The Hunger Angel Part 7

She said: From the cobbler. See how they bend, just like barefoot.

How much do they cost, I asked.

She said: You have to ask Tur.

Kobelian might give me the pieces of rubber for free. They have to be at least as big as two shovel blades. But I'll need money for the cobbler. I'll have to sell some coal now while it's still cold out. In the summer, next summer, the boredom may take off its footwraps and wear ballet shoes. Then it will walk around just like barefoot.

The ersatz-brother.

At the beginning of November, Tur Prikulitsch summons me to his office.

I have a letter from home.

My mouth is smacking with joy so much I can't close it. Tur opens one half of a cabinet and searches through a box. The closed half has a picture of Stalin pasted on the door: his cheekbones are high and gray like two slag heaps, his nose is as impressive as an iron bridge, his mustache looks like a swallow. The coal stove next to the table is clanging away, a tin pot of black tea is humming on top. Next to the stove is the bucket with anthracite. Tur says: Put in a little more coal while I look for your letter.

I pick through the bucket for three suitable chunks, the flame shoots up like a white hare jumping through a yellow hare. Then the yellow one jumps through the white one, the hares tear each other apart and whistle in two-part harmony: Hase-vey. The fire blows heat into my face and the waiting blows fear. I close the little feed door and Tur closes the cabinet. He hands me a Red Cross postcard.

The postcard has a photo that's been sewn on with white thread, evenly st.i.tched by machine. The photo is of a baby. Tur looks me in the face, and I look at the card, and the child sewn onto the card looks me in the face, and from the door of the cabinet Stalin looks all of us in the face.

Underneath the photo is written: Robert, b. April 17, 1947.

My mother's handwriting. The baby is wearing a crocheted bonnet with a bow under his chin. I read once again: Robert, b. April 17, 1947. Nothing else. The handwriting is like a stab, my mother's practical thinking, saving s.p.a.ce by abbreviating born with b. My pulse is throbbing in the card and not in the hand that's holding it. Tur places the mail register and a pencil on the table, I'm supposed to find my name and sign. He goes to the stove, spreads out his hands, and listens to the tea water humming and the hares whistling in the fire. First the columns start to swim before my eyes, then the letters. Then I kneel at the edge of the table, drop my hands on the table and my face in my hands, and sob.

Do you want some tea, asks Tur. Do you want brandy. I thought you'd be happy.

Yes, I say, I'm happy, because we still have our old sewing machine at home.

I drink a gla.s.s of brandy with Tur Prikulitsch, and then another. Much too much for skinandbones people. The brandy burns in my stomach and the tears burn in my face. It's been forever since I cried, I've taught my homesickness to be dry-eyed. I've even managed to make it ownerless. Tur presses a pencil into my hand and points to the proper column. My hand shakes as I write: Leopold. I need your full name, says Tur. You write the rest, I say, I can't.

Then I step out into the snow, the sewn-on child tucked away in the pocket of my fufaika. Looking in at the office window, I can see the cushion used to stop the draft, the one Trudi Pelikan told me about. It's very evenly st.i.tched and stuffed. Corina Marcu's hair couldn't have been enough, there has to be other hair inside the cushion as well. Funnels of white start flowing from the lightbulbs, the rear watchtower is swinging back and forth in the sky. Zither Lommer's white beans are strewn all across the snowyard. The snow slips farther and farther away, along with the camp wall. But on the path where I am walking, it rises up to my neck. The wind has a sharp scythe. I have no feet, I'm walking on my cheeks, and soon I have no cheeks. I have nothing but the sewn-on child, my ersatz-brother. My parents had a baby because they've given up on me. Just as my mother abbreviated born with b., she'll abbreviate died with d. She's already done so. Isn't my mother ashamed of the s.p.a.ce below the precisely st.i.tched white thread, below the handwritten line, the s.p.a.ce in which I can't help but read: As far as I'm concerned you can die where you are, we'll have more room at home.

