Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  “Isn’t it lovely?” Bruna asked, taking in the clumsy flight of the SS.

  We agreed that it was and stated our delight in viewing such a show. We swore that we would stand by Bruna and help her contribute to these destructions. She did not care for this plan; she pushed us bodily away from her.

  “You must go back to the barracks without me!” she insisted. “I have promises to take care of here.”

  Later, we would learn that Bruna’s promises were to Dr. Miri. The two had developed an evacuation plan for the weakest in the infirmary if an event such as this came to pass, and the SS began to pick off the ill as they lay in their beds. Bruna had better things to do than deal with us. Of course, she would never have put it that way—our Bruna dealt only in benevolent insults.

  “Go away, you babies, and hide in your bunks,” she hissed. “There, you worms have a chance. Your chances here—pfft—in this place you will live only by playing dead.”

  “We will do that, then,” I argued, pulling on the lapels of my jackal fur coat. Already, I felt it sharpening my instincts. But Bruna did not share my faith.

  “I doubt your ability to play dead well enough. You are too animated, Stasha. No, it is better for you to go to the barracks and wait. Wait for me to fetch you. If you don’t go back and save yourselves”—Bruna paused—“I’ll do awful things to you.”

  “Like what?” Feliks challenged. “Your worst is the best in all the world. I wouldn’t have anything but the worst. All the other girls—”

  She slapped him across the cheek with a resounding crack. He looked like he would swoon from the pleasure of the proximity, but her words ended that swiftly.

  “I’ll kill you, Feliks. You dumb bear. I may not kill you now. Or even tonight. Hopefully, it won’t be necessary at all. But if one of these Nazis tries to kill you, you can be sure that I will beat them to it. I won’t have my loved ones die at their hands. Only mine.”

  We saw the reason in this. We also saw the pistol in the waistband of her skirt. It seemed that Bruna and her fellow rebels had been prepared for this upheaval, even if they had not known, during their weeks of plunder and planning, the secretive missions undertaken in Nazi headquarters for supplies and the endless meetings, the breadth of destruction our freedom might bring.

  “So,” Feliks concluded, a forced brightness in his voice, “we will go. Back to the barracks. But only for now. We are leaving here together, yes?”

  Bruna lifted her eyes to the flickering sky, as if she expected the flames to deliver her words for her, words she hesitated to give.

  “Don’t ever wait for me,” she instructed us.

  All of this meant nothing to Feliks. He cared nothing about the future if it didn’t have a reunion with Bruna.

  “We won’t wait now. But perhaps—in case we are separated in this—we should establish a meeting place first?” he suggested. “That is what friends do. You are our friend, yes, Bruna? Only a friend would offer to kill you before others can.”

  I watched Bruna’s face struggle to maintain its usual stony veneer. She was touched. It seemed likely that the term friend had never been uttered so nakedly alongside her name before.

  “Of course,” she said. “But it may be some time. Who knows what waits for us? There could be months of running ahead, years of hiding.”

  Feliks would not be deterred.

  “Stasha and I will wait for you,” he said. “Just name the place.”

  I watched the depth of his determination occur to her, saw it light up one pink eye and then the next. I’d always expected Bruna’s tears to be as blush as her eyes but there they were, as clear and atremble as any I’d ever witnessed. She didn’t seem to care that I saw them and even accepted the sleeve of my sweater for use as a handkerchief.

  “I always wanted to go to a real museum,” she said between dabs. “To be a lady for a day and see the art.”

  “A real museum, then.” Feliks gulped. “In front of a statue, we’ll meet. And tea afterward, maybe a nice café. I’ll buy your ticket.”

  “That would be sweet,” she said, and she gave him a kiss. “You are very sweet, Feliks.”

  I’ve never been sure what motivated Bruna to accept this invitation, to bestow this kiss. Perhaps she saw true possibility in it. Perhaps she was just humoring Feliks. Maybe she was sensing—as anyone with eyes and ears would sense—that a protracted conversation in the middle of gunfire and grand-scale selection was unwise for any who might want to leave that place alive. But I think she cared for him, truly.

