A violet night was falling and we heard a clock ticking in the air, addressing us, telling us that we were running out of time. Two steps farther, I realized that this sound was only the pound of my heart, though the message remained the same. The ticks quickened when we rounded a corner and saw a Red Army soldier paring an apple with a nail file and leaning against a wall alongside a broom. I wondered if that broom was so young that it had only the experience of sweeping ash and rubble. The soldier was so airy and nonchalant that I assumed everything had ended.
“You have captured him already?” I asked.
The soldier peered at me over his nail file.
“Hitler?” he wondered.
“Not him,” I said. “The other him. The Angel of Death—have you found him?”
“I don’t understand the question,” he said. “Your Russian—very poor.”
I knew that he understood well enough. But I pantomimed so that he could claim no excuse for not answering; I pretended as if we were playing the Classification of Living Things.
With my hands, I tried to depict a person born to German industrialists and affectionately known as Beppo. This was easy enough to convey. I stood on tiptoe and made myself look vast; I twirled a mustache, plucked a hair from it, and popped it into my mouth to approximate Mengele’s nasty habit. Also easy to get across was the fact of his doctorhood. I swung the white wings of an invisible coat about; I plunged a needle, removed an organ, sewed children together, and caged a Lilliput. More difficult, however, was the degree of his evils. This I was unable to communicate in all its lowdown fullness, its beastly disrespect for all living creatures and their variety.
Yes, I failed at this as badly as I had failed in my cattle-car portrayal of an amoeba.
So I wasn’t surprised when the soldier shook his head in confusion. I begged his forgiveness about the complicated message. I tried again. I left nothing out. The experiments, the shared pain, the Zoo, the days, the nights, the smell. All the dead tossed to the mud banks of the latrines. I did my best, but I realized that those who had not seen what we’d seen would never truly understand.
The soldier didn’t understand. So I took another approach. Realizing that Mengele was a man that could become fully known only through his victims, I began to list them all in the dust. I wrote all the names that I knew. I wrote Pearl’s. I wrote mine too, and then I crossed it out. The soldier bent to inspect the names, shrugged, gave Feliks his half-eaten apple, and then stalked off into the rubble chasing the vision of a pretty girl who’d begun to hang her wash on the ruins of a butcher shop.
“You didn’t even try to help,” I said.
“Not true,” Feliks said through a mouthful of apple. “I stood by your side the whole time.”
I told him I was beginning to think that he didn’t want any outside assistance.
“You are right,” he confessed. “I want it to be you and me, no one else. We are the only ones entitled to kill him.”
For once, I could not argue. And we walked on in our quest, picking our way through these ruins. Men were crawling out from holes, puffs of dust and soot haloing their heads. Faces were covered with soot and ash and dust, but beneath these layers, determination peeked. They were singing to the city, these people, trucking their wheelbarrows to and fro. Children perched on fallen stoops with buckets. Cats surveyed the efforts with suspicion and made sudden moves to escape stew pots. Mugwort hung on the remaining houses, warding off traditional evils.
Feliks had a strange familiarity with this place, or as much familiarity as one can have with a city that has fallen. He’d had an auntie here once, he claimed, and so he knew the streets, and he took me through what remained of them. We found tattered clothing to replace our burlap bags, ragged socks and mismatched shoes for our feet. We inquired about the zoo to any who would pause to answer us. The inquiry always put people into fits of headshaking. We used to love the shriek of the cormorants, they’d say. We used to admire the canter of the zebras. And our downcast eyes told us that we would know this zoo by its destruction.
We came upon signs. The signs told of lives that should have been, lives that had burst or been diminished, lives that had wandered into the forest. Here, an aviary stripped of its feathers. There, the elephant house with its emptied swimming pools. Over there, in the middle of the green, tigers should have familied themselves into magnificence. Peacocks should have glinted, geese should have gaggled, apes mocked monkeys. The lynx should have given chase.
But where the grandeur of the animal kingdom should have made itself known, there was only scatter—an upturned moat, tufts of fur clinging to bars wrenched wide. The pheasant house fluttered with pages torn from a book; tourist maps clung to the mud. The polar bear’s pool hid beneath a blanket of scum and moss. The only pride in the lions’ house was now a litter of shells. In the monkey habitat, rope swings hung freely, ungripped by primate hands, suggestive only of the noose.
I traced my finger around the print of a hoof, laid myself beside it in the mud. Did anyone ever truly manage escape? The hoofprint did not seem to think so.
I’d come for Mengele, yes. But I’d hoped for life too. I hadn’t known this, though, till I saw nothing of it.
To the left of the hoofprint, I spied a small mound of earth, a fresh heap of soil capping the ground. I turned over the soil and plunged my hand in. What did I expect to find at the bottom of this tunnel? My hand dreamed of discovering another hand; it wanted to find my sister sitting in a patient vigil beneath Warsaw’s mud. But my fingers struck tin instead, and I smuggled out a glass jar populated with names.