The white s.p.a.ce below the line.

My mother's Red Cross postcard came in November. It had taken seven months to get to the camp. She'd sent it from home in April. By then the sewn-on child was already nine months old.

I stowed the postcard with my ersatz-brother in the bottom of my suitcase, next to the white handkerchief. My mother had written only one line on the card, and not a word in that line was about me. I didn't even appear in the white s.p.a.ce below the line.

In the Russian village I'd learned to beg for food. But I wasn't going to beg my mother to mention my name. For the two years that followed I forced myself not to answer her card. Over the past two years the hunger angel had taught me how to beg, and in the two that followed he taught me tough pride, as rough and raw as being steadfast with bread. He tormented me cruelly. Day after day he showed me my mother forgetting all about me so that she could feed her ersatz-child. Tidy and well nourished, she pushed her white baby carriage back and forth inside my head. And I watched her from all sides, from every place I didn't appear, including the white s.p.a.ce below the line.

Minkowski's wire.

Everyone in the camp has his own here and now. Everyone touches the ground in rubber galoshes or wooden shoes, even if he's twelve meters below the earth, sitting on the board of silence.

When Albert Gion and I aren't working, we sit on a bench made of two stones and a board. The lightbulb burns in its wire cage, and a c.o.ke fire burns in the iron basket. We rest and don't speak. I often ask myself, Can I still do arithmetic. Given that we're now in our fourth year of camp, and our third year of peace, there must have also been a first and second peace year here in the cellar, just like there must have been a time before the peace, without me. And the number of day and night shifts must correspond to the number of layers in the earth. I should have counted my shifts with Albert Gion, but can I still do arithmetic.

Can I still read. My father gave me a book for Christmas: Physics and You. According to the book, each and every thing-every person and every event-has its own place and its own time. This is a law of nature. It follows that each and every thing has its reason for being in the world, and also a wire that connects it to everything else that exists, the MINKOWSKI-WIRE. As I sit here, I have a Minkowski-wire running straight up from my head. When I bend, it bends, and when I move, it moves with me. So I'm not alone. Every corner in the cellar also has its wire, as does every person in the camp. And no wire touches another. Above all our heads is a strictly ordered forest of wires. Every person is in his place and breathes with his wire. The cooling tower breathes double, since the cooling-tower cloud likely has a wire of its own. But the book doesn't account for all the things inside a labor camp. For instance, the hunger angel must have a Minkowski-wire of his own, only it's not clear from the book if the hunger angel's wire always stays attached to us, which is why he never really goes away when he says he's coming back. Maybe the book would have impressed the hunger angel. I should have brought it along.

I almost always sit in silence on the cellar bench and peer into my head as if through a bright crack in a door. The book also said that every person is moving through his own film at every moment and in every place, and that the reels all spin at sixteen frames per second. PROBABILITY OF PRESENCE was another memorable phrase in Physics and You. As if there were a chance I might not really be here. Then I could be elsewhere without even having to want to leave here. And that's because as a body in a specific place, in this case the cellar, I am a particle, but because of my Minkowski-wire I am also a wave. And as a wave I can also be in another place, and someone who isn't here can be here with me. I can pick out anyone I want. But instead of a person I'd rather it be an object, that would go better with the layers of earth in the cellar. For instance, the DINOSAUR, which was the name of the long-distance bus that ran between Hermannstadt and the spa town ten kilometers away: very elegant, dark red, with chrome b.u.mpers. My mother and Aunt Fini used to take the DINOSAUR to the baths. When they came back they let me lick their bare arms to taste the salt from the baths. And they told me how the salt collected in pearly scales on the gra.s.s stalks in the meadow. Through the bright door-crack in my head I cause the DINOSAUR to run between me and the cellar. It has its own bright door-crack and its own Minkowski-wire. Our wires never touch, but our bright door-cracks join below the lightbulb, where the fly ash is swirling around with its Minkowski-wire. And on the bench beside me Albert Gion sits quietly with his Minkowski-wire. The bench is the board of silence, because Albert Gion can't tell me which film he's in at the moment, just like I can't tell him that I have a dark-red long-distance bus with chrome b.u.mpers right here in the cellar. Every shift is a work of art. But its Minkowski-wire is nothing but a steel cable with little carts moving up and down. And every cart with its wire is nothing but a load of slag twelve meters below the earth.

