“Where do you think you’re going?” Taube leered at Peter as he passed the revels of this crew. “The Puff is empty tonight!”
He punctuated this statement by hurling a bottle at Peter’s retreating back. We heard the bottle shatter at the threshold, and then we saw Uncle walk in, resplendent in a white suit, a silken Nurse Elma at his side, her neck beflocked with a string of minks, each of which surveyed the celebration warily, their beady eyes of jet telegraphing doom to whomever they glinted upon by chance.
“Quite a party,” Uncle observed. He glared at the guards—their vulgarity in the presence of children annoyed him, but he appeared determined not to diminish his festive mood. He reached up to the toddler perched on his shoulders and tweaked his nose with affection.
It was an Italian boy, a non-twin whose handsomeness had endeared him to Mengele. He was three years of age, and others joked that he could have been the doctor’s own son. In fact, this boy’s resemblance to him trumped Rolf Mengele’s likeness to his father. As I watched him bounce about on Uncle’s shoulders and attempt to say the doctor’s name, I couldn’t help but wonder how many others might be seen as potential protégés. I hoped that they would not come between the doctor and me; it would not do to have my mission unraveled by a toddler. I vowed to apply myself to my work with renewed vigor.
I was interrupted in these vows by a sudden scuffle in the corner, a startled cry. Anika was pointing to the piano, a black expanse that stood like a beetle with one cocked wing. Taube strode over, his boots slapping against the floor, and she informed him of her instrument’s deformity. Taube stared at her curiously and then bent stiffly over the piano to inspect the absence in the keys.
Pearl blushed—her cheeks carried the pinkest bloom of guilt I’d ever seen. I realized that this was the piano she’d mistaken for our own—this was an error so severe that I had to wonder after her mind-set. Ours had a charcoal finish and cat scratches on every leg. It had not been this pristine luxury. I said nothing of this, though. Already, she felt bad enough about what she’d done. She buried her face in my shoulder so that her guilt over this piano’s pillage could remain undetected.
“You’re responsible for this instrument,” Taube was shouting at Anika. “And you will play it in this state. You will play it so that no one notices what is missing. Do you understand?”
Anika nodded and collapsed onto her bench. Her fingers hovered over the keys, hesitant. Then she began, her fingers finagling some solution to the absence. The orchestra played foxtrots, marching songs, songs sanctioned by the authorities. Looking down the row of girls, I saw Bruna tap her feet, saw the Lilliputs sway in time, saw Twins’ Father lift up a crippled girl so that she might have a better view than any of us.
We were all moving toward forgetting, it seemed; we didn’t know how hungry we were, how mangled and displaced. Our impurities meant nothing, our bodies were not unlike the other worthy bodies in the world, and not a death wish could be rooted out among us. The one person who avoided this rapture was Uncle.
He was bouncing the boy on his knee, but it was more a gesture of restless irritation than anything. I watched the boy’s eyes roll in his head as he was jostled. A fear of Uncle had entered them, perhaps for the first time.
“Come now,” he said. “Play my favorite.”
The conductor’s face was blank except for the false flush on her cheeks.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know my favorite?” Uncle demanded.
“Chopin’s funeral march?” the conductor quavered. She pulled nervously at her skirt.
“A funeral march!” He boomed with laughter. “Is that what you think of me? That I’m a funereal sort?”
The conductor tried to stammer out an explanation but was able to produce only a squeak.
“I’m only joking, Marcelle.” Uncle laughed. “Come make me happy.”
The conductor stood stock-still, her mouth agape. The violinist had to poke Marcelle in the side with her bow to bring the conductor back to life.
“He means the song,” the violinist hissed.
“Oh, of course,” the rattled conductor said, and then the orchestra eased into “Come Make Me Happy.” The flaws were frequent, because Anika was unable to make her instrument obey, despite her skill. The piano tripped and stumbled. I felt sorry for the piano. I wanted it to know that I understood its bereavement, that I feared nothing more than having an essential piece torn from me too.
