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Herta Muller, The Hunger Angel
(2010, Metropolitan Books)
---YouTube
Dramatic Recitation
https://youtu.be/osJlA-zDbE0
(Musical Actor. Jong-sun Choi)
70 p.
What kept me from doing so was the belief that the handkerchief was my fate. And once you let your fate pass out of your hands, you’re lost. I was convinced that my grandmother’s parting sentence I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK had turned into a handkerchief. I’m not ashamed to say that the handkerchief was the only person who looked after me in the camp. I’m certain of that even today.
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8 p.
On the wooden walkway, just next to the gas meter, my grandmother said: I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK.
I didn’t set out to remember her sentence. I carried it to the camp without thinking. I had no idea it was going with me. But a sentence like that has a will of its own. It worked inside me, more than all the books T had packed. I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK became the heart-shovel’s accomplice and the hunger angel’s adversary. And because I did come back, I can say: a sentence like that keeps you alive.
69 p.
Then the early moon looked at me with the face of my mother. The clouds moon looked at me with the face of my mother. The clouds moved on cushion underneath her chin and another one just behind her right cheek. Then they pulled that cushion back out through her left cheek. And I acked the moon: Is my mother now so frail. Is she sick. Is our house still there. Is she still at home, or is she in a camp as well. Is she even still alive. Does she know that I’m alive, or is she already weeping for her dead son whenever she thinks of me.
That was my second winter in the camp, we weren’t allowed to write letters home, or send any sign of life.
80 p.
Never was I so resolutely opposed to death as in the five years in the camp. To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.
224 p.
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 shell that was left belonged to the Russians.
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