Sometimes I'm convinced I died a hundred years ago, and that the soles of my feet are transparent. When I look through the bright crack in my head, what I'm really searching for is this stubborn shy hope that at some time and in some place someone is thinking of me. Even if that person cannot know where I am at any given moment. It may be that I'm the old gap-toothed man in the upper-left corner of a wedding photo that doesn't exist, and simultaneously a skinny child in a schoolyard that also doesn't exist. Likewise, I am both the rival and the brother of my ersatz-brother, and he is also my rival because we both exist at the same moment. But we exist at different moments, too, since we have not seen each other ever, that is, at any one point in time.

And at the same moment I know that the hunger angel sees me dead, but the death that he sees has not happened to me, not yet.

Black dogs.

I step out of the cellar into the blinding morning snow. Four statues made of black slag are standing on the watchtowers. They're not soldiers, but four black dogs. The first and the third statues move their heads, while the second and fourth stay frozen. Then the first dog moves its legs, the fourth moves its rifle, and the second and third stay frozen.

The snow on the roof of the mess hall is a white linen sheet. Why did Fenya put the bread cloth on the roof.

The cooling-tower cloud is a white baby carriage rolling toward the white birches in the Russian village. One day, when the white batiste handkerchief was in its third winter inside my suitcase, I went out begging again. I knocked on the door of the old Russian woman. A man my age opened. I asked if his name was Boris. He said NYET. I asked if an old lady lived here. He said NYET.

In the mess hall the bread is on its way. Someday when I'm alone at the bread counter, I'll screw up my courage and ask Fenya: When am I going home, I'm practically a statue made of black slag. Fenya will say: Well, you have tracks in the cellar, and you have a mountain. The little carts are always going home, you should go with them. You used to like taking the train into the mountains. And I'll say: But that was when I was still at home. Well, she'll say, so everything will be just like it was at home.

But then I enter the mess hall and take my place in line. The bread is covered with white snow from the roof. I could work things out so I'm the last one in line, so I could be alone with Fenya when she administers my bread. But I don't dare, her saintliness is too cold, and her face has the same three noses it always does-two of them being the beaks of her scales.

A spoon here, a spoon there It was Advent once again, and I was amazed to see my little wire tree with the green fir-wool set up on the table in the barrack. Paul Gast the lawyer had kept it in his suitcase, and this year he decorated it with three bread-ball ornaments. Because we've been here three years, he said. He could afford to treat us to the bread ornaments because he stole the bread from his wife, but he didn't think we knew that.

Heidrun Gast lived in one of the women's barracks, as married couples weren't allowed to live together. She already had the dead-monkey face, the slit mouth running from one ear to the other, swollen eyes, and the white hare in the hollows of her cheeks. Since summer she'd been working in the garage, where she had to fill the truck batteries. Her face was more pockmarked than her fufaika, from all the sulfuric acid.

Every day in the mess hall we saw what the hunger angel could do to a marriage. The lawyer searched for his wife like a watchdog. If she was sitting at a table between other people, he gave her arm a tug, then squeezed in close to her so that her soup was next to his. When she looked away for a second he dipped his spoon in her bowl. If she noticed what he was doing he said: A spoon here, a spoon there.

January had barely begun. The little tree with the bread ornaments was still on the table in our barrack when Heidrun Gast died. And the bread ornaments were still hanging on the little tree when Paul Gast started wearing his wife's coat with the small rounded collar and the tattered pocket flaps made of rabbit fur. He also started to get shaved more often than he used to.

