Mischling (17 page)

“Should I smile?”

She raised her magazine again, ready to issue another crack, but then thought better of it—I saw her glance up, fearful that Uncle might have entered the room unseen, as he so often did.

“Do you look like yourself when you smile?” She smirked.

I look like my past self, I wanted to say, but I remained silent. Nurse Elma gave me an instructive slap on the cheek. I wondered if it would leave a mark. If it did, I was sure that the artist would not be permitted to render it.

“Of course you don't smile!” Elma crowed. “Smiles change faces too. What the doctor wants here is accuracy. Stare straight ahead, eyes open, mouth still. So simple, any infant could do it!”

She then returned to her chair, and contented herself with her magazine. I felt sorry for the cover girl—it wasn't her fault that she was a picture in a magazine that was forced to participate in Nurse Elma's abuse.

As instructed, I kept my gaze straight ahead. I focused on the brick-edged window that sat above the artist, hoping that a singing or cooing bird might light on the sill and provide the artist with something to listen to as she worked. Since Pearl's disappearance, I'd noticed that animal life had become increasingly rare in Auschwitz. There was little hope of any arriving just because I wanted it to, and when no bird appeared, I put one there with my mind. In its beak, I made it carry a sprig of olive branch. But the bird kept dropping it. Even my own imagination, it seemed, had abandoned me.

I was stirred from this fantasy by Nurse Elma. She rose with her magazine and, with a barking order for me to behave, banged out the door.

With her exit, the sound of the brush increased. I saw the artist peer around the edge of the canvas, exposing a single eye. The eye was sunken and dark, afflicted, but illness hadn't starved it of warmth.

“I'd like to see you smile,” the artist said in a voice that matched the friendliness of the eye. There was something familiar in that voice, but I told myself that it was just the rasp it carried—that starved, battered edge that all prisoners eventually acquired. Still, there was something different about the artist's speech—even the coughing that ended her sentence had a rare charm.

“But Elma—”

“What does Elma know of art? She's just a monkey, a sham, a silly lady. Come now, give me a smile.”

I gave my best attempt.

“Wider now, show your teeth. Do I need to tell you a joke? How can I make you laugh?”

I told the artist that as hard as I tried to smile, I hadn't been able to in recent days. Jokes only hurt.

“A story, then,” she said. “I'll tell you a story about two girls. Would you like that?”

I nodded.

“Well, then,” the artist said. “I'm not so good at telling stories. But I'll try. There were two girls in Lodz. Twins. Exactly alike in every way. When the midwife left after the birth, their parents couldn't tell them apart. So their father put their first initials on their feet. The next day, when he bathed them, the letters washed away. The father was distraught. How could he know which girl was which? He tried to convince himself that it didn't matter. After all, the girls had only had their names for a day. How attached to them could they be? He put fresh letters on the bottoms of their feet and didn't say a word to his wife. Later that evening, he confessed his error. The wife only laughed. She whistled in front of the babies. The one that stirs at the whistle, she said, should be marked
S.
She whistled, but neither of the babies stirred. Then the father joined her, and the
zayde
and the
bubbe
too. They all whistled together and when the whistling didn't work, they clanged pots and pans over the cradle; they got out Zayde's clarinet and played even though no one could play well. They woke the whole neighborhood in their efforts to find out the babies' names. Still, neither baby responded. Already, both were living in their own world. It was as if they were content watching everyone scramble to tell them apart.”

“That wasn't a funny story,” I said. Or at least I think that's what I said; I might have said something else, because I was so overwhelmed by the artist's voice and her story. “And you should have told me years ago, Mama. Because all this time I have believed that I'm Stasha, but now I might be Pearl?”

The artist laughed the laugh I knew so well, and then she became Mama, my mama, though a Mama far removed from even the Mama of the cattle car.

“Is this your way of saying that you still won't smile?” she said. Or I think that's what she said. I'm not sure because her mouth was buried on the top of my head, since she'd risen from her seat to embrace me. Then, realizing the danger of this, she crept back.

We enjoyed the rapture of seeing and hearing and loving each other for the briefest of moments, and then—

“Where is your sister?” she whispered.

I told her I didn't know. I told her about “Come Make Me Happy.” I told her about Pearl's footprints and the field of poppies.

Mama dropped her brush. The tip of it was loaded with white; it streaked an ivory swath of erasure across the floor.

“That can't be,” she said. “I've only painted pairs of portraits. In every case, intact pairs only.” And just as her voice began to climb in its despair, she rose and walked toward me and she embraced me with all the remnants of her strength, and she cried with what was left of her tears. “I am so happy to see you, Stasha. I could not be happier.”

I buried my face in the star at her breast. There was so much I wanted to know. Why hadn't I seen her at the fence like so many of the other twins' mothers? I could see that Uncle was fulfilling his promise about the paint—though in a roundabout, very strange way—but was she getting enough bread? Was Zayde enjoying his swims at the pool?

As each question was asked, she gave me a kiss on the forehead, but at the last, she crumpled, and she begged me not to look at her—just for a moment, she said, don't look, she said, let's not do this this way, let's do it another way, when we're in a different world than this, a world that knows not to let such things happen. Don't look, she said.

I wish I hadn't disobeyed her.

Because when I saw her face, I saw Zayde. And he wasn't resting in his barracks; he wasn't throwing dice or talking politics or trading recipes or toasting the memory of a starling. He wasn't even dying in a swimming pool. There was no real hold, no center, nothing distinctive about what I saw. What had been done to him was the same that had been done to so many, and it continued still.

Seeing my horror, all Mama could do was say my name. She said it until she couldn't say it anymore, and then she started to say Pearl's. She said it over and over, as if in an incantation.

“Don't let them hear you,” I whispered.

