The Hunger Angel Part 8

A bright moment.

One afternoon I found Kati Sentry sitting at the little wooden table in the barrack, probably because of the cuckoo clock. Who knows how long she'd been there. When I came in she asked me: Do you live here.

I said: Yes.

I do, too, she said, but behind the church. We moved into the new house last spring. Then my little brother died. He was old.

I said: But he was younger than you.

He was sick, that makes you old, she said. Then I put on his suede shoes and went back to the old house. There was a man in the courtyard. Then the man asked me, how did you get here. I showed him the suede shoes. Then he said, next time bring your head.

Then what did you do, I asked.

Then I went inside the church, she said.

I asked: What was your little brother's name.

She said: Latzi, just like you.

But my name is Leo, I said.

Maybe when you're at home, but here your name is Latzi, she said.

Such a bright moment, I thought, there's even a louse-a Laus-inside the name, since Latzi comes from Ladislaus.

Kati Sentry stood up, hunched over, and glanced at the cuckoo clock one more time from the door. But her right eye s.h.i.+mmered at me like old silk. She raised her index finger and said: You know, you better stop waving to me in church.

Carelessness spread like hay.

In the summer we were allowed to dance outside on the Appellplatz. Just before nightfall the swallows flew in pursuit of their hunger, the trees turned darkly jagged, and the clouds were tinged with red. Later a finger-thin moon hung over the mess hall. Anton Kowatsch's drumming drifted on the wind, the dancing couples swayed like bushes. The little bells of the c.o.ke batteries chimed, and the glow that followed every wave of tinkling lit up the sky over our heads. Before the brightness faded you could see Singing Loni's trembling goiter and the heavy eyes of Konrad Fonn the accordionist, always staring off to where there was nothing and n.o.body.

There was something b.e.s.t.i.a.l in the way Konrad Fonn pulled the ribs of the accordion apart and squeezed them together. His drooping eyelids hinted at a lascivious nature, but his eyes were too hollow and cold for that. The music didn't enter his soul-he just shooed the songs away, and they crawled into us. His accordion shuffled along, hollow and dull. Ever since Zither Lommer had supposedly boarded a s.h.i.+p in Odessa, to head somewhere in the direction of home, the orchestra was missing its warm bright tones. Maybe the accordion was as out of tune as the musician, maybe it questioned whether deportees pairing off and swaying on the Appellplatz like bushes really counted as dancing.

Kati Sentry was sitting on the bench, swinging her feet in time to the music. If a man asked her to dance she would run off into the darkness. Now and then she danced with one of the women, craning her neck and gazing at the sky. She must have danced often in the past since she was able to follow changes of rhythm. When she sat on the bench she would throw pebbles if she saw the couples come too close together. It wasn't a game, either, her face remained serious. Albert Gion told me that most people forget all about the Appellplatz on those nights, that they go so far as to say they're dancing on the plaza. He also told me he was never going to dance with Zirri Wandschneider again, she was clinging to him like a leech and h.e.l.l-bent on giving herself to him. Besides, it wasn't him, it was the music doing the seducing, here in the darkness, he told me. During the winter Paloma, emotions stayed pleated like the ribs of the accordion, and locked up in the mess hall. The summer dance stirred up carelessness and spread it over our melancholy like hay. The barrack windows s.h.i.+mmered weakly, people felt rather than saw one another. Trudi Pelikan was of the opinion that homesickness trickled from the head to the belly when we were outside on the plaza. She saw the patterns of the couples s.h.i.+fting from one hour to the next-homesickness in pairs, was how she put it.

I think the mixture of goodwill and guile that these couplings revealed was probably as varied and possibly as wretched as the different mixes of coal. You couldn't mix what wasn't there. You had to mix what you had. And I had to keep out of all the mixes and make sure no one had any idea why.

The accordion player probably sensed why, there was something disdainful in his manner. I felt hurt even if I did find him repulsive. I couldn't resist looking at his face each time the glow from the factory lit up the sky and for as long as the light lasted. Every quarter hour I saw his neck above the accordion and his doglike head and his frightening eyes, white and stony, staring off to the side. Then the sky was black night once again. And I waited a quarter hour until the dog's head reappeared, as ugly as before. The summer Paloma on the Appellplatz always went like that. Only once did something different happen.

