Mischling (11 page)

When Patient was borne away from us, so lifeless, my sister hushed. If she said a word about her grief, I did not hear it. But perhaps I missed this—after all, grief was difficult to distinguish from the other sounds of Auschwitz. It was late October 1944—planes plowed the sky above us; they drowned out the barking of the dogs and the gunfire from the concrete towers.

“Russians,” Taube remarked bitterly to no one, his face tilted to take in the view. “If only I were coward enough to desert this hell now, before all of Poland falls to pieces.”

“Such a shame!” Bruna mocked. “That you are so burdened by bravery!”

I held my breath, waited for the retaliation for her insult. But none came. Taube was too busy with his musings.

“We should bomb this place immediately,” he continued. “Leave the whole lot of you writhing in the rubble. Let the Russians try to free your corpses.”

“What is stopping you, then?” Bruna taunted him. “You miserable lump of deformity!”

Taube was so distracted by the planes that he did not even chase her. Or perhaps the engine's roars made Bruna's insults inaudible. In any case, she took advantage of this opportunity. “Foul pudding!” she cried. “You tedious sore! More worthless than a fish's ass!”

She had such fun with this, it gave us even more reason to hope the planes might continue their paths. But while the appearance of the Russians was useful to the dreams of many, they meant nothing to my sister.

Without her friend to tend to, Stasha found herself overwhelmed by open swaths of time. Everyone had a suggestion as to how she should put herself to use, but she turned down Bruna's appeals to organize as a team and the Lilliput matriarch's invitations to tea. Knowing my sister's love of babies, Clotilde gave her the honor of plucking the lice from her twins' heads, but even this enviable show of trust failed to move Stasha.

She no longer had time for distractions of any sort, Stasha said, and it was true, she couldn't be tempted by a single round of our diversions, the awful rouse of Tickle the Corpse, or even a Kill Hitler play. There had been a time when Stasha's pantomimes had threatened to unseat Mirko's—she had nearly outdone his Hitler impression with an act that was less dependent on mustache than most, relying instead on a mockery of his speech and a fine line of drool. I knew that she enjoyed making the others laugh more than anything else, but nothing could convince her to participate after Patient was gone. When I tried to persuade her by saying that games were good because they involved friends, she said that she no longer had time for friends either, and she issued this declaration as loudly as possible, obviously hoping that Moishe Langer, who had recently offered her a sweet and killed a roach before it could plink across her foot, might finally put his bothersome affections to rest and leave her be.

And where she wanted to be was on the steps of the infirmary with her bread knife across her knees. Those steps saw the feet of many—the sick, the nurses, the dead being carried out. Dr. Miri began to exit and enter the infirmary with the greatest caution, avoiding my sister at all costs—her demeanor said that she couldn't risk discussing Patient's fate. But no matter how quickly she ascended or descended those stairs, she was always confronted by Stasha, whose stony face would attempt an expression at the doctor's approach. She did her best to make her countenance into a question mark, a soft confrontation, but Dr. Miri only wrinkled her brow in an aggrieved fashion, and then—as if in answer to the cries of the dying within—smoothed it promptly.

I don't know how Stasha was able to listen to the cries. I know she sifted through them for some thread of Patient's froggy voice, but that was more than I could ever endure. I believe she was testing herself for times to come. Because when the Russian planes retreated, Stasha finally began to hold conversations with me again. But her voice had a new bitterness to it. It seemed older than us both.

“I see that poppy in my mind lately. I see it all the time. Do you see it, Pearl?”

I did.

“I can't see more,” she told me. “Don't ever make me see a field's worth.”

It was this warning that made me plan for her future grief.

I went to talk to Peter in secret. Stasha hated Peter, the exalted messenger boy who had procured the ear horn for Patient. He knew far more than we did about painting and books, which impressed the doctor to no end. Worst and most puzzlingly of all, he was twinless and sported none of the typical abnormalities or genetic detours that meant salvation. In fact, it was his Aryan good looks—what Mengele appraised as a heroic nose and strong chin—that enabled his presence in the Zoo.

