The Hunger Angel Part 3

I liked the clock.

I didn't like the crazy cuckoo, or the worm, or the speedy pendulum. But I did like the two fir-cone weights. They were nothing more than heavy, inert iron, but I saw the fir forests in our mountains at home. The dense black-green mantle of needles high overhead. And below, strictly aligned, as far as the eye can see, the trunks-wooden legs that stand when you stand and walk when you walk and run when you run. But not the way you do, more like an army. You feel afraid, your heart starts pounding beneath your tongue, and then you notice the shiny needle-fall underfoot, this bright calm scattered with fir cones. You bend over and pick up two and stick one in your pocket. The other you hold in your hand, and suddenly you're no longer alone. The fir cones help you remember that the army is nothing but a forest, and that being lost in the forest is nothing more than going for a walk.

My father took great pains to teach me how to whistle, and how to tell where a whistle was coming from, so you could find a person who was lost in the woods by whistling back. I understood the usefulness of whistling, but I didn't understand the right way to blow the air through my lips. I did it backward, filling my chest with air instead of sending sound to my lips. I never learned to whistle. Every time he tried to show me, all I could think about was what I saw, how men's lips glisten on the inside, like rose quartz. He said that sooner or later I'd realize how useful it was. He meant the whistling. But I was thinking about the gla.s.sy skin inside the lips.

Actually the cuckoo clock belonged to the hunger angel. What was important in the camp was not our time, but rather the question: Cuckoo, how much longer will I live.

Kati Sentry.

Katharina Seidel came from Bakowa in the Banat. Either someone from her village paid to be taken off the list and some scoundrel grabbed her instead, or the scoundrel was a s.a.d.i.s.t and she was on the list from the beginning. Kati was born feebleminded and all five years in the camp she had no idea where she was. A small version of a large woman, she had stopped growing while still a child, except in girth. She had a long brown braid, and her head was circled with a wreath of tightly curled hair. At first the women combed her hair every day, and later, after the lice plague began, every few days.

Kati Sentry wasn't suited for any type of work. She didn't understand what a quota was, or a command, or a punishment. She disrupted the course of the shift. During the second winter, to keep her busy, they came up with a sentry job. She was to go from one barrack to the next, keeping watch.

For a while she'd come to our barrack, sit at the small table, cross her arms, screw up her eyes, and peer into the p.r.i.c.kly light from the bulb. The chair was too high for her, her feet didn't reach the floor. When she got bored she held on to the edge of the table and rocked back and forth. She could hardly stand that for more than an hour, then she'd be off to another barrack.

By summer she had stopped going to any barrack but ours, because she liked the cuckoo clock, although she didn't know how to tell time. She'd spend the night sitting under the light, arms crossed, waiting for the rubber worm to come out of his little door. When the worm started to rattle, she would open her mouth as if to join in, but wouldn't make any sound. By the time the worm came out again she'd be asleep with her face on the table. Before falling asleep she always laid her braid on the table and held on to it all night long. Maybe that way she wasn't so alone. Maybe she was afraid in this forest of beds for sixty-eight men. Maybe the braid helped her the way the fir cones helped me in the forest. Or perhaps she held her braid simply to make sure no one stole it.

The braid did get stolen, but not by us. As punishment for falling asleep, Tur Prikulitsch had her taken to the sick barrack, where the female medic was told to shave Kati Sentry's head. That evening Kati came to the mess hall with her cut-off braid and laid it on the table like a snake. She dunked the upper end in her soup and held it to her bare head so it would take root. Then she tried to feed the bottom end, and cried. Heidrun Gast took the braid away and told her it would be better to forget it. After dinner Heidrun Gast tossed the braid into one of the little fires in the yard and Kati Sentry looked on in silence as it burned.

Even with a shaved head Kati Sentry liked the cuckoo clock, and even with a shaved head she fell asleep after the rubber worm's first rattle, her hand clasping the missing braid. And she continued holding her hand that way even after her hair started growing back. But she also continued to fall asleep on duty, and several months later her head was shaved once again. After that her hair grew back so spa.r.s.e that you saw more lice bites than hair. But that still didn't stop her from falling asleep on duty, until Tur Prikulitsch finally understood that you can put any human being to the drill, no matter how wretched, but you can't bend a feeble mind to your will. The sentry post was abolished.

