Mischling (24 page)

Everywhere in Kolo, a sign, a message. Bits of paper leafed across the train station's walls. People wrote where they were going, where they'd been, who they were looking for. They wrote who they had been but were careful not to write who they had become.

I had never been to this town before, but I knew it by its former inhabitants: Kolo was a transfer point for Jews who were rounded up and deported to the Lodz ghetto. A couple of these captives became Papa's friends; they had met with him secretly in our ghetto basement. Papa's friends, they spoke mournfully of the town's history, its former hospitality to Jewish craftsmen. Their Kolo was not the one I saw from the windows of our train. This town, once so bucolic with its windmills and rivers, had become yet another place for Himmler to praise for its eradications.

I could hardly bear to look at it. I focused instead on the signs and the names.

Once, I saw Feliks scrape his name into the seat before us when he thought I wasn't looking. He performed this task with a hurried shame, embarrassed by the futility of the gesture and his compulsion to perform it. Because nobody was looking for us. Nobody even wrote our names anywhere. Nobody wrote,
If you are reading this, my greatest prayers have been
answered, because it will mean that you are not dead after all, you are just away from me, which is the same thing, but somewhat more remediable.
I always wanted to write that to Pearl. But there was no room for such a lengthy message among those many names and scrawls. So many names—they darted across every available surface with violent urgency.

I would be lying if I said that I did not look for my name among them, written in Mengele's script. Because I was certain that he was looking for me still. On any one of these message depots—at the stations, on the backs of train seats—I told myself, he would have to be looking for us. I was happy that he was gone, yes, happy that I had to hunt him down, because this would be a greater demonstration of my love for Pearl. But I couldn't imagine why he was so willing to abandon me, his most special experiment. I was beginning to think I had never mattered at all.

I was a broken half afloat in a great nowhere, and the trains were determined to keep me this way. Let me say this about those days, when the war was still a war, but one soon to end, when refugees were roaming and tanks lay overturned on their backs like great tortoises and one was wise to avoid the marching streams of any soldiers, be they Soviet or German: These trains we never should have trusted again, they appeared to be our only way home. And so people packed themselves into the cars quite willingly and looked the other way when they failed to arrive at their stated destinations. I marveled at our collective belief in an eventual safety.

While the trains did not take us back to Auschwitz, they appeared determined to strand and confuse us. Their only real benefit was that they sheltered us from the snow, and we paid nothing for them. Feliks and I, we'd sit two in a seat, and when a conductor happened along to squint at us, we had only to shove up the arms of our furred sleeves and show him our numbers. Their blueness purchased whatever direction the train cared to carry us.

After leaving the straw temple, we had days of halts and reversals. We went east, and then west, our heads bobbing listlessly on our necks, our bodies jostled in our seats. And when morning slipped into dusk and we entered Kolo, we witnessed yet another ending: the tracks. A conductor urged us out. This was not a hotel, he explained. We huddled into each other, tried to act as if we didn't understand his Polish, tried to bargain this stalled train car into a place to sleep. But though the conductors weren't bothered by letting refugees ride the cars for free, our true comfort was another matter. We were plucked up by our ears, led to the car door, and forced out into the ice, where we wasted no time tumbling down an embankment. For once, even Feliks was slow to stand. The contents of Bruna's precious sack spilled out over the snow, and we leaped about, retrieving the one and a half potatoes and the bottle of water, the remnants of our sustenance.

Defeated, we trudged into the woods and found a barn. It appeared innocent. A pig lived there, fatter than even a pig had any right to be, and a sad-eyed Blenheim cow who mooed in pain, her udders overwhelmed by milk. Feliks showed me how to milk her, and I was impressed by this skill. We were cheered by the spaciousness of our accommodations—the cow and pig occupied two of the four stalls, and we claimed the furthermost slot, with the blankness of a vacant stall beside us. So sheltered, we drew our furs fast around us and dreamed of a morning when we no longer had to be Bear and Jackal.

