Some days the steppe was covered with brown-lacquered crushed bundles of grass that looked as though they had appeared overnight. And overnight all the clouds had melted away. The only things left were the skinny cranes in the sky and the wild, fat blowflies on the ground. But not a single dead steppe-dog lying in the grass.

What do you think happened to them, I’d ask Karli. What are all those Russians doing, walking through the steppe and bending over and sitting down like that. Do you think they’re just resting, that they’re all tired. They have a tangled nest inside their skulls just like we do, and the same empty stomach. The Russians have their ways, too, I’d say to him. And they have all the time they need, they live here on the steppe. Believe me, I’d say to Karli, Kobelian doesn’t have anything against eating steppe-dogs. Why else would he keep a short-handled shovel in the cab next to the brake—after all, he picks his grass by hand. When we’re not with him, he doesn’t just stop to pick goat grass. I’d say all that to Karli, and I wouldn’t be lying, because I’d have no idea what the truth was. Even if I did know, it would only be one truth, and the opposite would be another. Besides, I’d say, you and I are different when we’re with Kobelian than we are without him. And I’m different without you. You’re the only one who thinks you’re never different. But when you stole bread you were different, and I was different, and all the others, too—but that I’d never say to him, because it would sound like a reproach.

Fur stinks when it burns. Hurry up and build the fire, I’d say, if Karli Halmen did decide to join in, I’ll skin the animal.

Another week had passed. Karli Halmen and I were once again riding across the steppe in the Lancia. The air was pale, the grass orange, the sun was turning the steppe into late fall. Night frost had sugared the steppe-dogs that had been run over. We drove past an old man. He was standing in a whirl of dust, waving to us with a shovel. It had a short handle. A sack was slung over his shoulder, it was only a quarter full and looked heavy. Karli said: That’s not grass he’s getting. If we have time on our next trip, if Kobelian lets us out of the truck even for a little while. I know Kobelian wouldn’t mind, but you, you’d rather be tenderhearted, you’d never join in.

They don’t call it blind hunger for no reason. Karli Halmen and I didn’t know much about each other. We were together too much. And Kobelian didn’t know anything about us and we didn’t know anything about him. We were all different than we are.