Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  But just by my thinking of this story, the man’s face began to follow me. I could not say a word. To rid me of that face, I asked after Someone’s. If I could see hers, I thought, his would leave me.

  “Were we identical?” I wondered aloud.

  “The same,” Miri confessed.

  “Where is she now?” I asked. I knew of the death marches. I’d heard about the tumult when the Soviets entered, the many lives that had been snuffed out. And there was the unspeakable—Mengele. My Someone was extraordinary—surely he had known this; perhaps he’d taken her? There were so many terrible things that could have happened that it seemed foolish to hope that a good one might arise, but still, I thought Miri might present me with one.

  Miri did not speak to any of these possibilities. But in her eyes, there surfaced a sadness, a bright and mournful quiver that said I was the sole survivor of my family. And then, as if she were desperate to change the subject, she enlisted Peter to join her in the task of telling me about things that were in the world we were returning to.

  Miri listed places. Parks, she’d say. Open spaces where you could have a picnic, which was a meal taken outside. Museums, which were places with pictures and statues. Synagogues, places where you could assemble and study and pray. Peter focused on objects. Telescopes that showed you stars. Clocks that showed you time. Boats, which were vessels much like my wheelbarrow, but vessels that moved over water. Instruments, he said, and then added, as if this was supposed to have some meaning to me, pianos.

  This was the second mention of this object. It did not have meaning to me. But he could repeat it all he wanted—I loved hearing Peter and Miri overexplain the world to me.

  I could have corrected their overexplanations if I wanted to. But I did not, for good reasons.

  For one, explaining the world gave them pleasure. For two, it made me whole.

  I noticed, though, that neither attempted to explain a train station to me when we slunk onto an emptied platform that evening, Twins’ Father having decided that his little troop could go on no more. The other children slept, cocooned in rags, side by side, but I remained in my wheelbarrow, like an overgrown baby in a filthy cradle. Miri lay on the ground beside me, her hand raised to clutch the lip of the wheelbarrow even as she slept. The snores of my fellow children rose and fell, and I tried to pick out Peter’s snores from the rest, but another sound took priority.

  The nightmares of Twins’ Father drifted past my ear as he defended himself in his sleep—who would be so foolish, he said, to create twins where there were none! Hearing his protest, I wondered if it was safe to dream, if there was any way to avoid this white-coated man as I slept. To make myself feel better, I renamed him. I called him No One.

  “Good-bye, No One,” I whispered. But the ache in my hobbled feet claimed that he would be with me always, even if I ever managed to take a step.

  Day Two

  Though morning came, it did not bring a train with it. Yet again, the sun had let us down. On foot and by wheelbarrow, we continued. And on this day, we began to sing a little, but haltingly, and with much argument as to which song we might sing.

  None of Twins’ Father’s songs were appropriate, as he was a military man. Miri’s songs were too serious and romantic and sorrowful. The only song we could agree on was “Raisins and Almonds,” because all welcomed the thought of food. The lullaby sank us into our memories as we trod forward, and I felt as if I were not in the wheelbarrow at all but in Mama’s lap. We sang:

  Under Baby’s cradle in the night

  Stands a goat so soft and snowy white

  The goat will go to the market

  To bring you wonderful treats

  He’ll bring you raisins and almonds

  Sleep, my little one, sleep.

  On the third rendition of this song, we were swarmed by a dozen women, all of whom had been sitting against trees at the edge of a forest.

  “Are you the last of Auschwitz?” a woman asked. “We are waiting for our children.” Her face fell. “Should we wait? Is there reason to wait any longer?”

  “There are others still,” Twins’ Father said, his voice hesitant.

  The woman nodded at this information, receiving it with a guarded excitement.

  “Children among them?”

  “There are bound to be some at the camp yet—the Red Army has control. With me, there is thirty-five.”

  The woman was awed by this meager number; her face—I would never forget the wince of hope in it.

  “Do you have a Hiram among yours? Little Russian boy.”

  “I do!” Twins’ Father turned and addressed the crowd. “Hiram! To the front!”

  A snippet of boy was pushed to the fore by the rest of the children. And then another small Hiram followed. The woman scanned both Hirams and then sank to her knees.

  “Not mine,” she whispered. “Not mine.”

  Everyone was too still for too long a time. It was as if all in our caravan were felled by the woman’s grief and silence, and we were able to stir only when she rose and shook the dust from her skirts. She turned to resume her post at the tree trunk.

  “Children, they draw other children, you know,” Twins’ Father said to her. “They see their own kind passing by, and they feel safe. You should join us. Maybe they will see us and find you.”

  “I leave a sign wherever I go,” the woman said. She pointed to the tree trunk she’d been leaning upon. I assumed that she’d carved her child’s name on it—I could not read it because the effects were indecipherable. Her knife must have been dull, her hand too shaky. “But it’s not enough. Who is to say that they will even try to read it?”

  I wanted to reassure her that children in captivity tend to read all they can. I wanted to tell her that as I traveled in my wheelbarrow, I was desperate to see any words on the horizon, words that could blot out the words of the gate I’d left behind two days before. I wished that the carved names could compete with the gate’s power. I wished that they stood as upright and clear. Because the only fault with the woman’s carved message was that it was tired and faint; every letter announced resignation.

