Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  From this time—there is not much I want to recall. What I want to dwell on is different, and it is mine.

  This may not be true for the world, but it was true for me, in my cage: There was a brief moment, a slip of rare time, quite unlike any time before it. Because when Auschwitz fell, the lives it took were restored—for the merest of moments—just so our dead could see it founder.

  Our dead in this moment—they were not your ordinary spirits. There was nothing of the specter in them, not a bit of ghost. They were simply people who had been tortured but were now allowed to see a justice. I could hear their murmurs, their joys. Theirs was an afterlife of mere moments, a permission to witness the ruin of what had ended them.

  Among the shouts and cries of millions as Auschwitz collapsed, two voices made themselves known to me.

  I heard an old man try to toast but he couldn’t find the words; he simply uttered the beginnings of them until his voice cracked. I heard a woman comfort him, I heard her assure him that the girls would not end, and that’s when I knew she was my mother. She and my zayde—they watched over me while the camp burned and the guards fled and the prisoners found that they did not know what to do with their freedom.

  I heard Mama suggest a game to get me by in this time. I knew games; they were familiar to me, the concept came from whatever sprawl of a life I’d had outside this cage. I told this woman whom I knew to be my mother that I wasn’t sure what game would have me anymore—though I could move a little, I was sure I was a cripple, and though I could think, I was sure that my mind had been broken. But Mama insisted that I try.

  My grandfather did too.

  Play an ant, he suggested. Ants lift fifty times their own weight. You need that strength.

  Play a chimp, Mama suggested. There is no dignity in it, I know, but the intelligence is fair compensation. You must be smart.

  Just then, a pigeon landed on the windowsill opposite me, some ten feet away, and began to daven. A silver band flashed at its feet announcing its status as experiment, messenger, or property. I could relate to all three roles.

  “I’ll play a pigeon,” I said.

  The pigeon has an excellent memory, Zayde murmured in approval. The pigeon navigates and rescues and delivers. This is good, he said. All will be well.

  A fine choice, Mama agreed. All will be well, she echoed.

  But I could not even lift my arm in imitation of a wing. Simply crooking my finger lit a pain that soared through me. I asked them how I was supposed to treat survival like a game if the game would not have me, but their voices had gone. They’d witnessed the fall, and then they performed their own fall back into nothingness, into what I hoped might be peace.

  This was how I knew that I was still alive, because I was not at peace at all.

  But I continued with the game long after the voices were no more. Play a mouse, I told myself. Play a fox, a deer, an elephant. I recited the order of living things, and I ended them the way one ends a prayer. This was how my recitations went: species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and all will be well.

  Stasha

  Chapter Eleven

  Bear and Jackal

  When I looked up from my blanket, the parts of the world were before and behind me, the plains of snow extending on either side like the wings of a dove. The death march had slunk on, the guards had continued to torture our fellow prisoners at a distance, and we were left with the sound of despair in our heads. The wasteland chose us, but we didn’t want to be chosen by it. There we were, moving so slowly across this eternal earth, readier for an end than ever; we clung to the winter beneath us, trying to remember that beneath it, there lay the heartbeats and mutters of a floral season. I knew I had to find a way to make Feliks stay alive, to see him through to that spring. I had not even a sense of direction without him.

  I was stripped of location. Feliks could remind me all he wanted that we were in the forests of Stare Stawy, a village outside of Auschwitz. But where we were meant nothing to me. The Classification of Living Things, that meant something.

  Because we were following the river, like animals do. Away from the death march, we’d been reborn; our instincts had reassembled themselves into a formation better suited to the wanderings of animals. Feliks was Bear—the protective forager, fearsome and charismatic, resistant to any human efforts toward taming. I was Jackal—the doleful creature, clever, stealthy, accustomed to ruin and abandonment. We were hungry, without direction. Little more than an hour stood between us and the death march we’d escaped. Or I should say that I believed it to be an hour. I really wasn’t sure that hours truly existed anymore.

  I knew I was not an easy burden, but though his hands were mangled and blistered, Feliks chattered easily, as he dragged me forward, with talk of his beloved city.

  I never asked the city’s name. How could I care? All I knew was that it had fallen. Its machines were abandoned, its books were burned, its synagogues turned to ammunition factories, its people stifled, disappeared. Still, Feliks said, he was sure the sun shone there still, and he insisted on spinning the place to me as we crept. He told stories of everyday kindness, stories that valued beauty. I knew he was trying to convince me that we should make a life there as brother and sister, with our brother-ghost and sister-ghost at our sides, and the stories were making me imagine myself into quite a different person, someone who could stop feeling as if her tongue were made of stone. This someone would not be an immediate someone but an eventual one, and I warmed, thinking of her.

  “And someday,” he concluded, shaking a fist purpled by cold, “we will leave that city, as beautiful as it is, and we will hunt down all the Nazis; we will make them pay. And after every thrilling capture, we will always return to the city, because it will be a fitting home for heroes like us.”

  “Your plans for this city aren’t convincing me,” I told him. We were deep in the woods now, with the stillness of the river in our ears.

