Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  It would be like Pearl to disguise herself so humbly. This was, in my view, a clever move.

  “You call those eyes?” he scoffed. “Just bits of tin or raisins. Hardly human at all.”

  Mengele gestured to the woman to turn around, to give us a show. She spun, slow but obedient, shuffling through each revolution.

  “It’s Pearl,” I insisted.

  “And does she speak?” he asked me. “Can she answer your questions, share a childhood memory?”

  The woman blinked, her eyes snow-white against the soot. I saw then the milky cloud that veiled her irises.

  “Glaucoma,” he announced. “This is a Greek woman, midfifties. Probably birthed three children, at the very least. Widowed more than once, and miserable all the way through. Cleans the cremos here. Looks to have a fever, and she’s going blind. Not much left of her, I’d think. Look at the scabs on her hands. Likely covered in them. What an infection.”

  I looked at the woman’s fingers, speckled with injury.

  “You are useless, yes?” Mengele said to the woman in a bright voice, his face giving the false impression of kindness. “You are an animal, correct? A low, stinking animal?”

  And the woman simply bowed her head low and nodded, exposing a scalp riddled with bruises.

  “You will get an infection, Stasha. Get back in the car.”

  But I wasn’t convinced. So I told this mysterious human that I didn’t care that she’d tried to go without me, leaving me only a piano key for comfort. If she was happier, that’s all I wanted. I told her in Polish and Yiddish and German, and then I told her in the secret language special to our own two skulls and studded my affectionate plea with images of all the things that joined us in love—toward the blackness of her mind I threw the softness of a litter of kittens, the cherry-blossomed sleeve of Mother’s dressing gown, the books on Zayde’s desk. And when that didn’t work, my efforts increased and I became resentful; I cast into her mind’s eye the bleakness of my Zoo, the knotty curl of my spine against the barrack bed. Surely, I thought, these desolate images would rouse her, they would compel her to discard this flimsy disguise and vault back into her position as my better half.

  They did not.

  Instead, the monstrous version of my sister bulged her eyes in fright, and she inserted an elderly thumb into the puckers of her mouth, sucking like a frightened baby.

  I ordered this demi-Pearl to stop. Thumb-sucking was no way to deal with pain. But the thumb-sucking continued.

  So I stooped and searched the ground for stones. To this day, I remain grateful for the absence of them, because I know that I would have thrown them at her if I could; I would have tried to force her from the strange husk through injury. Mengele noted the trembling of my hands and drew me back into the leathery recesses of the car, but I was able to peer past his form to see the woman scamper off with an athleticism enabled by fear. She then huddled behind the bed of a truck.

  Mengele sighed and clucked in a show of sympathy. He then produced a tin of candies from his pocket. These were not his usual gems of butterscotch, I noted, but a more evolved species of sweet. After administering this candy, he took up my hand and petted it comfortingly.

  “So—she’s not your Pearl. But the good news is that you may keep looking for the real Pearl. And here is the better news: You have forever to look for her. Your life will not end before you find her. How many may say this?”

  I told him that this was not lost on me. He gave Bolek orders to drive back.

  As the car roared from its idle, I gave one last searching glance toward the Pearl impostor, and it was then that I saw what I shouldn’t have seen. I shouldn’t have seen it because it should’ve been too dark, she should’ve been changed beyond recognition—by starvation, by anguish, by loneliness—she should’ve been obscured by those she rested with, those she’d likely come to know as family, her fellow dead whose outstretched arms should’ve covered the stillness of her eyes.

  There, in a heap of others on the bed of the truck, was our mother, or the body that had belonged to the person who’d been our mother. The keeper of the poppies who once held within her a whole world of floating. I’d long accepted that to return to the floating world was impossible, but I’d never imagined that the woman who created it would end so savagely. The form on the pile—it was changed. I had no idea if she was supposed to be our mother still or if the death they’d dealt her had changed her into some unreachable thing—a star, a flower, a wave on the sea—that the surviving likes of me had no right to care for.

