Mischling

by Affinity Konar

  Out in the hall, I overheard the nurses approach Jakub. The cost, he repeated. I know it well. I am sure that you know others too, working as you do, I’m sure you see us, desperate to shake these matters from our minds, you see us try to live until we try to die, and when we can’t succeed at either, we try to coax ourselves toward death by trying to remember them, the ones we couldn’t save, and when we remember them too well, it is terrible, and when we remember them too little, it is worse—

  Here, a nurse burst into the room, her eager step announcing an intent to distract me from the conversation in the hall.

  This nurse saw my need. She took off my shoes and laid me down in Miri’s bed, so white and clean-sheeted, and there I pressed my cheek to my guardian’s. That bed suited us so well. I could have stayed there forever, stroking Miri’s hair and listening to the nurse’s stories and telling some of my own. But the nurse said that I would have to leave someday. It was not good for me, she claimed, to be so surrounded by pain, and we needed to find a place free of it that I could go to.

  “A place like that is real?” I asked.

  I was asking not for myself, but for Miri.

  It is a particular madness, yes, to long for a cage, and for the sounds of isolation—rat-scratch, leak-drip, my fingertips drumming on the bars—but there, at least, I had some expectation of suffering. I could speculate reasonably about how I might feel pain and how I might be torn, how I could die in a flash, or slowly, bit by bit, in increments so small that I was unable to tell the difference between my life ending and my death beginning. In that space, I’d kept my hope fast. But in places like the hospital, with their white sheets and scrubbed floors and modest stores of food, I was suspended in a perpetual wait. Everything that was good, clean, and plentiful reminded me, once again, how swiftly I could be diminished, and without a single warning. I could be underfoot and powerless in mere seconds, and the anticipation of this made the struggle to remain seem utterly pointless. What work there is, I thought, in being a real person after death!

  I wondered how being a real person might feel after leaving the hospital. I assumed that one of us would be leaving soon, as a nurse had given us a suitcase. I also assumed that this person would be me. I would never be ready, I confessed to the nurse after receiving this gift. Ever patient, the nurse explained—Miri was ill, she could not take care of me. Polite, I protested—it was I who would take care of Miri now.

  The nurse was not convinced. She merely folded two pairs of socks and placed them neatly within the suitcase. Then she left me with that dreaded object.

  How odd it was, to own a real suitcase. We had become a people of sacks invented out of threadbare jumpers or emptied potato bags. These were easily slung over the back and were well proven in their utility. But a proper suitcase! When I took it up by the handle, I felt surrounded. By people and by wall. I felt as if I were boxed in, dust-covered; sweat pooled at my ankles and my ears rang with shouts and a panic burned too bright in my chest. I dropped the suitcase at my feet like a hot piece of coal.

  Miri saw what I had seen, and drew me close.

  “Believe that you are safe,” she whispered, and she spent the evening scratching out the monogram—JM, it said, in silvery script—with a pin, and there was no mistaking that her efforts had such a roughness to them that she nearly put a hole in the leather.

  Better a hole, she claimed, than a memory. I did not argue with this—Miri had more to forget than anyone, and it would do her good to impose large swaths of absence on her mind. But I hoped that as she pursued forgetfulness, a little memory of me might remain. Just a tiny bit, just enough so that if we were ever truly parted, she might seek me out again, someday.

  I looked out my window while Jakub and Miri had one of their discussions. There were no parachutists in the sky, but the heavens were assuming a different blue, and the frost seemed soon to end. I consulted a piece of paper that one of the nurses had given me. On it, there was a series of boxes, little cages that represented days. We were halfway through the month of February. Did my Someone know this? I wondered.

  Miri and Jakub spoke in hushed tones; they tried to conceal their plans. Jakub claimed that the time for worry was not ending, but it was changing a bit—the problems were different now, but so were the solutions, and he himself could escort the children toward one that was rare and brilliant. The authorities at the Red Cross confirmed the desirability of this scenario—already, they had selected eleven of Miri’s children to participate in this plan. And, of course, there was Pearl—surely she would join this exodus toward safety? The good doctor was in favor of this venture, wasn’t she?