By the middle of January our singer Loni Mich was wearing the coat. And the lawyer was allowed behind her blanket. Around this time the barber asked: Anyone here have children back home.

The lawyer said: I do.

How many, asked the barber.

Three, said the lawyer.

His eyes stared out of the shaving lather and fixed on the door, where my padded cap with the earflaps hung on a hook like a duck that had been shot out of the sky. The lawyer heaved a deep sigh, blowing a gob of foam off the back of the barber's hand onto the ground. It landed between the chair legs, right next to the lawyer's rubber galoshes. Wrapped around the soles of his galoshes and tied off at the ankles were two brand-new, glistening pieces of copper wire.

Once my hunger angel was a lawyer Don't ever tell this to my husband, said Heidrun Gast. She was sitting between Trudi Pelikan and me, because Paul Gast the lawyer hadn't come to eat that day, he had an abscessed tooth. So Heidrun Gast was able to talk.

And what she told us was this: The garage where she worked was housed in a bombed-out factory. The ceiling over the repair bay had a hole as big as a tree canopy. She could look up through the hole and see people clearing rubble from the next level of the factory. Now and then a potato was lying on the floor of the repair bay, which a man had tossed down especially for Heidrun Gast. Always the same man. Heidrun Gast looked up at him, and he looked down at her. They couldn't talk, he was surrounded by guards up in the factory just as she was down in the garage. The man wore a striped fufaika, he was a German prisoner of war. The last potato was a very small one, Heidrun Gast found it lying among the toolboxes. It's possible that the potato had been there one or two days and she just hadn't seen it. Either the man had tossed it down in more of a hurry than usual or else the potato had rolled farther than usual because it was so small. Or he had deliberately tossed it in a different spot. At first Heidrun Gast wasn't sure the potato had really come from the man above and hadn't been placed there by the nachal'nik as a trap. She nudged it halfway under the stairs with the tip of her shoe, so the potato couldn't be seen unless you knew it was there. She wanted to make sure the nachal'nik wasn't spying on her. She waited until just before quitting time, and when she picked up the potato she noticed there was a thread tied around it. As always, Heidrun Gast had looked up through the hole as often as she could that day, but there was no sign of the man. Back in her barrack that evening she bit off the thread. The potato had been sliced in two, and a sc.r.a.p of cloth placed between the two halves. She could make out some writing: ELFRIEDE RO, ERSTRa.s.s, ENSBU, and, on the bottom, ERMAN. The other letters had been eaten away by the potato starch. After the lawyer had finished his soup in the mess hall and returned to his barracks, Heidrun Gast went out to the yard, found a late fire, tossed in the sc.r.a.p of cloth, and roasted the two potato halves. I realize that I ate a message, she told us, and that was sixty-one days ago. I know he didn't go home, and I'm sure he didn't die, he was still healthy. He just vanished from the face of the earth, she said, like the potato in my mouth. I miss him.

A thin film of ice quivered in her eyes. The hollows of her cheeks were furred in white and clinging to her bones. Her hunger angel had to see there was nothing more to be gotten from her. I felt queasy, it seemed that the more Heidrun Gast confided in me, the sooner her hunger angel was likely to leave her. As if her hunger angel were looking to move in with me.

Only the hunger angel could forbid Paul Gast from eating his wife's food. But the hunger angel is a thief himself. All the hunger angels know each other, I thought, just as we all know each other. And they have the same professions we do. Paul Gast's hunger angel is a lawyer just like he is. And Heidrun Gast's hunger angel fetches and carries for her husband's. Mine also fetches and carries, but I have no idea for whom.

I said: Heidrun, eat your soup.

I can't, she said.

