Mischling (25 page)

“A good plan,” Heinrich said. “But such a terrible waste of bread!”

“I know,” the woman lamented. “But I have no other way to gain their trust. I can't read, and we have no toys. I suppose I should have sung to them?” This last bit—it was tinged with sarcasm. I could tell that she was displeased by their reaction. She'd expected praise and thanks, an outsize appreciation of her cruelty. Strangely, this had not been offered.

Heinrich stalked over to our corner and squinted at us. I am not sure how much of me there was to see because I had so thoroughly curled myself into Feliks's side. We were just bear fur on jackal fur, trembling. The old woman joined Heinrich in looking at us.

“Maybe you will do the honors?” she said. “Or you could hold them down for me?” Her hand, mapped with green veins, clawed at the collar of my coat. I wondered why I was not running. Feliks tried to bolt, but in his fright, he tripped over his own feet and collapsed. Fritzi chuckled at his clumsiness, but somehow, her laughter did not strike me as wholly cruel. And then, oddly, the attentions of the heads of Chelmno turned to our hostess.

“You sing, you say?” Heinrich asked breezily.

“Yes,” the woman said, her forehead crumpled at the detour of this question, and she rose up and smoothed her hands over her apron. “I was trained as a girl, in another life. What would you like to hear?”

“‘Zog Nit Keyn Mol'” was the ready answer.

“This is a Yiddish song?” the woman wondered.

“You do not know it?” Fritzi asked, and, drawing her pistol and pointing it at the woman, she added, “It has become very popular in the camps and the ghettos.”

Together, the two soldiers sang a song Feliks and I knew well, the partisan's song, the song of the Jewish resistance:

And when they came to that last line, the old woman opened her mouth and began to squeak. Maybe it was an effort to appease them by joining them; we had no idea. We didn't hear a glimmer of her singing voice. The woman might have had a fine voice, one for the ages, one that would have pleased Hitler and Mengele both. Perhaps she was owed a far different life on the back of her musicality. I would never know. We never had a chance to hear her, because as soon as she opened her mouth a bullet buzzed into it, like a bee returning to a hive, and traveled through the back of her gray head. Upon its exit, the bullet performed a little jig into the wall and there it stayed, very still and quiet, as if it were aware that its work was done. The avengers coolly stepped over the old woman and loped around the scene they'd created, taking in the wishbone and the angels, their faces shiny with youth and excitement.

“You should finish eating,” Fritzi said. Feliks rose, bumping his head on the table once again in his flurry, and reclaimed his seat. He tucked into his bread with zeal. I followed suit.

“Are those your real names?” Feliks asked.

No answer. They continued to stalk around the room. Fritzi had the attitude of someone at the intermission of a performance she was quite enjoying. Heinrich was equally mild. He took the third seat beside us at the table.

“May I?” Heinrich asked. He walked two fingers toward my plate, as if his hand were a person.

I pushed my plate to him. He didn't even notice that it was edged with my bile from my encounter with the bread. He was too busy admiring his partner. She took the cap from her head and it was then that I saw that her blond hair was coal-black at its roots. She cracked her knuckles as if preparing for a fight, and then she spat on the woman, on her clouded eyes, on her apron. Not a particle of her escaped this assault. Fritzi even took care to spit on the pool of blood on the floor. She spat and spat until her throat went dry, and then she eyed my milk, sniffed its whiteness suspiciously, and drank it down to the last drop. Her black eyes flashed above the rim of the cup like two ships traveling the horizon.

A great portion of difficulty with deathlessness is that you have an eternity to wonder who you have become. The death of a twin doubles this predicament. Though I would never cease being Pearl's half, I realized in that moment that I would not mind at all becoming someone like this dark-eyed girl avenger. My look for her must have been too admiring, because she turned from me with a grimace, as if to ward off my reverence, and declared, “You owe your life to no one.”

I started to argue this point with her, because she didn't know Pearl, she had no notion that my life was owed entirely to my sister, but I could tell that the girl avenger didn't care to debate; she was too busy rummaging through drawers and cupboards and throwing objects in her sack. All the meat, all the cheese, all the bread. She took a box of cigarettes, handed one to the young man, and lit it for him while the corpse lay at their feet. Between them, there moved a feeling, something sweet and strangely innocent, and they didn't even seem to remember the corpse that they stood over until the girl avenger began to fuss with a spatter of blood that had lit upon Heinrich's breast pocket, bright as a boutonniere. Her fingertips lingered there, just for a moment, and then Heinrich returned to our table with a look of satisfaction and winked.

He ate some more, chewing quietly like a gentleman, and then he looked at Feliks and he looked at me. We did not need to show him our numbers. He knew who we were.

“And what will you do with your freedom now? You have plans for your young lives?”

He handed Feliks his cigarette and nodded for him to take a puff.

