Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  Rats squeaked their way near me where I lay and I remembered: species, genus, family, order. In the dim, I saw whiskers, snouts, tiny feet. I knew that these were not the same parts I had, that I was human, but still, I sniffed in mimicry and became reliant on my nose. I could smell rust, waste, the dried blood encircling my ankles, the stitches at my abdomen, a stagnant pool of water. I told the rats about what I smelled but they weren’t impressed. I tried to smell more, I tried to smell all that I could, but the only other scent I could detect was death.

  The scent of death is not frantic. When you have been around it enough, it is oddly respectful; it keeps its distance, it tries to negotiate with your nostrils and appreciates the fact that at some point, one becomes so accustomed to it that it is hardly noticeable at all.

  Despite its politeness, I hated that smell. I wanted to train myself to smell other smells. This was an activity that was available to me, it was something I could do to pass the time. The rats, though, they refused to mentor me in this art. The pigeon at my window—he had departed long ago.

  It seemed that I would have to instruct myself—if I could retain this sense of smell, I thought, the world might want me still, if I was ever freed from my cage. I began my recollections with the owners of the voices. Mama smelled like violets. Zayde smelled like old boots. My papa—I could not remember what he smelled like, but I didn’t much care, because I found a different avenue of memory to traverse. Or my pain found it for me. Because when I became aware that both of my feet were clubbed and swollen, that the bones had been snapped at the ankle and my feet sat at the end of my legs like a pair of too-large lavender boots, I had a thought that he would fix everything: he would come and heal me if I only called.

  Papa, I remembered, he was a doctor. I remembered that.

  And this discovery was so great that it overshadowed that other, very different discovery—the realization that even if I were able to leap from my cage, I would not be able to walk.

  On what I’d later learn was January 27, 1945, footsteps surged through the door. There were words that were close to the first language I heard in my head, but they were not my words. My words were Polish. These words were neighbors in sound and meaning—They are speaking Russian, I thought. The Russian chatter increased, and the stomp of boots rose beside them. A pair of red spots bobbed toward me, and then the spots became stars and I saw that they were worn on the caps of soldiers.

  Someone trained a light to this corner and that, and then traced it up to the ceiling.

  The boots and stars moved through the dimness. The lights multiplied. There was a stumble, a fall of materials—wire clanged to the concrete floor, there was a metallic clamor of instruments and trays—and the soldiers pounded fists into boxes and debated, as if on safari, who had seen the most interesting and grotesque of sights. What they spoke of—all the many horrors—made me grateful for a moment that my darkness had kept such sights at bay. I thought about contributing my own story to their conversation—they seemed interested in all the goings-on, after all—but when I opened my mouth to speak I found that I could only croak.

  “You hear something?” a gruff soldier asked.

  “Rats,” said another.

  Their flashlights found the wall opposite me, glanced over the wall after that, and then settled on my cage.

  “What a shame,” a voice said. There was a catch in it, a start. And the others agreed that it was a real pity—the child looked so young; it was too bad, what had happened to that little body.

  Hearing this, I cried out. I wanted to speak to this child who was the focus of their concern. I wanted to say to this child, I wish I’d known you were here! I hope you didn’t think me rude. I didn’t mean to exclude you from my conversation with the leak in the ceiling!

  But of course, when I cried out these things, there was only a rattle and an exhalation.

  My voice was as good as smoke.

  Above me, the beam of the flashlight shuddered.

  “Is it dead?” asked the bearer of the light.

  “How could it not be?” another answered.

  “I swore I heard something. Like it tried to speak.”

  “There’s too much to hear in this place. My ears haven’t stopped ringing.”

