Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  “From the Soviets,” Mirko explained to me and Feliks, opening his bread knife and sectioning the meat into pieces. “We charmed them after they entered. Sang to them a little. And they permitted us a ride in one of their tanks, took us all the way past Stare Stawy and into this field. It seemed as good a place as any to hide and plan. Mother, she was quite ill with exhaustion, but she has improved after a week’s rest. If the trains are willing, we are going to go to Prague. We will be going back to the theater. Do you two have interest in joining us?”

  I couldn’t answer because my mouth was too full of food. I had tried to refuse it, but the matriarch would not allow this. She hopped over with a square of meat and insisted it between my lips, and then, as if I were a baby prone to spitting out foodstuffs, she held my mouth shut until I swallowed. When she’d decided I’d had enough, she cleaned my face with the corner of her shawl and tried to pinch the life back into my cheeks.

  “Mother always wanted a giant pet,” noted Paulina. And they all began to laugh, as if they knew they had to laugh again someday and it might as well be that moment. The laughter, though, it fell short; it was too soon, and they turned their attentions instead to drinking the melted snow from their tin cups, and gave Feliks seconds and thirds of wurst.

  When their bellies were full, Mirko and Feliks began to discuss the problem of return. Our friend had many plans. He spoke of the parts he wanted to play upon his reestablishment in Prague, of the theater they planned to make their temporary home. He was so hopeful, I never should have interrupted, but I had to say the words that had been with me since I woke. They flowed from me in a burst.

  “You never saw Pearl, that’s what you tell me. I believe you. But I also believe that since you are Mirko, you are being an actor, you are twisting words, you are not being truthful.”

  Mirko lowered his head so that I could take in only the sea of his curls.

  “I believe you never saw Pearl, the real Pearl, because she was already dead; she was just a body, she was emptied of who she was.”

  Mirko nodded, and then ducked his face into his scarf. I didn’t expect a confession. But then he decided to give me one.

  “I thought I heard her once,” he murmured. “But it was just a hallucination.”

  “Where?”

  “In the laboratory. A laboratory you are unfamiliar with.” He motioned to Paulina to put her hands over her little girl’s ears. She did so promptly, but the look on her face said she wished she did not have to hear this tale herself. Mirko covered the ears of the little boy, whose eyes darted curiously about as soon as his hearing left him. Only then did my friend continue.

  “I was in a cage,” Mirko said. “Is that what you want me to admit? That I was in a cage?”

  I told him I did not want to hear such a thing. This softened him.

  “I will say I was in a cage. But instead of the word cage, we will use the word haystack. This is more of my word-twisting, I know. Still, is this agreeable to you?”

  I indicated that it was.

  “So you see, I was in a haystack. I’d been in the haystack for three, maybe four days. The haystack itself was so small that I could not even turn around. I didn’t eat, but water was given to me. This was at the end. Before they had a chance to initiate a single death march. The haystack was making me go mad. There were five other haystacks in this dark room, a room with two sources of light—the crack beneath the door, and a tiny window set so high in the wall that it looked out only onto the sky. Pigeons gathered on the sill. And rats scampered across the floor. These animals were noisier than the inhabitants of the other haystacks. I assumed them to be dead or so dazed from the injections that they could barely speak. I knew that I was the latter, because sometimes, lights flashed around me, and a great hand would unlock the padlock and pet my head and rattle things a bit. You know who that hand belonged to. Every day, another injection. The injections made me ill with a fever, and he marveled at the fact that I still lived. Of course, I wished myself dead, if only to get away from him. As time passed, I saw his hand grow shakier as he gave the injections. He seemed not to be his precise self. He even took no notice of the incompetency of my padlock, which was weak and rusted. Or perhaps he did notice, but he underestimated my ability to break free. Whatever the case, I assumed he was no longer in possession of his full powers—the end seemed near, and his cruelty toward me rapidly increased, as if he was determined to expel every last torture that occurred to him while he was still able. One day, another small body was lowered into my haystack. I felt the face on the body. It was dead. A child, maybe four—equal to my size. I had no choice but to sit beside it. I swear, there was no other option. It seems that Mengele was aware of Jewish prohibitions about contact with the dead. He told me that he’d take the dead body out of the haystack if I recited for him. I recited all day long, and into the night, though I had little voice left in me, and I knew that there was no hope. During my recitation on one occasion, a voice interrupted me with a cry and a plea. Mengele silenced that voice with a kick to its haystack, and I never heard from it again.”

  “Was it a child’s voice?”

  “It was a small voice.”

  “Was it a girl’s voice?”

  “It was a sweet voice.”

  I did not need to imagine it. I could hear it.

  “My haystack was felled when the SS brutes came tramping through. This was during their sackings and evacuations and attempts at retrievals; the planes were above, and they were searching through the room, they were overturning it all, every last haystack, making us go, pell-mell. After their departure, I stood on top of the dead body in my haystack—apologizing all the while—and I fiddled with the padlock. This destructive romp of the SS had weakened it further—the rusty shank all but fell apart! I hissed out in the dark; I ran my hands across the bars of the other haystacks. Not a peep, not even from the one I thought held you. If one had lived there before—she no longer did.”