  Twins’ Father was too good to critique the marks she left, as poor as they were, but he took his own knife and neatly reinscribed her message, and after he was finished with this task, he took up her pack and waved for her to join our procession.

  “My friends,” she wondered. “What of them?” And he looked at the women who’d returned to their trees, all of them so varied in age and suffering, and indicated that they should join us too. All he asked, he said, was that they record their facts on his list, to facilitate his communication with any authorities who might question our passage.

  The women sprang from the trees and it was then that we saw that each trunk they had leaned against bore a message, a name, a plea. They would have covered the whole forest with the words if they were able. The face of Twins’ Father—this had to be one of the few times I saw it become so overwhelmed with sadness while he was awake, outside the grip of one of his nightmares. But I watched him steady himself and pass about his list, and soon enough, the women fell to the rear of our march. They tried to mother us, and we did our best to resist their attentions politely.

  We already had mothers, we wanted to say.

  I thought of mine every second. I thought of her, and I begged her and Zayde to show me Someone’s face. But neither responded. Had death forced them to abandon me? Or were they now so worried for my future that they couldn’t bring themselves to rejoice in my survival? My fingers searched my face; they tried to know it so they could know Someone’s too, but all they found were wounds, and two eyes that had seen too much.

  We walked beside swarms of refugees. Face after face, body after body, all of them alive and searching, and not a single one of them mine. Was who I searched for already dead? I asked the sun and the sun told me to ask the moon—it claimed that the moon had taken the responsibility of answering inquiries with ugly potential. Th
e sun was quite squirmy on this issue, I thought. It turned its back on me. And then a darkness lowered itself onto my eyes. The darkness was Peter’s hand, attempting protection.

  “Don’t look!” Peter instructed. He was pushing my wheelbarrow at the time. I shrugged off the shield of his touch. I wanted to see what he saw. It sounded like horror. And there it was—

  The body lay up the road, in a ditch. It was not a whole body.

  “I told you not to look,” Peter said.

  “It is her,” I whispered.

  “It will never be her,” Peter said. And to prove it, he defied Miri’s instructions and veered close to the ditch so that I could peer at this corpse.

  I did not know if it was male or female. I had no notion of its age—it was faceless and scalpless, and someone had cut off its legs so as to repossess its boots. That’s what Peter told me when he saw that I refused to avert my gaze. He said that the Soviets had superior boots, and whenever the Wehrmacht found them, they took these boots for themselves in the most desecrating way possible.

  “So, you see,” he assured me, “it can’t be your Someone. Your Someone would never have such boots.”

  I tried to find comfort in this. I could not. Did this mean that Someone was out in this winter with thin shoes?

  “Look ahead, only ahead!” Twins’ Father warned us.

  “What does she look like?” I asked Peter as we left the body behind.

  “She looked like you.”

  “I don’t know what I look like.”

  “I bet you look like your mother,” Peter said. “Do you remember what your mother looked like?”

  I couldn’t remember, not really. I decided that this would be another question to save for the moon. Its approach was nearing. I would ask it at any moment, even though I suspected that its answer was the same for all of us: We looked like death, one person after another; we were whittled and drawn, our eyes had sunk into our skulls, and the features that had once defined us had fled. Whether we would live long enough to be returned to our true selves—this seemed the greater question, and it followed me until we found our next shelter.

  That night, we came upon a stone structure in the woods. It was too small to be a house and too large to be a shack. Inside, there was a constellation of teeth on the floor, and four narrow beds of marble. These marble beds had lids too, but only one remained closed. The other three gaped with empty blackness.

  “Tombs,” Twins’ Father said before thinking better of it.

  This structure was meant to house the dead. But three tombs had been overturned. Whether their disruption was the work of a fellow refugee or a pillager seeking to rob corpses of finery, we couldn’t know. The yellow jawbone that had been tossed to the corner of the structure said nothing of this history. It sat, bereft of teeth, a silent, fossilized witness.

  Though we were not its usual guests, this house of the dead did just as well to shelter the likes of us. Twins’ Father cleared the emptied tombs of leaves and debris. They could fit a pair of children each. Peter stretched out on the lid of the fourth tomb and yawned. From the cradle of my barrow at the open door I watched the moon rise, answerless. Outside, a light snow fell and shook, like tiny white fists in the sky.

  Day Three

  A train ambled us a mere three miles toward Krakow. I looked out the window and saw roads filled with refugees, farmers returning home, Red Army soldiers slinking to unknowns. The frosty fields were scarred with the tread of tanks, and then we found ourselves in some untouched place, a row of intact farmhouses, as blocky and white as sugar cubes. Just as these farmhouses appeared, the tracks ended. We were forced to pile out, and as soon as all were accounted for by Twins’ Father, we were confronted by a fierce pillar of a Soviet soldier, his face sweaty with enthusiasm.