It was late September, on one of our last dance nights outside. I was sitting the way I so often did, with my feet on the wooden bench and both knees tucked under my chin. Paul Gast the lawyer took a break from the dancing and sat down next to my feet and said nothing. Perhaps he really did think about his dead wife Heidrun Gast every now and then. Because the moment he leaned back, a star fell over the Russian village. He said: Leo, you have to wish for something, fast.

The Russian village swallowed the falling star, and all the others glittered like coa.r.s.e salt.

I couldn't think of anything, he said, how about you.

I said: That we'll come out alive.

That was a lie, spread as carelessly as hay. I had wished that my ersatz-brother was no longer alive. I wanted to hurt my mother. After all, I didn't even know him.

On camp happiness.

Happiness is something sudden.

I know mouth happiness and head happiness.

Mouth happiness comes with eating and is shorter than your mouth, even shorter than the word mouth. It doesn't even have time to climb into your head when you p.r.o.nounce the word. Mouth happiness doesn't want to be talked about. If I were to talk about mouth happiness I'd have to add SUDDENLY before each sentence. And after each sentence: DON'T TELL ANYONE, BECAUSE EVERYONE IS HUNGRY.

I'll say it just this once: Suddenly you pull down the acacia branch, pick flowers and eat. You don't tell anyone, because everyone is hungry. You pick sorrel on the side of the path and eat. You pick wild thyme between the pipes and eat. You pick chamomile by the door to the cellar and eat. You pick wild garlic by the fence and eat. You pull down the branch and pick black mulberries and eat. You pick wild oats in the empty fields and eat. You don't find a single potato peel behind the mess hall, but you do find a cabbage stalk, and eat.

In winter you don't pick a thing. You leave your s.h.i.+ft and head home to the barrack and don't know where the snow will taste best. Should you take a handful right from the stairs to the cellar or hold off for the coal heap that's snowed under or wait until you're at the camp gate. Without deciding, you take a handful off the white cap on the fencepost and freshen up your pulse and your mouth and your throat down to your heart. Suddenly you no longer feel tired. You don't tell anyone, because everyone is tired.

Barring disaster, each day is like the next. You want each day to be like the next. But with happiness it's a little different, it's a matter of luck. Five comes after nine, says Oswald Enyeter the barber, and if you think of it that way, luck is always a little balamuc. I must be lucky because my grandmother said: I know you'll come back. I don't tell anyone, either, because everyone wants to come back. To be happy you need a goal. I have to find a goal, even if it's nothing more than the snow on the fencepost.

Head happiness is easier to talk about than mouth happiness.

Mouth happiness wants to be alone. It's mute and introverted. But head happiness is gregarious and craves other people. It's a happiness that wanders around, even if it's limping along behind. It lasts longer than you can bear. Head happiness is fragmented and difficult to sort out, it mixes itself whatever way it wants and changes quickly from bright to dark.

blurred blind resentful hidden fluttering.

hesitant impetuous pushy unsteady fallen dropped.

stacked threaded deceived threadbare crumbled confused lurking.

p.r.i.c.kly uneasy repeated cheeky stolen thrown away left over.

missed by just a hair.

Head happiness can have wet eyes, a craned neck, or shaky fingers. But it always bangs around in your forehead like a frog in a tin can.

The very last happiness is the onedroptoomuchhappiness. That comes when you die. I still remember that when Irma Pfeifer died in the mortar pit, Trudi Pelikan opened her mouth like a great big zero, made a clicking sound, and said in one word: Onedroptoomuchhappiness.

She was right, because whenever we cleared away the dead we could see the relief, we could tell that the tangled nest inside the skull, the dizzying swing in the breath, the rhythm-crazed pump in the breast, the empty waiting room in the stomach were finally leaving them in peace.

