Mischling (16 page)

“Smidgen Two,” Bruna whispered into the peephole. “It is the dead of winter now, don't you know? Can't you feel the cold in there? Our whole world—a snowstorm!”

“It doesn't storm in here.”

“You can't live in a barrel anymore. You dear, stupid baby bedbug—come out!”

“I have to keep watch for her.”

“Keep watch from a window.”

“I don't trust the windows here.”

“Keep watch from a door, then.”

“I trust the doors even less.”

There was a pause, and then—

“Maybe you should stop watching, Stasha.” Never had I heard her voice so gentle.

I asked Bruna: “Should I stop watching because you have word from Pearl and you know that she's well, you know that she's just biding her time, just waiting until it is safe? Tell me that she's in a house somewhere. Tell me that she's hiding in a tree stump. That she's underneath someone's bed, and she is not who she used to be, but she is alive. I can take you telling me all of these things. Just so long as—”

“I haven't heard from Pearl,” Bruna confessed. “My Smidgen One. She was my friend, that girl, my favorite—”

“Of course you haven't heard from Pearl,” I interrupted with a snarl. “Why should you? It's not like you were important to her.”

“Know this,” Bruna said. “While you are in your barrel waiting for death, the Russian planes are back, more and more every day.”

“Of course they are,” I said. “They are here to bomb us.”

“My people would never do such a thing.” Bruna was indignant. “Maybe you should think, Smidgen Two, about how to prove yourself worthy of the freedom they are about to bring you. Decide now whether you are a cabbage or a girl. Fool! Barrel-dweller! How I miss you! You lousy coward!”

I turned away from the loving insults streaming through my peephole and retreated to my letters.

The next morning, I was surveying the snow from the peephole of my barrel when I saw Peter approach. His walk was hunched and slow and he had a wheelbarrow before him.

“Stasha! Come out, you have to see this!”

I removed the roof of my barrel and peered over the lip of the slats.

Peter's wheelbarrow held a bundle. The bundle was cocooned in a gray blanket, but the tips of the feet peeped from the frayed edge. A big toe frolicked in the wind.

I scrambled so quickly from my barrel that I overturned it and spilled onto the ground. This exit was as ragged and clumsy as my recent days of grief had been. A grief that, it now seemed, had been wholly unnecessary. I ran a hand above the length of the shroud as I'd seen a magician do once in a show. The bundle didn't animate readily, but that was just Pearl's way—she preferred a subtle showmanship.

“How?” I marveled.

“From the infirmary—just released.”

“How long have you known?”

“Two days. I didn't want to tell you because I knew you wouldn't believe me. Go on—lift it.”

You would think that after so much loss, I'd be eager for a reunion. But a feeling in me—one of the few feelings that Pearl hadn't taken with her—was hesitant to remove the blanket. What if Pearl had gone and changed without me? If she was not herself anymore, then who was I supposed to be? And then this hesitation was overcome by my eagerness and I peeled the blanket back.

The mouth that grinned up at me was now emptied of teeth. This was the face of a baby who had never been permitted a sojourn into the teenage but had skipped straight to manliness and then to old-manliness. His flesh was young but ancient; his eyes were new, so far as eyes go, but they'd seen too much. I am not sure how I recognized him at all, because his skin was no longer that be-veined, breathless blue, but a sickly white. Still, there was no mistaking his smile.

It was Patient. My Patient. I knew he would've been Pearl for me if he could have. Sensitive to my disappointment, he clasped at my hand, which was rather uncomfortable because my heart was busy falling into the blackest depths of me, a locale unknown even to Uncle, where it shed its skin, rolled in bile, assumed a new shell, and grew thorns. Thus armored, the resourceful organ climbed the ladder of my ribs and returned to its place. And I did what Pearl would've wanted me to.

“What a blessing it is,” I said, smiling as a fresh ache partnered with my pulse, “to be family again.”

It was as if Patient had been renewed somehow. Something had done him good in his more than a month away from us—or maybe it was just the light? In any case, it seemed that his cough was intermittent. He clung to my side without any touch, warding off the slightest separation.

In the yard, others gathered to view our returned boy. With wet eyes, everyone joked about where Patient had been off to. Had he been sailing, riding, sunning?

Patient shook his head, solemn. He wanted to joke in return—but he couldn't.

Twins' Father clapped the boy on the back and then leaned in for a whisper.

“When you leave next,” he said softly, “it will be because we've been liberated and I'll be taking you and all the other boys home. It's a promise. And I'll need help with the little ones, so you'll be my second in command.”

Patient gave him a little salute, and Twins' Father left us to pursue his duties, but not without glancing back a few times as he walked, as if he still could not believe such a resurrection had taken place.

Bruna set to work pinching Patient's arm, her face lit with all the pleasures of tormenting one she'd missed.

“Do ghosts bruise?” she inquired, pinch after pinch.

“I'm not sure, Bruna,” Patient said, puffing out his chest. “I know only that your bruises are too embarrassed to be seen with you. I miss your white hair, though—you should wear it the old way. Charcoal merely dulls your beauty.”

Apparently, Patient had learned suaveness and cruelty within the confines of the infirmary. Bruna was flattered and impressed.

“That'll do, flea,” she said, and gave him the respect of a bow.

The others laughed, and then fell on him with questions. What was it like to be the first to return? Had he eaten anything interesting? Had he seen any of the others—to be specific, had he seen any of the others who went by the name Pearl Zamorski?

The last question was mine.