  Don’t weep, said my mother’s tearful, wide-open eyes as they stared back at me.

  And I knew better than to argue with my mother’s eyes, but deep within me, hidden from her all-knowing view, my vow for vengeance renewed itself and I began to shake and I felt the cold kisses of the knives in my stockings as they pressed against my skin.

  “Are you unwell?” he wondered. “So quiet, suddenly. Don’t worry. You’ll be with your family someday. We’ll all have dinner together; Pearl will dance. How will that be?”

  I thanked him, and as I did so, I nodded to my mother in an acknowledgment of the vengeance I would bring.

  Mengele prattled on, but I could not converse. It was safer not to speak, because if I spoke I would have said to him:

  Because you couldn’t kill my mother twice, you keep me in this place to want and suffer a hundred times over.

  Because you couldn’t make my zayde less than ash, you leave me gray and small, a twisted thing to be blown by whatever wind will have me.

  Because you had no power over the fact that I was born, you took from me what I was born with—the person who was my love, the half that made me entire—and now I am lessened into this dull thing, a divided person who will live forever, wandering in search of some nothing, some nowhere, some no-feeling, to mend my pain.

  The blood he’d given me fled from my brain and collected itself into a fist. He might have made me immortal, I told myself, he might have doomed me to outlive everyone, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t find some end, a death, a termination, in him. The knives in my stockings nodded in agreement. He leaned away from me to shout through the window at a passing nurse, making his back vulnerable. His neck was turned, his attentions were elsewhere. Now would be as fine a moment as any, the knives pointed out. But before I had a chance to act on this advice, he swiveled in his seat and regarded me solemnly.

  “The future,” he said. “We must always look forward to it. Understand?”

  I nodded. In my pocket, I felt for Pearl’s key. It was luminous, covered with shine; my fingertips felt glazed with light when they rested on it.

  “I want to show you something,” he said suddenly as the car found itself before the Zoo. He removed a box from the floor of the car. It was one of the boxes I’d seen at the laboratory, a box he apparently loved above all the others, because while those receptacles were marked with the usual inscription of War Materials, Urgent, this one was deemed good enough to bear his name. Dr. Josef Mengele it declared in script so fine and practiced that I could imagine him rehearsing the curve of every letter. He clung to this box like a child with a teddy bear, a boy with a kite, and when he lifted the lid, it was with a careful affection, as if he didn’t trust even himself with the marvels contained within.

  “All of this here,” he said. “Genetic material. You can’t begin to imagine what we might achieve with these tiny samples. A different kind of human, a perfect person.”

  The slides clinked musically together in the box. I ran my finger over their edges.

  “A perfect person,” I repeated. “Like Pearl.”

  He grabbed the box away from me, closed the lid on all the little lives before I had a chance to memorize them. He took me by my neck, gripped it with his fingers, tilted my head back, and then, with a movement so deft that it seemed like a magic trick pulled on a stage, he drew a dropper from his pocket and squeezed a little bead of liquid into my left eye.

/>   Oh, how it blinded and stung! That little bead of liquid—it embellished my tears.

  “What is this for?” I gasped, and my hand crept to cover my pained eye as if to protect it from further shock.

  “It is to remember me by,” he said.

  Through my tears, I told him that I didn’t want to remember him, I wouldn’t remember him. I refused to. Because he was so memorable, I feared that he would crowd out all the other memories. I said this as I reached for my bread knife. I fumbled blindly. All before me ran black, then white.

  “You flatter me, Stasha. That’s too bad.” I could not see him, but I’m sure he winked. “Now, tell me—before I go—what do you see?”

  I saw nothing. Oh, nothing!

  “Don’t worry, Stasha—it will be blue by tomorrow, I promise.”

  Then he opened the car door and pushed me from my seat and I tumbled out like some cast-off thing.

  Soon after, on a night unknown to us, he left his Zoo behind. I did not know the time of his departure, what he bore with him, or if he ever glanced back.

