which had grown so high and hollow that our steps echoed inside. A bright void in the skull, as if we’d swallowed too much glaring light. A light that sweetly creeps up your throat and swells and rises to your brain. Until you no longer have a brain inside your head, only the hunger echo. No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.
I looked at the orach that could no longer be eaten and tried to think about something else—about the last tired warmth of late summer, before the ice-winter came. But instead I thought about the potatoes we didn’t have. And about the women who lived on the kolkhoz who probably did have potatoes in their daily cabbage soup. Though apart from that, no one envied them. They lived in holes in the earth and had to work much longer every day than we did: from dawn to dusk.
Springtime in the camp was the season for cooking orach picked off the rubble heap. The German name MELDE sounded as if it meant more than it did. In fact, MELDE was for us a word without any overtone, a word that left us in peace. It wasn’t the MELDE DICH—present yourself—of roll call. This MELDE wasn’t a roll-call weed, but a wayside word. If anything, it was a word for after evening roll call, an after-roll-call weed. Because we couldn’t cook our orach until we had been counted, and that took forever because the numbers never came out right.
There were five work battalions, or ORBs—Otdyel’niy Rabochiy Batal’on—in our camp, each consisting of between five hundred and eight hundred internees. I was assigned to battalion number 1009, and my work number was 756.
For the Appell, or roll call, we stood in rank and file—what an expression for those five miserable regiments of swollen eyes, large noses, hollow cheeks. Our stomachs and legs were distended from the brown bog water. In freezing cold or searing heat, we spent entire evenings standing at attention. Only the lice were allowed to move. During the endless counting they could drink their fill, parade across our miserable flesh, crawl over us from head to pubic hair for hours on end. And after they were sated and resting in the seams of our quilted work clothes, we’d still be standing at attention. And Shishtvanyonov, our camp commandant, would still be screaming. We didn’t know his first name. He was simply Tovarishch Shishtvanyonov. But that was long enough to make you stammer with fear whenever you said it. For me the sound always conjured the rumble of the deportation locomotive. And the white alcove in the church at home, HEAVEN SETS TIME IN MOTION. Perhaps we had to stand so long to stop the time in motion. Our bones became heavy as iron. When the flesh on your body disappears, your bones become a burden, and the ground pulls you downward.
I practiced forgetting myself during roll call, to the point where I couldn’t tell breathing out from breathing in. I practiced rolling my eyes up without lifting my head, to look for a corner of cloud where I might hang my bones. If I was able to forget myself, and found the heavenly hook, it held on to me. But often there was no cloud, only blue sky, like open water.
Often there was nothing but an unbroken cover of clouds, a uniform gray.
Often the clouds were running, and no hook could hold fast.
Often the rain burned my eyes and glued my clothes to my skin.
Often the frost bit into my entrails.
On days like that the sky lifted my eyes up, and the roll call pulled them down—then my bones just hung inside me, with nothing to hold on to.
The kapo, Tur Prikulitsch, strutted back and forth between us and Commandant Shishtvanyonov, his lists slipping out of his hands, dog-eared from constant leafing. Every time he called out a number, his chest wobbled like a rooster’s. His hands were still a child’s. My hands grew in the camp: square, hard, and flat, like two boards.
If someone screwed up his courage after roll call and asked one of the nachal’niks, or even