  “It’s a promise,” she swore to us, and then she shook my hand and smiled. I could feel the residue of her tears in that handshake.

  Whatever else one could’ve said of our beloved criminal, we all knew that Bruna’s word was true. Theft was not her genuine talent. A promise—that was her real gift. She could not help but dream of fulfillment and creation, even as she dedicated her present to havoc. She meant well, our Bruna. But of course, she did her best to mask her virtue. And so her kindness and generosity were cons, double-dealers; they skulked about, disguised as flaws—and then, suddenly, when you weren’t looking, her tricks trespassed and broke inside you so that they could steal from you, bit by bit, until you hosted an emptiness in which your real goodness could thrive. In this way, she saved you. Bruna, she was our organizing angel.

  Only when she let go of my hand was I struck by the stupidity of our pact. How many museums were there? Were we speaking of Poland or Europe or the world entire? It was a foolish plan.

  In realizing this mistake, I looked at Bruna’s face, half turned, that goodness on it still apparent, and before I had even a slip of a minute to ask for clarification about our future plans, Taube leaped up behind her and grasped her by the neck. He gave it the famed twist we’d seen him issue so many times before, but now it was visiting our own. As the bones cracked, a rare color rose in her cheeks. Her pale face filled with blood. After Taube finished breaking Bruna’s neck, he snapped his fingers in our direction.

  We were on our knees then, having watched her flutter to the ground like a scarf. The newly black hair she’d made for herself bannered with a flag’s defiance. Taube caught up some of the coal-colored tangles and rubbed them between his fingers to reveal the whiteness she’d so desperately tried to conceal.

  “She really thought she could be someone else, did she?” he asked no one.

  Fearing Feliks might answer, I tried to clap a hand over his mouth, but he was too busy collapsing into the snow to speak. We looked at Bruna together. Her woolen skirt had upended itself, and the jumble of her white legs was exposed.

  As Feliks moved to straighten Bruna’s skirt, Taube interfered, placing a foot on the body to indicate that it had been thoroughly conquered. He stooped to draw the pistol from her waistband, balanced it in the palm of his hand, then redirected the muzzle at us.

  “You two. You find this something to stare at? On your feet now.”

  Feliks offered me his shoulder, but his shoulder wasn’t enough, and his bones were sharp enough to cut me besides. Still I clung to him. My shuffle drew attention to our furs.

  “The coats. Where did you get them?” Feliks’s mouth was still drawn into a silent scream. I turned his face away from Bruna, and I told Taube that the coats were a gift from the doctor.

  “Tell me”—he laughed—“were you such a good liar before? Or do you have Auschwitz to thank for that?”

  I told him I was sure I didn’t know the answer, but it seemed a fair question.

  “What is with this obsession with fairness? No matter,” he said with a sudden cheer. “Keep your lousy coats. Who knows how cold it will be where you’re going.” He put Bruna’s pistol at our backs.

  There it was—we had lost the chance of escape that our dead beloved had entreated us to take.

  Snow fell as flames rose. Both were outpaced by Taube. He was herding us, every last one—children and women and injured all. The usual efficiency had fallen away; it was all pell-me
ll stomping and dragging, people grasping onto other people, people stumbling, people trying to lift other people up.

  Choiceless, we joined the swarm, that ever-enlarging multitude dotted with faces, scarves, bandages. We lost ourselves in it, and the loss was so thorough that the image of dying Bruna that had burned itself into the backs of my eyelids began to fade. It would reappear to me over the years—I would wake and see it in mourning—but in that moment I had to walk.

  Feliks, though, I believe he walked with this vision of Bruna. Even as he supported me, he trembled and shook, and he spoke to me as if he were trapped in a dream.

  “How many of us are there?” I asked him.

  “Not enough” was all he would say.

  Later, history would say that more than seven thousand people stayed behind at Auschwitz, emaciated and immobile while the rest of us were turned out in droves, dense marches of death and near-death. We in this particular death march numbered twenty thousand. Among us marchers, the hesitant were shot; the lame were shot too. Our numbers quickly dwindled. The soldiers entertained themselves with a trick of shooting one body so that it fell into another body, and that body toppled another in turn, and so and so pitifully on, bone-crack, hiss of bullet, snap on snap—our people fell, and the SS strode upon them, shooting whoever dared to stir.