  Miri was not stirred by Jakub’s excitement. She muttered something beneath her breath, something wholly unintelligible to me aside from the mention of my name. She said it longingly, or so I believed. Perhaps I imagined this. But when I turned at the window, I caught the trail of her gaze—it was fastened on me; her eyes, they appeared fixed on my injured legs.

  Palestine, Jakub continued, insistent. First, a trip to Italy, which could be dangerous—some concealment was necessary—and then a ship that did not have room for everyone but would surely accommodate the twins. Hearing this, Miri faded still further—the voice I’d not believed capable of becoming any smaller lilted softly in query.

  “This flight—it is our only hope?” she asked. “Still?”

  I knew the tone she used. It was the tone I heard on all the streets when people turned and asked each other if it was safe to resume living.

  “Would you like to take the risk?” Jakub whispered. “Is there ever a moment when you are not looking behind your back? Yes, it is over—we are free. Until they decide that we are no longer free—the war is not over, everything remains undetermined—”

  This was an argument of proponents of the Bricha, organizers of the flight. We did not know it then, but peace was still over three months away. But who was to say it would come May 8, not July or the next year? While we lived in February’s thaw, creeping toward spring, many believed that flight to another, more hospitable land was a necessary risk.

  “She will be safer there than she is here,” Jakub assured her. “I will see to it.”

  If there was a moment in which everything was decided, I suppose it was that moment.

  Because my guardian did not increase her protest, and I did not raise one at all, and so it was assumed, by all three of us, that this was what would become of me. I would be shipped to Italy, where I would board a boat that held its own sea, a sea of numbered people like myself, young and old, survivor and refugee, and every last one a searcher seeking to purchase a new beginning.

  Jakub had promised. It was to be a box quite different than the box I’d known—I was to bob within it next to Sophia, the two of us surrounded by the company of supplies: rolls of bandages, vials of medicine, tins of meats, bags of tea. But when the day came for my departure, a wooden box arrived at the hospital. It was a bit glamorous, so far as boxes go. It had a cherry-lacquered top rendered in the goyish style so as not to attract additional suspicion, and it was sized for a large adult. I could have rolled myself up like a blanket and lived in one corner. At the sight of my hiding vessel, Miri wept. Tears big as marbles rolled down her face. She tried to hide them with her hair, as was her custom.

  “It’s a coffin,” she said.

  “A trunk,” Jakub corrected.

  “I know coffins,” Miri said.

  I would only have to hide myself in order to cross the borders, he assured her. There were holes in the bottom so that I would be able to breathe. And there were other children that would be hidden alongside me, the ones that I knew so well from our journey to Krakow. We were to be quiet, but we would know we were not alone, and this, the man claimed, was a comfort.

  Into the truck bed piled eleven of my thirty-two companions. While only a week had passed since I last saw them, they looked different from the children I’d known. Their faces were rounder; their eyes no longer carted
hollows beneath them. Sophia had a new hair ribbon. The Blaus had gotten haircuts. One of the Rosens wore a pair of spectacles. They were ragged still, but you could tell that some hand had cared for them. I saw Miri’s face as she took in the details of their transformations and I knew that she wished she had been that hand, but she only smiled at each of them and asked if they were excited about this latest journey, and she helped seat me in a corner of the truck bed, where I could lean myself against the coffin box for comfort.

  Miri had a gift for me, which she presented with her ever-trembling hands. When I saw this gift, the fact struck me with all its finality. She was not coming with me—not then, and perhaps never.

  Like us, the tap shoes were a mismatched pair. One was bigger, younger than the other.

  All I knew was that one shoe was blush, the other white. I am not sure how she missed these differences. Maybe she hated the exaltation of symmetry after following Mengele’s orders. I couldn’t know. Both were kissed by the necessary metal at heel and toe. She shined them for me and caressed the laces with pride. She placed the shoes in my hands. She said she’d see me again.

