Morning altered our borrowed house and drew my attention to a cage in the corner of the room. Its little wire door was open, hanging listlessly from a single hinge. The emptiness of that cage, the thought of the bird’s flight, even if it escaped only to founder—it put a dream of motion in me. I wanted a pair of crutches. To move on my own, uncarried, toward the future I believed possible.
I told Miri about this fantasy as she thrust on her coat and readied to step out into the city. She warned me of the scarcity of crutches but said that she would inquire at the hospital. Already, she was embedded in new duties in Krakow, as was Twins’ Father. He held a hushed meeting with Jakub at the kitchen table, one I strained to overhear while the other children ran up and down the stairs and romped in the rooms above.
Sometimes, it is fortunate to be a cripple. By not playing with the others, I learned our fate. Feigning interest in the birdcage, I spied as Twins’ Father explained his sorrows.
Twins’ Father was concerned about a woman. He said that she had witnessed the unimaginable, she had saved all she could, and now—she could not emerge from this unaltered, fully alive. He knew this because it was true for himself too.
Jakub paused before answering, thoughtful, as if he knew this matter too well. The burden saved you, he finally said, until you had a moment to examine it, to feel, for once, its full weight.
I think Twins’ Father agreed. But his voice was too small for me to hear.
Jakub assured Twins’ Father that the only thing greater than his devotion was the needs of the children. And then he gave a recommendation, one that put the identities of all in this conversation into sudden relief: The twins, he said hesitantly, should be put into the custody of the Red Cross. Only then could they flourish and the adults recover.
She will never leave them, Twins’ Father replied, his voice hollowed by dread. I knew he spoke for himself too. Jakub urged him to reconsider. Thirty-four children, he said, all of them on the edge of one suffering or another. Jakub vowed to look in on us in Krakow and to send word to our guardians. They won’t be forgotten, he swore.
But Miri, I thought. She is the forgotten one. Without us, she would not continue. Had no one seen the change in her since we’d lessened from thirty-five to thirty-four?
If this separation were to come to pass, I thought, I would remember Miri. First, I would save myself with a pair of crutches. Then I would save her from her sadness.
I did not tell the others what I’d heard. The children had enough concerns. Already, they had an obligation to experience freedom. This was not as simple as one might think. Fresh from our journey, we still had leagues of hesitations, stores of panic. Even a pleasant laugh floating down from a window was enough to make us startle. But we were determined to make something of our first days in Krakow, so we spent the afternoon riding the trolley, flashing our numbers at the conductor for free rides. The townspeople were charmed by us—never before had they seen so many children who matched. Peter and Sophia and me, we were the lone strays.
Peter carted my wheelbarrow on and off the trolley, onto street corners and into shops, so we could inquire after crutches together. He swore he’d find a pair, and as we searched, I tried to tell him that it was Miri who truly needed help, because we would soon be leaving her. But I could not find the words to say this. Soon enough, I realized I didn’t need to.
Because when we arrived at our adopted home, it was to the sight of a dim-eyed Miri seated in a chair, an empty cup cradled between her hands. Twins’ Father stood at the hearth and instructed us to gather round; he counted us, consulted his ever-present list, and when he said that it was time to discuss the future, all manners of plans tumbled out. The children spoke of reunions with their families, their schoolmates, their houses.
“You may return,” Twins’ Father warned, “but your house may no longer be your house. Your country may not be your country. Your belongings—they may belong to someone else.”
As he spoke, he looked at Miri, as if expecting her to refute what he said. But she merely stared into her cup, as if she might find some other solution to our plight at its bottom.
“The Red Cross is better equipped to take care of you,” Twins’ Father said, and he began to speak of the arrangements, but the younger ones drowned him out with protest—they clambered over Miri in her chair, surrounding her with pleas, each tripping over the other in distress. She dipped her face into the sleeve of her coat as if to shut them out.
