“Yes,” I confessed. “I am.”
“Then I love you too,” he said, and I know we both wished we meant it. Still, I repeated the phrase into the bony ladder of Peter’s chest. I did so soundlessly, shaping the words. I am sure he felt them, somehow. Because it was with great reluctance that, when the song ended, he turned from our waltz and headed off into the violet streaks of evening, assuring me as he left that he would get me what I so badly needed, no further kissing required.
I told him that I’d do as I liked in terms of kissing.
He said that he would never try to stop me from doing so.
Night—it had forgotten that it shouldn’t be beautiful in Auschwitz. There was no stopping its velvet sway at the messenger’s back.
October 27, 1944
By day, my pain worsened. Some mornings, I woke to find it fevering in my toes, and on others, it was sulking about in my guts. Every day, a new location, a heightened pitch. I tried not to wonder after the identity of my sickness—what could this matter?—but my mind wanted a name for it. Eventually, I settled for calling my sickness a weakness, with the idea that labeling it as such might motivate me to become stronger. I’d overheard Dr. Miri say that resistance and strength were at the center of this experiment, that the doctor was testing to see which twins were able to defy the travels of the intruders that entered our bodies through his needles.
Whether I’d been visited by typhus or smallpox or whether it was the work of some anonymous germ, I didn’t know how I could hide my weakness much longer. I listened to the other children, tried to overhear their recommendations as to what might cure my ills, because I couldn’t go to Stasha. They all had their tricks, my fellow experiments. They all knew how to evade questions that might result in being sent to the infirmary; they knew how to transform a cough into a laugh. When Ox inquired after the temperature of my suspiciously beaded forehead, another girl slipped the thermometer in her mouth while her twin distracted the blokowa. And so it was that my fever went unread.
Potatoes were commonly upheld as medicine by the whole of the Zoo. I was curious, though, if it was the complex process of procuring them that was the real cure, as it distracted me from my pain. Bruna was a great help in this, of course. We stole into the prisoners’ kitchen together under the ruse of helping the cook carry a large vat of soup. As soon as the cook’s back was turned, the potatoes went down the waistband of my skirt.
At our barracks, I bit into their brown jackets raw and felt my teeth wiggle in their sockets, keening like birds on a wire about to be toppled by the wind.
Day by day, potato after potato, I became weaker. And each day I went to Peter after roll call and he showed me the empty linings of his pockets. Then he’d tell me stories. About how he’d been asked to recite a poem at one of the SS parties and had passed off some Whitman as his own, with no one the wiser. About how the women of the Puff said that Taube was a crier and a drunk, a big cabbage-faced baby who proposed to the Jewesses when no one was looking. About the hollow book he’d been given by a member of the underground that held a secret store of gunpowder. He told the stories in an attempt to lessen the anxieties of the wait, but I think he could see, even as I did my best to listen, that I was pinned by some unseeable wound, some disaster that was biding its time within me.
A week after the initiation of his quest, he came to me, his fingers curled around what I wanted.
“I wonder,” he said, “if you’ll have any use for me after this.”
He pressed it into my palm with ceremony. I couldn’t believe he’d managed to sneak it from our captors. I tucked it into the waistband of my skirt for safekeeping, thanked Peter, and said good-bye. He didn’t want good-bye. He wanted a new mission, he wanted to have to look for something; it was better for him, he claimed, to have this purpose.
“Ask me for anything,” he said. “I need to have something to search for in here. Something better to do. Whatever you want, I’ll bring it. Whatever you need, I’ll get it.”
There was a plea in his voice. I wanted to name something. But I couldn’t think of anything. The pain inside of me was blotting out all of my wants.
“Ask like there’s a future,” he said. “Or at least another month, a week!”
The boy I’d known—or had started to know—suddenly, he was so lost, he looked nothing like the leader we children hailed him as.
Unnerved by my silence, Peter transformed it into a challenge.
“I’ll steal real instruments for you,” he said, and he tried to mask the falter in his voice with a jesting tone. “Not just pieces of pianos. Whole pianos! Baby grands! You doubt me?”
I didn’t, I said. But this provided little comfort. I saw him eye what he had given me, and it was as if he wished that he could take that back, and more. He wanted to take back all that we had shared, that feeling, that moment, just so that we could relive it. This is what I suspected, at least. Because it was how I felt too.
But no amount of feeling for another can compete with the need one has to be alone with one’s pain.
Zayde, he’d always told us about animals that crawled off to die, the injured and the weak that separated themselves from the others so as not to affect the endurance of their pack. I knew this was something I would have to do someday, that I should practice for that inevitable moment when I needed to turn my head and shuffle off, for the good of those better suited to survival, people like Peter and Bruna and Stasha, who had not been selected by Josef Mengele for deterioration and ruin. That was my role, my lot. I was glad for it—it meant that I did not have to watch my sister suffer as I did.
But I did not want to practice this abandonment with Peter, not then. I wanted a week with him. I’d settle for days.
“You can steal the whole orchestra for me,” I said.
“Is that all?” He laughed, and he drew me close.