  I should’ve been one of the battered lame, one of the shot hesitants, but I fell into another category on the death march.

  Of this twenty thousand, there were a fair number of people who managed the impossible, shouldering their supplies and falling into a steady pace. Feliks was one of these. He was able to walk so well that he even managed to whistle. He whistled for my sake, knowing that I enjoyed watching the miniature clouds spindled by his breath. I had a fair view of these whistle-clouds because I wasn’t a marcher. I wasn’t even a stumbler or a limper. I’d managed only a trio of wondrous steps beyond the gate before collapsing in the snow. Feliks responded to my fall by digging the blanket from his pack and unfurling the wool. It lapped at the snow like a red tongue. He’d gestured for me to climb aboard this blanket like a sleigh. In this way, we soon fell to the rear of the march.

  People speak a lot about power. They say that it left them, or they summoned it. They talk about it in terms of exchange, of loss. Feliks, he had stores of it. I knew this, though, only because he was saving me. Would I have known it if he had saved someone else? I would like to think so. But when you have been halved and split, when you are torn, when you have been set against yourself by someone who claimed that he did it for your own good, it becomes harder to recognize the goodness of others unless their goodness is visiting you directly.

  Feliks’s power was made all the more visible as he slowed. Every fourth step was a stumble, every sixth step was an ache. The whistle-clouds receded. Night fell on us with its unbearable weight.

  Still, he continued to drag me forward.

  From my blanket, I had a view of many deaths. A woman stooped to drink snow and died. A man paused to ask a question and died. They died swiftly, bullets lodged in their heads.

  In a hush, we spoke about where we were going. Would they march us into the sea, drive us off a cliff? Auschwitz had failed them, despite all its many innovations, so it was clear that they’d decided to end us all, to walk us to death, in the simplest of terms. I wondered how I would explain my immortality when a guard put a bullet in my head.

  A cough took hold of Feliks’s lungs, and he gasped for air. I ordered him to abandon me. He lurched instead of walked. He wouldn’t let me go. And I wasn’t his only burden. On his back he carried a sack of our possessions. He threw out the scarf filled with flour that he’d organized. The flour hit me and painted me white. He threw out the crusts of bread we’d collected over the weeks; the wind caught up the crusts. He tossed the potatoes out to the ice, but he was so weak that his aim faltered and the potatoes dropped at his feet and his feet tripped themselves up.

  I thought it the end—he fell with a thud and a smack of skull, his limbs akimboed onto my blanket, while his parted lips kissed the ice. The procession stepped over us. Skirts and coats fluttered over my cheeks. The marchers were careful not to trample us, and the limpers approached us gingerly, but the pace of all quickened with the warning shots. All the while, we lay there, unmoving.

  I whispered to him, I told him that it couldn’t be this way, with him dying here. If you have to die, I begged, don’t do it while I’m watching, and if you have to do it while I’m watching, do it while I’m not feeling.

  He coughed, and the snow beside his mouth bloomed. I suppose I should’ve kissed him then, for Bruna. But before the thought even had a chance to occur to me, a boot lowered itself on his neck. Its sole gaped, exposing a grin of sock. I made my heart still. I like to think I made Feliks’s heart still too. I watched his eyelids flutter.

  Above us, Taube sighed. The boot moved from Feliks’s neck. He stooped and plucked a stray potato from the snow. He bit into it with a great gnashing of teeth and then swore with disgust. “Rotten!” he declared, and he spat the potato-flesh on my scalp. The potato mustn’t have been too rotten, though, because he took another bite. This, too, he spat out. It struck Feliks’s forehead. He repeated this procedure again, and then once more. The warmth fell onto our cheeks and backs, on the snow beside us. It seemed that there would be no end to this potato.

  And then, Taube’s name rang out across the field. His evil was needed elsewhere. He stooped and sniffed us—he knew we were alive; I’m sure of it—and then, with a parting arc of spittle, he turned.