There was never such a thing as pure head happiness, because hunger was in the mouths of everyone.

Even sixty years after the camp, eating still excites me greatly. I eat with every pore of my body. When I eat with other people I become unpleasant. I behave as though my way of eating were the only way. The others don't know mouth happiness, they eat sociably and politely. But when I eat, I think about the onedroptoomuchhappiness and how it will come to everyone as sure as we're sitting there, and that we'll have to give up the nest in our skull, the swing in our breath, the pump in our chest, the waiting room in our stomach. I love eating so much that I don't want to die, because then I couldn't eat anymore. For sixty years I have known that returning home was not enough to subdue my camp happiness. To this day its hunger bites the middle out of every other feeling. And what's left in the middle of me is emptiness.

Every day since I came back home, each feeling has a hunger of its own and expects me to reciprocate, but I don't. I won't ever let anyone cling to me again. I've been taught by hunger and am unreachable out of humility, not pride.

We're alive. We only live once.

During the skinandbones time, all I had inside my brain was a hurdy-gurdy droning day and night: hunger deceives, cold slashes, tiredness burdens, homesickness devours, bedbugs and lice bite. I wanted to work out a trade with things that aren't alive but aren't dead either. I wanted to make an emergency exchange, trading my body for the horizon line above and the dusty roads on the earth below. I wanted to borrow their endurance, exist without my body, and when the worst was over, slip back into my body and reappear in my fufaika. This had nothing to do with dying, quite the opposite.

Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed. And we agree, absolute zero and I, that absolute zero itself is beyond discussion, except in the most roundabout way. The zero's wide-open mouth can eat but not speak. The zero encircles you with its strangling tenderness. An emergency exchange has no tolerance for compromise. It is urgent and direct, like: 1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

During the skinandbones time my emergency exchange must have worked. Now and then I must have had the endurance of the horizon and the dusty roads. Otherwise with nothing but my skin and bones in the fufaika I wouldn't have survived.

Even now it's a mystery to me how our bodies get nourished. Things are torn down and built up inside the body just like at a construction site. You see yourself along with all the others day in and day out, but you never know how much inside you is breaking apart or coming together. How the calories give and take remains a riddle. How they erase all traces when they take, and put them back, when they give. You can't say exactly when things started to get better, but you know your strength has returned.

In our last year of camp we were given cash for our work. We could buy things at the market. We ate dried prunes, fish, Russian pancakes with sweet or salty cheese, bacon and lard, corn-flour cakes with sugar-beet paste, oily sunflower halva. Within a few weeks we were completely renourished. Fat and full as a sponge-BAMSTI was the word in the camp. We became men and women again, as though we were experiencing a second p.u.b.erty.

The new vanity began with the women. The men went on shuffling into the day wearing their quilted work clothes, still content with how they looked, and pleased merely to supply the women with material for their vanity. The hunger angel developed a taste for clothes, for the new camp fas.h.i.+on. The men brought one-meter lengths of snow-white cotton rope from the factory. The women unraveled the rope, knotted the threads together, and used iron hooks to crochet bras, stockings, blouses, and vests. The st.i.tches were always pulled to the inside, so you didn't see a single knot on the finished product. The women even fas.h.i.+oned hair ribbons and brooches out of the cotton threads. Trudy Pelikan wore a crocheted water-lily brooch like a demita.s.se pinned to her breast. One of the Zirris wore a lily-of-the-valley brooch with white thimbles affixed with wire, Loni Mich wore a dahlia dyed with red brick dust. During the first phase of this cotton transfer, I, too, was still content with how I looked. But I soon wanted to spruce myself up. I spent several long hours painstakingly sewing a newsboy cap out of my torn coat with the velvet collar. I had worked out the pattern in my head, a difficult, sophisticated construction. I took a band of tire rubber big enough so that the cap could be raked over the ear, and wrapped it in material. I used roofing felt for the bill, stiffened the oval upper part with cement-sack paper, and lined the whole cap with usable remnants from a tattered unders.h.i.+rt. The inner lining mattered to me, I felt my old vanity resurfacing, my need to look good even in places other people never see. It was a cap of expectation, a cap for better times.