  I only knew that when next I saw him, it would all be different. We would be in a place that could prove one of two things: that the whole world had become Auschwitz, or that the world was no longer whole at all, that it, too, had split and sundered and ceased to be. On that mid-January day, I had no glimmer of that event, not an inkling. I could only retreat to the Zoo, like any poor and beaten animal, half blind, one hand held to my weeping eye while the other searched for the burrow of my barrel. I wasn’t thinking of Mama’s death; I couldn’t think of Zayde’s death either—I would never think of them, I swore, until I was able to avenge them both, and Pearl.

  In that eye, there remained a blackness. For many days or weeks, it was just black on black. I tried to see the bright side of this. The bright side was that if I closed my good eye, I was blind, and if I was blind, every human that remained had the potential to be my Pearl. It was only when someone spoke to me that this illusion was ruined.

  After my eye went useless, Dr. Miri pulled me from my barrel and installed me in the infirmary. She thought it would scare me into trying to live, and she put me in a private room in the back, with three other children.

  “You know it is not a good thing,” she said. “To be in the infirmary. They take people from the infirmary to the trucks.”

  I nodded.

  “And the trucks—you know where they go—”

  I did not make her finish this sentence. I indicated my understanding—I knew that the trucks took people to the gas. Dr. Miri couldn’t know why the threat of this meant nothing to me. But I think she realized that I would go on any vehicle that might lead to my sister, and that was why she worried so and began to hover over me at any available moment.

  In the night, I woke and traveled among the bunks of the greater infirmary in search of my sister. This thronged, howling place—it surpassed our Zoo barracks in its ability to pile one human atop another.

  Row after row of bodies rested on bunks, in slots so tiny that the effect was of insects resting in a hive. The bodies were covered with white sheets and resembled clouds with heads affixed to them. Most of the heads were turned away from me, or buried in the mattresses, but all the bodies outstretched their hands, knots of bone and bramble, in a plea for food and water.

  “I don’t have anything,” I’d cry.

  The clouds didn’t believe me, but they weren’t angry either. They were too sick to be angry. They had dysentery and fever and germs that could kill. They had blood loss and family loss, and their hearts were slipping away from the standard heart-seat in the chest, more and more every day. What did these human-clouds have to live for? They merely rolled over and went back to sleeping or coughing or dreaming or whatever human-clouds do best.

  As I trudged back to my room, a burst of light sparked against the window.

  It was a rebuke, I knew. Wherever they were, Mama and Zayde, they were telling me not to be weak. They were ashamed that I had not fulfilled my purpose, and they emphasized this with a series of rat-a-tat-tats, as forceful and repetitive as gunfire. I didn’t blame them for such extreme measures.

  “I hope you understand,” I said in the direction of the window, “that I’m not myself without Pearl anymore.”

  The loud noises swelled and increased. My bad eye saw only a blur, but the untouched eye helped me see the smoke that crept toward the building.

  I hoped that smoke would take me till there was nothing left.

  This thought must have disturbed Zayde and Mama more than anything. The windowpane began to rattle. Another rebuke. A spark, a flash of smoke. I knew the meaning of all of it. But I didn’t know that I was weeping till I felt a hand wipe my cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Dr. Miri as she offered me her handkerchief.

  Her face was oddly still, and then it began to crack along its every seam, and laughs and sobs began to pour from her.

  “What are you sorry for?” she said between the fits of this display.

  “All of this.” I motioned to the flash of smoke passing by the bank of windows.

  “This is not your doing,” she said.

  I assured her that it was, and just as I was about to confess—

  “It is hard to believe, I know,” she said, one trembling hand at my shoulder. “But the camp, it may be ending. We’ve been told the Russians have been approaching for weeks. It seems impossible, but all of this”—she gestured toward the knock-knocking on the panes by thick threads of smoke; the rattles; the hums—“it could give us hope if we chose it.”

