Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  After I finished writing, I turned to the essential study of my anatomy book—this would keep me on my vengeful path. But before I could find my page, an ancient but boyish face appeared from above.

  “Did he get your tongue?” Feliks asked.

  I told him I was quiet because I’d seen my mother, and I hadn’t seen my grandfather, but I’d heard of him.

  Feliks responded with his own quiet, a quiet so still that it roused me.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” I asked in earnest. “For having thought I might outsmart him, change him, make him into who he should have been?”

  Seeing that he had no intention of answering this, I climbed out of the barrel to face him directly.

  “I think you like to see the good in people because there’s been so much bad that you have to believe in good,” he opined.

  “Do you do that too?”

  “No. I see the good in knives instead of people. Although there’s really no such thing as a bad knife or a good knife, so long as it cuts.”

  “You sound like Bruna.”

  “I have arrived at my viciousness over time.”

  “I think I’m arriving there too.”

  He grew excited.

  “We can have a lot of fun that way,” he said.

  “I’m not sure it will be fun at all,” I said. “But it will be necessary.”

  He handed me one of Bruna’s precious newspapers, a bit of contraband that circulated among the communists till it inevitably fell into the hands of a guard.

  “I can teach you how to hate,” Feliks said. “Step one: Read this. It says that they are coming for us, the Russians—those planes we have seen are theirs. It also warns that the heads of Auschwitz will flee at any minute, that they will try to destroy the place and us with it. This means that we have little time left to take care of Mengele.” He shook the page at me meaningfully, urging me to read.

  “I don’t know Russian.”

  “I can teach you that too. It is a good language for hating Nazis in. Perhaps better than Polish. We can save Polish for other things—that would make our fathers happy, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t need your instruction. I hate them all. I always have. It is just that I hate Mengele the most.”

  Never again, I swore, would I call him Uncle, not even in the interest of appearing innocent.

  I saw that Feliks had a new respect for me as I spoke so nakedly of my hatreds, without the slightest attempt at concealment. He clung to every word I said, and wanted more.

  “You should do something about this hate while he still trusts you,” he suggested.

  “That has been my notion all along. I have just been waiting for my moment.”

  “Do it now. You have an access to him that I envy. You know who else envies it? The whole of the Russian army; the American one too. We should exploit it.”

  He handed me two bread knives.

  “Now you have three weapons,” he said triumphantly. “That should be enough, I would think. I would recommend plunging the first into his thigh, the second into his neck, and the third into his heart. And when you get to the heart—give it a little twist and then kick it with your foot. Kick it till the heart squeaks and then you will know that he is dead.”

  I was too overwhelmed by the presence of the knives themselves to even think of the noises a heart could make. I made a point of writing this fact down in my anatomy book before returning to our plans and admiring the new trio of my weaponry.

  “Why did you have two bread knives, Feliks?”

  “One was my brother’s. He would have been honored for you to have it. It hasn’t been easy, holding on to it. Bruna looked after my weapons when I was in the infirmary, though. She knew what these bread knives meant to me, and what the cause is. It’s too bad that Bruna isn’t close to Mengele—she would be sure to get the job done. No hesitation with her.” He lingered around the sentence admiringly, as if simply speaking of her brought him closer in his conquest of the whitest angel.

  “I can be just as fearsome as Bruna,” I said. I did not believe this, but I hoped I could make it true.

  We conjured a plan. The plan was this: I would get Mengele alone somehow, preferably in an enclosed area. This was important, Feliks pointed out, because while the doctor was stupid—

  “He’s not stupid.”

  “So! He’s not stupid. But isn’t evil a form of stupidity?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It is something I arrived at. I did a lot of thinking in the infirmary. More thinking than you know. I thought about good and I thought about people and I thought about evil. Evil was the easiest one to think about, since we are around it all the time. I know evil. It comes and sits inside me whenever I am in the laboratory. The idea that evil makes a person stronger than good people—this is a popular misconception. But while Mengele doesn’t have certain strengths that you have, he is stronger than you, more able, so it would be best to have him in a corner. Or on the ground. You must have the upper hand in these situations or someone will cut your hand off and then the rest of you will follow. Understand?”