“My father the rabbi, he liked to say,” Feliks began, attempting a puff before collapsing in a coughing fit. “He liked to say that the dead die so that the living may live. I did not understand that until now. In the case of our torturers, I think it more than applies.”

Heinrich took this in appreciatively and raised his glass to the sentiment. Feliks had the look of one who had met his hero. I can't say that I felt any different. I wanted to tell the avenger my secret—I wanted him to know that while I appreciated that he had saved me, I hadn't required saving. It was only Feliks who was in danger. But all of the room was too absorbed with making plans.

“I assume you have had many torturers, though,” Heinrich said. “It is quite ambitious to want to take them all on.”

“We only want one,” Feliks said. “Josef Mengele.”

“You are too young to kill.” This was the girl's opinion.

“I watched them open my brother,” Feliks protested.

“It would ruin you, to kill. Look at us. We are ruined,” the girl said.

I wanted to argue that they didn't appear ruined by any measure. To the contrary, they had a glow I hadn't seen since the war began. Feliks pressed on, determined to secure their blessing for our mission. “My brother was my twin,” he said. “When the knife went through him, it went through me too.”

“You are not strong enough.” Fritzi clucked.

“That knife goes through me every day,” Feliks said. “And still I live.”

Heinrich and Fritzi exchanged glances. Will you think it strange if I say that love strung itself between them at every interval?

“Very well,” Heinrich said. “Who can argue with the determination of the freed?”

So began our training. Heinrich spent the next hour schooling us on the proper use of a revolver. For my first shot, I took aim at the five ceramic figures on the woman's mantel. Even angels, you see, did not escape my fury, as they'd been quite content to observe our sufferings without intervention. The first angel splintered in the air, obedient. It knew what it had done. Then Feliks took a turn. We picked those angels off, one by one; we doomed their fragile souls to nothingness. After we'd each killed two angels, we turned to each other, both expecting a fight over this last murder. But all this shooting, it had a strangely civilizing effect.

“It is yours,” we said in unison.

The avengers were frustrated by our manners. “On with it!” both cried.

And so Feliks took aim at the last remaining figure; he did so with great relish, and when the bullet struck this final angel, the avengers flung their sacks over their shoulders.

Of course, this made us wish that there were more ceramic angels, enough to keep killing forever, so that our new companions might remain with us, too intrigued by our executions to go. But they were determined to leave us. To soothe our distress, they addressed our need for better weaponry and treated us as peers in their mission. Fritzi said, quite airily, that we could keep the gun. Then Heinrich took the hatchet from the wall and handed it to me.

“It is a bit heavy,” he said.

“We will manage it,” Feliks said. He came up beside me and tested its edge with a fingertip, then he wasted not a minute in stealing it from my hands. “This hatchet didn't know what it was doing before. I will make it know its place now, in the heart of Mengele. And if not the heart, the guts. And if not the guts, the back.”

I saw them mask their amusement. They were not successful in this. If they thought us a joke, though, they were fully committed to our comedy, because Fritzi bent toward me with a delicate smallness cupped in her hand. At first, I thought it was a pearl. But this misperception was due to my bad eye. Looking closer, I saw that it was a pill. A pill, Fritzi explained, that would kill one instantly after consumption. It was a pea-size ampule, walled with brown rubber, and its core was fatal: a concentrated solution of potassium cyanide. She deposited it into my hand, curled my fingers around it, and advised me to drop it into Mengele's drink before a toast, first crushing it to release its powers of brain-death and heart-stop.

I was overwhelmed by this. For death to seat itself in a pill held by my own hand! For vengeance to slip down Mengele's throat unawares! This pill had charms that I did not. It outranked my bread knives and, possibly, Feliks's new gun and hatchet. In my estimation, its powers matched the amber magic of Mengele's needle. I could only hope that handling it would not corrupt me as the needle had surely corrupted him.

I nudged the little poison pill along down one of the paths of my open palm, expecting it to unfurl like a beetle. It seemed like a living thing. On impulse, I put my ear to it—I had to decode its whisper.
I will always be strong enough,
it whispered.
In me, there rests a century's worth of justice.

It had Pearl's voice, I thought. Or was it my voice? Did we still sound the same, now that she had taken on the duty of being dead, and I the role of the bereft?

I was about to ask the poison pill what it meant by this, but then I saw that everyone was watching me. Feliks blushed when I caught his eye, and he redirected his gaze, as if embarrassed by his association with me. The avengers chuckled freely at my haze.

But the corpse? Feliks asked what we were to do with it. That is for you to decide, they said hastily. They were eager to return to killing. From the doorway, we watched them enter a car, a sleek, boot-shiny thing with a Nazi flag waving pitifully from its stalk. Instead of a good-bye, they cried for revenge.
“
Zemsta!”
they shouted, the word encased in blue puffs of cold that burst in midair, and then they sped away, and they no longer belonged to us but to the realm of Nazi impostors who sought justice at every opportunity.

