work together to create a swaying, swinging motion. You hold the crossbar with your left hand and the neck of the blade with your right, so that your fingers rest on the seam of the weld. Then you jab underneath the coal and swing your shovel in an arc, toward the back of the truck. As you turn, your weight shifts, and you let the length of the handle slide through your right hand, out over the edge of the gate, so you can dump the coal into the deep. Then you bring the empty shovel back up. Then you plunge the shovel back inside for another load, another swing, another dump.
Once most of the coal has been unloaded and what’s left is too far from the gate, this rotating swing is no longer effective. Now you need to take up a fencing position, with your right foot set gracefully forward, while your left serves as a supporting axis in back, toes gently turned out. You hold the crossbar with your left hand, but this time you don’t hold on to the metal seam with your right hand, you just let the handle slide up and down as you balance the load. You plunge the shovel in, shifting your weight onto your left leg as you add a little push from your right knee. Then you pull the shovel back out, carefully, so that not one piece of coal falls off the heart-blade. You step back onto your right foot, continuing to turn with your whole body. This brings you to a new, third, position, with your left foot gracefully poised, its heel lifted as though dancing, so nothing but the tip of your big toe has any purchase—ready to lunge forward as you fling the coal off the heart-blade into the clouds. For a second the shovel hangs horizontally in the air, only the crossbar is still attached to your left hand. The movements are as beautiful as a tango, a series of ever-changing acute angles against a constant rhythm. And if the coal has to fly even farther, the fencing gives way to waltzing: you move in a triangle, your weight shifting from one leg to the other, and you bend as low as 45 degrees. You fling your coal and it scatters in flight like a flock of birds. And the hunger angel flies as well. He is in the coal, in the heart-shovel, in your joints. He knows that nothing warms the whole body more than the very shoveling that wears it down. But he also knows that hunger devours nearly all the artistry.
Unloading was always a job for two or three people. Not counting the hunger angel, because we weren’t sure whether there was one hunger angel for all of us or if each of us had his own. The hunger angel approached everyone, without restraint. He knew that where things can be unloaded, other things can be loaded. In terms of mathematics, the results could be horrifying: if each person has his own hunger angel, then every time someone dies, a hunger angel is released. Eventually there would be nothing but abandoned hunger angels, abandoned heart-shovels, abandoned coal.
On the hunger angel
Hunger is always there.
Because it’s there, it comes whenever and however it wants to. The causal principle is the work of the hunger angel.
When he comes, he comes with force.
It’s utterly clear:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
I myself could do without the heart-shovel. But my hunger depends on it. I wish the heart-shovel were my tool. But the shovel is the master, and I am the tool. I submit to its rule. Nevertheless it’s my favorite shovel. I’ve forced myself to like it. I submit because it is a better master when I’m compliant, when I don’t hate it. I ought to thank it, because when I shovel for my bread I am distracted from my hunger. Since hunger never goes away, the heart-shovel makes sure that shoveling gets put ahead of hunger. Shoveling takes priority when you are shoveling, otherwise your body can’t manage the work.
The coal gets shoveled away, but fortunately there’s never any less of it. New shipments arrive every day from Yasinovataya, so it says on the coal cars. Every day the head becomes possessed by shoveling. The body, steered by the head, becomes the tool of the shovel. And nothing more.
Shoveling is hard. Having to shovel and not being able to is one thing. Wanting to shovel and