into the blinding morning snow. Four statues made of black slag are standing on the watchtowers. They’re not soldiers, but four black dogs. The first and the third statues move their heads, while the second and fourth stay frozen. Then the first dog moves its legs, the fourth moves its rifle, and the second and third stay frozen.
The snow on the roof of the mess hall is a white linen sheet. Why did Fenya put the bread cloth on the roof.
The cooling-tower cloud is a white baby carriage rolling toward the white birches in the Russian village. One day, when the white batiste handkerchief was in its third winter inside my suitcase, I went out begging again. I knocked on the door of the old Russian woman. A man my age opened. I asked if his name was Boris. He said NYET. I asked if an old lady lived here. He said NYET.
In the mess hall the bread is on its way. Someday when I’m alone at the bread counter, I’ll screw up my courage and ask Fenya: When am I going home, I’m practically a statue made of black slag. Fenya will say: Well, you have tracks in the cellar, and you have a mountain. The little carts are always going home, you should go with them. You used to like taking the train into the mountains. And I’ll say: But that was when I was still at home. Well, she’ll say, so everything will be just like it was at home.
But then I enter the mess hall and take my place in line. The bread is covered with white snow from the roof. I could work things out so I’m the last one in line, so I could be alone with Fenya when she administers my bread. But I don’t dare, her saintliness is too cold, and her face has the same three noses it always does—two of them being the beaks of her scales.
A spoon here, a spoon there
It was Advent once again, and I was amazed to see my little wire tree with the green fir-wool set up on the table in the barrack. Paul Gast the lawyer had kept it in his suitcase, and this year he decorated it with three bread-ball ornaments. Because we’ve been here three years, he said. He could afford to treat us to the bread ornaments because he stole the bread from his wife, but he didn’t think we knew that.
Heidrun Gast lived in one of the women’s barracks, as married couples weren’t allowed to live together. She already had the dead-monkey face, the slit mouth running from one ear to the other, swollen eyes, and the white hare in the hollows of her cheeks. Since summer she’d been working in the garage, where she had to fill the truck batteries. Her face was more pockmarked than her fufaika, from all the sulfuric acid.
Every day in the mess hall we saw what the hunger angel could do to a marriage. The lawyer searched for his wife like a watchdog. If she was sitting at a table between other people, he gave her arm a tug, then squeezed in close to her so that her soup was next to his. When she looked away for a second he dipped his spoon in her bowl. If she noticed what he was doing he said: A spoon here, a spoon there.
January had barely begun. The little tree with the bread ornaments was still on the table in our barrack when Heidrun Gast died. And the bread ornaments were still hanging on the little tree when Paul Gast started wearing his wife’s coat with the small rounded collar and the tattered pocket flaps made of rabbit fur. He also started to get shaved more often than he used to.
By the middle of January our singer Loni Mich was wearing the coat. And the lawyer was allowed behind her blanket. Around this time the barber asked: Anyone here have children back home.
The lawyer said: I do.
How many, asked the barber.
Three, said the lawyer.
His eyes stared out of the shaving lather and fixed on the door, where my padded cap with the earflaps hung on a hook like a duck that had been shot out of the sky. The lawyer heaved a deep sigh, blowing a gob of foam off the back of the barber’s hand onto the ground. It landed between the chair legs, right next to the lawyer’s rubber galoshes. Wrapped around the soles