Once during roll call, before her head was first shaved, Kati Sentry was standing in the middle of a row. She took off her cap, placed it on the snow, and sat down. Shishtvanyonov shouted: Get up, Fascist! Tur Prikulitsch jerked her up by her braid, but when he let go she sat down again. He kicked her in the small of her back until she lay doubled up on the ground, holding her braid in her fist and her fist in her mouth. The end of her braid stuck out as though she'd bitten off half a little brown bird. She lay there until after the Appell, when one of us helped her up and took her to the mess hall.

Tur Prikulitsch could order us around as he wished, but he disgraced himself with his coa.r.s.e treatment of Kati Sentry. And when that backfired, he disgraced himself with his show of sympathy. Because she was beyond correction and beyond help, Kati Sentry showed how hollow his authority really was. In order to save face, Tur Prikulitsch softened. He had Kati Sentry sit next to him on the ground during roll call. For hours she would sit on her quilted cap and watch him in amazement as though he were a marionette. After roll call, her cap would be frozen to the snow and had to be pried off the ground.

For three summer evenings in a row Kati Sentry disrupted the roll call. For a while she sat quietly next to Prikulitsch, then scooted close to his feet and started polishing his shoe with her cap. He stepped on her hand. She pulled it away and polished the other shoe. Then he stepped on her hand with his other foot. When he lifted his foot she jumped up and ran through the a.s.sembled ranks, fluttering her arms and cooing like a dove. We all held our breath, and Tur let out a hollow laugh like a big turkey-c.o.c.k. Three times Kati Sentry managed to polish his shoes and become a dove. After that she was no longer allowed at roll call. Instead she had to mop the floors in the barracks. She took a bucket of water from the well, wrung out the rag, wrapped it around the broom, and changed the dirty water after every barrack. She worked without hesitation, her mind unclouded by any distraction. The floor was cleaner than ever before. She mopped thoroughly, without haste, perhaps out of habit from home.

Nor was she all that crazy. For roll call, instead of Appell she said APFEL-apple. When the little bell rang at the c.o.ke batteries she thought it was time for ma.s.s. She didn't have to invent illusions, because her mind wasn't in the camp to begin with. The way she behaved didn't conform to camp regulations, but it did fit the circ.u.mstances. There was something elemental about her that we envied. Even the hunger angel was baffled when faced with her instincts. He visited her as he did all of us, but he did not climb into her brain. Kati performed the most basic tasks without thinking, abandoning herself to whatever came her way. She survived the camp without going door-to-door. She was never seen rummaging through the kitchen waste behind the mess hall. She ate what could be found in the yard and on the factory grounds. Seeds, leaves, and flowers in the weeds. And all kinds of insects-worms and caterpillars, maggots and beetles, spiders and snails. And in the snowy yard inside the camp the frozen excrement of the watchdogs. We were amazed at how the dogs trusted her, as if this human were one of them as she tottered about, her cap flapping over her ears.

Kati Sentry's madness never went beyond what we could put up with. She was neither clinging nor aloof. Through all the years in the camp she seemed as much at home as a house pet. There was nothing alien about her. We liked her.

One September afternoon after my shift, the sun was still blazing hot in the sky. I drifted along the overgrown paths behind the mouth of the coal silo. Singed by the summer, the skeletons of wild oats shimmered like fish bones as they swayed among the fiery orach, which had long since turned inedible. Inside the hard husks, the kernels were still milky. I ate. On my way back I didn't want to swim through the weeds again and so I decided to go a different way. Kati Sentry was sitting by the zeppelin. Her hands were on an anthill swarming with black ants. She was licking them off and eating them. I asked: Kati, what are you doing.

She said: I'm making gloves for myself, they tickle.

Are you cold, I asked.