Lacking his usual eye for precision, Uncle seemed unaware of these flaws and was merely roused by the song. Maybe it was because he was seeping with vodka. Maybe it was just his good mood. In any case, he deposited the boy on the floor and grabbed Nurse Elma for a dance. Everyone looked on with embarrassment and fear, as neither was a good dancer—Uncle was positively clumsy, and Nurse Elma kept trying to lead—and the couple’s gracelessness was highlighted by the flawed music. Here was the perfect pair, the photogenic two, stellar genetic specimens, and they couldn’t keep time. The oboist stifled a laugh into her instrument, which bleated piteously from this input. This sound startled Uncle and he dipped Nurse Elma precariously and then dropped her on her bottom. He tried to play this off as a joke, but no one could overlook his innate lack of coordination.
To distract from this failure, he strode before us and directed us to sing along, an impromptu maestro with an unskilled choir of ragged children. I’m not sure how many of us even knew the words to “Come Make Me Happy.” I’m sure that many, like myself, invented words as they went.
But as we sang, we forgot our hunger and our filth, we forgot that we were splittable, faded, dim. For a moment, I even forgot that I was mischling. At the end, we hit the high note with the force of those who are usually powerless to strike, and I knew we were enabled because of the strength of our numbers, all the old and the new, and the force of our many pasts, small as they were; they conspired to make us sound beautiful. Even Uncle—I could tell he thought it so. And was it possible? Did the loveliness of our song make him reconsider the fates he’d planned? I swore I saw a bit of uncertainty cross his face as he swung an unseen baton at our chorus.
Work would never set us free, despite what they’d promised. But beauty? Yes, I thought, beauty might see us past the gates.
And then the song stopped abruptly when Anika’s hands stumbled and the music soured. Boos rose and Taube, his face more massive and red than usual, threw his bottle at the beleaguered musician. It crescendoed at her feet.
Anika rose from her bench, glass crunching beneath her thin shoes, one with a high heel, the other cripplingly flat, in the mismatched manner of the footwear most women were issued. But even with this forced imbalance, she was able to stand upright, to put her hands in the air as if newly arrested. Her lips parted as if she wished to speak, but her tongue kept rolling out and saying nothing. She looked like an old doll I’d once left out in the rain, a toy stripped of its life through use and circumstance.
Taube directed Anika to lay her hands out on the wing of the piano. They quivered like two baby mice on the black lacquer while he took his time removing his belt, and the leather hissed like a snake in the grass as it whipped round his waist and entered his grip.
All was too quiet. I saw the belt. I saw her hands. I had never seen a room in such silence.
As I watched this confrontation, I felt for the piano key in my pocket. And when my fingertips lit on its surface—I tried to help it but I couldn’t—I shrieked.
Anika breathed deep, Taube frowned, Pearl fidgeted beside me. And then Uncle, once again bouncing that boy on his knee, addressed me from across the room.
“What is it, Stasha? Why are you crying?”
But words had left me. I could only fidget with the hidden key in my pocket as he approached me.
“Tell me,” Uncle insisted. He came to me, passed the flat of his hand over my forehead, and, finding no evidence of a fever, stooped to inspect my eyes. Finally, he withdrew and sighed. “You must not interrupt,” he advised me. �
�Especially in matters you don’t understand.”
I promised that I would keep quiet from then on. He looked as if he didn’t quite believe me, but he patted me on the head before striding to the piano, where Anika’s hands still shook.
“Let the woman go,” he instructed the guard.
“You are too kind, Doctor.” Taube made no effort to conceal his surprise. It lifted every plane of his red face.
Uncle sauntered up to Taube so closely that his mustache must have tickled the guard. It was an unsettling proximity. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the corner of Taube’s lips, where a bit of angry spittle had gathered. Taube went as white as the handkerchief.
