Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  And where she wanted to be was on the steps of the infirmary with her bread knife across her knees. Those steps saw the feet of many—the sick, the nurses, the dead being carried out. Dr. Miri began to exit and enter the infirmary with the greatest caution, avoiding my sister at all costs—her demeanor said that she couldn’t risk discussing Patient’s fate. But no matter how quickly she ascended or descended those stairs, she was always confronted by Stasha, whose stony face would attempt an expression at the doctor’s approach. She did her best to make her countenance into a question mark, a soft confrontation, but Dr. Miri only wrinkled her brow in an aggrieved fashion, and then—as if in answer to the cries of the dying within—smoothed it promptly.

  I don’t know how Stasha was able to listen to the cries. I know she sifted through them for some thread of Patient’s froggy voice, but that was more than I could ever endure. I believe she was testing herself for times to come. Because when the Russian planes retreated, Stasha finally began to hold conversations with me again. But her voice had a new bitterness to it. It seemed older than us both.

  “I see that poppy in my mind lately. I see it all the time. Do you see it, Pearl?”

  I did.

  “I can’t see more,” she told me. “Don’t ever make me see a field’s worth.”

  It was this warning that made me plan for her future grief.

  I went to talk to Peter in secret. Stasha hated Peter, the exalted messenger boy who had procured the ear horn for Patient. He knew far more than we did about painting and books, which impressed the doctor to no end. Worst and most puzzlingly of all, he was twinless and sported none of the typical abnormalities or genetic detours that meant salvation. In fact, it was his Aryan good looks—what Mengele appraised as a heroic nose and strong chin—that enabled his presence in the Zoo.

  From the very first, Mengele had anointed the boy as someone special, and he was given advantages that placed the fourteen-year-old above and beyond us all. If Peter was aware or ashamed of this, I couldn’t tell. He carried himself differently—I’d watched him from the very beginning, looked on as he slipped beneath fences like a cat, prowling about with a look of grim concentration that betrayed his intent to subvert all the benefits of his post. He was gifted with adaptation, this Peter, but he was more civilized than Bruna; he approached matters with the utmost diplomacy, and it was easy to forget how young he was, given these skills. He stood out in this way, and more. Perhaps most notably, in this place of constant filth, he was an oddly clean boy. Never with any grime underneath his fingernails, unlike the rest of us. I often saw him smoothing his clothes with his hands and mending the buttonholes, and though he was as skeletal as any of us, he could be seen trying to exercise in the fields, performing endless series of push-ups and lifting stones above his head. He was captain of the soccer team and president of the boys’ secret Zoo society, the Panthers, which was not very secret at all and seemed to amount to fits of meetings that ended in arm-wrestling matches.

  But more impressive than any of these other achievements was this: Peter was one of the few who still had pride, and he dared to have it even in Mengele’s presence, which seemed to be the greatest trick of all.

  Yet the main reason for Stasha’s envy was the fact that, since Peter was Mengele’s messenger boy, he got to see all the sights and cross all the borders of our strange city. From block to block, from the men’s barracks to the women’s, through the coveted field of wildflowers and into the finery of Nazi headquarters, he roamed, carrying words from one place to the next. We were infinitely more limited. We knew the boys’ barracks and the girls’, we knew the length of the fence, the rear of the infirmary, the road to the laboratories, and the terrible insides of those laboratories. Of the rest, we could only dream. But Peter saw.

  He saw Canada, the warehouses filled with all our lost luxuries. Heaps of gold, pyramids of silver. Forests of grandfather clocks, pillaring high. Stacks of china, enough for thousands of celebrations. Soft piles of fur and leather. He talked about it constantly.

  He saw the secrets of the infirmary, witnessed the barter systems of the kapos. He saw people leave codes on the sides of the latrines, bury helpless messages in the dust. He talked about that, but in hushed tones.

  He saw other piles too, the unmentionable piles of precious teeth and hair and flesh. He didn’t want to talk about them.

