From beneath the blanket, she posed a question, the same question she’d ask day after day in an interrogation that would soon become so routine that I found myself answering it even as I slept.
“Have you practiced dancing today?” she inquired.
I wasn’t about to tell her the truth, which was that I’d started to practice but as soon as I was in first position, a drop of blood leaped from my throat and into the air, as if it were trying to alert me to the damaged performance of my insides. In all its redness, the little drop made this clear: Mengele’s plans to unfurl me had begun, and if I were to outlive the harm he’d wrought, it would take a miracle doubled and doubled again, multiplied to some impossible degree.
“What reason could I have not to dance?” I said.
Stasha
Chapter Five
The Red Clouds
After Uncle hurt my ear, everything I heard carried an echo. This was good when someone said something pleasant. It was terrible when someone barked a nasty order.
I think I don’t have to say which occurred more frequently, considering that Ox was charged with my care. That woman would never be pleased.
A second side effect: A constant peal of absence. A certain soreness, a raw pang.
A third side effect of this damage was more welcome. The puncture he’d left in my ear granted an easier passage for dreams to sift into my brain. I had all manner of dreams in the days after my hearing on that side went black. They were so beautiful that I almost forgave Uncle for the perversions he’d wrought on my eardrum. Because I could not turn down the opportunity, even in fantasy, to confront him with all the wrongs he’d done.
“Did you have the dream too?” I asked Pearl one morning after a particularly satisfying episode of revenge. I’ll admit it: I was testing her; I wanted to see how aligned we were that day.
“Of course I did,” she said. And she stretched out on the rough slats of our bunk and yawned a little, just to distract me from her unconvincing tone.
“What was in it?” I challenged.
Knowing that her face would give away the deception, she turned her back to me and stared at the bricks.
“Family,” she said. “What else?”
I felt so guilty that I hadn’t dreamed of family at all—not a glimmer of Papa or Mama, not even a figment of Zayde—that I went along with this lie she presented.
“A good one, yes. But I wouldn’t mind if it changed a little from time to time,” I said. “That part where Zayde turned the cabbage into a butterfly was pleasant enough, but the part where Papa reappeared every time Mother wept was terrible.”
“It was dreary, really,” Pearl said. “I’m not sure why we can’t dream better.”
“And I suppose these defects were all my fault? You were born first, after all,” I said. “You always take the lead in such things. Even at the laboratory, they think you are the leader.”
“That only proves how stupid they are,” Pearl said. “Anyone with eyes can see that you are in charge of us.”
I swung my legs around to the edge of the bunk. It could have been a good day if we were anywhere else. The sun was out and for once, the birds were determined to get their chirps in alongside the howls of the guard dogs.
“Out of bed!” Ox roared. She walked along the wooden railings, banging each with a spoon and reaching up to tweak a girl’s earlobe whenever it pleased her.
I put my hands over both ears.
“Hear no evil, eh?” Ox said.
I nodded. My hands remained in their position.
“You’ll see no evil too. Not today. A soccer match out at the field. Won’t that be nice?”
I put my hands down, cautiously, and replied that yes, I was excited to watch the match.
My sister also cheered to this news. She’d been slow in recent days, but for once, she leaped onto the ladder and dressed in a hurry. But Ox caught her by the collar and pulled her aside.
“No match for you, Pearl,” Ox said.
That’s when we saw the flash of the ambulance as it rumbled past the door.
I began to wish, as I saw Nurse Elma collect Pearl, as I watched them disappear into the mouth of that trickster ambulance and roll off, that he’d blunted the abilities of my eyes as well, just so I could no longer witness the continued torture of my sister. But I was not to be spared the burden of sight, not yet.
We assembled in the yard, with Ox at the fore. She appeared to be a great fan of the sport, and she tried to raise our spirits, talking to each child about different plays and which guard was the best on the field. Dr. Miri and Twins’ Father were less enthusiastic about the event. They walked among us, keeping a dutiful count.
Patient loped over to me in his knock-kneed way. His eyes were more shifty than usual.
“I have a present for you,” he said. His arms were tucked behind his back.
“All I want is for you to be well, Patient.”
He coughed in reply.
“And you’re not well at all.”
“It is one of those things,” Patient said brightly, “where it gets worse before it gets even worse and then it never really gets better but who has the time to care because you’re too busy fighting for a tin cup full of nettles.”
This had become a popular saying at the time. I didn’t care for it much. I turned away to avoid continuing the course of this conversation. I felt a whack at the rear of my skirt. And then a tap at my shoulder. Laughing, Patient held up an ear horn.
“It’s for you,” he said. “From Canada. They kept it because it is ivory, I think.”
This antiquated ear horn must have belonged to a wealthy woman. It had that precious finish, and a horse’s head for a handle. This horse was a defiant animal; its mouth quested, and its mane ribboned back, as if confronted by some terrible wind. I worried what Uncle might say about it if he happened to see me crossing the yard.
“Try it and see,” he begged. “Put it to your bad ear and I’ll say something.”
I didn’t try it. I stroked the horse’s mane skeptically.