“You are upsetting the children,” Uncle said. His voice was slow and precise with anger. Chastened, Taube wove the belt back around his waist with fumbling fingers, but his face betrayed the fact that he would carry this insult with him long into the evening. Uncle folded his handkerchief, but just as he was about to put it in his pocket, he snorted with disgust to fully convey how much he loathed any further contact with Taube. Pinching the soiled hankie between his fingertips, he circled Taube like prey, all the while issuing that same half-smile that so many of us had received while we were being inspected by him and found lacking. Finally, when his intimidation was complete, he leaned into Taube’s face for a long hiss, one so loud and pronounced that we could hear it from across the room.
“I never liked that song anyway,” he said.
It was only then that I noticed that the piano key was slick within my hand. I marveled at this for a moment, thinking it had wept, before realizing that this was only the result of my guilty, sweating palm.
Uncle stalked back to his seat. We could hear the precision of his every footfall.
“I thought we were here to listen to music,” he said merrily to the conductor, and she bowed her head obediently and gave the signal to the musicians to begin again, and then the famous singer entered the room, causing an immediate stir. She was a recent transport, so the guards had not yet had the time to get accustomed to the glow of her presence, and even they parted for her as she walked.
“Mama’s favorite,” Pearl whispered.
“Yes,” I said. “It is too bad that Mama wasn’t invited too.”
She would have loved to be there, I knew. These songs—they were her friends after Papa left. He didn’t mean to leave forever, I was sure of it. He only stepped out because there was a sick child down the street, a boy overcome by fever, and Papa was a good doctor, he couldn’t deny anyone his attention. I’d spent so much of my time wishing that he had. Because he never arrived at the boy’s house. The child died, and my father—he died too. He left too close to curfew, and the Gestapo caught him up in their clutches—that is what I think happened. But the authorities gave another story. They had a story for every disappearance. We didn’t ask Mama what she believed. She’d shut herself up in the ghetto basement and refused to eat or change her clothes. We left food for her on plates, took it back in the morning, untouched. Playing the singer’s music was the only thing she was able to do, and though the strains of it were sad, they uplifted her somehow. I know she was lonely, lonelier than any of us. She was a woman who had never had a twin, and before our very eyes, by and by, she became less motherly, and then less womanly, until she was reduced to a girl even younger than we were. She was restored to herself only when Zayde, the papa to our papa, arrived, his hearty embrace and booming voice a cover for the mourning of his son, and ordered that the music end.
I’d never wanted to remember such things—these images were Pearl’s responsibility. But I suppose it wasn’t her fault that my memory was so insistent. Looking at her, I saw that she was recalling the same things.
“She’d fall asleep listening to that music with her boots still on,” Pearl mused.
“And her soup barely touched,” I said.
“We were always putting a mirror to her mouth,” Pearl said.
“To see that she still breathed,” I finished.
We hadn’t completed each other’s sentences in some time—I leaned against the brick wall with a fresh contentment. I didn’t even mind that Peter was standing next to Pearl and managing furtive grabs at her hand. All that mattered was the music.
It was a song I’d never heard before, an original piece that the conductor had created. Listening to it, I wondered if she had access to a window that the rest of us didn’t. She must have been fed better, must’ve slept better, must’ve been allowed a letter from home, one unmarked by censors and full of good news. The song bore me up; it gave me a fuzzy feeling and a picture of the future I would someday have.
This future was at the movies—it had matinee tickets and a silver screen and a newsreel full of confetti and liberation. The future was Zayde and Mama and me, the three of us seated in blue velvet chairs waiting for the show to begin. I sat between them, surrounded by Mama’s violet perfume on one side and Zayde’s smell of old books on the other. The scents collaborated to create their own nature. Mama’s hand was consumed by bandages, but she cupped my knee, and I saw her opal ring glint amid the gauze. We were trying to act as normal people act, but I still kept my ticket beside my tongue for safekeeping. I had all sorts of goods stored there, in a pocket of my mouth, and this disgusted my mother, who thought it no longer necessary for her daughter to carry razor blades in her mouth. But Zayde came to my defense; he kept telling her that the doctor had altered me in such a way that I might never be the same again, that I had impulses different than those of a girl who had not stared into the bright lights of a surgeon’s table. Mama argued that yes, this was terrible, what had been done to me, what had been done to all of us, but it did no good to walk about always with one eye anticipating the next disaster.