I reached for her soup. Trudi Pelikan was also eyeing it furtively. And Albert Gion from across the table. I began spooning away, without counting. I didn't slurp, because slurping takes longer. I ate for myself, without Heidrun Gast or Trudi Pelikan or Albert Gion. I forgot everything around me, the entire mess hall. I sucked the soup into my heart. Faced with this bowl of soup, my hunger angel ceased being a servant and became a lawyer.

I shoved the empty dish over to Heidrun Gast, until it touched the little finger of her left hand. She licked her unused spoon and wiped it dry on her jacket, as if she and not I had eaten the soup. Either she could no longer tell whether she was eating or watching, or she was acting as though she had eaten. One way or the other, you could see her hunger angel stretched out inside her slit mouth, mercifully pale on the outside and dark blue inside. He may have even been able to stand in a horizontal position. And it was clear that he was counting her days in the thin cabbage soup. But it's also possible that he had forgotten Heidrun Gast and was calibrating the scale in the back of my throat. Or that as we were eating he was figuring out how much he could get from me and how long it would be before he got it.

I have a plan.

When the hunger angel weighs me, I will deceive his scales.

I will be just as light as my saved bread. And just as hard to bite.

You'll see, I tell myself, it's a short plan with a long life.

The tin kiss.

After supper I went to the cellar for the night shift. There was a brightness in the sky. A flock of birds was flying like a gray necklace from the Russian village toward the camp. I don't know if the birds were screeching in the brightness or in the roof of my mouth. I also don't know if they were screeching with their beaks or rubbing their feet together or if their wings had old bones with no cartilage.

Suddenly a piece of the necklace broke away and split into mustaches. Three of them flew right into the soldier in the rear watchtower, just under the brim of his cap. They stayed there a long time, and didn't fly out again until I'd reached the factory gate and turned around one more time. The soldier's rifle was shaking, but he stayed frozen. I thought, The man is made of wood, and the rifle of flesh.

I didn't want to trade places with the guard in the tower or with the bird necklace. Nor did I want to be the slag worker who has to climb down the same sixty-four steps into the cellar every evening. But I did want to trade places. I think I wanted to be the rifle.

During the night shift I flipped one cart after the next, as always, and Albert Gion did the pushing. Then we switched. The hot slag cloaked us in fog. The pieces of ember smelled like fir resin and my sweaty neck like honey tea. The whites of Albert Gion's eyes swung back and forth like two peeled eggs, his teeth like a lice comb. In the cellar his black face had disappeared.

During the break, sitting on the board of silence, the little c.o.ke fire lit up our legs all the way to our knees. Albert Gion unb.u.t.toned his jacket and asked: What does Heidrun Gast miss more, the German or the potatoes. That wasn't the first time she's untied a potato, who knows what was written on the other sc.r.a.ps. The lawyer's right to steal her food. An old marriage makes you hungry, infidelity makes you full. Albert Gion tapped me on the knee, as a sign the break was over, I thought. But then he said: Tomorrow I'm taking the soup, what does your Minkowski-wire say to that. My Minkowski-wire said nothing. We sat there a while in silence. My black hand disappeared on the bench. Just like his.

The next day Paul Gast was again sitting next to his wife in the mess hall, despite his abscessed teeth. He was back to eating, and Heidrun Gast was back to keeping quiet. What my Minkowski-wire said to that was that I was disappointed, as so often. And that Albert Gion was being spiteful in a way I'd never seen. He was out to spoil the lawyer's meal and tried to pick a fight. He accused the lawyer of snoring so loud it was unbearable. Then I turned spiteful too and told Albert Gion that his snoring was even worse than the lawyer's. Albert Gion was furious that I'd spoiled his fight. He raised his hand to strike me, and his bony face was like a horse's head. By that time the lawyer's spoon was already well into his wife's soup. She dipped her spoon less and less and he dipped his more and more. He slurped, and his wife began to cough, just to do something with her mouth. And when she coughed she covered her mouth, daintily holding out her little finger that was corroded by the sulfuric acid and grimy from the lubricating oil. Here in the mess hall all of us had dirty fingers, the only one with clean hands was Oswald Enyeter the barber, but the hair on his hands was as dark as the filth on ours, and looked as though he'd borrowed some fur from the steppe-dogs. Trudi Pelikan also had clean hands, ever since she became a nurse. Clean, but colored yellowish brown from rubbing ichthyol on all the sick people.

