Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  Because those lice couldn’t help but fall in love with Nurse Elma. They were always pacing my scalp, racked with longing for her. They oohed over her hips, her leather gloves, the cascade of her hair over her eye. The lice and I would get into frequent debates over her beauty. They likened her to perfection and I likened her to a parasite, which they took as a favorable comparison. At one point, a particularly tubby hustler had the temerity to pirouette up and away from the barrel as he professed his desire. Quite a leap for such a small insect. As soon as that louse said that he loved her, Elma grabbed me out of my barrel, hauled me to the laboratory, and reached for the razor. I’m sure he wasn’t the first fellow to experience such a reaction, but I felt sorry for him all the same. Beneath her hand, the curls that had belonged to us gleamed in midair, then fell, and when my scalp was stripped, I saw my reflection in a steel cabinet. I did not recognize us in it. This frightened me, because maybe Pearl wouldn’t be able to recognize me either. I slunk back to my odorous lair and slept. The guards knew of my presence in those barrel depths, but they let me be. I wondered if Uncle had told them to grant me this leniency or if they were intimidated by the sounds leaking from the barrel, because I spent all my time in that darkness sharpening my fingernails with my bread knife and practicing my snarl. The more I snarled, the faster my fingernails grew. The faster my fingernails grew, the more the guards trembled. They couldn’t imagine the truth, which was that I sharpened my fingernails in the interest of words, not weaponry. I was writing letters to Pearl on the wooden slats of my home, inscribing it all against the grain. I wrote her once, sometimes twice a day.

  November 7, 1944

  Dear Pearl,

  Is there music where you are?

  Dear Pearl,

  I know what you’re thinking. Stop thinking that. There is no way that you can be dead.

  Mere days into my epistolary captivity, I was already running out of barrel, even though I took care never to sign my name. And yes, I knew that there was no way for me to send letters written on this material. I just hoped that wherever Pearl might be, she could sense the scratch of every word and longing.

  One day, bread crumbs flew through the hole of the barrel. I caught them like flies and threw them back.

  “You bother me,” I said to the visitor. This was my standard greeting at the time.

  Because I had a lot of visitors. The other children visited my barrel to ask me questions; it seemed that my reputation as a smart girl had doubled in the wake of my sister’s disappearance, as if I had been allotted all her genius. They had many questions, but none of them were meaningful, just talk-talk to take up space and time. They asked me what poultices were made of, how to cure a dog of crying, what it meant to dream of a swarm of bees. To everything, I answered, “Pearl!” That made them leave me alone. They didn’t want to talk about my sister, because they all believed her to be dead.

  In my pocket, hidden from view, my fingers clenched the piano key. I had no idea what to believe. I resented its presence, because it was a sad thing to have a piano key as the sole vestige of my sister. I hated how still it was, how mute, how inanimate. But I was becoming like that too. And like me, the key had no use for crumbs or visitors either. Still, the crumbs—they kept insisting themselves into my barrel.

  “Save your crumbs,” I said to the visitor.

  “Stasha!” the visitor hissed. “You have to eat. You know what happens if you don’t eat!”

  It was Peter’s voice. I’d heard from Bruna that he too had been suffering since Pearl’s absence, that his stride had changed, that he no longer took pleasure in the freedom of his movements about the camp but tended to sit in the schoolroom all day, staring at the maps.

  I told him I’d eat when Pearl came back.

  “That may be a while. Long enough for you to starve more than you’re already starving. Don’t you want to be healthy when she returns?”

  He threw another crumb. I caught it up in my hand and put it in my pocket. I told him that I knew Pearl would love this crumb when she returned and thanked him in advance.

  “Fine. Wash, then. You have to wash. You know what will happen if you don’t wash.”

  “Are you saying that Pearl will die if I don’t wash?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then,” I said. I could’ve added that there was nothing strong enough to cleanse me of certain filths that had been imposed on me through the experiments, but I didn’t.

  “Do you want to be kaputt?” Peter demanded.

  I wasn’t about to address the center of my concerns: I could never be kaputt. Through the eye of his needle, Uncle had prevented this. Never would I die. On his icy table, I’d thought I was doing what I needed to do to ensure the survival of Pearl and me. But Pearl was gone. I did not know if she was dead or not-dead, but I knew that he had never given her that needle, and I knew, too, that she would be ashamed of what I had done. Because after all this time in the barrel, I’d begun to suspect a few things. I suspected that my endurance was made possible by the deaths of others. My blood was thick with the thwarted survival of masses; it carried the words they’d never say, the loves they’d never know, the poems they’d never make. It bore the colors of the paintings they’d never paint, the laughs of the children they’d never bear. This blood made living so hard that sometimes I wondered if it was good that Pearl was spared deathlessness. Knowing the fullness of what I had chosen, I would not have wished her this fate—to live alone, a twinless half, forever burdened by the futures torn from others.

  “Stasha? Are you crying in there?” Peter’s knocks increased.

  It was only my barrel creaking, I said. That barrel, it would insist on creaking for weeks.