A store in the Russian village further enhanced the women's crocheted camp fas.h.i.+on with toilet soap, powder, and rouge. All were the same brand: KRASNIY MAK-Red Poppy. The powder was pink and had a sharp, sweet aroma. The hunger angel was amazed.

The BALLETKI were the first fas.h.i.+on craze that caught on with men as well as women. I took half a rubber tire to the cobbler, others managed to get some rubberized material from the conveyor belt in the factory. The cobbler fas.h.i.+oned light summer shoes with very thin pliable soles, perfectly fitted to every foot. Handmade on the last, very elegant, good for stepping out. The hunger angel became light-footed. The Paloma grew giddy with excitement, everyone went to the plaza and danced until shortly before midnight, when the anthem sounded.

The women wanted to look nice for themselves and for the other women, but they also wanted to appeal to the men. And the men, eager to get at the crocheted underwear behind the blankets, worked a little harder on their own appearance. So in the wake of the balletki, men's fas.h.i.+on moved beyond the shoe. New fas.h.i.+ons, new loves, mating season at the animal crossing, pregnancies, abortions in the local hospital. But also more and more babies behind the wooden screen in the sick barrack.

I paid a visit to Herr Reusch, who came from Guttenbrunn in the Banat. I only knew him from the Appell. By day he cleaned rubble out of the bombed-out factory. In the evening he repaired torn fufaikas in exchange for tobacco. He was a master tailor, and when the hunger angel started running around so recklessly, Herr Reusch's expertise was very much in demand. He rolled out a thin sc.r.a.p of ribbon marked with centimeters, and measured me from my neck to my ankles. Then he said, one and a half meters of material for the pants and three meters for the jacket. Plus three big b.u.t.tons and six small ones. He said he'd take care of the jacket lining himself. For the jacket I also wanted a belt with a buckle. He suggested a buckle with two metal rings and an inverted box pleat for the back of the jacket. He said that was the latest thing in America.

I ordered two metal rings from Anton Kowatsch and took all my cash to the store in the Russian village. The material for the pants was a muted blue with a bright-gray nap. The material for the jacket was a plaid of sandy beige and cement-sack brown, the squares stood out as if in relief. I also bought a ready-made tie, moss green with slanted diamonds. And three meters of repp fabric for a s.h.i.+rt, in light gray-green. Then some larger b.u.t.tons for the pants and jacket and twelve very small ones for the s.h.i.+rt. That was in April 1949.

Three weeks later I had the s.h.i.+rt and the suit with the inverted box pleat and the iron buckle. Now at last the burgundy silk scarf with its matte and s.h.i.+ny checked pattern would have suited me perfectly. Tur Prikulitsch hadn't worn it for a long time, he'd probably thrown it away. The hunger angel was no longer inside our brains, but he was still perched on our necks. And he had a good memory, though he didn't need it, since our camp fas.h.i.+on was just another kind of hunger-eye hunger. The hunger angel said: Don't waste all your money, who knows what's yet to come. And I thought: Everything that's yet to come is already here.

I wanted some fancy clothes for going out, for the camp street, for the Paloma plaza, and even for the path to my cellar through the weeds, rust, and rubble. I changed clothes in the cellar before my s.h.i.+ft. The hunger angel warned: Pride comes before a fall. But I told him: We're alive. We only live once. The orach never leaves here either, and yet it puts on red jewelry and tailors itself a new glove with a different thumb for every leaf.

Meanwhile my gramophone box had its new key, but was gradually becoming too small. I had the carpenter build me a solid wooden trunk for my new clothes. And I commissioned a substantial lock for the trunk from Paul Gast in the metal shop.

When I presented my new clothes on the plaza for the first time, I thought: Everything that's yet to come is already here. If only everything would stay the way it is.

Someday I'll stroll down elegant lanes.