I spilled its contents over the ground like seed, little slips of yellowed paper. There was Alexander and Nora. There was Moishe and Samuel and Beryl. Agathe, Jan, Rina, Seidel, Bartholomew, Elisha, Chaya, Israel. Not a Pearl among them. Feliks looked at the names and mourned. I was glad he did, because I didn’t have any mourning to spare. We couldn’t have known then that the names belonged to the children smuggled by the Jewish underground, children who had been assigned new identities and homes and faces, children who sank their selves into objects—a bolt of fabric, a pile of medicine, a slew of bottles—children who lived in their mother’s skirts, beneath floorboards, under beds, behind false walls, so that they might someday rejoin life. But instinctually, he knew enough to sweep up these names with his hand and bury the jar again, admonishing me all the while for disrupting their hibernation.
We crept through the habitats; we asked ourselves where a Mengele might lurk.
I wondered if he’d learned the art of camouflage, taken a suggestion from some animal at the zoo, an innocent that believed, as I had, that goodness could be found within him. Chameleons could be optimistic like that. But Mengele—he’d think too highly of himself to blend with stone, dust, earth. Still, with every step, I expected him to leap up beneath our feet, to bolt from an underground hiding place. I couldn’t be too cautious. I kept one hand fishing about in my sack of stones and readied the other with foul gestures.
“Check the trees,” I whispered.
But Feliks was not interested in my instruction. He threw his makeshift spear into a copse of birches and shrugged. He considered his sack of stones, and then laid the stones down, one by one, as gently as if he were handling birds’ eggs. Then he sank to the ground and let the wind play over his face as he stared into the evening sky above, with all its dusky drifts of clouds, and with an odd air of resignation he played the game we’d played so long ago, on the soccer field.
“I don’t see a single Nazi among you,” he said to the gathering cumuli.
I said there was no time for this game. I promised that as soon as we found Mengele, we could rest and read the clouds. We didn’t even have to kill him right away, I reasoned. We could secure him in the tiger pen and take care of him later, to maximize our viciousness.
“I’m tired,” he claimed, and he did not move.
In all our travels, this was the first statement of weariness I’d h
eard. I’d seen Feliks struggle to walk, to lift his head, to open his eyes, to swallow a morsel of food—but never had he voiced his fatigue. This concerned me. I put a hand to his forehead, but he wrenched it away.
“We should sleep and look for him in the morning,” I said brightly. “It would be stupid for us to confront him when we are not at our best. Like your father the rabbi would say—”
“My father was never a rabbi,” he said dully. “I lied.”
He confessed this to me, but he said it to the clouds above.
“I forgive you,” I said. “I lie too. I lie all the time since Pearl left. Actually, that’s a lie—I lied before she was gone. I always have.”
This revelation did not bring him the comfort I thought it might. I watched a tear slip from his eye and plummet down the side of his face. He didn’t bother to wipe it away.
“I am the biggest liar of all,” he said. “My father was a drunk, a criminal, an indigent. We lived with him in graveyards, back alleys, anywhere we could find. He didn’t even survive the invasion. My mother—dead long ago. I don’t know how. My brother—after our father died, we went to live with a woman, a kind woman, she took us in—”
I told Feliks that he could stop. This was not a contest about who was the biggest liar. This was a contest about who could be the best killer of Josef Mengele, Angel of—
He sat bolt upright, mouth twisted with confrontation.
“Let me finish! We lived here in Warsaw. Behind this zoo, in fact. See that house there, so close? It was ours, once.”
I looked at the remains of the house, its insides exposed like the nest of a wasp. The sight of its skeleton laid everything bare. I thought of his odd familiarity with the city, the way the people nodded at him as he passed, how he knew the name of every street. I told Feliks that I forgave him, none of these falsehoods mattered. The one thing I didn’t understand was why he had acted as if this was a new place, as if he’d never been here before—
He did not look at me as he explained.
“I thought you’d love the zoo. I thought that once you saw the animals, you’d want to live again, and maybe you’d want to live with me. I thought—if you had that chance, that hope, it might even be possible for you to put this deathlessness aside. That ridiculous story he gave everyone! He told all of us that fib, you know. A bigger liar than myself!”
I don’t know what my face looked like but I’m sure it showed my foolishness. For so long, I’d hoped that others would forgive me my survival. Just a moment before, I’d believed that the years of children and mothers were in me, the minutes of violinists and farmers and professors, every refugee who never managed to return from the seething country that war had put them in. And now it had come down to this: not science or God or art or reason. Just a boy—a traitor, friend, brother—who wanted to show me a tiger.
“You know that it isn’t true? How could you believe it? Mengele told all of us, you know, every last—you were not the only one he put evil into.”
Hearing this, I put my spear down too. I dropped my sack of stones, which thudded on the ground with finality. The stones took my side in this matter. The stones cried out, they agreed with me that, yes, I’d been a fool, but Mengele thought I was special, Mengele singled me out, he said I was a rare girl, the only worthy one.
My friend’s mouth twisted with pity.
“If I had ever thought you believed that, Stasha—”
Seeing my distress, Feliks hurried to my side, and he went on to say that all I needed was a good night’s dreaming and then a new family, maybe an adopted family, and then a new country, complete with a future. The soothing nature of his voice only riled me. I covered my ears to protect them against the force of his good wishes, and I removed my hands only to reach down into my sack and pull out a stone. It careened past his ear, toward the carnage of his home.