  “In Italy?” I asked.

  “If I am well by Italy.”

  “And what if you aren’t well then?”

  “I will be well someday,” she promised.

  We would have a dinner, she said, and I could wear my new shoes. I wanted to point out that they were dancing shoes, and I could not walk, let alone dance, but she looked so pleased at the prospect of this reunion that I said not a thing. I put the shoes in the box and did not look at her as she continued to swear that this was not the end for us.

  Her form, as the truck trundled off—first, distance diminished her, then the fog swept away her face. I tried to memorize Miri as the expanse between us grew, her eyes, nose, mouth, chin. Wordlessly, I said good-bye to each, until there was nothing left of her to be seen, and I told myself to be happy for this, this chance to say good-bye, to say that I loved her. My affections had found a home in her; she was not my mother, my father, my sister, my Someone, but she was who I wanted to be, she was born kind, but hardship kindled it, and her vulnerabilities did not live apart from her bravery. Miri knew what suffering was and still, she wanted to know restoration too.

  I don’t know if she ever truly believed that our reunion would come to be. What is more, I don’t know if she thought she might live even an hour past my departure. But I believe she knew that she had to become well so that I could see her again, alive and restored. She could not do this with me at her side, as much as she would have loved to have me near. This was not abandonment, I told myself, years later. This was love, her dream for my future.

  I’m not sure she thought much of her own future. She couldn’t have dreamed of her triumph, I am sure. That she would be allowed a haven in America, that she would be permitted to resume her practice in the halls of a hospital, that she would enter thousands of rooms with her soft step, eyes fixed on the expectant patient.

  Dear God, she’d pray as she washed her hands and pulled on her gloves and turned to the waiting mother. You owe me this—the chance to deliver a true and vital life, a child that will never have to be known as a survivor. And thousands would take their first breaths in her hands.

  No, she couldn’t have even dreamed of that, not then. We don’t always know ourselves, who we can become, what we may do, after evil has done what it likes with us.

  A decade later, we would find each other in a waiting room at a Manhattan hospital where I was to see a specialist. I recognized her as soon as I saw her back, those dark curls tangling at her shoulders, and her usual stance—a slight tiptoe, as if ready to tend to a new disaster at any moment. And though she’d been well prepared for our meeting, she could not help but call me Stasha when she saw me, and I spent the next minute or so begging her not to apologize for this error, which remained in my mind as a sweetness that I couldn’t experience enough.

  Stasha, she’d whispered, as if in memoriam.

  And like the mother-sister she’d become, she remained with me as I was led to an examination room, as I was undressed and poked. She bossed the nurses a little, and she directed the doctor to be as gentle as he could, and when this inquiry of my insides were over, after I’d spent an hour reliving my girlish selves, all two of them, one the chosen sufferer, the other an intact half, I laid myself down on a couch in a private waiting room, and when the results were declared to be in, and the doctor took a seat to address me, I put my hand in Miri’s.

  Miri sat by my side as I was told the details of what he’d done to me, all the undetectable troubles that had begun to plague my health. Together, we learned that parts of me had never fully developed—my kidneys remained the size of a small, starving child’s, a child caught on the cusp of adulthood, her growth interrupted by the fact that there’d once lived a man who had no soul, and he’d collected children and those he found odd, acted as if he loved them, marveled at them, and destroyed them. The insides that he’d tampered with—they did not meet the demands of my grown life.

  Miri wept for me then. She took on the tears that couldn’t pass from my own eyes. She did so as if there were some unspoken pact between us. She looked at me, so still, and wondered aloud after my feelings, and when I didn’t answer, she said my name, and Stasha’s too. She didn’t care who saw her cry, she wanted all to know what he had done to me—she was so different then from the woman who’d forced herself to be stoic during our journey out of Auschwitz.

  At our parting, I thought those tap shoes were all she had left me with. But when I was forced to enter the coffin while crossing a border, I found, in the toe of one of the tap shoes, a note. Opening it, I expected to see her say good-bye. I thought she might say that she was sorry, that she might detail how her burdens kept her from joining me in my flight.