  His travels weren’t without risk—while most of the guards were aware of his status as one of Mengele’s pets and knew to leave the boy alone, there had been occasions on which Peter had been mistaken for a trespasser. One such incident ended in scarring—the lash of a whip tore a crescent of flesh from his ear. Mengele tried to fix it, but his clumsy handiwork only enlarged the wound. Peter didn’t care about this disfigurement. He said that the resulting discipline of the officer at Mengele’s own hand was its own reward, and he’d welcome future opportunities to repeat this sort of incident, because how else was he to inflict any kind of vengeance?

  This torn ear only further commended Peter to me, because it reminded me of a stray cat my sister and I had loved when we were small, an animal we’d trained to run to us when we rang a bell. I’ll admit it: I often found myself wondering what it might be like to pass my hand over that injury, to roll that scar between my fingertips, to know, before it was too late, what it was to touch Peter, to know the unique temperature of his skin.

  I’d hoped to find him alone, though I had no real idea of what I might say.

  But when I found Peter, he was with the Yagudah triplets, all of them leaning against the wall of the boys’ barracks and practicing sleight-of-hand tricks. The triplets were trying to make white handkerchiefs act like streams of milk, to pour them out of one hand and into another. It was a trick that had made them very popular among the others because it provided an illusory proximity to food. Stasha had not been impressed by their magic. It had no utility to it, she complained, it was the stuff of dreamers in a world that didn’t recognize dreams anymore. She’d been quite vocal about this opinion, and I hoped desperately that the Yagudahs wouldn’t mistake me for my outspoken sister. Judging by their looks, though, they certainly had.

  “What are you doing here, Stasha?” two of the three queried in unison.

  “It’s not Stasha,” Peter said without the slightest upward glance. “Stasha is deaf now. This is the non-deaf one.”

  “She’s not deaf,” I said. “She’s only half deaf. And her health, it’s constantly improving.”

  The boys elbowed one another with glee.

  “I’m sure she’ll be dancing for Taube any day now,” said one of the Yagudahs with a titter.

  “Tell me,” I said, cheeks burning, “how far does that handkerchief-milk go divided among the four of you? Are you stronger than the rest of us for drinking it?”

  They balled their hankies in their hands and glowered, but I couldn’t be deterred by such pettiness. I joined the boys against the wall. A silence followed. The boys and the girls of the Zoo didn’t mix much. Before the cattle car, I’d heard older girls discuss the awkwardness of dances. I figured that this was the closest that I might ever know of that phenomenon. It was so quiet that I could hear my pain traversing new paths inside of me—it trilled as it coiled through me; it burned and sank like a stone. So I was grateful when Adam Yagudah leaned over to speak to me, if only for the distraction.

  “You know that business about Taube being friends with Zarah Leander isn’t true, don’t you?”

  “I’m not an idiot,” I said.

  “Well, your sister seems to believe it.”

  “She’s not an idiot either,” I said. “And don’t you have any better tricks to do? If I were you, I’d make myself disappear before the Nazis do.”

  This prompted a peal of laughter from Adam’s brothers. Adam himself wasn’t amused.

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny,” I said.

  “Of course you weren’t,” Peter said, lowering his face to mine so that our eyes had no choice
but to meet. “Being funny is Stasha’s job, isn’t it?” He spoke softly, without mockery, as if we were alone and not surrounded by an audience, as if we were in a real room and not outside by the dusty walls of the barracks. And then, as if embarrassed by his own earnestness, he wound a finger in my curls and pulled. Touch—it had grown so complicated and strange. The curl-pulling was a gesture I’d been familiar with all my life, or at least in the parts of my life where boys sat behind me in school, but this tease felt different. It carried a pleasant thrill, and I knew this was the closest I might ever come to an affectionate touch from a boy. But the fact that this could be my last thrill—it undid me. And Peter’s torn ear—I could not look away from it. I wished for pockets in the skirt of my dress, simply so I could still the twitch of my hands as they longed to touch the badly healed wound.

  “I’m only teasing,” Peter said. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell.”