The orach still grew whistling-green in the fourth year of peace, but we didn't pick it, we no longer felt the savage hunger. After four years of being starved, we were convinced that we were now being fattened up, not to go home but to stay here and work. Every year, the Russians waited expectantly for what was coming, while we were afraid of what might be in store. To us, the old time was a hurdle to overcome, for them a new time was flowing into their giant land.

There was a rumor that for years Tur Prikulitsch and Bea Zakel had been h.o.a.rding clothes meant for us, that they'd sold them at the market and divided the money with s.h.i.+shtvanyonov. As a result, many people had to freeze to death who, even according to the rules of the camp, had a right to underwear, fufaikas, and shoes. We no longer counted how many. But I knew that 334 dead internees were resting in peace according to the registry Trudi Pelikan kept in the sick barrack, and I knew which peace they were resting in-the first, second, third, or fourth. For weeks I wouldn't think about them, but then they'd pop up like a rattle inside my brain and stay with me all day long.

Often, when I heard the little bells from the c.o.ke batteries, I had the sense they were ringing in a new year. And I thought: Someday I'd like to see a bench in a park instead of on the camp street, a bench with someone on it who's footloose and free, who's never been in a camp. On the plaza one evening the words CREPE SOLES made the rounds. Our singer Loni Mich asked what crepe was. And Karli Halmen winked at Paul Gast the lawyer and said, crepe comes from krepieren, to kick the bucket, we'll all be wearing crepe soles when we kick the bucket and go to the great sky over the steppe. After crepe soles the talk was of MUTTON CHOPS, which were supposed to be the latest thing in America. Loni Mich now asked what mutton chops were. The accordion player Konrad Fonn told her it meant hair cut like s.h.a.ggy wool around your ears.

Every two weeks the cinema in the Russian village showed films and newsreels for us, the people from the camp. Mostly Russian films, but also some from America and even requisitioned German films from Berlin. In one of the American newsreels we saw confetti flying between the skysc.r.a.pers like snow and singing men with crepe soles and sideburns down to their chin. After the film the barber Oswald Enyeter said that these sideburns were the mutton chops. See, here we've gone completely Russian and it turns out we're following the latest American fas.h.i.+on, he said.

I didn't know what mutton chops were, either. I seldom went to the cinema. Because of my s.h.i.+ft I was always working in the cellar or else too tired from working in the cellar when they showed the films. But I had my balletki for the summer, Kobelian had given me half a tire. And I could lock my gramophone suitcase, Paul Gast had made me a key with three fine bits like mouse teeth. From the carpenter I had a new wooden trunk with a good lock. I was outfitted with new clothes. I had no need of crepe soles in the cellar, and while I could grow mutton chops if I wanted to, they sounded more like something for Tur Prikulitsch. To me they looked downright apish.

Now it was easy for me to imagine running into Bea Zakel or Tur Prikulitsch in some other place, where we'd be on equal terms, perhaps at a train station with cast-iron pilasters and hanging baskets of petunias like at a spa. For instance: I'll climb aboard the train and Tur Prikulitsch will be sitting in the same compartment. I'll say a brief h.e.l.lo and sit diagonally across from him, that's all. At least I'll act as if that's all, I won't ask if he married Bea Zakel, even though I'll see his wedding ring. I'll unpack my sandwich and set it on the little folding table. White bread thickly spread with b.u.t.ter and slices of pink boiled ham. I won't enjoy the sandwich, but I'll make sure he doesn't notice that. Or perhaps I'll run into Zither Lommer and he'll be with the singer Loni Mich. Neither will recognize me, but I'll notice that her goiter has gotten bigger. The two of them will offer to take me to a concert in the Athenaeum. I'll decline and let them go their way. Then I'll appear as an usher in the Athenaeum and stop them at the entrance and point and say: Let's see your tickets, even-numbered seats on the right and odd on the left, I see you have 113 and 114 so you're sitting apart. And only when I laugh will they recognize me. But maybe I won't laugh.

I imagined a second meeting with Tur Prikulitsch, in a big city in America. This time he doesn't have a wedding ring, he's coming up the stairs with one of the Zirris on his arm. The Zirri won't recognize me but Tur will wink like Uncle Edwin the time he said: Quite the ladies' man, aren't I. But I'll just go on my way and that will be that.