The older ones began to protest too but thought better of it and exchanged their outcries for a single question: When? they wondered.
The answer: four days.
Twins’ Father consulted with each of us in turn. He informed Sophia that he would not leave her without a new coat; he assured the Blaus that they would not be separated. All of his reassurances appeared routine—but then, ever so softly, I heard him tell Peter that their plans for Krnov had been solidified. Peter caught sight of my confusion.
“A friend of my aunt’s,” he explained dully. “She says that she will be my mother now. She lives in Krnov. Twins’ Father is going to take me there, on his way to Brno.”
I was not the only one to be surprised by this news.
“How did you manage it?” the others asked. “Was it a trick? How did you fool this woman into wanting you?”
I could have told them: It was too easy to like Peter. He gave and fought and searched—who would not want his company? That was what I wanted to say to the other children, who now appeared to regard him as a mystery and—judging by their expressions, which ranged from light scowls to outright disdain—one to be resented. When I asked him why they were so angry, Peter told me that I should be angry too. A family was a rare thing these days, he said.
I knew Peter had given me much. Now that I knew we would be parted, I wanted to give him something too. But words were all I had. So I told him that I had ten memories. Of those, there were six that I really wanted to have. So, really, I had six memories. The first was Dr. Miri’s face. The second was Peter pushing my wheelbarrow. The third was the gates, but only the gates in my hindsight as we left. The fourth was Peter throwing a stone at those gates. The fifth was Peter scouring the streets of Krakow for a crutch. The sixth wasn’t really memory at all, it was more of a longing for a memory, and it was my Someone.
“You are in three of those,” I pointed out.
He responded to this by increasing our search for a crutch. In our remaining days, we traveled up and down the streets in search of a pair, knocking on doors, asking passersby, inquiring at the hospital. We also checked with Jakub.
“Do you have any crutches?” I asked him on the first day of our search.
“Not crutches, but onions,” he said, handing Peter a pair of yellow globes. One could see that refusing us anything pained him greatly.
That night, at our abandoned house, I put the onions in a soup pot and watched their yellow faces bob and revolve with unending optimism. I took their sunniness as a sign—by dawn, I thought, Jakub would have crutches for me.
And then, the following morning—
“Here for food, are you?” he ventured jovially.
No, we said. We thanked him for the soup. And did he have any crutches?
“I don’t,” he said, regretful. “But will you take this?” He folded a blanket into my wheelbarrow. I took its warmth as a sign—by dawn, I thought, I will have crutches.
But on the third day, Jakub hung his head at the sight of our approach. He couldn’t bear to say no to me, so I did not ask. Grateful for our lack of inquiry, Jakub placed a pocketknife in my hands.
“That is all that I have to give,” he said sorrowfully. We thanked him and then wheeled away. I studied the pocketknife. Peter saw my disappointment.
“Good for a trade,” he assured me.
Back at the stoop of our abandoned house, I etched images over the frosty windowpane at the entry with my fingertip. I etched the image of one crutch, and then another, and as s
oon as I’d completed the second, a storm arose, erasing all I’d imagined.
I decided not to take anything as a sign anymore.
It was my responsibility—not fate’s—to ensure that I was strong enough to look after Miri, even if I remained within my wheelbarrow for all my days.
When I wasn’t with Peter, I was with Miri, who spent her mornings making rounds of the streets of Krakow. I was her attending nurse, or so she told me. Really, she just couldn’t bear to leave me alone. Together, we went to the Red Cross and moved among the many cots. She knew that I was perpetually on the lookout for crutches, but she was determined to make me useful too, so I sat and wound bandages under her supervision. This work was good for me. But my guardian benefited even more, because Miri forgot her pain while surrounded by the pain of others. In tending to them, she was renewed. It was women that we looked after, for the most part, because not every soldier entrusted with the welfare of Krakow had been worthy of this task. Women and young women and girls that war had made women of too soon. I looked at them and wondered: Would they have appreciated the protection of my cage?