While I was thinking about Heidrun Gast's little finger and the condition of our hands, Karli Halmen came up to me and wanted to swap bread. My mind wasn't clear enough for swapping bread, so I fended him off and stuck with my own portion. Then he traded with Albert Gion. That pained me, because the piece of bread that Albert Gion then bit into seemed bigger than mine by a third.

From all around the mess hall came the clatter of tin. Every spoonful of soup is a tin kiss, I thought. And every one of us is ruled by our hunger, as though by an alien power. But no matter how well I knew that in the moment, I forgot it right away.

The way of the world.

The naked truth is that Paul Gast the lawyer stole his wife's soup right out of her bowl until she could no longer get out of bed and died because she couldn't help it, just like he stole her soup because his hunger couldn't help it, just like he wore her coat with the rabbit-fur pocket flaps and couldn't help it that she had died, just like our singer Loni Mich wore the coat and couldn't help it that a coat was free because the lawyer's wife had died, just like the lawyer couldn't help it that he was also free because his wife had died, just like he couldn't help wanting to replace her with Loni Mich, and Loni Mich couldn't help wanting a man behind the blanket, or wanting a coat, or that the two things were tied together, just like the winter couldn't help being icy cold and the coat couldn't help being so warm, and the days couldn't help being a chain of causes and effects, just like all causes and effects couldn't help it that they were the naked truth, even though this was all about a coat.

That was the way of the world: because each person couldn't help it, no one could.

White hare.

Father, the white hare is hunting us down, chasing us out of life. He's growing in the hollows of more and more cheeks.

He hasn't crawled out of my face yet, he's just been looking at my flesh from the inside, because it is also his. Hase-veh.

His eyes are coals, his muzzle is a tin dish, his legs are pokers, his stomach is a little cart in the cellar, his path is a set of tracks rising steeply up the mountain.

He's still sitting inside me, pink-skinned, waiting with his own knife, which is also Fenya's, the knife for cutting bread.

Homesickness. That's the last thing I need The seven years after my return home were seven years without homesickness, without Heimweh. But when I looked in the display window of the bookstore on the main square and saw The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway, I read The Sun Also Rises by Heimweh. And so I bought the book and set off on my home-weh, I mean my way home.

There are words that do whatever they want with me. They're completely different from me and they think differently than what they really are. They deliberately pop into my mind so I'll think there's one thing that intends a different thing, even though I may not want that second thing at all. Hemingway. Heimweh. Homesickness. That's the last thing I need.

There are words that have me as their target, that seem created solely for my re-deportation-not counting the word RE-DEPORTATION. That word would be of no use if I were re-deported. Another useless word is MEMORY. The word HARM won't help if I'm re-deported, either. Nor the word EXPERIENCE. Whenever I have to deal with these useless words, I have to pretend I'm dumber than I am. But they're harder on me with each new encounter.

In the camp we had lice on our heads, in our eyebrows, on our necks, in our armpits, and in our pubic hair. We had bedbugs in our bunks. We were hungry. But we didn't say: I have lice and bedbugs or I'm hungry. We said: I'm homesick. Which was the last thing we needed.

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it's no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

I know that even lice can yearn for home, in three different places: there's the head louse, the clothes louse, and the crab louse. The head louse crawls on your scalp, behind your ears, in your eyebrows, along the hairline on your neck. If your neck itches, it could also be a clothes louse in your shirt collar. The clothes louse doesn't crawl. It sits in the st.i.tches of whatever you're wearing. It's called a clothes louse but it doesn't live off threads. The crab louse crawls and itches inside your pubic hair. We didn't say: Pubic hair. We said: I've got an itch down there.