She said: Not today, tomorrow. My mother baked poppy-seed rolls, they're still warm. Don't step on them with your feet, you can wait, you're not a hunter. When the rolls are all gone the soldiers will be counted at the apple. Then they'll go home.

By then her hands were swarming black again. Before she licked off the ants, she asked: When is the war over.

I said: The war's been over for two years. Come, let's go back to the camp.

She said: Can't you see I don't have any time now.

The case of the stolen bread.

Fenya never wore a fufaika, she wore a white work ap.r.o.n, and a crocheted wool sweater over that-a different sweater every day. One was nut brown, another a dirty purple, like unpeeled beets, one was muddy yellow and another speckled with whitish gray. Each was too loose in the sleeve and too tight at the stomach. We never knew which sweater was meant for which day, or why Fenya wore them at all, or why she wore them over the ap.r.o.n. They couldn't have kept her warm, they had more holes than wool. The wool was from before the war, repeatedly knitted and unraveled, but still good for crocheting. The yarn may have been salvaged from all the worn-out sweaters of a single large family, or else inherited from everyone in it who had died. We knew nothing about Fenya's family, or whether she even had one, before or after the war. None of us was interested in Fenya personally. But we were all devoted to her, because she doled out the bread. She was the bread, the mistress from whose hands we ate, like dogs, day after day.

Our eyes clung to her, as though she might create the bread for us. Our hunger examined everything about her very closely. Her eyebrows like two toothbrushes, her face with its powerful chin, her too-short horse lips that didn't quite cover her gums, her gray fingernails gripping the large knife she used to fine-tune the rations, her kitchen scale with its two beaks.

Most of all, her heavy eyes, as lifeless as the wooden beads on the abacus she rarely touched. The fact that she was repulsively ugly was something we couldn't admit even to ourselves. We were afraid she might see what we were thinking.

As soon as the beaks of her scale started moving up and down, I followed them with my eyes. My tongue twitched along with the beaks. I closed my mouth, but parted my lips so Fenya could see my toothy smile. We smiled out of necessity and out of principle, our smiles were genuine and false, helpless and underhanded at the same time, so as not to lose Fenya's favor. So as not to challenge her sense of justice but encourage it, and if possible even increase it by a few grams.

But nothing helped, she was always in a foul mood. Her right leg was so much shorter than her left that we said she was lame, and this limp seemed to cause the right corner of her mouth to twitch up and down, while twisting the left into a permanent grimace. When she hobbled up to the bread counter, her bad mood appeared to come from the dark bread, and not from her short leg. Her mouth gave her face an agonized appearance-especially the right half.

And because she was the one who gave us our bread, her limping and her tormented face struck us as something fateful, like the staggering gait of history. Fenya seemed to exude a Communist saintliness. She was undoubtedly a loyal member of the camp's administrative cadre, otherwise she would never have become mistress of the bread and accomplice of the hunger angel.

All alone she stood behind the counter in her whitewashed chamber, between abacus and scales, wielding the large knife. She must have carried lists in her head. She knew exactly who should get six hundred grams, who eight hundred grams, and who was to receive the thousand-gram ration.

I was overcome by Fenya's ugliness. But in time I came to see that it was beauty turned inside out, and that made her the object of my veneration. Disgust would have made me bitter and would have been risky in view of her scales. I sc.r.a.ped and bowed, and often hated myself for doing so, but only after I'd savored her bread and felt halfway sated for a few minutes.

Today I imagine Fenya having administered all the bread I ever ate. First was the daily bread from Transylvania, the in-the-sweat-of-thy-face sour bread of the Lutheran G.o.d. Second was the wholesome brown bread from Hitler's golden ears of grain in the German Reich. Third was the ration of khlyeb on the Russian scales. I believe the hunger angel knew of this trinity of the bread, and that he exploited it.

The bread factory made the first deliveries at dawn. By the time we arrived at the mess hall, between six and seven, Fenya had already measured out the portions. She placed each person's ration back on the scales and balanced it against the weight, adding a bit more or cutting off a corner. Then she pointed her knife at the beaks, c.o.c.ked her heavy chin, and looked at you as if she were seeing you for the first time in four hundred days.