  Even as she attempted brightness for my sake, her tone indicated that this was not a particularly large or impressive hope, but a hope that was a bit tattered and that introduced a new set of unknowns and troubles into our lives.

  Three of the cloud-people rose from their beds and clambered over to the window for a look. They were told to lie down, to rest—I could see that the staff was worried; it seemed not entirely certain that the planes overhead were friendly. The cloud-people themselves demonstrated a division in this line of thought. It would soon be over, all over, some said. It will never be over, others said. I did not know whom to believe but looked to Dr. Miri’s face for guidance. Her eyes were lit, active with optimism, but her mouth remained set in a grim line.

  For three days we waited, with fingers in our ears, with eyes wide open, with our shoes at the ready in case we had to run. We waited while the bombs whistled a pretty tune, waited without knowing where they might fall. We waited while the snow mixed with smoke and the camp went gray with wondering.

  I waited knowing that if freedom truly came, another wait would begin for me. I lay in my bunk and began another letter to my sister; I scratched it into the wall that stretched beside me, but I was able to execute only the salutation. Dear Pearl, I wrote, believing that someday, if only for a moment, she might leave the site of her capture—be it death, be it Mengele—and see this greeting and know that we were people, still, in spite of what we’d been told.

  Auschwitz, its work was done, said the grim faces of the guards as they pursued the shambling of it. The place that had once welcomed their every evil impulse now threatened to be their undoing. We were accustomed to that burning-chicken-feather smell, that red sky, the ash always hunting us down, but this—now the flames leaped with tongues whose vocabularies were devoted to the destruction of Auschwitz. The SS set fire to the little white farmhouse where they’d gassed us; they had pyres of documents, they destroyed all they had built, but they were not systematic about this destruction the way they had been with ours. No, this was a blazing assault on the kingdom over which they had ruled, and the random nature of its dismantling placed us at still greater risk. The prisoners walked with bowed heads—meeting a guard’s eye could only encourage his ruthlessness. While these guards had once answered to superiors, they now answered only to their desperations. There were rumors of what they might do, and no two rumors were alike—it was said
that they would relocate us to another prison camp, that they would send the whole of Auschwitz up in flames to destroy evidence of their crimes, and that this was the beginning of surrender.

  The last seemed most unlikely to me. I couldn’t imagine that one would embark on surrender by enacting these particular violences, this tossing of children in the air to make them more challenging targets, this cornering of women to cut their throats, this mowing down of men with vehicles. Watching this chaos from the window of the infirmary, I wondered if a bullet or a scream could better pierce the sky.

  On January 20, 1945, the movements of the SS festered into flights. We saw them load themselves onto the same trucks they had piled our loved ones on, and they fled. They scampered into cars and hurtled through fences, leaving twisted wire in their wake. Those who didn’t flee were roaming about, extracting whatever power they could find. Along the rows of us, Miri was issuing strict instructions: “Stay inside,” she said, “wait, wait, the Soviets are not yet here, but they are coming, and only then, perhaps not even then, will it be safe to venture out.”

  Being deathless, I slipped past her form. There was no keeping me within those walls. Not when I could see Bruna waving to me from the window, her arms full of supplies, her charcoaled hair thrown back, and her face drawn in anticipation of a good-bye. After I bolted down the steps she was there, around the corner, waiting with Feliks. She clapped a fur coat on my back.

  “Jackal,” she said, stroking the fur in benediction. I had never played a jackal in the Classification of Living Things, but it suited me. The coat shone with the determination of a clever animal whose reputation had been much maligned but who chose to endure.

  Feliks was wearing a bear’s pelt. It was luxurious, full of gloss and menace. In these additions to our own hides, we ran past the menace of uniforms, the goods that Bruna had given us bouncing in our sacks. We ran past the block where the orchestra had played, and the flames, they were eating all the instruments, they were gnashing with all the violent flicker entrusted to their kind. We heard the skins of drums burst, heard the oboes whimper as their reeds died. Thunder rose from the remains of the piano. But Pearl’s piano key—it stayed by my side.