  “But you thought the voice was hers?”

  “I thought it was yours at the time.”

  “Then it was Pearl.”

  “It was cold, I was starving more than the usual starvation, and Mengele, he was poking me, and when it wasn’t pitch-black, he was flashing lights in my eyes. It is all difficult to recall.”

  “Maybe if I say what the voice was saying,” I said, “it will confirm things for you. Do you think you can remember it, if I say what the voice was saying?”

  “Perhaps.” But Mirko did not seem to want to approach memory at all. I had to encourage him. I put on my sweetest manners.

  “I know you’ll remember,” I said. “You are better than us all, Mirko. The smartest, the strongest to survive.”

  My closest companion did not take well to this praise. He looked at both of us with the wary eye of one who feels quite left out.

  “If you flatter him,” Feliks said, “you might change his memory.”

  Mirko bolted up, his head striking the hay ceiling and his fists trembling, as if ready for a fight.

  “I will always remember this with accuracy. Until I choose to forget it entirely, which I plan to do after we arrive in Prague. As soon as I step over whatever threshold that remains—poof! You will be amazed, all of you, how much I won’t remember!”

  He stood, suddenly forgetting about his responsibility to his nephew’s ears. Now his hands curled as if ready for a fight, and the matriarch scolded him softly; she tugged at his pant leg and eased him back to the earth.

  “Which is all the reason now for you to tell me,” I argued. “Tell me what the voice said so that I can repeat it and you can confirm and then forget.”

  “Might I tell you in writing?” Mirko asked.

  “Of course.” It would be better that way, I thought, because then I might carry the words with me. From Bruna’s satchel, I withdrew one of my last bits of paper and the stub of a pencil. With these precious objects in hand, Mirko hesitated. He turned his back to me as he wrote, and the R
abinowitzes gave a show of hushing themselves, as if we were in the velvet cavern of a theater. When he finally handed the slip back to me, I read:

  Tell my sister that I

  Long ago, I might have thought that such words would be enough to end me. But in that moment, the five of them felt like friends.

  Tell my sister that I

  Looking at Mirko—it became painful in that moment. His was perhaps one of the last faces my sister had seen. For her, it could have been far worse, I thought. He was handsome and genteel in a way that you only imagine movie heroes being. His bearing within a cage must have given her hope. In him, there was a valiance I knew I would remember. It was too bad that he was no longer Mirko to me but Mirko, the Last and Final Sight.

  I could not bear to look at him any longer, and I told Feliks that we had to leave. He responded by reaching into our sacks and thrusting one of the precious bottles of water at the matriarch. To this sacrifice, he added half of our potato, divided with his bread knife.

  “You are leaving?” Paulina cried. “But it is not safe!” And she entreated her brother to stop us, to invite us to stay.

  “We have to find a man,” I told her. “We have to find him now more than ever.”

  And I ignored their pleas, their warnings. A jackal had no use for the likes of those. But I was human too. Here is proof of it: I put Mirko’s note in my pocket, next to Pearl’s piano key, and with every good-bye I said to the Rabinowitzes, I felt a tear knock on the door of my eye, a tear that acknowledged my sister’s death and Mirko’s proximity to her final hours. He pulled on the sleeve of my coat, indicating that I should lean down and lend him my ear. On tiptoe, he stood, so intent on the delivery of his parting message.

  “Pearl is free now,” he whispered, and then his voice divided itself beneath the weight of his grief. “Try to think of her, Stasha, as free.”

  And then, with his story told, we left our benevolent hero and his golden temple and traveled out into what the Rabinowitzes surely thought was our end.

  Pearl

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Russians Make a Movie

  I would wander into my body and try to know it, to stake my claim within it. It was weak, this body; I was ashamed of it. It had none of the strengths I’d imagined it might have while still in the tomb of my box. I did not have the strength of an ant. I did not have the memory of a pigeon. All I owned was breath, really, and a single thought: that the numbers on my arm represented how many times I would have to prove myself useful in the world in order to remain in it. But even I knew that this was untrue; it was the logic of my cage and my keeper, and I had to overcome it.

  It took bread to make me find my fingers and my hands. When the bread rolled down my throat, I found that I had a belly. I became reacquainted with my back again when the Russian laid me down on a bed within the infirmary. There, I looked out the window and occasionally faced the wall and sometimes the ceiling, and though there was no leak to converse with, I was the happiest girl one could know.

  And though I took all of this in once I was out of the darkness of my cage, I didn’t truly know I had eyes until I met the camera later that day. That is to say, I knew I had eyes, but I didn’t know what they could do, as they were still adjusting to a world of light.

  The cameraman in charge of the Russians’ movie was a solemn, thin-lipped man. While many other members of the Red Army gave themselves to some wide-roaming emotion, he remained stoic. I imagined that the camera saw too much for him, or perhaps it provided details that he would rather have avoided. Strangely, the first time I saw him smile was when that camera attracted my interest.

