“I thank you,” he finally managed to say. “And I swear that I will kill a Nazi someday, in your name.”
The woman cocked her head at him, gave another ragged exhale, and, by some miracle, capped it with a girlish laugh. It seemed that there were two words that she recognized. They were Nazi and kill, and though neither appeared to be relevant to her wishes, she seemed to appreciate their usage. She clapped as if we’d just performed for her, and then she crooked her finger at us apologetically, and pointed to her abdomen.
“We have nothing—” I started, but it didn’t matter what I said because she was pulling up the hem of her ragged jumper to reveal a belly that was not the starved belly that we were accustomed to seeing but one of an unfamiliar fullness. A prick of movement encircled her navel. A ripple of life, that’s what it was.
I moved to sit beside her, to hold her hand. I did this not out of familiarity but out of a desire not to faint. And then she drew my hand in a neat line beneath her abdomen. Her manner was instructive, her movements precise. There was no mistaking her petition. Feliks grasped me by the arm; he tried to force me back.
“You will kill her,” he whispered.
I told the woman that I couldn’t use the knife as she asked. She smiled at me and repeated the motion. She wanted to be my teacher, my reason to continue; she wanted to show me birth.
I told her I couldn’t. But already, I was wondering if I could—she was dying, this woman, she was leaving the world with a life inside her, a life that could go on to know nothing of the suffering we had endured. A life with a real childhood. Didn’t I owe something to a life like that?
“You won’t forgive yourself,” Feliks warned me.
I thought back to Mengele’s charts. Once, I’d seen him open up a woman while I lay in the examination room. It was an unusual procedure, he’d claimed, a favor for a friend. I’m not sure what kind of favor sees a newly born child plunged into a bucket behind its mother’s back, but he insisted on speaking of this as a charitable act, even though the cesarean soon turned into a vivisection before my very eyes. Before I had a chance to look away I had learned from this experience—I’d chosen to forget the bereaved mother’s face, but I remembered the scars of such deliveries, their position, their length, their arc; I knew that such incisions could end children just as easily as they could deliver them.
And then I sank my knife in the way the woman wanted, the way my memory told me to, the way that Mengele never would have—I did it with care and the remnants of my love, and as she stopped crying, a new cry began.
For all my vengeful ambition, this was the first time I had had blood on my hands. We watched the woman’s eyes dim, her posture slacken.
I think she saw the squirmer before she left. Its face was so humorous, shrimp pink and ancient. Why else would she have died smiling?
I passed my knife to Feliks and told him how to cut the cord. Let him, I thought, be responsible for this final severance.
“What do we do with it?” he asked.
I wiped the membrane of the floating world from the baby’s skin.
This baby was so different than the camp babies. Its problem was not that someone was trying to kill it, but that no one in this house knew how to make it live.
In the morning, Baby wailed in my arms as I walked. I was on my way to the orphanage, crossing this street and that in my quest to put Baby where it belonged. Baby needed to be in hands that could properly care for it and see it grow into a child who could someday be more than an orphan. I knew this plan would be met with disagreement from my companion, so I’d crept out before Feliks could wake. His love of the impossible would make him want to keep the sweet unfortunate. And I did not want to be convinced. Because, you see, a new plan for my future had formulated within me as I’d spent the evening rocking Baby and watching Feliks dig a grave for the Roma mother.
He’d buried her near the glass jar of names.
The newborn cared nothing about this grave, but I knew Baby could feel the thoughts in me as I’d stood over the mound and placed the plume of a peacock feather where a headstone should have been. When the wind blew that feather away, Baby wailed. It wailed not only in grief, but as a negotiating tactic. It wanted to be known to me as a real human, and it saw that I respected grief more than anything. This was a shrewd plan, one much advanced for an infant, but as a hardened girl, I required more.
I looked down at its face now, wiped the sleep from its dark eyes with my shirtsleeve, and hoped that this attention to hygiene could serve as a substitute for love, but the infant mistook it for a gesture of true affection and blushed. Already, it wanted me as family. I felt sorry for it for choosing to love me even as I moved toward its abandonment, holding it at arm’s length while footing through the rubble.
During this walk, I noted what I was leaving behind. Once, I was Mengele’s experiment. And now, it seemed that I would be an experiment for the war-torn countries, the disassembled, the displaced—how do you restore everything to its rightful home? everyone was asking. Of course, I wasn’t alone in being an experiment in this way. There were so many like me, and I wondered how many among them would make the choice that I was going to make.
You see, the pill the avengers left me with, the poison intended for Mengele that I’d carried in my mouth out of the depths of the salt mine—it was secured in my sock. It took every step with me, whispering all the while into my ankle, which just so happened to carry nerves and veins that sided with my heart. This poison wasn’t the bully I’d expected it to be but a strange comfort, a modern invention that knew my pain. It was wiser than I was; its chemicals had passed over the earth for centuries, and it was a well-traveled substance, practiced in human dismissal. From time to time, it tried to escape my ragged sock, but I only pushed it back and kept walking. The distance between myself and the orphanage was growing ever shorter, and I wanted to appreciate the walk because, though the city was gray and rubbled, it was the last city I’d see, and so I saw all I could—the old woman blowing dust from her photographs, the children collecting husks of bullets in a heap, the shop window full of stopped clocks and my reflection.