Sleep comes so easy when you know you will wake to milk.

But when we did wake, it was not to sustenance but panic, to the neigh of a horse and the sight of a pair of boots, their muddy heels visible through the crack between the wall and the floor. As the owner of the boots secured the horse, Feliks and I tried to make ourselves very still; we flattened ourselves against the floor and possumed, and we would have gotten away with this, I'm sure, if it were not for Feliks's sneeze. This noise sent the wearer of the boots shuttling out of the horse's stall and into ours. She was an older woman in clean clothes and a decent coat. Her round cheeks bobbed like suns on her face, and the eyes above them were cloudy blue and suggested near blindness. I did not like the look of them, but when she approached us I convinced myself that they were kind, because we were lost and starving, living on beggar's time, and you can only live on beggar's time for so long until everyone starts to look like your salvation. She regarded us thoughtfully, as if calculating a move, and then, having reached her decision, plunged toward us with an open embrace.

“Children!” the woman cried. “I have been looking for you! I thought I'd never see you again!” She took us into her arms. She was a large woman, but she'd been diminished still—one could tell from her grasp; loose wings of flesh were enfolded in her sleeves. “Never run off again!”

I wriggled from her arms, huddled myself tightly against the wall of the barn.

“We are not yours,” I said, calm. “I am Stasha Zamorski. Pearl's twin.”

“Oh? Forgive me. And this is Pearl, you say?” She gave Feliks a punch on the arm.

“Hardly. He is a boy. But you're right to recognize him as a twin.”

“I could've sworn you were my own lost children,” she lamented. “I thought you'd returned. But maybe you can help me find them? I will give you food and shelter in exchange.”

Feliks gave me a look, the kind of look that said this was my decision. For all the woman's suspiciousness, he had been disarmed by the prospect of comforts. If we had not been tossed about by trains and weather, if we had full bellies and proper shoes, and if the world hadn't been overwhelmed by white, I'm sure he would not have considered it at all. He pulled me aside for a consultation.

“If need be,” he said, “do you think we could overtake her?”

I vowed that I would never allow harm to come to either of us. He received this skeptically but turned to the woman to present his plan.

“We will stay for an evening,” he told her. “Just long enough—the girl is weak, you see. A meal too? We are hungry. And perhaps some bread when we go?”

“My home and bread are yours,” the woman soothed.

“It is a deal, then,” Feliks declared. “Madame, we will be eager to assist you in the search for your children.” He gave a little bow, one shockingly graceful in its bent. And we followed the woman as she picked her way through the snow flanking the barn and onto a little path, where there stood a cottage so humble and white, like a child's overturned top, that I couldn't imagine any harm might come to us within it. Still, I knew that trusting such a stranger was a gamble. The woman's milky eyes did not warm to us, and as we walked in the company of her detached and blighted stare, I began to wonder if her true flaw was not a matter of her sight but her disposition.

My deathlessness was useful in situations like these. But Feliks? I had to make certain that no harm befell him.

The woman's lodging was simple. She had a rag-covered bed, snowshoes by the door. A drab braided rug, the usual harvest wreath. A bucket posed to capture a leak. The low ceiling made giants of us both, and the woman walked at a curvature so as not to crack her head. What must it be like, living at such an angle? She was crooked, I thought, but she must have been a good mother still, because the cottage was without spot or stain. The bench was cherry and polished, the cupboards plain and clean. A shiny hatchet lorded over the table from its nail on the wall.

“Your children—how long have they been missing?” I asked.