  I’d thought Stasha and I had kept our arrangement secret—I couldn’t imagine how Peter knew. The triplets fell stonily silent, as if they themselves were familiar with such a coping tactic in their own lives. Peter must have seen my discomfort because he snapped his fingers, and the other boys scattered. I admit that I was impressed by this power. It was an odd thing, to see a sense of command so genteelly expressed in a place where a boot on the neck was the most common order.

  “Will you walk with me?” Peter asked. And he tried to give me his sweater; he pulled it off and attempted to drape it over my shoulders. I shrugged it off, just the instinctive reaction of an awkward girl. It wouldn’t do to take too much from him, and I was happy enough for this amble besides.

  As we wandered, I saw that winter would soon approach. In the distance, past the cremo and the soccer fields, you could see the birches shedding the lit amber of their leaves, readying for snow. And beyond those white-limbed trees, I knew there was a river, hills, an escape. Like everyone, I’d heard the story of the rebel lovers—Rozamund and Luca—who were shot as they’d attempted that escape, how they’d died together, entwined in the mud at the fence’s edge, blood flagging their backs in surrender, after a month’s worth of sweet notes and covert courtship. I tried not to think of that then, with Peter; I tried to focus only on the stumps that bordered the length of the fence. I walked ahead of him, jumped from stump to stump so as not to touch the ground. It was easier to speak to him this way, and during this exercise, I forgot my pain too well, and was reminded of it only when I stumbled.

  Peter plucked me up from the ground and pulled out a pebble lodged in my knee with his knit-gloved hand. After all the prodding of the nurses and the doctors, I shivered at the feel of a hand that would never want to hurt me.

  “I’ve heard the stories about you,” I told him. “About how you organize all sorts of things and taught Taube’s dog to growl at Hitler’s name. About how you put a toad in Nurse Elma’s desk, and an egg in Mengele’s house slipper.”

  Peter’s hair had a habit of falling in his eyes. He used this as an excuse not to look at me then.

  “I’ve had some adventures,” he admitted. “But the house slipper! I can only wish. I don’t know where these stories come from at all. They sound like some of your sister’s inventions.”

  “I’ve heard less wholesome stories too.”

  “Oh? Well, perhaps you can convince Stasha to create more flattering fictions about me?”

  “Not Stasha. Bruna. She is the one who told me about your visit.”

  He stopped short in our walk, disturbed.

  “Then I assure you, the account is inaccurate. Bruna has no idea what that was about. You don’t believe me?”

  I was silent, too embarrassed to address the details of what I’d heard.

  “I have been to the Puff only to deliver messages. But on one occasion, it is true that I lingered, because I saw an old friend. Did you know Ivan?” He paused, thoughtful. “No, you couldn’t have—he was not here when you arrived. He was a couple of years older than I, but we grew up together, in the same neighborhood. I had not seen him for at least a year. All the men on his block saved up to take him to the Puff. I was shocked, but Ivan was so pleased by his gift—he even made me promise that if I ever saw his father again, I would let him know that he had had that evening.”

  “And have you seen his father?”

  Distance entered his voice.

  “Yes.”

  “And did you tell him?”

  The distance increased.

  “No.”

  “So you broke your promise.”

  Here, Peter hesitated. I could see that this was a story he was not longing to tell. But—

  “Not really. Because when I saw his father, he was dead; he was lying alongside bodies. I don’t believe in talking to the dead—if you talk to the dead here, it’s not long before you stop speaking your true language, whatever it may be. So I wrote him a note instead. I wrote that Ivan had had a night that would have made him happy to know about, and I put it in his pocket. It was an awkward note to write.” He paused. I wouldn’t have taken him for one to blush, but he did then. “Do you think that was the right thing to do?” he wondered. “It bothers me. I think of it all the time.”

  I knew what haunted me. Was it terrible to take comfort in knowing what haunted him? Reflective, he ground the toe of his tattered shoe into the dirt, as if to make the thoughts that preyed upon him join the dust.

