touched my face like a nurse. Maybe I no longer need the potatoes at all, I thought, maybe I’m going to die from the poison in the cellar and just don’t know it yet. I heard halting birdcalls from the trees and a sad, gurgling lament in the distance. The night silhouettes flowed around me. I can’t allow myself to be afraid, I thought, or else I’ll drown. I talked to myself, so as not to pray:
The things that last never squander themselves, they need only one unchanging connection to the world. The steppe connects to the world through lurking, the moon through giving light, the steppe-dogs through fleeing, and the grass through swaying. And my connection to the world is through eating.
The wind hummed, I heard my mother’s voice. In that last summer at home my mother should not have said: Don’t stab the potato with your fork because it will fall apart, use your spoon, the fork is for meat. But my mother couldn’t have imagined that the steppe would know her voice, that one night on the steppe the potatoes would pull me into the earth and all the stars would stab me from above. No one could have guessed, back then at the table, that I would be hauling myself like a big trunk through fields and grassland all the way to the camp gate. That only three years later I would be alone in the night, a man made of potatoes, and that what I would call my way home was a road back to a camp.
At the gate, the dogs barked in their soprano night-voices that always sounded like crying. Perhaps Tur Prikulitsch had also made an agreement with the guards, because they waved me through with no inspection. I heard them laughing behind me, their shoes tapping on the ground. With my clothes stuffed so full, I couldn’t turn around, presumably one of the guards was aping my stiff gait.
The next day I took three middle-sized potatoes to Albert Gion on our night shift, thinking he might want to roast them in peace and quiet over the fire in back, in the open iron basket. He didn’t. He studied them one at a time and put them in his cap. He asked: Why exactly 273.
Because minus 273 degrees Celsius is absolute zero, I said, it doesn’t get colder than that.
You’re very scientific today, he said, but I’m sure you miscounted.
I couldn’t have, I said, the number 273 watches out for itself, it’s a given.
What’s given, said Albert Gion, is that you should have thought of something else. My God, Leo, you could have run away.
I gave Trudi Pelikan twenty potatoes, to pay her back for the sugar and salt. Within two months, just before Christmas, all 273 potatoes were gone. The last ones sprouted blue-green sliding eyes like Bea Zakel’s. I wondered whether I should tell her that someday.
Sky below earth above
Deep in the fruit garden, at our summerhouse in the Wench, stood a wooden bench without a back. We called it Uncle Hermann. We called it that because we didn’t know anybody by that name. Uncle Hermann had two round feet made of tree trunks stuck into the earth. The top of his seat was smooth, but the underside was still rough timber, with bark. When the sun was blazing, Uncle Hermann sweated drops of resin. If you plucked them off they grew back the next day.
Higher up on the grass hill stood Aunt Luia. She had a back and four legs and was smaller and slimmer than Uncle Hermann. She was older as well, Uncle Hermann had come after her. I climbed up to Aunt Luia and rolled down the hill. Sky below earth above and grass in between. The grass always held me firmly by the feet so I wouldn’t fall into the sky. And I always saw Aunt Luia’s gray underbelly.
One evening my mother was sitting on Aunt Luia, and I was lying on my back in the grass at her feet. We were looking up at the stars, which were all out. And Mother pulled the collar of her jacket over her chin, until the collar had lips. Until not she, but the collar said:
Heaven and earth make up the world. The reason the sky’s so big is because there’s a coat hanging there for every human. And the reason the earth is so big is because the world’s toes are so far away. So far away you