  November 20, 1944

  Dear Pearl,

  The war is over. The Zoo is over. Mama and Zayde are living with me now. We are planning a party for your return and installing a carousel for the occasion. The guards are building it because they do what we say now. There’s a white horse for you. A mermaid for me. When you return, we’ll ride together, and when we go backward, it’ll be as if you never disappeared.

  I left my barrel for a limited number of reasons: roll call, bread-eating, washing, and retiring to my bunk upon Ox’s orders. The only time I left my barrel uncompelled by these chores was to see Uncle. I referred to him by this name still because I had yet to surrender my ruse—I still held hope that I might exterminate him yet, by the skin of my charm. Was it strange, the relief I had in revisiting the cold sterility of his laboratory? Even I was alarmed by the fact that I was comforted by it, until I realized that it had become familiar to my life, just as a schoolyard might be familiar to another. Where my sister would have sat, there was only an empty chair, but it was easy enough to pretend a person into a chair. Patient had taught me that, so long ago.

  As I pretended, I could hear my sister shaking, her quivers setting the steel legs of the chair atremble. But no sooner was I closing in on summoning some mirage of her than Uncle Doctor made his presence overly known. Leaning over my shoulder to apply a stethoscope to my back, he breathed too freely on the side of my face, and the scent of his breath—sweet, but with an acrid tang—made me wonder after his lunch, and I soon found myself adrift in thoughts of food and was jolted out of my musing only by the intrusion of an instrument. He then tested the reflexes of my knees. Left, right, left, right. And when he was finished, he inquired as to how I’d been.

  I told Uncle that I wasn’t sure if he’d noticed, but Pearl was missing.

  “You don’t say?” he said absently. “Now put on your clothes.”

  I expected him to turn to me with some suggestion of where to look for my sister, but he only went to the sink and washed his hands and combed his hair and popped a mint in his mouth. I obeyed his orders and put on my clothes. The fit of my skirt was predictably loose, so when I restored the piano key to its usual hiding place within my waistband, it clattered to the floor. He picked it up and eyed it with a curiou
s smile.

  “Explain this to me, Stasha.”

  I said only that I was sorry.

  “Children like you often are. But what are you doing with this?”

  I required a souvenir, I said, because I was afraid that I might forget this place one day. Seeing as I would live forever, that seemed a reasonable risk—how much could the deathless remember, anyway? So I’d taken the key from the piano before the concert. He drew his lips together in an exaggeration of a frown, as if he’d studied portraits of parental disapproval and found ones to emulate. There was nothing human in it, but I responded to it appropriately and hung my head in shame.

  “You do realize that Anika was nearly beaten for your theft, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “And you felt no guilt over this?”

  “My sister” was all I could say. And then my voice gave out, or, rather, it pulled itself away from me as if tethered by some length of rope, the end of which was surely held by Uncle.

  “There, there,” he said, a flurry of mock sympathy contorting his face. “You have nothing to be afraid of.”

  I merely stared into his shoes, hoping that their gloss might reveal her location. But their usual shine was dressed in mud, and a tuft of dog’s fur rose comically from the tip of one, like a clown’s pom-pom. This was the first sign that something was awry. The second was his glass full of ice and whiskey. The glass itself was not unusual, but the many times it was emptied and refilled was alarming.

  He left me sitting on the table, swinging my legs and dabbing at my eye with his handkerchief. His monogram was staked out at the corner, and I was careful not to let it touch my skin. As I dabbed, I allowed myself to peep around the handkerchief and take in the chaos that surrounded us. Never had I seen the laboratory in such disarray. Herds of folders were shoved into boxes, and the boxes were shoved into bigger boxes, and it appeared as if he were planning some great migration with all the pieces of us that he’d collected.

  It is difficult to realize that part of you might travel for a lifetime with someone you hate, entirely against your own will. You may know what I speak of—maybe someone remembers you when you’d rather be forgotten; maybe someone has a piece of you that is impossible to retrieve. I can only say for myself that it was then that I knew that we were linked forever, the doctor and I, and I fainted before I could inquire about his future plans of escape.

  The inside of my barrel became all but indecipherable, so thickly was it covered in letters to Pearl. I knew that if she did not return soon—actually, I knew nothing beyond the fact that my letters were growing angry and their lack of signature was erasing me. No one was counting bits of me in the laboratory anymore. No one was totting up the pieces of me. I did not know if this was because the doctor told people not to or because the best part of me was gone. Once, Bruna asked me, in her brutal and friendly way, why he bothered keeping me alive at all, and because I could not tell her that the doctor couldn’t kill me ever, not even if he wanted to, I said that I expected him to end me any day, and she drew me close to her chest and vowed to spear him as soon as she had the chance.

  I didn’t know if she would ever have the chance. His presence was diminishing in those days. Here and there, from behind a curtain, I saw glimpses of him. He’d waggle his fingers at me pleasantly, give me a whistle. I had to find a way not to cringe at that whistle. In order to do so, I thought of my insides, all the tributaries of my blood, the inlets of my nerves, and wondered how hope fit into such a body. Because I had it still, that wild hope; it was as steady as a spine, and so pronounced I marveled that the nurses and technicians did not take note of this development within me and mark it on their charts.