  And he suggested that they move on to the next block, that they should permit someone else to collect my body—and I was sure that they were gone without another thought for me, but then they heard my whimper. The gruff soldier found my padlock and he fiddled with it and then he took up an ax and though I thought I knew that he was there to rescue me, I curled into myself as the blade closed in, and one of the other soldiers, he kept hushing me all the while, he kept saying, “Na, na,” which is a way of saying, “Nothing, nothing”—Zayde used to say this all the time to comfort me to sleep—and I wanted to agree with him, I wanted to say that I was a nothing, or at least that the man had made of me a nothing, he’d turned me into so little that I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to escape that blackness because it seemed certain, as I shivered and bit my tongue and watched the little leak at the roof, that I was no match for living anymore.

  But the gruff soldier was not to be reasoned with, he was determined to smash the lock and turn me loose, and so I let him reach down and take me up from my depths, and there I was, I was free.

  Was birth like that?

  I had to wonder.

  There I was, gasping for air and squinting at the light. I was bare as a baby; my hands swung helplessly at my sides. Everything about me was infantile. But what kind of infant had these scars on her face? What baby is emptied of her innermost organs, a procedure indicated by the crude stitches across my abdomen? A newborn can’t walk because she is new. I couldn’t walk for a far different reason.

  The gruff soldier clasped me to his front.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

  “Don’t cry!” his companion ordered, looking at me.

  I opened my mouth again to protest. I might have done terribly within this box, I might have withered and lost the use of my legs, and I knew that there was something even greater in me missing, something so large that it was the equal of a whole other person, or at least a small girl. But I’d never cried. And then a drop lit on my cheek, and I realized that the soldier wasn’t speaking to me but to the gruff man who held me, a man who trembled while my tongue crept from my mouth to find the evidence of his shock and joy.

  “Look at it!” he said; he wept. “It is drinking my tears!”

  Stasha

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Straw Temple

  When the woods fell behind us on our third day of wandering, we found ourselves near the village of Julianka, hunched and frost-threatened animals with two potatoes to our names. A vast azure opened up, and the clouds insisted on being formless and unread; they floated high above us and acted lofty, as if they feared nothing, not hunger or cold or the Angel of Death. I wanted to tell the clouds they weren’t so mighty because I didn’t fear him anymore either. Hadn’t they heard of Feliks’s plan? I shouted this for all the sky to hear.

  A distant boom answered me. It was faint, but explosive, with a frayed edge.

  Feliks’s eyes darted about in panic, and he clapped a hand over my mouth, and he folded me over like I was an empty box. He held me close to the icy ground and glanced about to see if my foolish cries had been overheard. Fortunately, not a soul approached.

  “Madness” was all he would say. But empathy shimmered through this statement. He felt mad too, I was quite sure, because we were emptier now than ever before; hunger toured through us during our rare intervals of rest, and winter was threatening to take the toes peeking through our holey shoes. While it seemed likely that we were crazed from all our deprivations, the booms were quite real. The following day, we would learn that these sound bursts were not gunfire but the work of Jewish rebels blowing up the tracks some miles away. In the grasp of that early evening, though, we had no notion of its fr
iendliness.

  So when, out of the emptiness, we saw a golden column at the farthest periphery, we ran toward its gleam, encouraged by the change in the scenery.

  Like a brass bell sprinkled with snow, this straw temple rose from the earth with a steady determination. As we neared, we saw that we were not the only ones that this golden column had drawn in. It appeared that bales had been removed from the lowermost of this stack to create a burrow—we could see the discarded piles of hay flung about, their golden threads strewn on the ice, and through a flimsy panel of straw at the rear, we could see a peepery of eyes. They were scattered throughout in the manner of constellation, and with equal glitter. The eyes were friendly, I thought, but I’d been wrong about the friendliness of eyes before.

  Was this a trap? A trick?

  Another boom cried out into the night.

  Before we could debate, Feliks parted the wall of straw and scurried inside. He dragged me with him, deep into the itchy burrow, on hands and knees. On all fours, we were rib to rib and so close to each other that I was quite unsure where I ended and he began. You would think this would have been a welcome feeling, considering the compromises of my hearing and vision, but it made me feel only amorphous and undone.