  Let me be clear: Taube did not spare us out of a fit of conscience. He did not spare us in defiance of his superiors. He spared us for the same reason that he bothered to do anything—because he could.

  Only after his departure did I realize that the rattle of gunfire wasn’t as immense as it had seemed. We had walked surrounded, hemmed in by the noisy spatter of numerous guns. But while pretending myself into death, the curtain was raised on this ruse, the smallness of the rat-a-tat-tat. There were two guns, maybe three at most. An ineffective trinity, low on ammunition. They stuttered into the distance while Feliks and I played possum.

  “Is it safe to be alive now?” he whispered.

  I cursed him for lifting his head from the snow. What if someone looked back and saw him?

  “No one’s looking back.” He laughed bitterly. “The whole world will never look back. And if they do, they’ll probably say that it never really happened.”

  I was listening to him only in halves. Taking what I wanted to hear and dismissing the rest. What I wanted to hear was the part about never looking back. As I listened, I watched the velvet blackness of my closed eyelids. If I closed my eyes too suddenly and too tightly, I could see small sparks alight on that velvet, like footlights at the perimeter of a stage. I wanted to send my sister dancing across that stage, wanted to see her attempt something new. Some jump I’d never heard of, some turn that would reverse everything. But no matter how hard I tried to achieve this vision, only the blackness and the scattered lights remained.

  “Stasha? Why so quiet? You’re not really dead, are you?”

  “I don’t think so.” I could never tell him what Mengele had done to me.

  “Because I feel kind of dead myself. What if we are dead? My father the rabbi, he didn’t believe in a heaven. But he didn’t believe people would come and kill us someday either. So what if this is a heaven?”

  I told him that this wasn’t a heaven. This lousy, awful blankness—a heaven? This freezing, thunderous tundra—a heaven?

  “It could be,” he argued. “It could just be some special heaven-hell for people like us.”

  “It isn’t a heaven-hell. It’s not even a hell-heaven.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  There were, I figured, two ways of convincing him. The first was by presenting the fact that his brother was not there to greet him. Whether heaven existed at all was uncertain, but if it did, it would have n
o choice but to reunite us with our flesh, simply because all such systems depend on symmetry. And it was quite clear there was not a brotherly footfall about. But looking at his forlorn face, the cold-bitten hands—I couldn’t speak of the lost brother to Feliks; he was so weak and frail and he had borne me across the vastness of an icy tundra, a white beckoning of fog and uncertainty in a place that still wanted to make us as insignificant as possible. We were nothing but two buttons loosened from the doctor’s coat. Two specks beneath his microscope. Two samples of bone and tissue. As small as we were, Feliks remained the stronger, and I could not risk weakening his resolve with mention of his departed twin.

  So I chose the second way to convince him that we were not dead. I spread the blanket, heavy with frost, on the ground.

  “Drag me again,” I said. “You will see that my weight is the weight of the living.”

  Feliks wiped his eyes and reached for my hand in reply. He looked for the sun, and I swore I heard his heart bow in his chest, as if in recognition of the great feat he was about to pursue.

  We could have lain there forever. Because of him, we did not. How we were to survive in such a wasteland, we did not know. We could not even be sure what duties had to be divided on the journey ahead. Someone was going to have to find shelter, someone was going to have to find food, maps, shoes, hope. What it took to survive—even this was growing, and as it did, it diminished us both.

  Pearl, I thought, I never should have made you in charge of the past. I cannot endure this future.

  Part Two

  Pearl

  Chapter Ten

  The Keeper of Time and Memory

  I had a face still. I didn’t know my name, but I was aware of others. I knew the name of Auschwitz. I heard it shouted out in whatever world lay beyond the boxes that I lived in. There were three boxes, so far as I could tell. One was a building, the second a room, and the third—that was the cage of wire and lock that kept me. It was the white-coated man who put me there. After he finished inspecting me on his table, he dropped me to the cage bottom with a thud and took away my blanket so I could experience nakedness in such a way that the wires dug into my flesh. He came, he left. He shone lights into my darkness and made notes about my squint, my response. He did more than that, but I chose not to remember this then. I knew his name when this occurred. But I chose to forget that too.