From the very first, Mengele had anointed the boy as someone special, and he was given advantages that placed the fourteen-year-old above and beyond us all. If Peter was aware or ashamed of this, I couldn't tell. He carried himself differently—I'd watched him from the very beginning, looked on as he slipped beneath fences like a cat, prowling about with a look of grim concentration that betrayed his intent to subvert all the benefits of his post. He was gifted with adaptation, this Peter, but he was more civilized than Bruna; he approached matters with the utmost diplomacy, and it was easy to forget how young he was, given these skills. He stood out in this way, and more. Perhaps most notably, in this place of constant filth, he was an oddly clean boy. Never with any grime underneath his fingernails, unlike the rest of us. I often saw him smoothing his clothes with his hands and mending the buttonholes, and though he was as skeletal as any of us, he could be seen trying to exercise in the fields, performing endless series of push-ups and lifting stones above his head. He was captain of the soccer team and president of the boys' secret Zoo society, the Panthers, which was not very secret at all and seemed to amount to fits of meetings that ended in arm-wrestling matches.

But more impressive than any of these other achievements was this: Peter was one of the few who still had pride, and he dared to have it even in Mengele's presence, which seemed to be the greatest trick of all.

Yet the main reason for Stasha's envy was the fact that, since Peter was Mengele's messenger boy, he got to see all the sights and cross all the borders of our strange city. From block to block, from the men's barracks to the women's, through the coveted field of wildflowers and into the finery of Nazi headquarters, he roamed, carrying words from one place to the next. We were infinitely more limited. We knew the boys' barracks and the girls', we knew the length of the fence, the rear of the infirmary, the road to the laboratories, and the terrible insides of those laboratories. Of the rest, we could only dream. But Peter saw.

He saw Canada, the warehouses filled with all our lost luxuries. Heaps of gold, pyramids of silver. Forests of grandfather clocks, pillaring high. Stacks of china, enough for thousands of celebrations. Soft piles of fur and leather. He talked about it constantly.

He saw the secrets of the infirmary, witnessed the barter systems of the
kapos
. He saw people leave codes on the sides of the latrines, bury helpless messages in the dust. He talked about that, but in hushed tones.

He saw other piles too, the unmentionable piles of precious teeth and hair and flesh. He didn't want to talk about them.

His travels weren't without risk—while most of the guards were aware of his status as one of Mengele's pets and knew to leave the boy alone, there had been occasions on which Peter had been mistaken for a trespasser. One such incident ended in scarring—the lash of a whip tore a crescent of flesh from his ear. Mengele tried to fix it, but his clumsy handiwork only enlarged the wound. Peter didn't care about this disfigurement. He said that the resulting discipline of the officer at Mengele's own hand was its own reward, and he'd welcome future opportunities to repeat this sort of incident, because how else was he to inflict any kind of vengeance?

This torn ear only further commended Peter to me, because it reminded me of a stray cat my sister and I had loved when we were small, an animal we'd trained to run to us when we rang a bell. I'll admit it: I often found myself wondering what it might be like to pass my hand over that injury, to roll that scar between my fingertips, to know, before it was too late, what it was to touch Peter, to know the unique temperature of his skin.

I'd hoped to find him alone, though I had no real idea of what I might say.

But when I found Peter, he was with the Yagudah triplets, all of them leaning against the wall of the boys' barracks and practicing sleight-of-hand tricks. The triplets were trying to make white handkerchiefs act like streams of milk, to pour them out of one hand and into another. It was a trick that had made them very popular among the others because it provided an illusory proximity to food. Stasha had not been impressed by their magic. It had no utility to it, she complained, it was the stuff of dreamers in a world that didn't recognize dreams anymore. She'd been quite vocal about this opinion, and I hoped desperately that the Yagudahs wouldn't mistake me for my outspoken sister. Judging by their looks, though, they certainly had.

“What are you doing here, Stasha?” two of the three queried in unison.

“It's not Stasha,” Peter said without the slightest upward glance. “Stasha is deaf now. This is the non-deaf one.”