  “Who says it’s you I’m trying to convince?” he spat.

  He dropped the corner of my blanket and wiped his hands in an exaggerated gesture of disgust. From the parcel Bruna had assembled for us, he drew two bottles of water and a potato and planted them in the ground beside me. I watched his form retreat, watched his bear coat waver and blur before blending into the trees. I put my finger on the speck that was him in the distance. Ever since the cattle car, I had been denied good-byes. This was the first real good-bye I could have had, and yet I refused it. I didn’t shout after him, I didn’t even whimper. All I could do was stare at the dullard of a sun, so high above me, but penitent still.

  It stood like a guilty trickster with his hands in his pockets. A sun with such a conscience—you’d think it could be easily manipulated. I thought if I stared at it long enough it might correct my vision.

  Because what Mengele had done to my eye—it grew grimmer by the day. A consequence of the tamper with my vision: Shadows lilted around the edges of everything I saw. My shoes. My cup, my hat. Our sacks. I didn’t understand the intention of this shadow. Why it insisted on cradling all I needed, I didn’t know. Would it ever leave me?

  “No, Stasha—I can never leave you.” Because he’d returned and heard me speaking to myself, as usual. When he extended his arm to me, I saw his hand was outlined by that ever-present black. “I wasted time walking away from you,” he said. “And even more trudging back. Now it is your turn to carry me, but you are unable. What do you propose that we do in such a situation?”

  I promised that I would make him laugh at some point.

  “I’m sure you will,” he scolded, “but will it be for the right reasons?”

  I stretched out my hand, and he hoisted me up. He shouldn’t have had the strength even for this simple motion—he was stooped and twisted, and his hands were raw; he faltered a little at my grasp, and when he smiled, the force of his expression made the frost leap from his eyebrows.

  “For Pearl,” he said, and he gestured impatiently for me to walk.<
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  I thought of my sister dancing. The tap-tap of Pearl’s feet, the clap-clap of my hands as I watched. All of it in pairs, in repetition.

  This is how I walk, I told myself. One step, then another. This is how I walk with the sun, this is how I walk through the snow. This is how I walk in memory of Pearl, the girl whose every step could have been musical, and for all time, if only Mengele had fulfilled his promise and given her the deathlessness too. That last thought—it made me stop walking again. But not walking would not do. I studied my feet and began once more.

  This is how I walk beside someone I love who lives still, I thought, someone who should abandon me, but together, we walked until we found shelter—deep in the woods, a wall of fallen logs, and with the paws of jackal and bear we dug a shallow ditch beside this wall; we lay down and covered ourselves with leafy branches and decided that we would take turns sleeping and keeping watch so that no one could creep up on us in this feeble shelter and throw a match into our nest.

  Feliks huddled beside me in his bear fur with all the closeness of a brother. Even in his sleep, he made vows. But they were not the vows of vengeance I expected to hear. Instead, he vowed to himself that he would never be alone again, he would never be parted from me, he would not permit separation to alight between us. When he began to panic in these vows, gnashing his gummy jaws together in grief, I saw fit to wake him.

  “Your turn,” he said, rubbing his eyes and peering into the darkness for intruders.

  I tried to sleep. I begged my mind to give me a dream of Pearl. Not the best dream, the one in which the world never knew war at all, or even the second-best dream, the one in which Auschwitz remained swampland, but the third-best dream, the one in which Mengele gave Pearl and me this deathlessness at the same time, in unison; he plunged the needle down and we turned to each other and knew that while living forever was a terrible burden, this was something we could do together, in our usual style.

  She would take the best, the brightest, the funniest.

  I would take the guilt, the blame, the burden. And if she ever couldn’t walk, I would do all the walking for her. Because now that I could walk again, I did not want to stop. It seemed a triumph to me, and yet both my ankles were braceleted by an ache that I knew not to be frostbite. It was an odd sensation, and not entirely unpleasant, due to the fact that it let me know I could still feel, and someday, I knew too, my walk would increase its pace, someday soon, I might even jump.

  Papa, the good doctor—he’d told me that people who lost limbs and fingers and toes, they continued to perceive sensations in them long after, in the form of pangs and tickles, and to such an extreme that it felt as if they’d never lost any flesh at all.

  But he never warned me about this.

  The next morning, we heard the Vistula River crack, heard it shuffle its sheets of ice like a deck of cards. The morning was blue on blue; trees thrust their limbs into the clouds. The sky rustled like Pearl’s blue hair ribbon when she turned her head. We shook off the blanket of snowfall and wondered at the fact that we still lived.

  The river, fissured, was a great white expanse, and the cracks watched over us as we knelt toward the ice. Its surface was so milky that I felt welcomed by it—it seemed to me the freshest, most innocent surface on the earth. Despite the darkness crouching in the canopied trees, we found a rabbit struggling in a hollow.

  “Cripple,” Feliks said, noting a wounded leg. I looked away while the bread knife sank, but I made myself watch him hang the rabbit from a branch and strip the tufts of its fur. He popped the eyes in his mouth, wrenched the bones bare.