Maybe I'll still be relatively young when I get out of the camp, in the prime of my life, as they say, like in Loni Mich's song: I WAS SCARCELY THIRTY. Maybe I'll meet Tur Prikulitsch a third and fourth time and on numerous occasions after that, in a third, fourth, sixth, or even eighth future. One day I'll look out of a third-floor hotel window and it will be raining. And on the street below a man will be opening his umbrella. He'll take a long time and will get wet because his umbrella won't open. I'll see that his hands are Tur's hands, but he won't know that. If he realized that, I'll think to myself, he wouldn't take so long trying to open his umbrella, or else he'd put on gloves, or else he wouldn't venture out on this street in the first place. If it weren't Tur Prikulitsch but just a man with Tur's hands, I'd call out from my window: Hey, why don't you go across the street, you won't get wet under the marquee. If the man looks up he might say: Do we know each other. And I would say: I don't know your face but I know your hands.

Someday, I thought, I'll stroll down elegant lanes, where people have a different way of life than in the small town where I was born. The elegant lane will be a promenade by the Black Sea. The water will be white with foam, with rocking waves like I've never seen. Neon signs will light up the promenade, saxophones will play. I'll run into Bea Zakel and recognize her by her slowly drifting eyes. I won't have a face, because she won't recognize me. She'll still have her heavy hair, but it won't be braided, it will flutter around her temples, bleached flour-white, like seagull wings. She'll also still have her high cheekbones, which will cast two hard-edged shadows, the way buildings do at high noon. The right angles of the shadows will make me think about the settlement behind the camp.

A new Russian settlement had gone up behind the camp in the third fall-rows of little houses known as Finnish cabins because they were built from prefabricated wooden parts that came from Finland. Karli Halmen told me that the parts had been precisely cut and that they came with detailed construction plans. And that all the parts got mixed up when they were unloaded, so that no one knew what went where. The construction was a disaster, with too few parts here and too many there, and sometimes the wrong parts altogether. In all my years in the camp, the construction supervisor was the only person who saw the deportees as people from civilized countries, where a right angle really did have ninety degrees. He considered us thinking human beings and not just forced laborers, which is why I remember him so well. Once during a cigarette break at the construction site he gave a speech about socialism and its good intentions being wrecked by people who didn't know what they were doing. He concluded with the remark: The Russians know what a right angle is, but they can't manage to build one.

Someday, I thought to myself, who knows in which year of peace and in which future, I'll come to the land with the mountain ridges, the place I travel to in my dreams when I ride through the sky on the white pig, the place people say is my homeland.

There were many variations on the theme of going home, different scenarios circulated through the camp. According to one, our best years would be behind us by the time we made it back, and we'd suffer the same fate as the prisoners of war from the First World War-a return journey lasting decades. s.h.i.+shtvanyonov orders us to our last and shortest roll call and proclaims: I hereby disband the camp. Get lost.

And everyone heads out on his own, farther east, in the wrong direction, because all roads west are closed. Over the Urals, all the way across Siberia, past Alaska, America, and then Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. Then, twenty-five years later, we'll arrive at our home in the west, a.s.suming it's still there and not already part of Russia.

In other versions we never even leave, they keep us here so long that the camp turns into a village without watchtowers, and we simply become villagers out of habit, though we still won't be Russians or Ukrainians. Or they keep us here until we no longer want to leave, because we're convinced that no one is waiting for us at home, that other people are living in our houses, and that our families have long since been driven out to who knows where, and no longer have a home of their own either. Or we wind up wanting to stay here because we no longer know what to make of our home and our home no longer knows what to make of us.

When you haven't heard from that other world you know as home for so long, you wonder if you should even want to go back, or what you should wish for once you're there. In the camp, all wis.h.i.+ng was taken away from us. We didn't have to decide anything, nor did we want to. It's true, we wanted to go home, but we contented ourselves with looking back, and didn't dare yearn ahead. People mistook memory for yearning. How can you tell the difference, if the same thing keeps churning in your head over and over and your world is so lost to you that you don't even miss it.