“She's not deaf,” I said. “She's only half deaf. And her health, it's constantly improving.”

The boys elbowed one another with glee.

“I'm sure she'll be dancing for Taube any day now,” said one of the Yagudahs with a titter.

“Tell me,” I said, cheeks burning, “how far does that handkerchief-milk go divided among the four of you? Are you stronger than the rest of us for drinking it?”

They balled their hankies in their hands and glowered, but I couldn't be deterred by such pettiness. I joined the boys against the wall. A silence followed. The boys and the girls of the Zoo didn't mix much. Before the cattle car, I'd heard older girls discuss the awkwardness of dances. I figured that this was the closest that I might ever know of that phenomenon. It was so quiet that I could hear my pain traversing new paths inside of me—it trilled as it coiled through me; it burned and sank like a stone. So I was grateful when Adam Yagudah leaned over to speak to me, if only for the distraction.

“You know that business about Taube being friends with Zarah Leander isn't true, don't you?”

“I'm not an idiot,” I said.

“Well, your sister seems to believe it.”

“She's not an idiot either,” I said. “And don't you have any better tricks to do? If I were you, I'd make myself disappear before the Nazis do.”

This prompted a peal of laughter from Adam's brothers. Adam himself wasn't amused.

“I wasn't trying to be funny,” I said.

“Of course you weren't,” Peter said, lowering his face to mine so that our eyes had no choice but to meet. “Being funny is Stasha's job, isn't it?” He spoke softly, without mockery, as if we were alone and not surrounded by an audience, as if we were in a real room and not outside by the dusty walls of the barracks. And then, as if embarrassed by his own earnestness, he wound a finger in my curls and pulled. Touch—it had grown so complicated and strange. The curl-pulling was a gesture I'd been familiar with all my life, or at least in the parts of my life where boys sat behind me in school, but this tease felt different. It carried a pleasant thrill, and I knew this was the closest I might ever come to an affectionate touch from a boy. But the fact that this could be my last thrill—it undid me. And Peter's torn ear—I could not look away from it. I wished for pockets in the skirt of my dress, simply so I could still the twitch of my hands as they longed to touch the badly healed wound.

“I'm only teasing,” Peter said. “Don't worry, I won't tell.”

I'd thought Stasha and I had kept our arrangement secret—I couldn't imagine how Peter knew. The triplets fell stonily silent, as if they themselves were familiar with such a coping tactic in their own lives. Peter must have seen my discomfort because he snapped his fingers, and the other boys scattered. I admit that I was impressed by this power. It was an odd thing, to see a sense of command so genteelly expressed in a place where a boot on the neck was the most common order.

“Will you walk with me?” Peter asked. And he tried to give me his sweater; he pulled it off and attempted to drape it over my shoulders. I shrugged it off, just the instinctive reaction of an awkward girl. It wouldn't do to take too much from him, and I was happy enough for this amble besides.

As we wandered, I saw that winter would soon approach. In the distance, past the cremo and the soccer fields, you could see the birches shedding the lit amber of their leaves, readying for snow. And beyond those white-limbed trees, I knew there was a river, hills, an escape. Like everyone, I'd heard the story of the rebel lovers—Rozamund and Luca—who were shot as they'd attempted that escape, how they'd died together, entwined in the mud at the fence's edge, blood flagging their backs in surrender, after a month's worth of sweet notes and covert courtship. I tried not to think of that then, with Peter; I tried to focus only on the stumps that bordered the length of the fence. I walked ahead of him, jumped from stump to stump so as not to touch the ground. It was easier to speak to him this way, and during this exercise, I forgot my pain too well, and was reminded of it only when I stumbled.

Peter plucked me up from the ground and pulled out a pebble lodged in my knee with his knit-gloved hand. After all the prodding of the nurses and the doctors, I shivered at the feel of a hand that would never want to hurt me.

“I've heard the stories about you,” I told him. “About how you organize all sorts of things and taught Taube's dog to growl at Hitler's name. About how you put a toad in Nurse Elma's desk, and an egg in Mengele's house slipper.”