Lice come in different sizes, but they're all white and look like little crabs. When you squeeze them between your thumbnails you hear a dry crack. They leave behind a watery speck on one nail and a sticky speck of blood on the other. The colorless eggs are strung together like a gla.s.s rosary or transparent peas in a pod. Lice are only dangerous if they're carrying typhus or typhoid fever. Otherwise you can live with them. You get used to itching all over.

You might think that the camp lice got transferred from head to head at the barber's, by comb. But they had no need of that, they were able to crawl from bed to bed inside the barrack. We set the feet of our bunks in tin cans filled with water so as to block their path, but they were as hungry as we were and found other ways. We shared lice during roll call, in line at the food counter, at the long tables in the mess hall, at work loading and unloading, while squatting during a cigarette break, while dancing the Paloma.

Our heads were shorn with a special clipper, the men by Oswald Enyeter in his barber room, the women by the Russian medic in a wooden shack next to the sick barrack. When their hair was first cut off, the women were allowed to take their braids and keep them in their suitcases as souvenirs of themselves.

I don't know why the men didn't help each other pick lice. The women put their heads together every day, told stories and sang and picked the lice off one another.

In the very first winter, Zither Lommer taught us how to remove the lice from wool sweaters. At sunset, when it's well below freezing, you dig a hole in the ground thirty centimeters deep, stick the sweater in the hole, and loosely cover the hole, leaving just a little bit of wool sticking out, the length of a finger. During the night all the lice crawl out of the sweater. By sunrise they've gathered in white clumps on the little tip of wool. Then you can squash them all at once with your shoe.

Once March came and we could work the earth, we dug holes between the barracks. Each evening the sweater tips stuck out of the ground, like a knitted garden that bloomed at dawn with white foam, like cauliflower. We squashed the lice and pulled the sweaters out of the ground. The sweaters again kept us warm, and Zither Lommer said: Clothes don't die even when you bury them.

The seven years after my return home were seven years without lice. But for sixty years, whenever there's cauliflower on my plate, I'm eating lice from the sweater tips at sunrise. And to this day whipped cream is never just a topping on the cake.

In the camp, from the second year on, we had a new method of getting rid of lice-the ETUBA, a hot-air chamber over a hundred degrees Celsius set up next to the showers. Every Sat.u.r.day we hung our clothes on iron hooks which circled around on rollers like the little trolleys in the cooling room of a slaughterhouse. The clothes took much longer to roast than we did to shower, about one and a half hours-we quickly ran out of time, as well as hot water. So we stood in the entrance area and waited. Bent, mangy figures, in our nakedness we looked like worn-out draft animals. But no one was ashamed. What is there to be ashamed of when you no longer have a body. Yet our bodies were the reason we were in the camp, to perform bodily labor. The less of a body we had, the more it punished us. The sh.e.l.l that was left belonged to the Russians. I was never ashamed in front of the others, only in front of my earlier self, remembering my days in the Neptune baths, when my skin was smooth and I was giddy from the lavender steam and the gasping delight. When I never thought about worn-out draft animals on two legs.

After the clothes came out of the etuba, they stank of heat and salt. The fabric was singed and brittle. But two or three pa.s.ses through the etuba turned smuggled sugar beets into candied fruit. I never had any sugar beets to bring to the etuba. I had a heart-shovel, coal, cement, sand, cinder blocks, and cellar slag. I had spent one terrifying day with the potatoes, but not a single day in the field with the sugar beets. Only the men who loaded and unloaded sugar beets at the kolkhoz had candied fruit in the etuba. I knew what candied fruit looked like from home: gla.s.s green, raspberry red, lemon yellow-little gemstones sprinkled inside a cake that got stuck between your teeth. The candied sugar beets were earthy brown, once peeled they looked like sugar-glazed fists. When I saw the others eating them, my homesickness ate cake, and my stomach contracted.