  It was then that I realized how misspent my education in this place had truly been. My hours had gone to Mengele, intent as I was on learning how to heal and fuse, how to stop the blood and start the heart, and, most important, how to make one thing match another, how to impose symmetry where none existed, all with the goal of impressing him enough so that I might gain the required closeness to fell him. In truth, though, Feliks was the real expert, the one I should’ve consulted. Because he’d schooled himself—through exposures to violent encounters that befell all of us, through the literature of rebel factions, through the scenarios he played out in his head—in how a body could be undone. He knew the place to stick so that one’s victim might bleed out the quickest, the spot to target if one wanted to stun. He just didn’t have the ruse, he claimed, to carry it out.

  In me, he believed, there was a real opportunity for vengeance.

  But Mengele wasn’t as available as he’d once been. When the frequency of the planes increased, so too did the time he spent holed up in his office, shutting out his once-beloved subjects. According to Dr. Miri, he neglected new work, tended to the organization of files and slides, drafted frantic letters to his mentors. Boxes rose in front of the windows of the brick laboratory. Cars idled at the laboratory doors, and attendants shuffled in and out, bearing those boxes into the backseats.

  For thirty-six days after Mama painted my portrait, I lay in wait for him. I replayed Feliks’s plan for Mengele’s death in my head, sifted through every move and shuffle. I whet the bread knives against the stairs. We will never be sharp enough, they sang. We will never slash deep enough to get to the bottom of all this misery! But I told them they would have to do.

  Together, the bread knives and I waited. We waited anywhere the doctor might linger; we looked with interest at any footprint that spoke of his whereabouts. But the doctor’s footprints were more reticent than your average footprint—when I looked at their whorls, I could feel only a boot at my neck.

  On the thirty-seventh day of my wait, January 15, 1945, I sat on the steps of the hospital with my three knives in one stocking and Pearl’s piano key in my shoe. I’d been waiting six hours, maybe eight, possibly two. Time, I’d noticed, passed differently now. I wondered if I would ever get real time back or if Pearl’s absence would permanently change the function of the minutes, the way they trembled and circled the clock. I was always arguing with myself over which was best, to move forward or to stay still, and it was only when I’d decided on the former that the doctor’s car pulled up.

  He stepped out, unusually harried. The part in his hair was mussed and dust streaked the legs of his pants. Every feature on his face was drawn with stress. He ran up the steps, fetched a box, and nearly stumbled at the sight of me.

  “Little Deathless? Why are you here?”

  “You remember me by that name?”

 
“Of course I do,” he chided me. “There’s no forgetting you. Even if things here are not what they used to be.”

  “Not what they used to be,” echoed the driver of the car, a ruddy man with the whiskered face of a catfish. His lips were slow and overblown and engaged in the consumption of a sandwich. I took notice of them as he spat from the window of his car in an expression of his disgust with some inferior meat. My stomach rumbled at the sight of the rejected food.

  “Bolek would know.” Mengele nodded at the driver. “He was here from the beginning. He helped build this place. Tell her, Bolek.”

  “It was 1939,” Bolek said with his mouth full. “Back then, this was all swampland. Now look at it!”

  He lifted his hand momentarily to sweep it across the length of the windshield. And then spat again, magisterially this time.

  “Roads, gardens, music rooms, swimming pools, music rooms,” he intoned lovingly.

  “You said music rooms twice,” Mengele pointed out.

  “And why shouldn’t I? You think they have those at Buchenwald? At Dachau? Some things bear repeating. Who can say Auschwitz is not a civilized place?” Bolek stared at me warily, as if I were the person to make that very accusation.