And every afternoon, when another doctor relieved Miri from her post, she took me to the station. There, we looked for a name. The name of Miri’s sister. Or for Miri’s name—in case Ibi was looking for her. The station wall was thick with names, but Ibi’s was not there; she was not looking for Miri. Name upon name, letter after letter, plea after plea, and not a single one addressed to us. Until one afternoon, the day before the grand parting, Miri seized upon a flutter of paper and said that we owed the writer a visit. Her hand shook as she held this note, and her eyes were so overwhelmed with tears that it seemed a miracle to me that she could read it at all. All I could spy was the flash of an address. I wanted to inquire after the note’s full contents, but Miri’s demeanor told me enough: this was not a happy discovery but an obligation, and she steered me toward the address with dread.
In answer to our knock, a scarfed head poked out of the doorway. The woman’s mouth was jam red and she had curls to match—a colorful person, to be sure, and behind her form, we could spy glimpses of a room that was once very fine, a parlor with gilt paper and furniture whose shimmer had been dulled by age and neglect.
The woman squinted at us curiously, and just as she was about to address us, a drunken man tripped down the steps with promises to return for fun the next day. That was how we knew this was not an ordinary house. Miri turned away, but the woman slipped down the steps and clasped the doctor’s shoulders. With warmth, she studied my guardian.
“Very pretty,” the woman said approvingly. “And I see you have a daughter to feed.” She regarded me with pity. “But I’m afraid I have too many girls already—”
“I’m so sorry,” Miri said to the woman. “We are in quite the wrong place.”
She glanced down at the paper, and the woman took note of it too. Her eyes went wide with recognition. “If these names mean anything to you”—and she took the slip of paper gravely from Miri’s hands—“then you are precious. We must speak.” Introducing herself as Gabriella, she gestured for us to enter. “Do not worry,” she said, spying Miri’s dubious expression. “Nothing untoward for your daughter to see. Just a matron and her girls and a cup of tea.”
So we followed the woman up the stairs, through the parlor, and into the kitchen, where a dour teenager, her limbs spotty with bruises, glared at Miri as if she believed her to be an old enemy. With a mocking bow, she pulled out a chair for my guardian.
“Away with you, Eugenia!” our hostess ordered, bewildered by this display, and the girl fled to join a trio lounging on the stairs, but not before casting a final look of disgust at Miri.
In the sweetly perfumed kitchen, Gabriella’s softness increased; she lifted me from the wheelbarrow and onto a chair as if she performed this task every day of her life. Then she placed the note on the kitchen table and smoothed it lovingly with her hand, as if doing so achieved some proximity not just to the names, but to their owners.
“I left the note for my nieces,” she said. “I do not expect their mother to be alive. She was lame, like your girl. I know that the cripples did not last.”
Miri asked the woman if she had been at Auschwitz.
“I was in hiding here,” Gabriella said. “This place—it was not my choice. I used to be a dressmaker. But who needs pretty dresses in war? What I know of Auschwitz I learned from my girls. Two of them came here from…the Puff, I think they called it.”
Miri glanced at the girls on the stairs, the frills of their pastel underthings lending them the look of half-dressed parakeets. I knew she searched for Ibi. She did not find her.
“I have heard that twins were precious at Auschwitz. From Eugenia.” She indicated the bruised teenager, whose sulkiness had yet to abate. “She insisted there could be hope if one was a twin. I assumed my nieces to be dead even as I left that note. But now you come here with their names in your hand—and you would not bring bad news?”
I thought Miri’s silence strange. It seemed simple enough to reveal herself as the guardian of Auschwitz’s twins, a caretaker who was losing pieces of herself to the stress of keeping them whole. But she said nothing. I took this as a chance to act on her behalf. And so, with an adult tone borrowed from my caretaker, I asked Gabriella her nieces’ names.
“Esfir and Nina,” the woman said, her voice wistful. Again, she caressed the note.