I pretended that the clocks had stopped for Pearl and me. I had failed at protecting her in life, but there was a chance, I believed, of finding her in death. She would want it that way, I told myself, and not just because she wanted to see me. Pearl would want me to die because she knew me, she knew how intolerable it was to my spirit that Mengele would escape unavenged, wholly beyond my desperate reach, my every wish for justice. Even if I was never reunited with her—I could not live with that failure.
And if there was a life for us beyond this death, we could embark on a new set of tasks and divisions.
Pearl could take the hope that the world would never forget what it had done to us.
I could take the belief that it would never happen again.
No one would know us as mischlinge. In that life, there would be no need for such a word.
And then I came to my destination. A red mitten was impaled on the iron gate, like a pierced heart. The paving stones before the remaining walls of the orphanage were upturned, the earthworms were surfacing in the exposed soil, the rosebushes were showing their roots, and the thorns were pointing the way to the iron knocker on the red door, a bold but tarnished lion. I wiped the dew from the doormat and laid Baby down upon it. I was no savage—I was careful to keep it wrapped in the blanket that had belonged to its mother. Baby appeared content—there were coos, a pleased thrashing of fist. I placed its thumb in its mouth. It was the least that I could do, I thought, though it began to wail a moment later. I started to leave, and I would’ve done so quickly, I would’ve passed through the gate and headed down the street to take my poison pill in a quiet corner, but I did not look where I was going and I collided with a man. He was coatless; his clothes were ragged, and his shoes were in pieces. He had no face—at least, none that I could see, because he held a Soviet newspaper before his head. The p
rint shrieked across the front page. I begged his pardon. He begged mine. Or he almost did. For some reason, he stopped short in his apology. Then he clutched my numbered arm, and the paper fell at my feet.
There, on that front page, was a face I knew better than any other. It floated in a sea of other faces, behind the barbs of a captivity I knew too well.
From above, a drop descended to the page, threatening to blot the face out. Thinking it rain, I snatched the paper from the ground, and that’s when I heard the crying.
You might wonder how I could recognize a man by his crying when I’d never, in all the years we’d spent together, heard him cry. Laughter had been his chosen sound, and shouts of frustration largely featured too in those last days before his disappearance, when he was trying to negotiate with the other men of the ghetto, all of them so interested in doing good, and all of them bearing conflicting ideas as to how to achieve it. But there, at the steps of the orphanage, it was his cry that solved our long separation.
“You are alive” was all I could say.
My father held me close. He sobbed. His sobs should have made him still stranger to me, but instead, they reintroduced a man who knew what it meant to search and press on, to ignore all doubts that wanted so badly to diminish him. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this—Papa was never good at doubting, not for as long as Pearl and I had known him. And now, in our father’s eyes, there was all the good I’d ever known, and there was good to come; there were days to see and stories to hear and weapons to abandon. From his threshold, nestled in his basket, Baby went quiet, so quiet, as he observed our reunion. They say the newly born see nothing. They are wrong. I can testify to this fact because in my own way, within Papa’s clasp, I was newly born too.
When I saw Papa, the world rolled on for me. In seeing his face, so changed, I felt found by luck, by miracles. All became awe, and rain fell to join our tears. How strange, I thought, that rain remains rain after what we’ve endured! Some things were unchanged; this was proof. Another unchanged thing: my father lived, and as he pressed me to his chest, I could still hear his heart! It did not know quite what to say.
Papa was similarly speechless. He stroked my face with a bandaged hand, a hand that still knew, through its tribulations, Pearl’s face as well as my own. When he tweaked the tip of my nose, I could not help but join him in his tears.
And through these tears, I tried to tell him that Zayde was dead, but all I could say was Please, Papa, bend so I can see your face, a leaf is caught in your beard.
I tried to tell him that Mama was dead, but I just said, Mama, Mama.
I tried to tell him that Pearl, our Pearl, my Pearl—he made me stop speaking, and he drew me even closer. I could feel his lips move against my scalp as he spoke.
“I am so happy to find you,” he said. “The article said that the children are scattered all over. Displacement camps, mostly. Some orphanages. Gross-Rosen. Mauthausen. I have been traveling for weeks, one stopped train after another—I thought I might locate someone with information in Lodz, but I found myself in Warsaw. How could it be that I would discover you here?”
Papa laughed and I thought I heard Baby laugh too, in his newborn way. I couldn’t laugh with them. I was too busy looking at the photograph in the newspaper that my father now clutched with one hand.
“That is not me,” I said.
I said it not only to my father but to my sister’s face, which peered out from the photograph, a look of capture in her eyes even as she floated above the place that tormented her, cradled in the arms of one of our few protectors.
“I thought it was you,” Papa said. “The expression—it is yours.” My father could not stop shaking, and yet he did not know how to move; we stood there, before the door of the orphanage, experiencing a joy so many would not.
“I didn’t hear you, Papa,” I whispered. “I am half deaf now.”