  But this long-ago letter, the one that wept in her blurred script?

  It was not about her life, her loss, her sorrows. It was about mine.

  And when we children were waylaid, when the roads clogged with tanks made us travel to the wrong city, and then the wrong village, I’ll say this—it was not my will that kept me alive, it was not the canteen of water, the provisions of bread, the company of Sophia beside me or the other twins that rattled in their boxes in the bed of our truck. It was not even our system of communication as we knocked on the linings of what held us whenever we crossed a border or had to hide—one knock to say I’m here, two to say I’m here, but there is little in the way of air, three to say I’m here, but I’m not sure I want to be.

  It was only what Miri told me about the Someone who had loved me. All the details she wrote about this person—all her games, her fondness for a knife, the way she’d made me dance—those details kept the breath in me for three days of travel, till our truck was detained by a pair of Wehrmacht deserters so desperate for transit that they were not above forcing Jakub from the driver’s seat. Seeing their approach, Jakub had warned us to take cover in our boxes. Whether he knew this was the end of his life, I don’t know. All I knew was the sound of the pistol, and then the sound of a body hitting the ground beside the truck. I heard, too, the whimpers of Sophia as she lay beside me, and as we sped away, I told her that we had only to bide our time till the soldiers paused in their travels, and as soon as the vehicle stopped, we would slip out, the lot of us, head for the nearest village, and find another rescue. She pointed out that I was on crutches. I pointed out that we were twins, the both of us, even though we’d had our share of loss. I assured her that freedom was something we might achieve together, that my Someone had always said so.

  And in that moment, having no one to share my duties with, I took them all on. I took the hope and the risk, the reckless determination, the stubborn belief that yet again, I would survive.

  Inside my latest box, I put on the tap shoes and waited for the moment that my kick at the ceiling of my confines might turn into a leap.

  Stasha

  Chapte
r Twenty-One

  Not the End

  What kind of welcome did I expect from the ruins of Warsaw? In the place where Mengele’s life was to end and lend a new beginning to ours, there was only the echo of peasants spitting in the streets, emptying their lungs of dust. And look at us—our weapons were gone, our furs had been stripped. Near naked, defenseless, we wore burlap sacks begged from a roadside farmer; we wrapped our exposed legs and arms in woolen rags discarded on the side of the road, we stumbled forth in too-large shoes, and my friend winced with every step, his hand constantly returning to worry at the wound on his shoulder, which had surrendered its bullet into my hand. With two fingers I’d pried it from his flesh as he shrieked, cursing the fact that my own affliction could not enjoy the same bloody and swift extraction. That, I told myself, was the last doctoring I would ever do. Destruction was all I cared for now, and Feliks shared this with me—together, we improvised fresh and clumsy methods of persecution. We collected a new sackful of stones to lob at our torturer’s skull, we clutched sticks beneath our arms, makeshift spears, the ends of them whittled to points fine enough to pierce his chest, and we trusted that the meek power of these humble instruments would be transformed by our fury when, at last, we came upon Mengele, cornering him in the cages of his hideout at the Warsaw Zoo.

  Warsaw did not recognize our destructive aims, as it was too possessed by its own restoration to know us. But although it did not note our entry, I trusted the city to host our mission. It had been destroyed like we had been destroyed. It was gutted and drawn; vacancies had been cleared until the city was little more than a cellar, a tomb, a waiting room with a telephone that said only good-bye, but everywhere, I saw people crushing themselves to revive it, I saw them expelling every breath they had into the foundations of the felled synagogues. They had the power specific to natives—they compelled the leaves to remain on the trees, coaxed the flowers to bloom and the skulls to stay in the ground, buried where no dog might unearth them—but we had the gifts of outside avengers. While they entrusted the city with life, we were there to ensure a death. Only when Mengele was finished would the leaves remain, the flowers bloom, and the skulls go back to sleep.