  He was moving a white cloth over the lens so tenderly. He held the camera to the light, took a look, cleaned it some more, and I found myself stretching out a hand, as if stroking the air that held such a magical instrument was contact enough.

  “She doesn’t reach for anything,” the woman said, with awe. The woman—she had been the first to hold me after my retrieval, and she refused to leave my side. I remembered her doll eyes and her touch, but nothing more—I was told, though, that she was a doctor, that she could be trusted, that I didn’t need to be afraid. I accepted this because I liked how she said my name, as if she’d known me for years.

  The cameraman and the woman collaborated to give me a look through the lens. I passed from her arms into his, and I put my eye to the glass. I think I expected to see someone I loved in the eye of that camera. Someone I loved who still lived. But there was no one there.

  Disappointment, that’s what that camera held. I don’t know why I’d expected the little black box to contain something better than a view of this place. All I could see were prisoners, tiny little prisoners whom the Russians had dressed in the gray-striped, voluminous uniforms of adults for the atmospheric purposes of their film. They were cold and sad and their faces said nothing of freedom.

  Still, though I was unfamiliar with my personality, I had the impression that I had been an acquiescent sort, one interested in guarding the feelings of others, so I made a point of acting impressed as I looked in the camera, and when I was done, the woman picked me up, commenting on my lightness, and we joined the crowd of children to make the Russians’ movie. We milled about near the fences, shivered in the snow. All us actors, so young and unskilled, were in a state of confusion. Why do we have to wear these clothes? we kept asking. We never wore these clothes before! we cried. Why are we marching but not leaving? But the moviemakers didn’t care for our opinions—they wanted only to see us march in a tidy procession as proof of how free we had become.

  We were lit with a snowy blur; all of us moved as if shaken from a long sleep. The camera loved two faces in particular, two small girls of ten, Romanians, who were pushed to the fore. Though these identical girls clung to each other as they walked before the lens, their postures were different. One was sober and demure, but the other tossed her head in the air and, ever so briefly, stuck out her tongue. Whether the gesture was deliberate, a cheeky reproach to the cameraman, or done out of thirst or reflex or simple girlish fun is uncertain. What is certain: Those twins would one day tell the world of the man who was not angel or doctor or uncle or friend or genius. They would speak of the man we experiments would banish from our thoughts except for when we had to warn others that people like him existed, that they walked among us without souls, seeking to harm others for sport and perfection and the satisfaction of some inborn cruelty. Someday, Eva and Miriam Mozes, they would not let the world forget what had been done to us.

  But then, as the camera rolled, they clung to each other, so fearful of being parted, comforted only by their sisterhood. They were as bewildered as the rest of us. Confusion was the dominant expression of the photographed children. We were walking down a path, fences rising on either side of it, as if we were free—these gates were not the famed gates the world is so familiar with now, but another opening, unadorned by language—and then we retreated back as if we were not. By the time the movie was declared perfect, we weren’t sure in which direction our true future lay, but the Soviets assured us that we would be in every paper, in every movie house. People would see us; they would know that we lived.

  And I noticed something during this constant march, back and forth and cut from and cut to: nearly every child was part of a pair. Each was like the other in looks and manner and voice, and they marched together, step by step, in unison; they moved as if one could not move without the other. It was then that I knew I was not whole.

  What I knew was small, but it enlarged itself quickly. We were in a place where we’d been meant to die, but we’d lived. For what, I wasn’t sure—but I was hardly alone in this. No one could tell me, not really, and there were so many sources of information too, all of them chatterboxes. They’d been bossed and corralled so often that they went wild in the infirmary; they spent their time shouting and jumping from bed to bed.

  I envied that jumping. It was something I wanted for myself, someday, to
leap and jump and run and dance, yet whenever I peeked beneath the bandages on my feet, the possibility of any of these seemed doubtful.

  The shouting, though—I had no interest in that. But these freed children loved to shout. To their credit, these were quite organized shouts; they followed a strict pattern and held much meaning.

  “No more needles.”

  “No more ‘Heil Hitler.’”

  “No more measurements.”

  And whenever one of these recitations ended, this little chorus would turn to me.

  “No more,” I said. “No more.”

  They took pity on me and supplied me with items with which to end the sentence. Roll call. Root soup. Injections. X-rays. Elmas. Mengeles.

  The last made me shudder. I knew the name belonged to the man who’d lowered me into my cage. Hearing him mentioned made me not want to play this game at all. But I forced myself to participate.

  “No more cages,” I said to all of the infirmary.

  It was all I could offer, as I could remember only the cage. I was certain of one other fact, and it was very curious: my name. It was scratched into the wall. Dear Pearl, the letters said. I liked to trace the letters in the dark and wonder after who had loved me enough to put them there.

  That afternoon, the woman who carried me during the Russians’ movie embarrassed me with her attentions. I wanted to ask her if we were family, because she acted as if she owed me every kindness she could give me. She bathed me and fed me and neglected her other charges in the infirmary to look after my needs. I wanted to point out to her that they suffered too, but I had the feeling that she was not easily influenced by others when it came to matters of suffering.