  There was only one other person besides Peter and the doctor’s staff who reminded me that I was real, alive, a girl, Pearl’s sister.

  “Smidgen Two,” Bruna whispered into the peephole. “It is the dead of winter now, don’t you know? Can’t you feel the cold in there? Our whole world—a snowstorm!”

  “It doesn’t storm in here.”

  “You can’t live in a barrel anymore. You dear, stupid baby bedbug—come out!”

  “I have to keep watch for her.”

  “Keep watch from a window.”

  “I don’t trust the windows here.”

  “Keep watch from a door, then.”

  “I trust the doors even less.”

  There was a pause, and then—

  “Maybe you should stop watching, Stasha.” Never had I heard her voice so gentle.

  I asked Bruna: “Should I stop watching because you have word from Pearl and you know that she’s well, you know that she’s just biding her time, just waiting until it is safe? Tell me that she’s in a house somewhere. Tell me that she’s hiding in a tree stump. That she’s underneath someone’s bed, and she is not who she used to be, but she is alive. I can take you telling me all of these things. Just so long as—”

  “I haven’t heard from Pearl,” Bruna confessed. “My Smidgen One. She was my friend, that girl, my favorite—”

  “Of course you haven’t heard from Pearl,” I interrupted with a snarl. “Why should you? It’s not like you were important to her.”

  “Know this,” Bruna said. “While you are in your barrel waiting for death, the Russian planes are back, more and more every day.”

  “Of course they are,” I said. “They are here to bomb us.”

  “My people would never do such a thing.” Bruna was indignant. “Maybe you should think, Smidgen Two, about how to prove yourself worthy of the freedom they are about to bring you. Decide now whether you are a cabbage or a girl. Fool! Barrel-dweller! How I miss you! You lousy coward!”

  I turned away from the loving insults streaming through my peephole and retreated to my letters.

  December 1, 1944

  Dear Pearl,

  I confess, none of that last letter was true. There is no carousel. The war is not over. But still, won’t you return?

  The next morning, I was surveying the snow from the peephole of my barrel when I saw Peter approach. His walk was hunched and slow and he had a wheelbarrow before him.

  “Stasha! Come out, you have to see this!”

  I removed the roof of my barrel and peered over the lip of the slats.

  Peter’s wheelbarrow held a bundle. The bundle was cocooned in a gray blanket, but the tips of the feet peeped from the frayed edge. A big toe frolicked in the wind.

  I scrambled so quickly from my barrel that I overturned it and spilled onto the ground. This exit was as ragged and clumsy as my recent days of grief had been. A grief that, it now seemed, had been wholly unnecessary. I ran a hand above the length of the shroud as I’d seen a magician do once in a show. The bundle didn’t animate readily, but that was just Pearl’s way—she preferred a subtle showmanship.

  “How?” I marveled.

  “From the infirmary—just released.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Two days. I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you wouldn’t believe me. Go on—lift it.”

  You would think that after so much loss, I’d be eager for a reunion. But a feeling in me—one of the few feelings that Pearl hadn’t taken with her—was hesitant to remove the blanket. What if Pearl had gone and changed without me? If she was not herself anymore, then who was I supposed to be? And then this hesitation was overcome by my eagerness and I peeled the blanket back.

  The mouth that grinned up at me was now emptied of teeth. This was the face of a baby who had never been permitted a sojourn into the teenage but had skipped straight to manliness and then to old-manliness. His flesh was young but ancient; his eyes were new, so far as eyes go, but they’d seen too much. I am not sure how I recognized him at all, because his skin was no longer that be-veined, breathless blue, but a sickly white. Still, there was no mistaking his smile.

  It was Patient. My Patient. I knew he would’ve been Pearl for me if he could have. Sensitive to my disappointment, he clasped at my ha
nd, which was rather uncomfortable because my heart was busy falling into the blackest depths of me, a locale unknown even to Uncle, where it shed its skin, rolled in bile, assumed a new shell, and grew thorns. Thus armored, the resourceful organ climbed the ladder of my ribs and returned to its place. And I did what Pearl would’ve wanted me to.

  “What a blessing it is,” I said, smiling as a fresh ache partnered with my pulse, “to be family again.”

  It was as if Patient had been renewed somehow. Something had done him good in his more than a month away from us—or maybe it was just the light? In any case, it seemed that his cough was intermittent. He clung to my side without any touch, warding off the slightest separation.

  In the yard, others gathered to view our returned boy. With wet eyes, everyone joked about where Patient had been off to. Had he been sailing, riding, sunning?

  Patient shook his head, solemn. He wanted to joke in return—but he couldn’t.

  Twins’ Father clapped the boy on the back and then leaned in for a whisper.

  “When you leave next,” he said softly, “it will be because we’ve been liberated and I’ll be taking you and all the other boys home. It’s a promise. And I’ll need help with the little ones, so you’ll be my second in command.”

  Patient gave him a little salute, and Twins’ Father left us to pursue his duties, but not without glancing back a few times as he walked, as if he still could not believe such a resurrection had taken place.

  Bruna set to work pinching Patient’s arm, her face lit with all the pleasures of tormenting one she’d missed.