  Adding to this discomfort was the general overpopulation of the haystack, which trembled with the shifts of its fugitives. We were not the only ones on hands and knees. Though it was dark, I could make out the forms of five individuals, all seated against the perimeter, and all so small that I assumed them to be children, not a one of them any older than the age of seven. But the curses that confronted us were quite adult; they tumbled toward us in Czech. We do not speak that language, we said. Then a few voices switched to cursing us in Polish. That is the way to curse us, we said. And we apologized for crowding them so.

  “You can’t stay here,” a male voice hissed. His Polish was quite good, I thought.

  “Why can’t we stay?” we hissed back.

  “No room! We did not escape to be crushed by strangers. You must leave!”

  “But we are making it warmer in here for you,” I pointed out. The temperature was most hospitable with this crowd of bodies, and the ceiling of this burrow was low, so low that when I moved my head, the hay tickled my scalp in a pleasant way. I cared little whether our hosts welcomed us or not—I could not ignore the welcome of this golden palace.

  “It is true that you are warming us,” the male voice conceded. “But we have warmth enough, and you are crowding my mother. This haystack is not as spacious as it appears. And it belongs to us. We carved out this burrow with our bare hands! Do you know how difficult a feat this is in winter? Only the most desperate men are capable of such miracles!”

  I respected the speaker’s message, but I did not care to move. It was too lovely in the haystack—like curling up in a summer I’d once known. The perfume of the hay was so sweet, and the perfume of its inhabitants—it was not terrible. For all time, I could live there, and my reluctance to exit made this clear.

  A large sigh arose. It sounded as if it came from the depths of a matriarch. The eloquent speaker addressed us again.

  “You have to leave, children! I am sorry—we have no room!”

  Exhaustion possessed me and I could only weep. And I did not care who my tears fell on in this little crowd.

  “Stasha!” Feliks whispered. “Collect yourself!”

  All of the haystack hushed after this command.

  “Stasha?” said the male voice. “Pearl’s sister?”

  At first, I confess, I did not know him, even as he expressed familiarity.

  “Have you seen Pearl?” I blurted out, and my desperation nearly felled the haystack. “Or did you see what happened to her?”

  “No, I haven’t seen her,” the male voice said.

  A lie, that’s what it sounded like to me.

  “Who are you?” Feliks demanded. He was truly a bear in the tradition of the Classification of Living Things. A defensive lining, part growl, had entered his voice. Bruna and Zayde both, they would have been proud of this performance. But the speaker was not put off at all by this inquiry.

  “I’m the one you call Sardine,” he said.

  His voice was even and brave. It had none of the oily flavor or shrunken nature of a canned fish. I couldn’t imagine a more inaccurate term for this gentlemanly Lilliput, and I hung my head in recognition of the taunts he had so stoically faced.

  “We’re sorry,” Feliks said. “Truly. We can’t beg for your forgiveness enough!”

  Because it was Mirko who presided over this straw temple alongside his family. Apologies were owed to the lot of them, because the children of the Zoo had referred to all the Lilliputs as sardines, at Bruna’s instruction. Now, it seemed, sardines would be the preservation of us.

  Upon realizing that we’d been reunited with fellow survivors, we felt as if the whole world might be held within this haystack; it was all that mattered. In this pile of straw, I thought, there may not be happiness, but there is a hope that may impersonate happiness, if only for a small while. We had lived through death together—how could we not want the intimacy of this haystack?

  “This girl is my friend,” Mirko told the other inhabitants. “I might not think much of her companion, but the girl—a gem. And she has lost so much.”

  Something in his voice made me want to ask how exactly he knew how much I had lost. There was a mournfulness, a knowing that indicated he was familiar with the workings of my grief.

  “You hardly know her,” another voice said. I recognized it as his mother’s. “It’s as if everyone from Auschwitz is a friend these days, no matter that they lived beside us for so long without a care for us. Is this how we will live—picking up every stray and pretending a friendship?”