  Mengele took to fussing with the boxes in the trunk, placing some of the presumably more precious loads into the rear seat. I spied a briefcase back there. The suit of a Wehrmacht officer was draped over it. Catching my glance to this strange costume, he was quick to cover it with his coat, but otherwise he acted like a papa readying the family car for a picnic.

  “Just a brief trip. I’ll be back soon. I have to do some rounds first, though—would you like to come with me? Perhaps we can look for Pearl?”

  “Pearl is dead,” I said. This was the first time I’d said it. Did the clouds flee when I spoke? Did the horizon march off to the sea while the layers of earth and dust came undone, each peeling itself back to reveal a lake? Did the ash shake hands with the dust while crows presided over the truce? Although such events should’ve been sparked by those words—Pearl is dead, gone, over, Pearl is no more—I didn’t know if any came to pass because the mere saying of such words stole my other senses from me. I stood there, tongue flapping, deaf and blind to all but the sight of Josef Mengele.

  “Oh, is she? How funny—” He looked at me meaningfully. “I never signed a death certificate.”

  “But you sign so many,” I said. I didn’t say that he could’ve overlooked it; that wouldn’t do. And if he suspected any hint of an implication of forgetfulness, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  “So I do.” He sighed. “I do sign so many. But still, it couldn’t hurt to look. You’d be amazed, Stasha, at the ways that people manage to hide in here. They make themselves smaller than you could ever imagine. I’ve found many a child folded in half and shut in a valise! And these are stupid children, not like our clever Pearl. She’s so cunning, she could fit herself into a teapot!”

  This praise for my better half resurrected her in my mind, and this resurrection—I admit, I was stupid, foolish, desperate—overshadowed what I knew him to be, just for a moment.

  “You are very right,” I said.

  “Let’s go find her, then,” he said, and he opened the front door and gestured for me to get in. I did. The car stank of smoke and ash and a leathery oil. Bolek grumpily threw his sandwich out the window and watched the Yagudah triplets fight over it in the dirt. Mengele sat beside me, lighting a cigarette. The car rumbled outside of the Zoo limits.

  There was a prolonged silence. It felt dangerous. The doctor moved his hand toward me very suddenly, to the vicinity of my neck. I flinched. I’m sure he noticed, because his affectionate manner with me increased.

  “Stasha is my medical student,” he noted to the driver. “She had lovely yellow hair once, but the lice—you know. Brown eyes, though—it is unfortunate.”

  “She looks very healthy,” Bolek returned. His tone was familiar and approving, but his eyes in the driver’s mirror told a different story, one that wished me little in the way of good.

  I swallowed and fiddled with the key in my pocket. I couldn’t tell you the logic of my nerves. After all, I had no reason to fear death, but the willful proximity to such a death-maker was unnerving. We were thigh to thigh. He directed me to lean my head on his shoulder. Did I obey? Of course I did. For the sake of ending him, I obeyed.

  “What did you do with yourself this morning?” he asked.

  “Studied,” I lied.

  “With Twins’ Father?” His tone was scornful.

  “I’m teaching myself.”

  “Good. Zvi is a nice man, but I’m not sure that he’s the best teacher. You’d come out with a most inaccurate education. What are you studying?”

  “Dr. Miri gave me a book. About surgeries. I’m learning about incisions. I learned about cesareans this morning.”

  “Interesting subject,” he said drearily, clearly not interested at all. “You saw me perform that procedure once, didn’t you? A messy business.” There was a wink in his voice—he knew, even as he described it as such, that it was not a cesarean that I witnessed, but a vivisection. The woman—she’d had her child pulled from her, yes, he’d opened her and dispatched the child to a bucket full of water, drowning the baby before its mother’s eyes, but that was not the end of her suffering. He sustained it for as long as he was able and my memory of this—I did not want it; I did not want even Pearl to remember it for me.

  But if Mengele chose to remember this killing as a cesarean, then so it was, in Auschwitz.