Early on-around the time of the stolen bread-it dawned on me that Fenya's saintliness, cold and cruel, had crept inside the bread, which is why we were capable of killing in the name of hunger.

By reweighing the bread like that, Fenya showed us that she was just. The ready portions lay on the shelves, covered with linen sheets. Before doling out a ration she would lift the cloth a little bit and then put it back, exactly as the practiced beggars did with their coal when going door-to-door. In her whitewashed chamber, with her white ap.r.o.n and white sheets, Fenya was like a priestess celebrating bread hygiene as a pillar of camp civilization. Of world civilization. The flies had no choice but to land on the fabric instead of the bread. They couldn't get to the bread until we were holding it. And if they didn't fly away quickly enough we ate their hunger along with our bread. At the time, I never thought about the flies' hunger, or even about the hygienic rites with the white bread linens.

Fenya's sense of justice, this combination of bitter resentment and accurate weighing, made me utterly submissive. There was perfection in her very repulsiveness. Fenya was neither good nor bad, she was not a person but the law in a crocheted sweater. It never would have occurred to me to compare her to other women, because no other woman was so agonizingly disciplined and so immaculately ugly. She was like the rationed loaves we coveted-appallingly wet, sticky, and disgracefully nourishing.

Each morning we received our ration for the whole day. Like most people, I belonged to the eight-hundred-gram group-that was the normal ration. Six hundred was for light work inside the camp: moving waste from the latrines into cisterns, sweeping snow, spring and fall cleaning, whitewashing the rocks along the main street. Only a few people were given a thousand grams, that was the exceptional ration for the heaviest labor. Even six hundred grams sounds like a lot, but the bread was so heavy that a single slice as thick as the length of your thumb weighed eight hundred grams, if cut from the center of the loaf. If you were lucky enough to get the heel, with the dry crusty corners, the slice was two thumbs thick.

The first decision of the day was: Am I steadfast enough to not eat my entire portion at breakfast with my cabbage soup. Can I, in all my hunger, save a little piece for the evening. At midday there was nothing to decide, since we were at work and there was no meal. In the evening after work, a.s.suming I'd been steadfast in the morning, came the second decision: Am I steadfast enough just to check that my saved bread is still under my pillow, only look and nothing more. Can I hold off eating it until I'm in the mess hall, after evening roll call, which could take another two hours, or even longer.

If I hadn't been steadfast in the morning, I had no leftover bread in the evening and no decision to make. Then I would fill my spoon just halfway and slurp deeply. I had learned to eat slowly, to swallow a little spit after every spoonful of soup. The hunger angel said: Spit makes the soup longer, and going to bed early makes the hunger shorter.

I went to bed early but woke up constantly, because my throat was swollen and pulsing. Whether I kept my eyes open or closed, whether I tossed around or stared at the lightbulb, whether someone was snoring as if he were drowning, whether the rubber worm from the cuckoo clock was rattling or not-the night was boundlessly vast, and in the night Fenya's bread cloths were endlessly large, and beneath them lay the abundant, unreachable bread.

In the morning, after the anthem, hunger hurried off with me to breakfast, to Fenya. To the heroic first decision: Am I steadfast today, can I save a piece of bread for the evening, and on and on.

But how far on.

Each day the hunger angel gnawed at my brain. And one day he raised my hand. And with my hand I nearly struck Karli Halmen dead-because of the bread he had stolen.

Karli Halmen had the day off. He had the barrack all to himself, since everyone was at work. He'd eaten his entire ration of bread at breakfast. And that evening, when Albert Gion came off his shift, he found his saved bread had disappeared. Albert Gion had been steadfast for five days in a row, he'd saved five little pieces of bread, a whole day's ration. He had been on our shift the entire day and, like everyone else who'd saved his bread, he had spent the entire day thinking about eating it with his evening soup. Like everyone else, the first thing he did when he came off the shift was to look under his pillow. His bread was no longer there.