What will become of me at home, I thought. Wandering in the valley between the mountain ridges, I'll always be a returnee, wherever I go I'll always be preceded by a tch-tch-tch, as though a train were pulling in. I'll fall into my own trap, into a horrible intimacy. That's my family, I'll say, and I will mean the people from the camp. My mother will tell me I should become a librarian, because then I'd never be out in the cold. And you always wanted to read, she'll say. My grandfather will tell me I should consider becoming a traveling salesman. Since you always wanted to travel, he'll say. My mother may say this, and my grandfather may say that, but here it was the fourth year of peace and despite the new ersatz-brother, I had no idea whether they were still alive. In the camp, professions like traveling salesman were good for head happiness, because they gave you something to talk about.

Once on the board of silence in the cellar I talked about it with Albert Gion and even managed to coax him into speaking. Maybe I'll become a traveling salesman later on, I said, with all kinds of stuff in my suitcase, silk scarves and pencils, colored chalk, salves, and stain-remover. I remember a sh.e.l.l from Hawaii that my grandfather brought my grandmother, as big as a gramophone funnel, with bluish mother-of-pearl on the inside. Or maybe I'll become a builder, a master of blueprints, I said on the board of silence in the cellar, an ozalid-blue master. Then I'll have my own office. I'll build houses for people with money, and one of them will be completely round like this iron basket. First I'll draw the plans on sandwich paper. In the center there'll be a pole running from the cellar up to the cupola. The rooms will be like slices of a cake-four, six, or eight sections of a circle. I'll set the sandwich paper in a frame on top of the blueprint paper and set the frame in the sun to be exposed for five to ten minutes. Then I'll roll the blueprint paper into a tube and run some ammonia steam inside and just a few minutes later my plans will come out beautifully: pink, purple, cinnamon-brown.

Albert Gion listened to me and said: Blueprints, haven't you had enough of steam by now, I think you're overtired. The reason we're in the cellar in the first place is because we don't have a profession, much less a good one. Barber, cobbler, tailor-those are good professions. The best, at least here in the camp. But either you brought them from home or you didn't. Those are professions that decide your fate. If we'd known we'd be sent to a camp someday we would all have become barbers or cobblers or tailors. Never traveling salesmen or master builders or master blueprinters.

Albert Gion was right. Is hauling mortar a profession. If you spend years carrying mortar or cinder blocks or shoveling coal or scratching potatoes out of the earth with your hands or cleaning up the cellar, you know how to do something, but that doesn't count. Hard labor is not a profession. And labor was all what was demanded of us, never a profession. Fetch and carry is all we did, and that's no profession.

We no longer felt the savage hunger, and the orach still grew silver-green. Soon it would turn woody and flaming red. But because we knew what hunger was, we didn't pick it, we bought fatty foods at the market and wolfed them down without restraint. We fattened up our old homesickness, it soaked up the hasty new meat. But even with the new meat, I fed myself the same old dream: Someday even I will stroll down elegant lanes. Even I.

Fundamental, like the silence.

After the skinandbones time and the emergency exchange were all behind me-when I had balletki, cash, food, new flesh on my bones, and new clothes in my new trunk-we were released. It was hard to accept. For my five years in the camp I have five things to say: 1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed.

The emergency exchange is a visitor from the other side.

Inside the camp, the we-form is singular.

Perimeters run deep.

But all five things have one truth in common: they are fundamental, like the silence that exists between them, and not the silence in front of witnesses.

The disabler.

I came home from the camp at the beginning of January 1950. Once again I was in a living room, sitting in a deep square underneath a ceiling of white stucco, like snow. My father was painting the Carpathians, every few days a new watercolor, with gray-toothed mountains and fir trees smudged with snow, almost always in the same arrangement. Rows of firs at the foot of the mountain, groups of firs on the slope, pairs and single fir trees on the ridge, with birches sticking out here and there like white antlers. Evidently clouds were the most difficult to paint, they always wound up looking like gray sofa cus.h.i.+ons. And the Carpathians always looked sleepy.