The object seemed too good to be real. I studied it; I turned it over in my hands. I’d thought I had wanted it for Stasha. But now that this object was in my possession, I knew I’d wanted it for myself too. I sat with it for a moment. And then two. Finally, I went to find Stasha.
She was sitting by herself behind the boys’ barracks, scribbling in her little blue book, transferring anatomy diagrams into it. It was strangely quiet, or at least it was what passed for quiet behind the barracks, because only the guard dogs could be heard, and then, if you strained to part their barking, there was the sound of the cremo churning, spitting out its fire and snow with a dreadful efficiency.
Stasha’s eyes were narrowed in study, and her mouth was drawn in a tense line as she penciled in her thoughts. The depth of her concentration drew my attention to how different we looked. It wasn’t that change had touched only me, of course. I couldn’t help but carry all the breakage of illness, but she too had been altered, though perhaps in subtler ways. Our youth had left us, but it had taken no pains to extract itself in equal measures. I said nothing of this, but she heard it still.
“It’s true. We do look different,” she said, acknowledging my thoughts.
“It’s my fault. I parted my hair in the opposite direction,” I explained.
“Why? Parting your hair differently won’t bring anyone back,” she said mournfully. And then she lapsed into her usual talk, the business about how she hadn’t done right by Patient, that she’d failed thus far at ending Mengele.
Patient would understand, I told her. But there was nothing I could do to save her from her own convictions. So I braided her hair instead. She sat at my feet and I attempted to plait but my hands kept shaking and her hair kept slipping through my fingers.
“I don’t know why I can’t manage it,” I said after the third try.
“It reminds you too much of Mama.”
“Maybe so.”
She put her book aside. The fact that she could even bring herself to do so startled me. I’d assumed that it had become my replacement, something she could love without the risk of losing it.
&n
bsp; “Can we play the game where my arms are your arms?” she suggested.
“No.”
“You forgot how to do it already? But it’s so easy. You put your arms back and I put my arms through like they’re your arms. And then I do funny things with my hands, like, say, wave and make a cup of tea and lose at cards.”
“No.” I made no attempt to be nice about this.
“Fine, I’ll make you win at cards. Now will you?”
“Never.” I shuddered. I had a good reason to refuse; the game no longer had appeal for me. Because while the Zoo had changed many things for us, its most severe alteration might have been the very damage it did to our notions of what it meant to be close to another living being.
The stories of this place, they alone changed our longing for attachment. Here is one such story: In the spring before our arrival, Mengele fastened two Roma boys together, sewed them back to back. First, they disappeared from their camp. Then, screams were heard from the laboratory, screams unlike other screams. The volume of their agonies unnerved the other experiments too much, so Mengele moved the joined boys to another location. Peter had told me this story; he’d watched as the boys were carried out on a single stretcher, and he’d followed the truck that transported them, at a safe distance, through the camp until it stopped. On the stone floor of a cellar, the Roma boys lived as a single entity for three days, each staring in the opposite direction, joined by a seam at their spines, and an infection.
The fact that they could not see each other’s suffering was the only good to come of that.
I didn’t want to speak of this, so I changed the subject. I had to say good-bye to her somehow, I had to slip it in so it didn’t disturb her, I had to sweeten it so she overlooked its sting.
I assumed a cheery tone appropriate to such deceptions. I’d learned this from our mother, after Papa’s disappearance, and I’d practiced it to myself down in our ghetto basement whenever I found myself alone and doubtful about our future.
“If you’re so good at reading my mind these days,” I said in a bright voice, “then what do I have in my pocket?”
Her eyes livened.
“You have a letter from Mama? From Zayde?”
“Guess again.”
“A knife? A gun? What is it? Wait, don’t tell me—I want the fun of a guess.”
But it was too late. I had already pulled the object from my pocket and displayed it in my palm.
“A piano key?”
“More than that,” I informed her.
She turned its whiteness over, and inspected it. Knowing how her mind worked, I understood she was already searching for another, lamenting its loneliness as a single key. She was confused by its lack of siblings.
“What’s this for?” Her tone was not just unimpressed; it also carried the splinter of a conviction that said there was nothing I could give her in these times that would be of any use.
I explained that it was more than just a key, it was a key from our old piano—it was a token of our past, a reminder of something important, and whoever had it would be with me forever.
She bounced the piano key up and down in her palm as if handling a coin that she was about to gamble. Whenever the key was in the air she looked bright, thoughtful, anticipatory—but as soon as it fell into her hand, she went grim, as if the simple fact of gravity were enough to dash every hope.
“So if I ever leave you,” I continued, “I’ll never leave you. Because you have this, you see.”
“This key, you mean. This is supposed to comfort me?”
I had no response for this. She buried her face in my shoulder, and my sleeve quickly grew damp. She shook a little. Enough to loosen her hands. The key fell, turning one whole revolution before clattering on the ground. Watching its escape, I wondered if the Roma twins died at the same moment, or if life, as it left them, had allowed one to ease the way for the other.
My sister put her lips to my ear and made a half hiss, half sob of despair, but managed nothing in the way of intelligible sound. What came from her was mangled and tortured, an attempt stopped short. I could only imagine what her words wanted to be. I couldn’t imagine what the Roma twins had said to each other.