  “Eat!”

  “Why can’t we build a fire? Just for a minute.”

  “You know why. There are people who would be happy to catch us in these woods. You don’t even have to be a Nazi to enjoy capturing a Jew.”

  He was becoming like a father, this Feliks. He was impatient with me; his tone often dipped into severe registers. I didn’t doubt that he would stuff my mouth with the raw rabbit if I continued to decline. It was better to be agreeable.

  I watched him struggle to chew the bloody meat. His tooth loss made this difficult. So I chewed for him, then spat it out into my hand. Embarrassed gratitude—that was the look he gave me, but he accepted the chewed food from my hand and popped it into his mouth, swallowed as if it were medicine. He urged me to eat for my own sake, and this was harder to do—still, I was tired of arguing and gave it a try.

  “We have to keep up your strength.” Feliks nodded. “We can’t achieve the vengeance we’ve sworn ourselves to if you are bones.”

  I agreed. Vengeance, it was what I longed for most, but I’d begun to doubt how it might be handed down from experiments like us. I’d made attempts before. Mengele was slippery, beyond cornering. In him, I saw a little boy life had long indulged. Life didn’t always indulge, though, did it? Was there any chance that we, in such diminished states, might ever truly finish him? We did not even have a clue as to his location.

  My companion stabbed a tree trunk with his bread knife. He issued pairs of gashes—one, two; one, two—in a meditative fashion. Then, inspired, he turned and looked at me curiously.

  “There is something I must tell you,” he said, cautious. “This city I speak of—it is not my city at all, I have been lying, but for good reason, to persuade you. It is Warsaw, and I have been trying, from the very beginning, to take you there.”

  I couldn’t imagine what cause he might have to usher me into such destruction. The isolation of Auschwitz had not saved me from the knowledge that the place he spoke of would soon enter history as the most devastated city of all time.

  “There is no greater ruin than Warsaw,” I said.

  He crouched in the snow and took to stabbing it with his bread knife. One, two. One, two. The motion was resolute, a way to steady his argument.

  “But the man we want dead is alive there,” he said. “I overheard him; he was speaking too freely in the final days. While I sat waiting on my bench at the infirmary, he was on the telephone discussing his future plans. He was going to flee to Warsaw. He was going to rendezvous with someone there. I think he was telling this to Verschuer. They have documents about us, valuable pieces. Research. Information, I believe. Or maybe bones, all that war material, those slides you keep talking about.”

  I couldn’t understand why he was telling me this now. Why had he not been direct before? I joined him in stabbing the snow. Have you ever stabbed the snow to make sense of things? It is not something I recommend.

  “Let’s say that I do believe you,” I ventured. “What else did you hear?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, as airily as if we were seated in a parlor putting sugar in our tea. “Something about the Warsaw Zoo.”

  “It would be like him to want to go there,” I offered. I thought of all the cells in a zoo, joining, dividing, engaging in all the tricks of variation that so enraptured Mengele.

  “It would, wouldn’t it?” He sounded oddly pleased, as if he’d had a hand in the sense-making of it all.

  I will be honest—nothing in this wild story should have sounded correct to me, but I didn’t want to doubt. It felt good to believe in something for once. It made me feel real. In believing, I was less experiment, more girl.

  And so it was decided, there, on the banks of the Vistula, with its cathedraled branches of trees and snow: We would take Mengele’s life in Warsaw. We would repossess his slides, his bones, his numbers, his samples. We would take and take from him until there remained only a single mustache hair as proof of his villainy.

  He had tried to make monsters of us. But in the end, he was his own disfigurement. Future innocents, we swore, had to be protected, and then there was the matter of repayment for his misdeeds. In the name of Pearl, he would be our kill. I thought of his eyes, I thought of the terror that would color them when he spied my approach; I thought of his surrender, his arms flailing in that blasphemous white coat. He would cry out; he would beg. We wo
uld permit him to beg because we would enjoy the spectacle, but when his beggary ceased to amuse us we would put him down, and because our humanity had not left us entirely, we would be swift about it. Mengele’s expression—the shock on his face at discovering our survival and pursuit of justice—that would be trophy enough for our violent souls.

  And I knew that the animals in the Warsaw Zoo, witnessing the triumph of Bear and Jackal, would rejoice; I knew that they would lift up their voices in shrieks and cackles and guffaws so loud that even Pearl, in her death, would hear that vengeance was ours.

  Pearl

  Chapter Twelve

  My Other Birth

  There were things I knew still: There were doors that shut, there were shouts, there were scratches along the floor; there had been someone else, caged opposite me, who muttered poetry through the day and night, his voice melodious and familiar. I could not remember exactly when his recitation halted, I knew only that it had ceased, and then I wondered if I had ever heard a voice at all. Perhaps what I’d imagined to be a voice, one possessed by a lover of poetry, had merely been a leak in the ceiling. A meek drip-drop with a musical quality. This alone I could be certain of: I had tried to converse with the leak, I had begged for its help, but it did not help, it only stopped.