And then the last bleat of her missing daughter's name shifted into a cough, and we heard steps approaching the door, and Mama jumped a step back from me, tripping over her ill-fitting shoes. We were lucky that she had been quick to move, as Nurse Elma soon sidled through the doorway with her awful face. She was not pleased to see my mother away from her easel and so close to me.

“I had to get a closer look,” she explained to Nurse Elma before scurrying back to her chair. “My eyes aren't what they should be. I couldn't get her mouth right.”

“A fine thing—an artist with bad eyes!” Elma scoffed. “Do you think you can get it right now?”

Mother's voice dropped.

“I swear,” she vowed. “I will make everything right.”

If Nurse Elma had been at all attentive, her curiosity would've been aroused by the little catch in my mother's voice, by the way that she looked at me as she returned to her work. She even managed to sneak a nod and a grin to me while Elma stalked about in search of things to criticize. She paced the brief length of the room, and then stopped.

“Why is there paint on this floor? So clumsy and wasteful.” She made a big show of her patent shoes as she toed the offending splotch of white.

“Clean it,” Elma ordered Mama. “You have made this mess.”

She flung a rag at my mother, who obediently stooped to the floor to pick it up but lapsed into another coughing fit. I took the rag before she could grasp it and moved it over the white paint until the rag was consumed.

The artist—because that was how I had to think of my mother while she was being kicked by Elma—apologized, and swore to be more careful. She greatly appreciated the opportunity to paint rather than work at the factory or in Canada or at the Puff.

Nurse Elma surveyed the canvas.

“I believe this will be adequate for our purposes.”

“I am not finished,” Mama said.

But Nurse Elma's face said different.

“Mama,” I whispered. “Don't be frightened when you see Pearl. Because you will see her—she will come back. And we are still the same, all of us—”

“You may leave, Stasha,” Nurse Elma said. She collared me in her usual style and led me out the door, so annoyed by my emotion and the tears of the artist that she failed to notice that I slipped the rag, an object blessed by my mother's touch, into the waistband of my skirt.

I slept that night with that rag pressed to my cheek. Some might think that strange, but I did it because my mother had just told me her belief. She believed us to be the last remaining members of our family. She hadn't told me in words but in the way that she'd painted my face. She'd painted it untrue, with hardly a real resemblance at all—this was a nice gesture toward subterfuge that I appreciated, but there was also an unmistakable element of mourning in it, the specific pierce of a mother's lamentation.

It was true, Mama was with us still. She painted our face, and, for a second or so, she and I had been restored to our real selves; we sat in our seats as if they were the chairs in our old house, and we looked at each other in a way that concealed our pain.

After I finished writing, I turned to the essential study of my anatomy book—this would keep me on my vengeful path. But before I could find my page, an ancient but boyish face appeared from above.

“Did he get your tongue?” Feliks asked.

I told him I was quiet because I'd seen my mother, and I hadn't seen my grandfather, but I'd heard of him.

Feliks responded with his own quiet, a quiet so still that it roused me.

“Do you think I'm stupid?” I asked in earnest. “For having thought I might outsmart him, change him, make him into who he should have been?”

Seeing that he had no intention of answering this, I climbed out of the barrel to face him directly.

“I think you like to see the good in people because there's been so much bad that you have to believe in good,” he opined.

“Do you do that too?”

“No. I see the good in knives instead of people. Although there's really no such thing as a bad knife or a good knife, so long as it cuts.”

“You sound like Bruna.”

“I have arrived at my viciousness over time.”

“I think I'm arriving there too.”

He grew excited.

“We can have a lot of fun that way,” he said.

“I'm not sure it will be fun at all,” I said. “But it will be necessary.”

He handed me one of Bruna's precious newspapers, a bit of contraband that circulated among the communists till it inevitably fell into the hands of a guard.

“I can teach you how to hate,” Feliks said. “Step one: Read this. It says that they are coming for us, the Russians—those planes we have seen are theirs. It also warns that the heads of Auschwitz will flee at any minute, that they will try to destroy the place and us with it. This means that we have little time left to take care of Mengele.” He shook the page at me meaningfully, urging me to read.

“I don't know Russian.”

“I can teach you that too. It is a good language for hating Nazis in. Perhaps better than Polish. We can save Polish for other things—that would make our fathers happy, wouldn't it?”

“I don't need your instruction. I hate them all. I always have. It is just that I hate Mengele the most.”

Never again, I swore, would I call him Uncle, not even in the interest of appearing innocent.

I saw that Feliks had a new respect for me as I spoke so nakedly of my hatreds, without the slightest attempt at concealment. He clung to every word I said, and wanted more.

“You should do something about this hate while he still trusts you,” he suggested.

“That has been my notion all along. I have just been waiting for my moment.”

“Do it now. You have an access to him that I envy. You know who else envies it? The whole of the Russian army; the American one too. We should exploit it.”

He handed me two bread knives.

“Now you have three weapons,” he said triumphantly. “That should be enough, I would think. I would recommend plunging the first into his thigh, the second into his neck, and the third into his heart. And when you get to the heart—give it a little twist and then kick it with your foot. Kick it till the heart squeaks and then you will know that he is dead.”

I was too overwhelmed by the presence of the knives themselves to even think of the noises a heart could make. I made a point of writing this fact down in my anatomy book before returning to our plans and admiring the new trio of my weaponry.

“Why did you have two bread knives, Feliks?”

“One was my brother's. He would have been honored for you to have it. It hasn't been easy, holding on to it. Bruna looked after my weapons when I was in the infirmary, though. She knew what these bread knives meant to me, and what the cause is. It's too bad that Bruna isn't close to Mengele—she would be sure to get the job done. No hesitation with her.” He lingered around the sentence admiringly, as if simply speaking of her brought him closer in his conquest of the whitest angel.