It was a great honor to be the first, he said. He hadn't met any pastries in there, but at the worst point in his illness he'd had the good fortune to hallucinate the smell of brisket. Pearl? She had been nowhere near, but all people tended to look the same in the infirmary, even though—

I slipped away, with the excuse that I had a letter to write.

He caught up with me quickly, his legs moving faster than they'd ever been capable of before, and the curious strength of this stride made me wonder if I was walking with the real Patient at all. Perhaps Uncle had sent an impostor back. Indeed, he introduced himself by a new name.

“You may no longer refer to me as Patient,” he said. “Call me Feliks.”

“Oh? Is that your name?”

“No. It was my brother's name. But I think I should have it for him now.”

This made sense to me. Other things didn't. I asked this Feliks why he was alive.

“That's a cruel thing to say.”

By all rights, I argued, he shouldn't have been. He was twinless, after all.

“So are you—and you still live. You look like the dead, though.”

I made no attempt to dispute this.

“I bet you'll want to know what saved me, since you are curious about medicine and all,” he said.

Then, as if to test my interests, he revealed the unique method of his survival. Jumping ahead of me as I walked, he shimmed down the loose waist of his pants and turned his back to me. A stump of a tail rode the space directly above his buttocks. The wriggle of this deformity—I could imagine Uncle's fascination.

“That's a fine trick.”

“You can touch it.” He reached for my hand.

“I don't want to touch it.” My hand recoiled.

“If you touch it, it might bring you luck too.”

Luck being unreliable in the Zoo, I continued to decline. He shrugged and lifted up his pants, thankfully concealing the little stub.

“It's always been with me. My brother was the same. The ambulance is never coming for me. I'm too valuable.”

“Will you tell me more about the infirmary, Patient—I mean, Feliks? What was it like? I need to know.”

He was only too happy to talk. He told me about row after row of beds, the thin soups, the crow that he could never see but whose caw woke him every morning. I listened and didn't question. Already, a map was spreading itself across my mind.

“I know what you're thinking, Stasha.” He shook his head. “She's not there.”

“Only Pearl knows what I'm thinking,” I said.

But it was true that as I turned from him I had a fantasy in my mind, and in this fantasy people had disguised my sister, given her a new name. They'd probably slipped her something that made her forget about herself, because they knew that the separation from me was a great risk to her health. When it was safe, though, they would give her an antidote.

We would find each other still. This Feliks had proven it—a return was possible.

The morning after our birthday, I woke to find a thread of smoke drifting around my barrel. I checked my sleeves, my shoes. Nothing appeared to be on fire. I pulled up my blouse, poked my belly button—I was sure that whatever Uncle Doctor had put in me was now scorching me from within.

Vermin!
said the smoke.

I agreed with its assessment.

Out with you!
said the smoke. It sounded strangely like Nurse Elma. But I obeyed, and bolted up, coughing. As soon as I exited, ash fell before my eyes. Nurse Elma loomed above, a cigarette wagging between her lips.

“You are needed!” she declared. “In the laboratory!”

I liked you better when you were smoke, I said.

“What is that you say? Speak up!”

“What can I do for you today, Nurse Elma?”

“Portrait time!” she declared.

I'd sat and stood and contorted for so many pictures already, all of them naked, all of them in the cold capture of the camera's eye, but every time, I'd done so with my sister. I'd never imagined that I'd be photographed without her; I wondered if I would even be able to stand for the photographer. But when Nurse Elma ushered me into a room in the laboratory, I saw neither the usual equipment nor any other subjects.

There was only a woman behind an easel, her face obscured by a canvas. Past its edge I could spy the crescent of an ear, a stretch of near-barren scalp tufted with gray. She wore the uniform of a prisoner and a gray shawl; her feet were shod with shoes of different heights. Though thin, the ankles above these mismatched shoes struck me as pretty in the way that I thought of things from my past as pretty: charm bracelets and potted violets in the window box, fires I built in the fireplace, Mama's Sabbath tablecloth.

Nurse Elma instructed the woman to begin and seated herself in the rear of the room to flip through her usual material, a magazine filled with actresses. I thought I saw Pearl's face on the cover, thought I saw her winking at me.
I miss you,
Stasha,
the mouth on the cover said.
Things just aren't the same. But I am better here.
I was just about to ask Pearl whether the place she referred to was the afterlife or California, but then the mouth opened wide and the cover girl began to sing. That's when I realized it wasn't Pearl at all, but a cinema star, because Pearl's singing voice was far superior to that.
Do you know where Pearl is?
I asked the cinema star, deep in my head, where no one, not even Nurse Elma, could hear. I suppose I asked it too quietly, because the cinema star didn't appear to hear it at all, she just kept singing, and then Nurse Elma, seeing that I was staring at the cover girl, mistook my gaze for one of enjoyment rather than investigation and folded the magazine in half with a resentful flourish.

I could hear the artist pause at her easel while taking in this action, and then the movements of the brush resumed. I listened as it described my features. It seemed to mean well, but it moved slowly, as if it were having a difficult time deciding what to do with my face. I wanted to apologize to the artist for being so broken and ugly. I wanted to give her something redemptive to focus on.

Because beauty redeems the world, that's what Papa always said. He'd said it at a time when I couldn't imagine why the world might require redemption at all, a time when I wasn't even certain what redemption was. I was sure that Pearl felt the same way as Papa about beauty's redemptive powers, and for the first time, I found myself wanting to know if they were together at last, in the same place. Fortunately, Nurse Elma saved me from reaching the conclusion of this grim thought when she rose from her chair and stalked across the room to smack me on the head with her magazine.

“Don't look like that, Stasha.”

“Like what?”

“Like you are about to cry. It changes the features too much.”