“You better like it,” he said. “I traded for that with Peter. He stole it from the warehouse for me. It is easier to get things from Peter if you are a girl, because then you can pay with a fumble. I had to pay with a cigarette.”
“I’d rather the cigarette,” I scoffed.
“Cigarettes can’t make you hear,” he said, his voice ever reasonable. “I might say something valuable someday in your left ear, something you don’t want to miss.”
He had a good point. More and more, I was enjoying our conversations. I could speak to him about things I couldn’t with Pearl. Things about ending Uncle. As in where to end him and how to end him, and the kind of implement that might end him the fastest.
At the match, we children spread out on the left side of the field and tried not to look at the right side, which was occupied by female wardens and some of the guards’ families, all of them visiting for the weekend, every last one beaming and lolling on bright blankets with potato salads and rolls and sausages. The mothers were chasing their cherub-babies around the grass and reading picture books to their girl children and snapping photos with their cameras at all the curiosities of Auschwitz. I saw a camera pointed in my direction, and gave a deliberate blink. Patient mimicked the gesture. We were becoming, I noted happily, more and more alike every day.
After we opened our eyes, the game began.
We watched the ball fly back and forth between the guards in their trim athletic gear and the prisoners in their shabby stripes. Patient was particularly excited; I had to remind him several times not to cheer too loudly, if only for the safety of his insides. An unmodulated cheer, I warned, was sure to rupture the fragilities within him.
“And don’t expect us to win either,” I said.
“But we will win,” he said to my good ear, thoroughly enraptured. “And when we win, the trains will move back on their tracks, through the forests, through the mountains. If we win, t
he ghetto will have never been, and there will never have been a knock on the door.”
He paused for my approval, but only for a second. He was enjoying his fancies, all the powers of his imagination. We were alike in that way too.
“If they win,” he continued, “my brother will be my brother instead of a dead boy. He’ll never have suffered. He’ll never have wondered where I was while he lay dying.”
I wanted to tell him I didn’t know if such a miracle could occur. I was privy to some of the secrets of this place and knew it to be strange, but a resurrection? That seemed impossible. But then I realized that I could not say that such goodness was unlikely because I had never thought the cruelty of Auschwitz was possible either.
But I kept these thoughts to myself, and if Patient was interested in what preoccupied my mind, he covered it quite cleverly by focusing on the match.
We watched the prisoners slouch across the field. But their slouch was determined in the first round and valiant in the second. Some were whittled sleepwalkers, while others were enlivened by the possibility of victory, summoning strength that was sure to dissipate. The ball didn’t care how feeble the kicks were, how sleepy the plays. It flew between the prisoner and the head guard as if trying to negotiate some impossible treaty. In the third round, a guard laughingly booted the ball off the field and replaced it with a sourdough boule, kicking it off from the starting point with a spray of crumbs. Even the crows perched in the trees knew better than to scavenge these crumbs; they turned their sooty heads toward the sun and ignored it. I saw that they were wise and followed their example, and Patient followed mine.
We looked to the sky instead of the match and we watched the clouds be clouds in their own way. Together, we read the shapes, in the style of children more innocent than ourselves.
“A clock,” I said, pointing to a cloud.
“A Nazi!” Patient said.
I pointed to another cloud.
“A rabbit,” I said.
“A Nazi,” said Patient.
This pattern continued. Where I saw a bride, a ghost, a tooth, a spoon, Patient saw only Nazis. Sometimes his Nazis were sleeping or picking their teeth, but mostly they were dying Nazis. The dying Nazis died of an array of diseases, of run-ins with wild animals, run-ins with Patient’s grandmother, and run-ins with the point of a bread knife held by Patient himself.
I tried to see what he saw, tried to follow his gaze from where he lay, his cheeks streaked with dirt. He coughed, but politely turned his face to direct this nasty exhalation into the ground.
“Explain to me how that looks like a Nazi,” I said. I pointed to the latest puff, which he’d declared to be a Nazi dying of a poisoned arrow.
In answer, the boy took his bread knife from his pocket and dwelled on the blade. All of us in the Zoo were given these knives to cut our rations with; most were dull and leaned weakly from their hilts. But Patient’s bread knife had a danger to its edge, a sharpness that he had cultivated from the backs of rocks.
“Someday I’m going to kill a Nazi,” he whispered. And then he bolted upright.
“I want to kill one too,” I whispered back. “But a very specific one. You know who.”
Patient fell to stabbing the soil around him.
“They are all the same,” he said. “I’ll take any I can.”
As he spoke, I felt a sudden pain. It was an interloper, one unknown to me. It tried to present itself as warmth, but really, what it carried was a sting so strong it was a wonder that I did not faint. Above me, the clouds rollicked without a care. Stupid clouds. I was beginning to tire of them. Not only were they unsympathetic to our plight, but not a single one was talented enough to attempt an imitation of my sister. As I felt this pain, I thought of Pearl in the laboratory. But I couldn’t think of Pearl in the laboratory, not like that.