And then the usher hushed us all because the movie was beginning. My sister was onscreen with all the greats.
It was a musical and Pearl played the part of me as well as the part of herself. Predictably, she was quite good in both roles, though I thought she could’ve been a little more mournful when she poisoned Mengele, because as bent on vengeance as I was, I was not a monster. The only element that troubled me more than this was the fact that the writers made us into orphans. This departure from the facts was a real insult. But I couldn’t deny that Pearl excelled at the part since we’d come so close to being orphans ourselves—her tears were perfect splinters of grief that held real triumph.
What I loved most? The final sequence. After Mengele was felled, Pearl wore a white fur and clutched a tabby kitten while tap-dancing on top of a piano as lustrous as her name, and the camera loved her so much that it zoomed in on her repeatedly throughout.
This imagined scene—I knew it would be enough to pull me through, to make me survive the Zoo. I wanted it to go on forever. But it ended as soon as the singer stopped singing.
I turned to Pearl. I wanted to know if she’d seen what I’d seen, if she’d imagined it all too. But just as I was about to tap on her shoulder, my thoughts were flooded by gray, and my heart contorted. Was this a fit? I wondered. Was it a side effect of my deathlessness, some phenomenon where I’d find myself assailed by half-consciousness? When I woke from this state, I was on the floor with a number of faces floating over me, all of them angled with concern.
Pearl’s was not among them.
I fumbled about to raise myself, and I pushed the faces away without knowing who they were, demanding all the while to know the location of my sister. And then I saw for myself—her absence, in full.
Where she had stood—now there was only a brick leaning out of the wall like a child’s loose tooth. I called my sister’s name. I called her by every name I knew, and then I invented new names for her. I even called her by my own name, just in case. She didn’t answer to any of these. The music was too loud. She couldn’t hear me. This is what I told myself while I screamed.
Then I saw her muddy footprints studding the floor. There were dirty quotation marks at t
he heels, brief flecks of mud that indicated that Pearl’s departure had not been so sudden as to allow her to leave without a smudge. Such tracks are the marks of a stolen person. These imprints testified that Pearl was steadfast in her love for me, even as our tormentors removed her from this life. I wondered if—wherever she was—she saw the vision too, the vision of what I’d so dreaded, in all its multiplication.
Chapter Eight
She Said She Would Never Leave Me But
Stasha
Chapter Nine
Million After Million
Auschwitz never forgot me. I begged it to. But even as I wept and bargained and withered it took care to know my number, and to count every soul that it claimed. We were so innumerable, we should have overwhelmed this land beneath us into nothingness. But this patch of earth would not be overwhelmed. Some claimed that we might overwhelm it when we fully understood its evil. But whenever we began to understand evil, evil itself increased. Others believed that hope might overwhelm it. But whenever hope flourished, so did our tortures. This was my belief: Auschwitz would end when Pearl returned. Where she had gone, I didn’t know. I only knew that she was not with me.
And I also knew that I spent most of my time in an old sauerkraut barrel, which was an advantageous spot for my vigil, despite the cabbage stink I soon acquired. A perfect circle of isolation to enable a lookout for my sister. No blokowa, no Zoo fellows, no Twins’ Father. Just me, my lice, and a peephole that held my view of the world.
“Are you in there?” Peter’s fist knocked on the wood of my home.
I should note here that I believe that three days had passed since Pearl’s disappearance, though we both know that time was not my strength, but my sister’s.
At first, I wasn’t alone. Right after the music of the orchestra swept Pearl away, the lice came to keep me company. White lice, each thick as your fingertip, with black crosses splayed on their backs. I didn’t mind them so much because they bit me and their bites kept me awake and I needed to be awake in order to find my sister. We struck a deal, those lice and I—I gave them my flesh in exchange for awareness, and by the grace of their jaws I kept a constant eye to the peephole of my barrel. I’m sure that we could’ve lived together quite beneficially for some time if it were not for the intervention of Nurse Elma.
Mischling Page 13