  The other inhabitants of the haystack appeared to agree with this statement. I could feel the straw tremble with the force of their nodding.

  “She was Mengele’s pet,” Mirko said firmly. “She knows what it is to be us.”

  Even though he spoke in defense of me, I couldn’t help but take issue with his words.

  “I wasn’t Mengele’s pet,” I said. “Not Pearl. Not me.”

  “I don’t know what you were.” Mirko sighed. “But he mixed his terrors with favors. How is that?”

  “True,” I said. Still, I felt defensive. I might have chided Mirko about the radio Mengele had given him. I might have reminded his mother about the lace tablecloth she’d eaten off of and confronted the whole lot of them with the palace of a room they’d been given while the rest of us were pierced by the splinters of our boxy little beds and given those black-crossed lice as company. I didn’t say these things, though, and not just because Pearl wouldn’t have approved of such an outburst. I had a more important question.

  “Did you ever see Pearl?” I asked. “You had to have seen her.”

  Mirko acted as if he hadn’t heard the question and breezed into another line of conversation.

  “My grandfather, you know that he could recite all the passages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses? It seemed such a feat to me, impossible. But in my captivity, I tried to do the same. Already I have the story of creation down pat. The beginning of the world, Stasha—what do you think of that?”

  “I think you lie,” I whispered. “I think you are lying about not having seen Pearl, and I don’t appreciate it. You are trying to spare me her pain. But her pain after death—that is mine to take!”

  I swore I could hear some of the haystack voices murmur in agreement. But Mirko remained firm, as if he knew my sister better than I did. I wondered what time they had spent together to allow him to form such a conviction.

  “Pearl would want you to live anew,” he whispered mournfully. “She would approve of this—she would want you to need the beginning of the world again.”

  I told him I was liking the ending just fine.

  My friend replied with a recitation:

  Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven,

&
nbsp; Nature was all alike, a shapelessness,

  Chaos, so-called, all rude and lumpy matter,

  Nothing but bulk, inert, in whose confusion

  Discordant atoms warred.

  As he narrated our supposed new beginning, I pared a little hole in the side of my haystack and looked out with my good eye. The heavens I saw, they had never been captured, but they were haunted like I was. Did they know the details of my sister’s death? Those stars, they knew what suffering and renewal meant, they were forged from collapse and dust and fire. That wisdom should have been enough to justify their existence, I’d think.

  But they insisted on being beautiful too.

  “Do you see what I see?” Feliks whispered. Because he’d made his own porthole too.

  “I see stars” was all I would say.

  “I don’t see the cremo” was all he would say.

  Pre-morning glistened through the peepholes of our haystack. Like a litter of kittens, we’d slept, curled back to back into the family that adopted us, confronted only by the temple’s golden lining. I rubbed my eyes and saw that it was true—there was hardly any room with the additions of us. The hollowed-out sections of haystack provided three square feet of space, but when I sat up straight, my head struck the ceiling of frozen straw.

  Still, I told Feliks that I wanted to stay. I was earnest, but he laughed. I could’ve told him that I’d lived in situations just as trying. The floating world, opposite Pearl. Inside the folds of Zayde’s coat. The vinegary confines of my barrel. And did I even need to mention the Zoo? But I chose to keep this logic to myself—I knew he’d mock me, and now we had company besides.

  Mirko’s sister Paulina was sitting opposite us with her two children, a boy and a girl, sleepy-faced charmers only as big as crumbs. Paulina was braiding the girl’s hair, and I watched her fingers weave back and forth. Seeing me study this, she gave me a smile, and I was about to apologize for staring, to explain the longing it aroused in me, for touch, for family, but I was saved from having to do so when Mirko and his mother entered through the little thatch, each with a tin cup of snow, which one person passed to the next, lapping up any moisture that one could. Then Mirko took a roll of meat from his pocket.