In the women's barrack on New Year's Eve in our fourth year, I, too, ate candied beets-in a cake that Trudi Pelikan hadn't so much baked as built. Instead of candied fruit there were candied beets, instead of nuts, sunflower seeds-instead of flour, corn bran-instead of dessert plates, faience tiles from the dying room in the sick barrack. Along with that, each of us received one cigarette from the market-LUCKY STRIKE. I took two puffs and was drunk. My head floated off my shoulders and merged with the other faces, the bunks started spinning in circles. We sang and locked arms and swayed to 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.

Kati Sentry sat with her piece of cake at the little table under the barrack light. She watched us impa.s.sively. But when the song was over she rocked on her chair and said: UUUH, UUUH.

She had made this same deep uuuh, the dull sound of the deportation train, at our last stop during the snow-night four years ago. I froze, others cried. Trudi Pelikan also broke down. And Kati Sentry watched us cry and ate her cake. You could see that she liked it.

There are words that do whatever they want with me. I no longer know if the Russian word VOSH' means the bedbugs or the lice. With my word VOSH' I mean both. Maybe the word can't tell one from the other. But I can.

The bedbugs climbed up the walls, and during the night they dropped from the ceiling onto our beds. I don't know if they dropped during the day as well and we just didn't see them. But they were another reason the light in the barrack was kept on all night long.

Our bed frames were made of iron. Rusty bars with raw welded seams. The bedbugs reproduced there as well as in the unplaned boards under the straw sacks. Whenever the bedbugs gained the upper hand, we had to take our beds out into the yard-that mostly happened on weekends. We had wire brushes made by the men in the factory that we used on the bedbugs, brushing the bed frames and the boards so hard that they turned red with blood. Exterminating bedbugs was one order we were eager to carry out. We wanted to clean our beds and have a few nights' peace. We were happy to see the blood of the bedbugs, because it was our own. The more blood we saw, the more determined we were to brush down the bed. All the hate was drawn out of us. We brushed the bedbugs to death and felt a kind of pride, as if they were the Russians.

Then exhaustion hit us like a blow to the head. Pride that is tired makes you sad. Our pride brushed itself down to size until the next time. Knowing that all our work was ultimately in vain, we carried the beds, temporarily free of bedbugs, back to the barracks. And with pitiful humility, we told ourselves: At least now night can come.

And sixty years later I dream: I've been deported for the second, third, or sometimes even the seventh time. I set down my gramophone suitcase by the well and wander around the Appellplatz. There are no brigades here, no nachal'niks. I have no work. The world has forgotten me, and so has the new camp administration. I mention my experience as a camp veteran. I explain that I have my heart-shovel, and that my day and night shifts were always works of art. I'm not some Johnny-come-lately, I know how to do things. I know about cellars and slag. I have a blue-black, beetle-sized piece of slag grown into my shin from the first time I was deported. I show it off like a hero's medal. I don't know where I'm supposed to sleep, everything here is new. Where are the barracks, I ask. Where is Bea Zakel, where is Tur Prikulitsch. Limping Fenya has a different crocheted sweater in every dream, but she always has the same sash made of white bread cloth. She says there isn't any camp administration. I feel neglected. n.o.body wants me here, but under no circ.u.mstances am I allowed to leave.

In which camp did my dream end up. Does my dream even care that the heart-shovel and the slag cellar really existed. That the five imprisoned years are more than enough for me. Does my dream want to go on deporting me and then refuse to let me work when I reach the seventh camp. That really hurts. I have nothing to counter with, no matter how many times the dream deports me and no matter which camp I end up in.

If I'm ever to be deported again in this life, I'll know: there are things that intend a different thing, even if you may not want that second thing at all.

What's driving me to stay so attached. Why do I insist on being miserable at night. Why can't I be free. Why am I forcing the camp to belong to me. Homesickness. That's the last thing I need.