  “Usually, I send them to the gas straightaway,” he added, seemingly for Bolek’s ears. “But taking care of it before it has a chance for a single breath? That can be humane too, under conditions like those. In any case, Stasha, you should be commended for your interest in these procedures.”

  He paused thoughtfully, took a bottle from his valise for a drink, and gave my knee a squeeze as he swigged.

  “But the arts—that appears to be your real calling. Dancing, isn’t it?”

  “That’s Pearl,” I reminded him. “I am a scientist.”

  He began to throw up his hands before remembering that he held a bottle in one of them. Liquor met my cheek.

  “Of course!” he said. “But it really doesn’t matter. Dancer, scientist—just keep yourself occupied. Dwell on your interests. Maintain your curiosity about the world. Curiosity has gotten me far. You lose your curiosity”—he shook a thick finger before my eyes—“and life, it will abandon you.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “But your voice—it says that your efforts don’t come naturally to you. I imagine that you’ve found it very difficult to get on without your sister? I’ve seen many twins experience similar. I’m actually quite interested in that particular phenomenon—how one survives without the other after years of inseparability. So fascinating.”

  I offered the answer that I thought would keep me intact.

  “I don’t miss her at all.”

  “You don’t have to be brave with me.”

  “I know she’s just hiding,” I said. “Until it’s safe to come out.”

  “A good guess, that’s what that is. You are a better detective than that, I’m sure. Now, take it further. Where do you think she might be hiding? Bolek, here, he’ll take us there.”

  And so we traveled through the men’s barracks and the women’s. We crunched along the perimeter of the gates. I sat with my face pressed to the glass, and Mengele stared straight ahead. Everywhere, I saw Pearl. I saw her so many times that the true purpose of my trip grew muddled. I convinced myself, as the wheels rolled on, that my sister was merely in disguise, that she was one of any of the figures we passed. Her theatrical background and perceptive nature had likely conspired to create the perfect costume.

  “That one,” I said, pointing to a figure in the distance.

  “That is a boy child. And a criminal at that.”

  “There’s Pearl,” I said of a different figure.
“I was born with her. I’d know her anywhere.”

  “I’m afraid I know that woman,” Mengele said. “She is a fine guard, but she isn’t Pearl.”

  I had hoped that some revealing information might slip as we traveled. I’d hoped that he’d confess to his crimes, or at least to the deceptions he’d practiced on me. Zayde was not eating or swimming or living. Mama was starving; she painted only portraits of experiments for Mengele’s archives. But as we continued to circle the camp, I knew that there was no sanity in that car. Not in him. And not in myself either, because every time I pointed to a person, I actually believed in the possibility that this he or she was my sister.

  “It’s her,” I said. I pointed to a kapo with a cigarette, a boy with a shovel, a cook with a ladle.

  “Who?” he’d always query.

  “Pearl!” I would cry through the window. “It’s Pearl acting as though she isn’t Pearl.”

  And Mengele would command the person in question to come to our window, where it would become obvious—through an accent, a snarl, a scar—that the subject was not the loved one I searched for. It was only a kapo, a boy, a cook.

  He seemed not to enjoy my disappointment, but I believe that he did like watching me inspect them. I performed this inspection just as he always had, employing similar gestures, asking questions of their origins.

  “You should’ve been in our employ,” he said with a chortle after I let the cook go.

  I was about to ask Bolek to return me to the Zoo when I saw a woman. She was coated in soot, but even in their darkness, her cheeks shone innocent. A basket hung from her arms at an elegant angle. Seeing my stare, Mengele motioned to the woman to come to our window, and his interest caused her to drop the basket at her feet.

  “Inspect her, Stasha.”

  I opened the door and stepped before her and I did as Mengele had done with us, lifting her chin with one finger. Beneath her jaw was a neat expanse of white, a brief reprieve from the soot.

  “It has to be her,” I said.