Had a good-bye been possible?
Or did the pain of their union render it unnecessary?
Thinking of these boys, I flushed and chilled; my pain made itself known, and I tried to push my sister away. It was one of those involuntary gestures, the kind that makes a person seem cruel, even though she’s not aware of what she’s doing. Simple as a reflex. Of course, my sister staggered back toward me; she threw her arms around my neck. My breath tried to leave me. I pushed her again, harder. The ache of this—it lit her face. She probably thought I was disgusted by the urgency of her cling, her pitiable illusions. I might have been, in some small measure, even though both had made the ruse of my piano key possible, but the truth was that, in that moment, I needed her to prove that she could manage without me at her side. The last time I pushed her, my force surprised me—she fell to the ground with a thud and sat there, blinking, as the first snow of the season began to fall.
“Get up,” I ordered her. I was so cruel. I thought it necessary. I believed it was the only way in this place. She needed to live for herself; that’s what the pain was telling me. I didn’t know if she was the stronger or the luckier of us two—I just knew she had to live.
But my sister, she stretched out in the snow. At first I thought she was making a snow angel, but then I saw that this was a most different posture—it was one of surrender, though it was not without its angles of defiance.
“I won’t get up,” she whispered.
“Get up, Stasha,” I ordered.
She rolled over like a dumb baby.
“I’ll get up when you promise to never leave me,” she insisted, her voice muffled against the snow-flecked ground. How terrible it felt, to stand over her like that, to maintain an impression of strength while she fell to pieces!
“I promise that a part of me will always be with you. Isn’t that enough?”
She raised her head from the ground but refused to look at me. Her lips and nose were puffed with sobs, and I watched her bare fingers clutch the earth. They were so desperate, those fingers, to maintain a hold on anything at all that even dirt and snow would do.
“Which part?” She sniffed.
Her old fantasy—I drew on it. Had I ever truly believed in it? If I hadn’t before, I certainly did in that moment, while my sister lay at my feet, so reduced.
“The part,” I said, “that knew who we were before we had names or faces. Back in the floating world. Remember the floating world? We were just less than babies then, and still, we knew how to love each other. We knew these times would come, we just didn’t know how, much less why. We had a lot of living to do before they came for us. That’s why we decided to leave Mama early and start seeing the world as soon as we could.”
“I don’t recall making that decision at all,” she said.
Stasha stared at the piano key glumly like it was some hateful thing.
“It’s not enough,” she said. But she got up. And in defiance of my pain, I bent myself at the abdomen, stooped to pick the piano key up from the ground. A tiny fracture branched out from one ivory corner. I displayed this new injury to her.
“Take better care of this,” I warned.
Stasha
Chapter Seven
Come Make Me Happy
I was telling myself that the pain I felt was not Pearl’s. Then I realized I was wrong. It had to be her pain. It was too pretty to have originated within me; it launched itself so delicately throughout my body, sending pirouettes of discomfort along my every nerve. Yes, I concluded, this pain belonged to Pearl—but before the fullness of this realization set in, I received a true blow. Bruna cuffed me on my ear.
“You cheated, Stasha!”
Bruna shivered with frost and anger. We’d been playing a game of cards behind our barracks. I’d
thought it had been a pleasant one. But now, she leaned into my face so that there was no avoiding her rage. The powdered puffs of her breath smelled like winter and starvation, with a tinge of tin-cup coffee. “Don’t deny it,” she snarled between the snowflakes. “You knew exactly what you were doing. You’re a cheater!”
I blushed and trembled. She was looking more fearsome than usual in those days. In an attempt to no longer be albino, she’d taken to coloring her white hair with coal so that it flowed down her back in a charcoal glory. This measure not only failed to deter Uncle’s interest in her as an experiment but resulted in fierce streaks of black across her white face. This lent her the appearance of a raccoon, and a rabid one at that.
Much as I loved her, I feared her too.
Because it was true—I was a cheater; my survival in the Zoo was a slimy, privileged thing. No work was required on my part, no stealth, no desire—I was doomed to live forever without lifting a finger. The eye of a needle had sealed my immortality, thwarting any chance of release.
None of this bothered me until I realized that Pearl had not been given the same opportunity. Why had he withheld it from her? This was not what I thought we’d planned for at all. We were supposed to be deathless together, side by side, just as we’d been babies and girls together. Had he suspected my plan? Was he countering it with a plan of his own, some plot that would deny Pearl the needle, and me my sister?
And now, here was Bruna, my friend and protector, a lover of violence—she had found me out, she knew there was a fraud in me, a crime that allowed me to flourish. I did not know how to defend myself against such charges.
You could say that it wasn’t my fault, the introduction of this lie. You could say that only Uncle could be blamed, because he had flooded my blood with it. And I would say that you were right, but while another child’s body might have rejected this fraud, recognized it as a virus, a poison, an undoing, mine had embraced it. I had been too pleased by the prospect that we would survive, always we’d be together, to question what it might mean to outlive others more deserving of life. And now here I was, still the sole bearer of this cure, doomed as of this moment to spend eternity alone unless I was able to undo what he’d done.
Mischling Page 11