  “Maybe now that I’ve told you, I can stop thinking of it. I can think of you instead.” I hadn’t known that a voice could be that tender. I also hadn’t known that one day a boy would draw near and pluck a stray eyelash from my cheek, and I would hope desperately that Stasha would not sense how I felt in that moment.

  I watched Peter rub the eyelash between his thumb and forefinger. “Nurse Elma will have to count them all over again tomorrow,” he said, in an attempt at lightness.

  I did not go to see Peter with the intention of kissing him. But that is what I did. I want to say that I only pressed my lips against his in manipulation, as a means to an end. I want to say that I maintained this position even as he kissed me back, cupping the side of my face as no one ever had before, that this was not the beginning of anything—not closeness, affection, love, the same wonder that had flourished in doomed lovers like Rozamund and Luca and led to their end.

  Because it was wrong, I told myself, to become too human to anyone in this place, to try to imprint myself upon someone’s memories, and, most pressingly, to give myself a first that might soon be my last.

  When that final thought struck—I pulled away. He wondered why I stopped but took a step back like a gentleman. Of course, this sudden reserve made me regret my action. But there were other matters of concern, and I forced myself to focus on them, despite my wants.

  “There is something I need,” I said.

  “Oh. I see,” he said wearily, and he sighed. “That is what this is about.”

  “You have dealt with this before? With other girls?”

  He gave a polite shrug. I saw then that he had been careful to hold my eyelash in the palm of his hand. The wind picked it up and whisked it away.

  I stood on the bottom rung of the fence so that I could reach his torn ear, and I put my feelings aside, and then I told him what I wanted. I needed this thing, I said, to keep my sister alive when I left her. And then with this business concluded, I touched the scar at his earlobe, that spot where his skin had struggled to mend.

  A faint lilt of music cantered over, lifting and swelling from the orchestra practice in the basement. We’d heard music in this place before. It had been there to greet our cattle car at the ramp, and now that the transports had ended and no new prisoners needed its initiation, it accompanied the inmates’ work as they built barracks and sorted warehouse goods and trundled carts full of bodies and dug grave after grave—alongside every labor, it rose and insisted and sang, Come this way, to this, the latest version of your extermination, one that you can survive if you prove your usefulness.


  In all the smallness of our life, I had never thought I could hate music before. This place changed that; I cringed at every note, dreaded each swell and start, because when I heard it I could think only of the fatal toil that took place alongside each tune.

  But I didn’t hate the music then, as I stood with Peter. With him standing beside me, in his tattered sweater, his eyes fixed on the field beyond our fence and the birch trees that lined its perimeter, I welcomed it, because it was the sound of what we’d lost—the strains of those years that should have happened and now never would. I wanted to approximate a piece of those years. I wanted to understand what music meant when two people held each other and moved through the minutes with affection.

  Like most boys, Peter couldn’t dance. Still, I initiated a waltz, one ill-timed to the creaky melodies. Someone in that orchestra needed to tune our old piano, I could tell. While clasping the bones of one arm around me and treading all over my feet, he addressed my request with a mock-serious tone, as if we were two adults out in the world discussing some complication in our daily routine instead of the desperate captives that we actually were.

  “You should know that what you’re asking for will be very difficult to procure,” he said. “Ox has taken to following me everywhere I go. And then there’s Taube’s new guard dog. That brute snores through his duties. But if I try to pass? He will wake.”

  I told him that it sounded like a challenge he would enjoy.

  “Not for anyone but you,” he said.

  His grip on my hand was clumsy and warm; it trembled. Through his thin sweater I felt the rung of a rib. Every day, I saw bones; I saw them expose themselves under the skins of children who were slowly dying. But never before had I felt these bones in a boy so close to me—I blame those bones for what I said next.

  “I love you,” I said into his shoulder.

  Peter stopped treading on my feet and cocked a half-closed eye at me in suspicion.

  “You don’t. You could—I think—in time. But you’re just saying that to me because you think you won’t have a chance to say it truthfully someday, aren’t you?”