Esfir and Nina—these names brought back the memory of my first night in the Zoo. I thought of them dragging a dead girl from our bunk and stealing her clothes.
“Resourceful girls,” Miri said carefully. “I was their doctor.”
Gabriella was beautiful in this renewal of her hope. Her eyes shone; her cheeks pinked.
“Where are they now? Can I see them?” Her gaze darted about the house, taking in all that would have to change to make this place into environs befitting the two refugees.
Before Miri could say a word, Eugenia began to speak.
“A doctor in Auschwitz was not a doctor at all,” she declared angrily. “Ask her who she answered to. Ask her what she did.”
Bewildered by this outburst, Gabriella looked at Miri, whose eyes were needlessly lit with shame. Gabriella reached out her hand and tried to take the doctor’s in it, as if the touch might prompt better news. Miri responded to this gesture with a start. Her tears were soundless, and they slid from eye to lips without the accompaniment of any expression at all. But in number, these tears—I have never seen them matched. One followed the other; they multiplied themselves; they became innumerable. I wondered how I might defend Miri.
And then the words presented themselves to me. At the time, they seemed to arise from a sweet nowhere, some place within me that I didn’t know I had. I told Gabriella that I’d known her nieces too. They were good girls, kind girls, and their last act had been a brave one of which any auntie could be proud. I said that no sooner had the girls found themselves in the Zoo than they began to plot as to how to thwart the death-doctor. These plans consumed them down to the second. Always, they were sly, sidling up to him like little foxes and applying thick layers of flattery to his willing ego. They pretended to like what he liked, to think what he thought, and when they had him alone in a vulnerable moment, isolated within the confines of a car, they grasped the hilts of their bread knives, which were secreted in their pockets, and even though this plan proved unsuccessful, they had been more alive than anyone in that moment, and their plots to kill the doctor—however naive, however foolish—were the stuff of legend. Every day, I said, I thought of them. I thought of them with such an intensity that they often merged into a single person and I thought of this person as if she were my own heart.
Gabriella kissed the top of my head and held me tight; her embrace was such that I knew, in our closeness, that she imagined me into the girls she had lost. Her touch carried heartbreak, but her voice held only resolve.
“You have made life livable,” she whispered
. I thought her grip might never ease, but she suddenly released me, and she walked across the room and then back, as if proving to herself that she could continue, and then an idea must have seized her because she darted to a closet by the entry. Out of it tumbled all manner of things: scarves, umbrellas, hats, even the tuft of a toupee. She sifted through this pile, reached to the back of the closet, and, triumphant, she presented to me what no one else in Krakow could.
“Left by a soldier,” she said. “A shrimp of a boy, and so ill—he is not coming back. Better for you to have these than some drunken lout!”
Though old, these crutches made me new. They made a version of me that could walk. Or at least, one that could do more than stumble. I could sidle a crutch forward and swing my feet before me, and even within a few steps, I saw the potential of what I might do. That I might remain broken, but I could be swift and broken, adaptable and broken, able and broken.
With these crutches at my sides, I could take better care of Miri.
As we left that place, Miri asked me where I’d summoned such a story, about plots and vengeance and dreaming this most impossible dream of Mengele’s death, and I told her that it was something imprinted within me, and while I couldn’t locate its origin, I knew it to be real, or half-real, or at least the warmth that ran through me—so intense that it cast a shadow I could pretend into family—felt realer than anything.
“Remember that,” she advised me. And so, it was official: this became my first true memory of my sister, the twin that I’d once had.
On our final morning I woke to the sun peering through the cracks in the boarded windows, tossing its ribbons over the rows of sleeping children on the floor, all of us cocooned in blankets and rags. Sophia lay on my left, snoring mightily, her arms flung over my chest. My crutches were on my right, and seeing them, I remembered: I could go anywhere by myself, and take Miri with me.
Mischling Page 26
