The Hunger Angel Part 2

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. s.h.i.+shtvanyonov had fallen asleep in the cab. Perhaps he was drunk. He slept with his chin on his chest, like a forgotten pa.s.senger 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 s.h.i.+shtvanyonov 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. s.h.i.+shtvanyonov 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 s.h.i.+shtvanyonov'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 b.l.o.o.d.y, 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 st.u.r.dy, 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 embarra.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.e, 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 st.i.tches 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, cus.h.i.+ony clouds. Then the early moon looked at me with the face of my mother. The clouds moved one cus.h.i.+on underneath her chin and another one just behind her right cheek. Then they pulled that cus.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.s 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 compa.s.sion. 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.

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 s.h.i.+ny, 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 n.o.ble 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fts, 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, s.h.i.+fting 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 s.h.i.+pments 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 s.h.i.+ft, 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, a.s.suming they aren't his. Hunger is my direction, a.s.suming it isn't his. The angel lets me pa.s.s. He isn't turning shy, he just doesn't want to be seen with me. Then I bend my back, a.s.suming 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 gla.s.sy.

The hunger angel looks for traces that can't be erased, and erases traces that can't be saved. Fields of potatoes pa.s.s through my brain, the farm plots angled between the gra.s.sy meadows in the Wench, mountain potatoes from back home. The first pale, round, new potatoes, the gnarled gla.s.s-blue late potatoes, the fist-sized, leather-sh.e.l.led, 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 cl.u.s.ters 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, a.s.suming 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.

The zeppelin.

Behind the factory is a place with no c.o.ke ovens, no extractor fans, no steaming pipes, where the tracks come to an end, where all we can see from the mouth of the coal silo is a heap of rubble overgrown with flowering weeds, a pitiful bare patch of earth at the edge of the wilderness, crisscrossed by well-trodden paths. There, out of sight to all but the white cloud drifting from the cooling tower far across the steppe, is a gigantic rusted pipe, a discarded seamless steel tube from before the war. The pipe is seven or eight meters long and two meters high and has been welded together at the end closest to the silo. The end that faces the empty fields is open. A mighty pipe, no one knows how it wound up here. But everyone knows what purpose it has served since we arrived in the camp. It's called THE ZEPPELIN.

This zeppelin may not float high and silver in the sky, but it does set your mind adrift. It's a by-the-hour hotel tolerated by the camp administration and the nachal'niks-a trysting place where the women from our camp meet with German POWs who are clearing the rubble in the wasteland or in the bombed-out factories. Wildcat weddings was how Anton Kowatsch put it: Open your eyes sometime when you're shoveling coal, he told me.

As late as the summer of Stalingrad, that last summer on the veranda at home, a lovethirsty female voice had spoken from the radio, her accent straight from the Reich: Every German woman should give the Fuhrer a child. My Aunt Fini asked my mother: How are we to do that, is the Fuhrer planning to come here to Transylvania every night, or are we supposed to line up one by one and visit him in the Reich.

We were eating jugged hare, my mother licked the sauce off a bay leaf, pulling the leaf slowly out of her mouth. And when she had licked it clean, she stuck it in her b.u.t.tonhole. I had a feeling they were only pretending to make fun of him. The twinkle in their eyes suggested they'd be more than a little happy to oblige. My father noticed as well: he wrinkled his forehead and forgot to chew for a while. And my grandmother said: I thought you didn't like men with mustaches. Send the Fuhrer a telegram that he better shave first.

Since the silo yard was vacant after work, and the sun still glaring high above the gra.s.s, I went down the path to the zeppelin and looked inside. The front of the pipe was shadowy, the middle was very dim, and the back was pitch-dark. The next day I opened my eyes while I was shoveling coal. Late in the afternoon I saw three or four men coming through the weeds. They wore quilted work jackets like ours, except theirs had stripes. Just outside the zeppelin they sat down in the gra.s.s up to their necks. Soon a torn pillowcase appeared on a stick outside the pipe-a sign for occupied. A while later the little flag was gone. Then it quickly reappeared and disappeared once more. As soon as the first men had gone, the next three or four came and sat down in the gra.s.s.

I also saw how the women in the work brigades covered for each other. While three or four wandered off into the weeds, the others engaged the nachal'nik in conversation. When he asked about the ones who had left they explained it was because of stomach cramps and diarrhea. That was true, too, at least for some-but of course he couldn't tell for how many. The nachal'nik chewed on his lip and listened for a while, but then kept turning his head more and more frequently in the direction of the zeppelin. At that point I saw the women resort to a new tactic, they whispered to our singer, Loni Mich, who began singing loud enough to shatter gla.s.s, drowning out all the noise made by our shoveling- Evening spreads across the vale.

Softly sings the nightingale.

-and suddenly all the women who had disappeared were back. They crowded in among us and shoveled away as if nothing had happened.