She was stronger than me, I thought, she would endure.
I forced myself to take a brighter view of things.
“Someday,” I told my friend, “killing won’t be necessary at all. Because the war, it will end.”
“The world?” Patient furrowed his brow.
“No, the war,” I said. “The war will end.”
Patient shrugged. I wasn’t sure if he shrugged at the sentiment or if he was reacting to the fact that the guards had scored another goal.
“World, war. These are also the same,” he said.
It was then, in a fit of anger roused by the guards’ victory, that he stood and thrust his bread knife at the Nazi-clouds, and his beleaguered body must not have been able to support even this small gesture, because he stumbled back, fell with a thud, and struck his head on a stone. His body shuddered and seized. Ox did nothing; I did less. I was afraid. I called for Twins’ Father, for Dr. Miri. Patient continued to shake; his eyes flashed. The prisoner-goalie let out a cry and dashed over; he tried to cradle Patient, and he tried to fit a stick in the boy’s seizing mouth so as to save his tongue. Seeing this rescue, one of the guards drew his pistol. Shots were fired. Two in the air, and one toward the flesh. Gut shot, the prisoner-goalie fell beside the twitching boy.
Uncle pushed his way through the crowd with a stretcher. He shouted furiously at all he passed, and he stepped over the body of the fallen goalie to retrieve Patient.
A premonition ran through my head as the boy was carted off on a stretcher: This was the last I would ever see of my friend. I looked down at my arms, which trembled around Patient’s gift. I didn’t need the ear horn to hear the shouts of Uncle as he screamed into Patient’s still face in some hopeless attempt at revival.
And in the midst of these screams and cries, I felt the pain of my sister that I’d tried to dismiss because she was stronger, because she would want it that way, because I couldn’t live with any other. Pearl’s pain, it insisted within me; it ran and coiled and it said: Do what you like with your share, but I will not be ignored, reconfigured, or endured.
Hearing this, I dropped the ear horn.
It fell some feet away from where the wounded prisoner-goalie lay on the field, clutching his belly with one hand. How can it be possible that we remain so curious to the end, so intent on knowing and experiencing even as we are dying? Because, you see, when the prisoner-goalie spied that precious object, so strange and foreign on that soccer field, he dragged himself forward in his dying haze—it was as if he wanted to see if that ivory ear horn held something final for him, a message, a sound, a cry. But the guard, spying this interest, took him down with a shot to the back just as he grasped hold of it. Only then did the wounded man lie still. Red clouds bloomed between the bars of his uniform—I watched them seep and travel across the horizon of his shoulders.
Pearl
Chapter Six
Messengers
When Patient was borne away from us, so lifeless, my sister hushed. If she said a word about her grief, I did not hear it. But perhaps I missed this—after all, grief was difficult to distinguish from the other sounds of Auschwitz. It was late October 1944—planes plowed the sky above us; they drowned out the barking of the dogs and the gunfire from the concrete towers.
“Russians,” Taube remarked bitterly to no one, his face tilted to take in the view. “If only I were coward enough to desert this hell now, before all of Poland falls to pieces.”
“Such a shame!” Bruna mocked. “That you are so burdened by bravery!”
I held my breath, waited for the retaliation for her insult. But none came. Taube was too busy with his musings.
“We should bomb this place immediately,” he continued. “Leave the whole lot of you writhing in the rubble. Let the Russians try to free your corpses.”
“What is stopping you, then?” Bruna taunted him. “You miserable lump of deformity!”
Taube was so distracted by the planes that he did not even chase her. Or perhaps the engine’s roars made Bruna’s insults inaudible. In any case, she took advantage of this opportunity. “Foul pudding!” she cried. “You tedious sore! More worthless than a
fish’s ass!”
She had such fun with this, it gave us even more reason to hope the planes might continue their paths. But while the appearance of the Russians was useful to the dreams of many, they meant nothing to my sister.
Without her friend to tend to, Stasha found herself overwhelmed by open swaths of time. Everyone had a suggestion as to how she should put herself to use, but she turned down Bruna’s appeals to organize as a team and the Lilliput matriarch’s invitations to tea. Knowing my sister’s love of babies, Clotilde gave her the honor of plucking the lice from her twins’ heads, but even this enviable show of trust failed to move Stasha.
She no longer had time for distractions of any sort, Stasha said, and it was true, she couldn’t be tempted by a single round of our diversions, the awful rouse of Tickle the Corpse, or even a Kill Hitler play. There had been a time when Stasha’s pantomimes had threatened to unseat Mirko’s—she had nearly outdone his Hitler impression with an act that was less dependent on mustache than most, relying instead on a mockery of his speech and a fine line of drool. I knew that she enjoyed making the others laugh more than anything else, but nothing could convince her to participate after Patient was gone. When I tried to persuade her by saying that games were good because they involved friends, she said that she no longer had time for friends either, and she issued this declaration as loudly as possible, obviously hoping that Moishe Langer, who had recently offered her a sweet and killed a roach before it could plink across her foot, might finally put his bothersome affections to rest and leave her be.
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