loud enough to shatter glass, drowning out all the noise made by our shoveling—
Evening spreads across the vale
Softly sings the nightingale
—and suddenly all the women who had disappeared were back. They crowded in among us and shoveled away as if nothing had happened.
I liked the name zeppelin: it resonated with the silvery forgetting of our misery, and with the quick, catlike coupling. I realized that these unknown German men had everything our men were lacking. They had been sent by the Führer into the world as warriors, and they also were the right age, neither childishly young nor overripe like our men. Of course they, too, were miserable and degraded, but they had seen battle, had fought in the war. For our women they were heroes, a notch above the forced laborers, offering more than evening love in a barrack bed behind a blanket. Evening love in the barrack remained indispensable. But for our women it smelled of their own hardship, the same coal and the same longing for home. And it led to the same worn-out give-and-take, with the man providing the food, while the woman cleaned and consoled. Love in the zeppelin was free of all concerns except for the hoisting and lowering of the little white flag.
Anton Kowatsch was convinced I would disapprove of the women going to the zeppelin. No one could have guessed that I understood them all too well, that I knew all about arousal in disheveled clothes, about roving desire and gasping delight in the Alder Park and the Neptune baths. No one could imagine that I was reliving my own rendezvous, more and more often: SWALLOW, FIR, EAR, THREAD, ORIOLE, CAP, HARE, CAT, SEAGULL. Then PEARL. No one had any idea I was carrying so many cover names in my head, and so much silence around my neck.
Even inside the zeppelin, love had its seasons. The wildcat weddings came to an end in our second year, first because of the winter, and later because of the hunger. When the hunger angel was running rampant during the skinandbones time, when male and female could not be distinguished from each other, coal was still unloaded at the silo. But the paths in the weeds were overgrown. Purple tufted vetch clambered among the white yarrow and the red orach, the blue burdocks bloomed, and the thistles as well. The zeppelin slept and belonged to the rust, just as the coal belonged to the camp, the grass belonged to the steppe, and we belonged to hunger.
On the phantom pain of the cuckoo clock
One evening in the summer of the second year, a cuckoo clock appeared on the wall above the tin bucket that contained our drinking water, right next to the door. No one could figure out how it got there. It belonged to the barrack and to the nail it hung from, and to no one else. But it bothered all of us together and each of us individually. In the empty afternoons, the ticking listened and listened, whether we were coming or going or sleeping. Or simply lying in bed, lost in our thoughts, or waiting because we were too hungry to fall asleep and too drained to get up. But after the waiting nothing came, except the ticking in the back of our throat, doubled by the ticking from the clock.
Why did we need a cuckoo clock here. Not to measure the time. We had nothing to measure, the anthem from the loudspeaker woke us every morning, and in the evening it sent us off to bed. Whenever we were needed, they came to get us, from the yard, the mess hall, from our sleep. The factory sirens were a clock for us, as were the white cooling tower cloud and the little bells from the coke oven batteries.
Presumably it was Anton Kowatsch, the drummer, who had dragged in the cuckoo clock. Although he swore he had nothing to do with it, he wound it every day. As long as it’s hanging there it might as well run, he said.
It was a perfectly normal cuckoo clock, but the cuckoo wasn’t normal. At three-quarters past the hour it called the half hour, and at a quarter past it called the hour. When it reached the hour, it either forgot everything or sounded the wrong time, calling twice as much or only half of what it should. Anton Kowatsch claimed that the cuckoo was calling the right time, but in different parts of the world.