It was a lie, somewhat. I just wanted to hear him say those words again. But there was no need to draw this phrase out of him. He was too eager to repeat his joy, to hold me close.
“I thought it was you,” Papa said, and he increased the clasp of his arms around me so that I could hear his heart acknowledge our loss even as his voice refused to. “Look at the expression,” he whispered. And this is where he crushed me, where he drew me so tight that I could not breathe. He held me so close I felt my ribs crowd toward each other, but curiously, there was no pain at all, and I wasn’t the least bit worried about the potential suffocation of his embrace. My father was a good doctor, and he could do my breathing for me in a pinch, maybe not as good as Pearl could breathe for me, but I was beginning to think that, when I saw her—
I couldn’t believe that I could even think such a thing.
Tell my sister that I, she had said.
Pearl was alive. Or at least, she had escaped the cage that Mirko told me of. She had been carried through the gates we had entered together. What happened after that, I couldn’t know, but I was certain that her legs were moving faster than anyone’s in her efforts to reach me.
I should have shouted, I should have danced, but this discovery was too sacred to be commemorated by anything we could humanly do. I picked up Baby, and Papa and I walked back to the zoo; we kicked up pebbles and watched them stonily confront the rain. We handed Baby back and forth, and we spoke to each other as friends invested in futures speak. Papa told me of Dachau, the camp the secret police had taken him to so long ago. There was more to the story, bits that Mama had never disclosed. Because the sick child he’d left us to tend to that night existed, yes, but so did the Jewish resistance, and Papa had been a part of that shadowy movement. With Mama’s blessing he’d risked himself, smuggling weapons from the border of the city into the ghetto, and on that night, he’d risked himself too well; he was captured and beaten and then—he did not want to say, but I could imagine him being tossed onto the back of a truck or onto a train, traveling farther and farther away from us, till he arrived at a place that claimed, like so many others, that work might set him free.
I told him what the Gestapo said, that he’d plunged his body willfully into the Ner.
“I would never do such a thing!” he said. And then he hung his head and admitted that before the Russian newspaper gave him the company of that beautiful image, he’d thought of doing that very thing every day, soon as he woke, but with a rope, not a river. It was the inclusion of that last detail—rope, not river—that set my mind to realize that this returner was not the Papa of old but a new, broken man, one who no longer insisted on revealing the horrors of the world in discrete increments to his daughter, as they had already made themselves as plain as the new scar that careened across his forehead.
Papa asked me about what had happened to me, to us, to Pearl. I could not speak of such things. I simply told him that I wasn’t fit to take care of this baby, as much as he thought we owed him a home. I had impaired vision, a bad ear. I was useless in matters of assisting another’s survival.
Papa took out our beloved newspaper and unfurled it pointedly so I could not escape the face of my sister. She was ours, even in that picture.
“We will find her alive,” he swore. “She would not leave this earth without you.”
Already, the old nature of our relationship was returning to us, though with alterations. Our walk, that was new. For the first time I could remember, I strode directly by his side. I knew he would have lofted me onto his shoulders if I’d let him; he would have held me high enough for all the city to see so that they could know that Janusz Zamorski was not only still a man, but also a father not entirely bereft of family, a man with two daughters, twin girls that he loved for all their differences.
But he did not try the old shoulder stroll of our younger years, because if I were to be carried in such a capricious manner, who would look after the safety of Baby?
Papa was immediately taken by the infant, you see. He appraised him as a good doctor does, admiring the broadness of his newborn chest
, the steady intake of his lungs. You would hardly know, he said in wonder as he tickled Baby, that this was the face of a wartime child.
I could see that Baby would never be left in a basket at an orphanage, not as long as Papa had some say. I did not want him. Or at least, I did not want him until I had Pearl by my side, because only then would I know that my life truly could continue. Baby must have seen my thoughts, he must have known in that way that infants do, because he escalated his handsomeness in a snap; he parted his lips and made his need for food known so discreetly. I had to admit the child was a charmer, but his comely manners could not overwhelm my doubts, and I assessed the matter as we picked our way through the streets.
“He is hungry,” Papa said, pointing to Baby’s mouth, open with want. “We must find him something to eat.”
Papa and me, we’d always spoken in bargains and bets. If I were to do this, I said, to take care of this baby, you must do one thing for me. What is this? he asked. He expected something playful. He expected me to make a joke. But I had none to make.
Please take this pill from me, I begged, please bury it where I can’t find it.
We kept a list; we crossed off names. The names were of orphanages, displacement camps, nunneries, and monasteries, all the places one had to look in those days. A farmer gave us rides around the towns bordering Warsaw. We went to Zabki, Zielonka, and Marki.
“Have you seen a girl,” Papa would say, pushing me forward, “who looks like this?”
“We’ve seen so many girls,” the nun or the official or the monk or the guard would say.
“She has a number,” I’d bleat, and I’d show them my own.
“This doesn’t help us,” they’d say, staring into the blue. Often, they seemed to lose themselves looking at it.
“She has other identifying marks,” I’d say. “If she still has hair, she wears a blue pin in it. If she still has legs, they are knobby at the knee. You can’t miss her—if you’ve seen her.”
Mischling Page 31