Albert Gion's bread wasn't there, and Karli Halmen was sitting on his bed in his underwear. Albert Gion positioned himself in front of Karli Halmen and without saying a word punched him in the mouth three times. Without saying a word, Karli Halmen spat two teeth onto his bed. The accordion player dragged Karli by the neck to the water bucket and held his head under water. Bubbles came out of his mouth and nose, then gasping sounds, and after that it was quiet. The drummer then pulled Karli's head out of the water and choked him until his mouth started twitching as hideously as Fenya's. I pushed the drummer away, but then I pulled off my wooden shoe. And I raised my hand, so high I would have killed the bread thief. Up to that moment Paul Gast the lawyer had been watching from his upper bunk. He jumped on my back, tore the shoe out of my hand, and threw it against the wall. Karli Halmen had wet himself and was lying next to the bucket, spitting up bready slime.

My bloodl.u.s.t had swallowed my reason. And I wasn't the only one, we were a mob. We dragged Karli in his b.l.o.o.d.y, p.i.s.s-soaked underwear out into the night, next to the barrack. It was February. We stood him against the barrack wall, he staggered and fell over. Without any discussion, the drummer and I undid our pants, then Albert Gion and all the others. And because we were all getting ready for bed anyway, one after the other we p.i.s.sed on Karli Halmen's face. Paul Gast the lawyer joined in as well. Two watchdogs barked, and a guard came running after them. The dogs smelled the blood and growled, the guard cursed. The lawyer and the guard carried Karli to the sick barrack. We watched them leave and used the snow to wipe the blood off our hands. Everyone went back to the barrack in silence and crawled into bed. I had a spot of blood on my wrist, I turned it toward the light and thought, How bright red Karli's blood is, like sealing wax, as if it came from the artery and not the vein. In the barrack it was dead silent, and I heard the rubber worm rattling in the cuckoo clock, sounding so close it could be inside my head. I no longer thought about Karli Halmen, or about Fenya's endlessly white linen, or even about the unreachable bread. I fell into a deep, calm sleep.

The next morning Karli Halmen's bed was empty. We went to the mess hall as always. The snow was empty as well, no longer red, fresh snow had fallen. Karli Halmen spent two days in the sick barrack. After that he was back with us in the mess hall just as before, except with pus-filled wounds, swollen eyes, and blue lips. The business with the bread was over, everyone acted the same as always. We didn't hold the theft against Karli Halmen. And he never held his punishment against us. He knew he had earned it. The bread court does not deliberate, it punishes. It knows no mitigation, it needs no legal code. It is a law unto itself, because the hunger angel is also a thief who steals the brain. Bread justice has no prologue or epilogue, it is only here and now. Totally transparent, or totally mysterious. In any case, the violence meted out by bread justice is different from hungerless violence. You cannot approach the bread court with conventional morality.

The bread court took place in February. By April, Karli Halmen was sitting on a chair in Oswald Enyeter's barber room, his wounds had healed, his beard had grown like trampled gra.s.s. My turn was next, and I waited behind him in the mirror, the way Tur Prikulitsch usually waited behind me. The barber placed his furry hands on Karli's shoulders and asked: Since when are we missing two front teeth. Karli Halmen answered, speaking not to me, nor to the barber, but to the barber's furry hands: Since the case of the stolen bread.

After his beard had been shaved off, I sat down on the chair. It was the only time that Oswald Enyeter ever whistled a kind of serenade as he shaved, and a spot of blood came spilling out of the lather. Not bright red like sealing wax, but dark red, like a raspberry in the snow.

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 gla.s.sy 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 Schnurleibl Mountain. We stayed for eight weeks. During these eight weeks we always took one day-trip to Scha.s.sburg, the nearest town. We had to go down into the valley to catch the train. Our station was called Hetur in Hungarian, and Siebenmanner 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 Scha.s.sburg, where we always went straight to the elegant Cafe 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 gla.s.s 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 cafe called.

Cafe 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 cla.s.sifies 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 c.o.king, 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 pa.s.sed 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 cuc.u.mber 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 gra.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls with shot, tiny b.a.l.l.s 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 gra.s.s. But you can't stake things with gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.sy 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.