  “Pigs!” this soldier shouted. “Pigs!” He waved his arms about in a frightful manner. One of the arms held a long rifle. His face was gray and his eyes were like red-blue sores or loose buttons fallen from a coat. He kept repeating that word as our ragged troop advanced.

  “Pigs!” he insisted. “Stop, pigs.”

  Twins’ Father brought our procession to a halt. A rare fright overcame him—he looked as if he were about to fold in on himself and collapse. Have we come so far just to end like this? his face seemed to say. He began to approach the man with one hand outstretched, offering his list, which shook more in his grasp than any wind could shake it. But the soldier didn’t even pause to look at the many names; he just raised his rifle to his shoulder and took aim. Children ducked behind smaller children. Miri’s hands quivered atop the wheelbarrow handles. The eye of the soldier’s rifle was our sole focus. We stared it down until the shot rang out, a shot that veered to the left of the road.

  A pair of massive hogs, spotty beasts round as barrels, their snouts white with foam, were hurtling toward us, full of grunts and confrontations. The soldier’s rifle struck them down, first at the forelegs, and then at the temples, and we watched their immense bodies sink to the snow with the moans and whimpers of tiny babies.

  We were accustomed to blood-snow. The blood shouldn’t have shocked our troop. But the confrontation dislodged something within us, because many began to cry in that silent way that captivity had taught them. The children shuddered and quaked, and then Sophia, a tiny four-year-old known for her queenly stores of dignity, collapsed in an uncharacteristic heap and wailed for us all. The soldier gave her a confused look—shouldn’t a hungry girl be pleased by this bounty? He put down his gun, nodded at the kills in a self-congratulatory fashion, and shook Twins’ Father’s hand, and yes, we ate well that night, children and adults, without a thought to any law above the grumbles of our stomachs, but I could not forget the panic in those animals’ eyes, not even as I comforted my hunger with their flesh.

  I did not want to have a memory at all, not then.

  As dusk fell on that third night, a farmer called to us from the side of the road. We saw him first by his beard, which bannered whitely in a peaceful manner. He offered us the shelter of his barn, and as eager as Twins’ Father was for us to make our way to Krakow, which was rumored to be relatively intact, he could not pass up this offer, as his troops had begun to wilt. The Kleins moaned with every step, and the Borowskis complained of cold. Peter’s toes had thrust through his shoes.

  Most pressingly, David Herschlag was bent with illness—the abundant meal of pig had overwhelmed the poor boy’s shrunken stomach. His skeletal body now bore a dangerous protrusion of abdomen, a belly so puffed that it looked to be filled with poison, and for the past ten miles, Twins’ Father had taken to carrying David himself. So while our leader was always cautious in his approach to the peasants, he accepted the farmer’s offer gladly.

  We entered the sanctuary of a barn, occupied only by a speckled flock of chickens and their chicken smells and, here and there, a nest of eggs. It was warm and lively—a skinny rooster stalked to and fro and chased the busty hens. None of the chickens feared us because we still had the remains of the pigs to consume, and when our second hasty meal was finished—one that David could not take part in—Twins’ Father shuffled off to a corner of the barn and attempted a fitful sleep while Miri traveled from one child to another, wrapping bandages and soothing feet and tipping canteens into mouths.

  After each round, she returned to David, who lay on the straw, colored with illness, his brow thick with sweat. She looked at me with alarm and asked Peter to help her make a bed for the boy. Peter built a sturdy nest, covered it with my woolen blanket, and deposited David within it like a precious egg. David’s face stirred with a smile—he stared up into the rafters at some sight we could not see, and Miri, she reprised “Raisins and Almonds.”

  Sleep, my little one, sleep.

  Like a bird, she leaned over this nest, and lullabied the boy into something resembling peace.

  Day Four

  In the morning, we woke to the sight of Twins’ Father kneeling. He bent down beside a form in the hay, and t
hen he took up the form and shook it, as if he were trying to wake a person who refused to be roused. We could see, from the way Twins’ Father held the boy, that David was no longer David, but a body.

  “Zvi,” Miri said. “You will frighten them.” But she herself was undone by the loss. And Twins’ Father would not lay him to rest. The boy appeared changed. I recognized him only by what killed him—the stomach that rose like a hill.

  Miri put a hand to the man’s shoulder; she tried to soothe him, but he would not be comforted. He fell to plucking feathers out of the still boy’s hair, and he spoke as if he’d forgotten his troop entirely, as if the dead alone could hear him.

  “I must have made at least a dozen sets of false twins,” he said. He glanced at Miri for confirmation.

  “Nineteen,” she said quietly. “You made nineteen sets.”

  “Nineteen,” Twins’ Father repeated. “But David—and Aron—they were the first.” Miri nodded as she removed her coat. She tried to cover the boy with it, but Twins’ Father wouldn’t loosen his hold on David.

  “In the beginning, they had trouble with it—the lie. They were so young—only four and five years of age. And my Dutch is very poor—they spoke no other language—it was difficult to explain to them what I needed. But every morning, before roll call, I would remind them: You are twins! And I made them repeat, over and over again, the birthdate I fabricated for them, and the fact that Aron came first, and David second. The difference between them—I shrank a year into five minutes!”