The woman didn't have a ready answer. I asked again. But she appeared to be a little deaf in addition to being nearly blind. I was not beyond sympathizing with her conditions and so I did not press the issue but simply watched as she busied herself with cutting a loaf of bread. It was then that the starkness of the house came to my full attention. I found it odd that there were no pictures of these lost children. Or any sign, really, that they—or anyone—had ever lived here. Not a book appeared on the shelves. There was no piano, no cat sleeping in a cat basket. Before my family's time in the ghetto, we had lived in a realm of objects, and sometimes I'd lie awake at night wherever Feliks and I happened to be sheltering ourselves and practice the memories of those things. I'd recite the details of Mama's dishware, the color of Zayde's telescope. I felt so sorry for the lost children because wherever they were, they had little to cling to in the way of reminiscences—this was a place where the candle had naught to flicker over. And then I saw the wishbone on the mantel followed by a procession of tiny ceramic angels. The sight of these objects comforted me—if I were a missing child of such origins, I would surely carry these tokens in my heart.

I asked the woman for her children's names, their faces. Instead of answering these simple questions, she poked me in the ribs, in the manner of one titillated by malnourishment, and insisted that I eat.

Feliks ate merrily, but I couldn't consume a thing. Eating bread required a talent that I no longer possessed. Raw rabbit—of that I was more deserving, as a jackal. But the civilized loaf of my past? Every piece of me had something to say about the fact that I did not deserve this bread if my sister no longer lived. What I am saying is this—I had no choice but to vomit on the table.

“What is wrong with you?” the woman cried, her voice entertaining a temperament quite different than the one we'd been introduced to. She raised her arm in the air. I could not tell if she was reaching for the hatchet on the wall or if she was settling for giving me a more standard beating, but I dove beneath the table and pulled Feliks down with me. “Vermin,” she muttered, nabbing a broom from its corner. Thus equipped, she stalked across the floor and bent toward our hiding place. With the handle of her weapon, she issued blow after blow, striking us at our shoulders, our backs. We fled, overturning the table in our wake, and parted to different corners of the cottage. The woman closed in on Feliks's corner. Her broom handle flew about it in a chaotic fury, inflicting pain wherever it could on his body, and in a most disorganized fashion. Feliks shook, overcome by the reasonable fear of the mortal. But he did not cry out, not even when the broom handle landed on his spine with an audible crack. This crack made it clear: Now was the time to fulfill my vow of protection. My hand took up my hidden bread knife, and I crept behind the woman—she was so occupied with her abuse that my step escaped her notice.

But a knock at the door, merry and crisp, interrupted my quest.

The woman paused in her viciousness and her white eyes shifted; she crossed the room to the door and put an eye to the peephole. The sight it contained cheered her, and we understood why when we saw her company: a young man and a young woman in gray uniforms, thunderbolts riding their chests. The man introduced himself and the woman as heads of operations at the extermination camp of Chelmno. He was Heinrich and she was Fritzi.

“May you be blessed!” declared the woman, a nervousness riding the edge of her voice.

The man explained that Chelmno had been overtaken by the Russians. The camp officers had made a valiant effort to do away with the prisoners; to the very end, they'd risked themselves, even while fleeing, trying to leave no Jew alive. Unfortunately, the Jews, they were scattered all over the countryside. But Heinrich and Fritzi and those who had been with the cause from the beginning were not going to let them scamper into hiding.

“I have two finds that will thrill you, then, I am sure,” the woman said, ushering both of them inside. She gave us a nasty glance as we clung together, pressed into a single corner, shaking in our coats. She fluttered about, pouring tea and proudly displaying us to her guests.

“These two, they will not leave here alive. My husband and I killed Jews together for years. It was a holy obligation. You see that hatchet on the wall there? A good weapon against their skulls. I used to merely collect children for him, and he did the work, but now—he is gone.”

The heads of Chelmno offered their condolences on her loss.

“Yes, he was a good man, so dedicated to the cause. Of course, finding Jews became more difficult over the years, due to the führer's efficiency! Once, we discovered a hiding place full of them in the woods, and from time to time, they even gave themselves directly to our hands, begging for food at the door. Collecting them is a much harder process without him. Now, if I am lucky enough to stumble upon them, I have to make them trust me. So I fill their bellies and then kill them while they sleep. You must understand my intentions—how else could I put these two at ease but with food?”