My grandfather had died, and my grandmother was sitting in his plush chair doing crossword puzzles. Now and then she asked for help: sofa in the orient, part of a shoe beginning with t, breed of horses, roof made of sailcloth.

My mother was knitting one pair of woolen socks after the other for her ersatz-child Robert. The first pair was green, the second white, and after that came brown, red flecked with white, blue, gray. My confusion started with the white pair-I saw my mother knitting clumps of lice, and with each new sock I saw our knitted garden between the barracks, the sweater tips at daybreak. I lay on the sofa, the ball of wool lay in the tin dish beside my mother's chair, it was livelier than I was. The yarn climbed and hovered and dropped. Two fist-sized b.a.l.l.s of wool were needed for each sock, but it was impossible to tell how much that would be if laid out in a single strand, the total length for all the socks might cover the distance from the sofa to the train station, which was a neighborhood I avoided. At last my feet felt warm, they only itched on the instep, which was always where the footwraps first froze to the skin. The winter days turned gray as early as four o'clock. My grandmother switched on the light. The lampshade was a pale-blue funnel trimmed with dark-blue ta.s.sels. The lamp didn't cast much light on the ceiling, which stayed gray as the stucco-snow began to melt. The next morning it was once again white. I imagined that it froze during the night, while we were sleeping in the other rooms, like the icy lace in the empty field behind the zeppelin. The clock ticked away beside the wardrobe. The pendulum flew, shoveling our time in between the furniture: from the wardrobe to the window, from the table to the sofa, from the stove to the plush chair, from the day into the evening. On the wall, the ticking was my breath-swing, in my breast it was my heart-shovel, which I missed very much.

Early one morning at the end of January, Uncle Edwin came by to take me to the crate factory and introduce me to his boss. Out on the street, I saw a face in the window at Herr Carp's, who lived next door in the Schulga.s.se. The face was cut off at the neck by the frost pattern on the windowpane. Strands of icy hair twined around a forehead, a sliding greenish eye, and there was Bea Zakel in a white-flowered robe, her braid now heavy and gray. Herr Carp's cat was sitting in the window the way it always did, but I felt sorry for Bea, that she had aged so quickly. I knew the cat could only be a cat, that the telegraph pole wasn't a guard, that the blazing white of the snow wasn't the camp street but the Schulga.s.se. I knew that nothing here could be anything other than itself, because everything had stayed at home. Everything except me. Among all these home-sated people, I was dizzy with freedom. I was jumpy, my spirit conditioned for catastrophe, trained in doglike fear, my brain geared to submission. I saw Bea Zakel in the window waiting for me, and I'm sure she saw me walk by. I should have greeted her, at least nodded or waved. But that didn't occur to me until it was too late, we were already two houses farther down. When we reached the end of the street and turned the corner, my uncle hooked his arm into mine. I was walking close to him but he must have sensed how far away I was. He was probably just hooking his arm into his old coat, which I was wearing. His lungs were whistling. There was a long silence, and then he said something I felt he didn't really want to say. His lungs seemed to be forcing him to speak, which is why he had two voices when he said: I hope they take you on at the factory. It seems things are a bit grouchy at home. He was referring to the disabler.

Right where his fur cap touched his left ear, the crease of skin above his lobe flattened out just like mine. I wanted to see his right ear too. I unhooked my arm and crossed to his right side. His right ear was even more like mine than his left. There the crease smoothed out farther down, the lobe looked longer and wider, as if ironed flat.

They took me on at the crate factory. Every day I left the disabler at home and returned to him after work. Each time I came home, my grandmother asked: Are you back.

And I said: I'm back.

Each time I left the house she asked: Are you leaving.

And I said: I'm leaving.

When she asked me these questions she took a step toward me and placed three fingers on her forehead as though she couldn't believe what I was saying. Her hands were transparent, nothing but skin with veins and bones, two silk fans. I wanted to fling my arms around her neck when she asked me that. The disabler stopped me.