His face? The sadness in it told me we had been family.
I reached again, threw stone after stone. I threw them not to strike but because I needed to no longer carry such burdens. I threw them into the remaining window shards of his house. The stones pleased me with their shatters. The last, in particular, sounded distinguished, almost musical in its destruction. I did not realize the reason for this until my target cried out in dismay.
“Your key!” Feliks shouted.
I looked into my sack. It was true, I had reached into its depths with a careless, raging hand and thrown Pearl’s piano key by mistake. Already Feliks was turning to run into the house to retrieve it, and I was at his back.
If Feliks felt the recognition of his old home as he entered, he did not say, but I watched him scan its insides warily from the doorway, I watched him step purposefully on a framed photograph that lay just beyond the threshold. I looked at the photograph, and a younger Feliks looked back at me. His twin looked back at me too. I could not tell how long before the boys were herded into Mengele’s Zoo this photograph had been taken. But though their young lives had never been prone to ease, it appeared that once, they had been immaculate; they grinned the same grins, these twins, their hair was parted in the same direction, and their eyes were wide and hopeful.
It was difficult for me to put that past down, but we had to move forward.
We found ourselves in a parlor with armchairs and sofas in disarray, all of it covered in a fine shower of concrete and crockery. The looters had searched the floorboards and pulled the china from the cupboards. The whole of this house was overturned and smashed, but its ruins were not pathetic in the way ruins can be—this place had struggled against those who came to overthrow it.
We climbed to the second floor, bolted up a staircase muddy with footprints, and found rooms aflutter with mosquito nets. They’d been suspended over every summer bed but the looters had ripped them and dragged them to the ground. This tulle, with its drapes and flounces, floated over the floors and furnishings, a ghostly blizzard. We sifted through this tulle foam for that white key; we bumped into this corner and that, and then Feliks stopped with a start.
“Did you hear that?”
I had not.
“A woman—crying,” he said. “Listen.”
And then it soared toward us like an invitation and we hesitated at a stair before bolting upward into the darkness.
“It’s coming from the parlor,” Feliks said. “And it sounds as if someone is hurt.”
The weeping increased. I felt so distant from my body while listening to it. I could swear that cry was familiar. It sounded like a cry I’d heard all my life, one that I had once dreaded hearing but now welcomed.
“It’s Pearl,” I said to Feliks.
And then, as if in confirmation, there was a crash, a startle, the sound of something falling across a set of piano keys. I pushed past Feliks and, without the aid of candlelight, picked my way over the shattered glass, the furniture outstretching its arms.
In the parlor, I saw the piano. It was intact. Feliks rushed toward it, blocking my view.
“Who is in my house?” he demanded.
We received only more cries. I noticed, then, that these cries had a womanly note; they drifted out of an experience I was quite unfamiliar with. As we neared the piano, I saw their source: a figure swaddled in blankets. I watched Feliks approach this figure, and then slow.
“You have to see this, Stasha,” he whispered.
It was a Roma woman. She was slumped against the side of the piano, but she lifted her face to us. Looking at her, I forgot Pearl’s key. I wasn’t even trying to look for it. The woman wilted before us—she was not unlike a petal struggling to remain on the stem.
“She’s dying, isn’t she?” Feliks asked. “That’s why her breathing is so strange?”
I wasn’t sure if the breaths were dying breaths. They sounded like a different sort of distress, though one just as life-changing as death. I was certain that I had never made such sounds. I was certain Pearl never had either. These moans carried a wisp of future in them—they were aggrieved, but h
opeful too, as if the woman had some happy prospect in her mind even as she wept. But I said nothing of this to Feliks. Because I was too busy looking at this pitiable woman with hatred. Instead of my sister, she was this—a woman who had been hunted down, left to wander. A bereaved creature, much like myself, without too many gasps left. I wondered what had been promised her in life—a home, a husband, a child—and how it differed from what had been promised to me, but I couldn’t get very far with that thought because I couldn’t remember what life had ever owed me in the first place.
Feliks peeled back one of the blankets in search of a wound, and the woman exhaled with startling force. She flurried her hands at us—begging for pause—and then she reached behind herself and produced the arc of an immense knife. It may as well have been a miracle, that blade; we forgot ourselves looking at it and were impressed by her unforeseeable power. Surely, anyone who possessed such a weapon should be the true vanquisher of Josef Mengele. Though prostrate and beaded at the forehead with illness, she shamed us both with her smiting potential.
We told her how impressed we were. If only, we told her, if only we’d had such a knife at our disposal in the wilds of the Zoo.
She was confused—drops of sweat were tossed from her brow as it furrowed.
“Not this zoo,” Feliks said. “Another zoo, the one that made—”
The woman exhaled sharply. At first, I thought it was frustration. But when that exhalation multiplied into a series, I saw that it was pain, and in the midst of these spasms, she gestured for Feliks to lean in toward her. And into his grimy palm she placed the long blade with a ceremonial flourish.
Mischling Page 30