I liked the name zeppelin: it resonated with the silvery forgetting of our misery, and with the quick, catlike coupling. I realized that these unknown German men had everything our men were lacking. They had been sent by the Fuhrer into the world as warriors, and they also were the right age, neither childishly young nor overripe like our men. Of course they, too, were miserable and degraded, but they had seen battle, had fought in the war. For our women they were heroes, a notch above the forced laborers, offering more than evening love in a barrack bed behind a blanket. Evening love in the barrack remained indispensable. But for our women it smelled of their own hards.h.i.+p, the same coal and the same longing for home. And it led to the same worn-out give-and-take, with the man providing the food, while the woman cleaned and consoled. Love in the zeppelin was free of all concerns except for the hoisting and lowering of the little white flag.

Anton Kowatsch was convinced I would disapprove of the women going to the zeppelin. No one could have guessed that I understood them all too well, that I knew all about arousal in disheveled clothes, about roving desire and gasping delight in the Alder Park and the Neptune baths. No one could imagine that I was reliving my own rendezvous, more and more often: SWALLOW, FIR, EAR, THREAD, ORIOLE, CAP, HARE, CAT, SEAGULL. Then PEARL. No one had any idea I was carrying so many cover names in my head, and so much silence around my neck.

Even inside the zeppelin, love had its seasons. The wildcat weddings came to an end in our second year, first because of the winter, and later because of the hunger. When the hunger angel was running rampant during the skinandbones time, when male and female could not be distinguished from each other, coal was still unloaded at the silo. But the paths in the weeds were overgrown. Purple tufted vetch clambered among the white yarrow and the red orach, the blue burdocks bloomed, and the thistles as well. The zeppelin slept and belonged to the rust, just as the coal belonged to the camp, the gra.s.s belonged to the steppe, and we belonged to hunger.

On the phantom pain of the cuckoo clock.

One evening in the summer of the second year, a cuckoo clock appeared on the wall above the tin bucket that contained our drinking water, right next to the door. No one could figure out how it got there. It belonged to the barrack and to the nail it hung from, and to no one else. But it bothered all of us together and each of us individually. In the empty afternoons, the ticking listened and listened, whether we were coming or going or sleeping. Or simply lying in bed, lost in our thoughts, or waiting because we were too hungry to fall asleep and too drained to get up. But after the waiting nothing came, except the ticking in the back of our throat, doubled by the ticking from the clock.

Why did we need a cuckoo clock here. Not to measure the time. We had nothing to measure, the anthem from the loudspeaker woke us every morning, and in the evening it sent us off to bed. Whenever we were needed, they came to get us, from the yard, the mess hall, from our sleep. The factory sirens were a clock for us, as were the white cooling tower cloud and the little bells from the c.o.ke oven batteries.

Presumably it was Anton Kowatsch, the drummer, who had dragged in the cuckoo clock. Although he swore he had nothing to do with it, he wound it every day. As long as it's hanging there it might as well run, he said.

It was a perfectly normal cuckoo clock, but the cuckoo wasn't normal. At three-quarters past the hour it called the half hour, and at a quarter past it called the hour. When it reached the hour, it either forgot everything or sounded the wrong time, calling twice as much or only half of what it should. Anton Kowatsch claimed that the cuckoo was calling the right time, but in different parts of the world. He was infatuated with the clock and its cuckoo, the two fir-cone weights made of heavy iron, and the speedy pendulum. He would have happily let the cuckoo call out the other parts of the world all through the night. But no one else in the barrack wanted to lie awake or sleep in the lands called by the cuckoo.

Anton Kowatsch was a lathe operator in the factory, and in the camp orchestra he was a percussionist and played the drum for our pleated version of La Paloma. It pained him that no one in the camp orchestra could play big-band swing the way his partners had back in Karansebesch. He was also a tinkerer, and had fas.h.i.+oned his instruments at the lathe in the metal shop. He wanted the worldly cuckoo clock to conform to the Russian day-and-night discipline. By narrowing the voice aperture in the cuckoo mechanism he tried to give the cuckoo a short, hollow night sound that was one octave lower than its bright day sound, which he hoped to lengthen. But before he could get a handle on the habits of the cuckoo, someone tore it out of the clock. The little door was wrenched partly off its hinge. When the clockwork wanted to animate the bird to sing, the little door opened up halfway, but instead of the cuckoo all that came out of the housing was a small piece of rubber, like an earthworm. The rubber vibrated, and you could hear a pitiful rattling noise that sounded just like the coughing, throat-clearing, snoring, farting, and sighing we did in our sleep. In that way the rubber worm protected our nighttime rest.

Anton Kowatsch became as excited about the worm as he was about the cuckoo, and especially about the sound it made. Each evening, when the loudspeaker anthem chased us into the barrack, Anton Kowatsch used a bent wire to switch the little piece of rubber to its nighttime rattle. He'd linger next to the clock, look at his reflection in the water bucket, and wait for the first rattle, as if hypnotized. When the little door opened, he'd hunch over a bit, and his left eye, which was slightly smaller than his right, would sparkle right on time. One evening, after the worm had rattled, he said to himself more than to me: Well well, it looks like our worm has picked up a little phantom pain from the cuckoo.