We lingered in the doorway and then we remembered the body on the floor. We looked at the hearth and its severance of angels.

“What now?” Feliks wondered aloud, and he tossed a ceramic wing into the fire.

A shared thought moved between us. It flickered in him; it sparked in me. With the old woman's broom handle, we fed the flames to the curtains. The whole house was hungry for the fire; the flames moved over it in tongues, and sparks like birds fluoresced in the night. We watched it consume the rug, the table, the wreath, the wishbone. But as soon as it began to nibble at the woman's body, the flames crowning her temple, we fled without looking back. I was afraid of what I might turn into with such a sight in my mind. So I plodded on with Feliks and our new weapons; we stumbled through the snow, back to the barn that had initially promised comfort. The horse greeted us. He knew how we needed him. He saw the heaviness of our hatchet, our gun, our food—there was no way, his eye argued, that we could continue without him. After all the evil tours of his master, he owed us this, he insisted.

“He is old,” Feliks said sorrowfully, stroking Horse's flank. “We would do better to eat him.”

“Who would take care of the slaughter?” I wondered. Maybe Fritzi was right. Maybe we weren't suited to killing at all. I could not confront the fullness of the question, because what could I think of myself if I were unable to execute vengeance on my sister's behalf?

On Horse's back, we traveled on, tripping across all the fallen things of the forest, making our way toward a future we weren't sure wanted us at all.

Day One

I would reacquaint myself with what a day was as we traveled east toward Krakow. During the course of this journey, I'd see the sun and moon alternate, taking turns in their duties.

The sun took the hunger, the mile after mile, the swollen and weary feet. The moon took the nightmare, the unreliable road, the train tracks with the sudden ending, all that was no more. I was not sure which had the worse part of this deal. All I knew was that both shone.

“Look ahead,” Twins' Father instructed. “I'll look everywhere else for you.”

So we looked ahead, only ahead. But all I could see was what lay above me. First, I was swaddled in a woolen coat, and then a sheepskin rug, and then another rug, and these protections enwombed me up to my eyes. Above these layers was a sheet of cold air, a snap of frost, and this wintry skyscape was interrupted by my breath-clouds. I watched the little breath-clouds bear themselves into being and float up to Miri. She was most of the sky above me as she pushed my wheelbarrow.

Who needs a sun or a moon when you have Miri?

With myself below her, a dull, injured planet, she was determined to assume the responsibilities of both.

In our exodus, we were determined to make our leader proud, to conduct ourselves like the soldiers he treated us as. Some troops sing as they march, but we did not. In the beginning, we didn't speak, not even a whisper. All it took, we told ourselves, was attracting the interest of one bad man, or even a man who was not bad but fallen on desperate times. With these thoughts in mind we skittered down the demolished roads.

“How is she?” a boy was asking Miri. She nodded to me.

“Pearl, this is Peter. He is your friend. He has many friends. This is true, isn't it, Peter?”

Peter affirmed that it was. At least the part that we were friends, he and I. He didn't know about the other part. Most of his other friends were—

Miri would not let him finish that sentence. “Describe yourself, Peter,” she instructed. “Leave nothing out.”

Peter said his parents were dead. He was fourteen. At Auschwitz—

“Don't speak of it,” Miri commanded. “Say who you are, what you do with yourself.”

Peter swallowed audibly. He said that once, he had stolen a piano—

“This is Peter,” Miri interrupted, her voice firm. “He is one of those people who is so smart that I'm not sure what he will do with himself. Always helping too,” Miri added. “I'm sure you have faults, Peter? But I can't think of any right now.”

I caught Peter staring at me with pity. Staring—that might be one of his faults, I thought.

“She is better than she should be,” Miri told him. “Hardly remembers still.”

“She must remember,” he said in hushed disbelief.

“Put yourself in a cage,” Miri tried to whisper, but I heard it all. “And then put the cage in a dark room. Once in a while, have a hand come through the top of the cage. Sometimes, the hand will give you food. Mere crumbs. Other times, the hand might shine a light or ring a bell or douse you with water—”

Miri could not bring herself to fully color the details of this scenario. I watched her grip on the handles tighten. Peter asked what the purpose of such an experiment might be.

Miri gave one explanation: Mengele wanted to know what might happen when identical twins, the ones most bonded to each other, experienced separation.

It was true, in its simplicity. But I could've given Peter another explanation: I was put in that cage because I loved too much. I had a great bond with Someone, a connection much envied by this man. He was cold and empty and he could not form attachments, not with his family or wife or children. All that coursed through him was ambition, and this empty man, like so many empty men—he was determined to make history. One day, he decided that the best way to do so was by discovering how two girls who loved each other too much might react to being parted. He tore us accordingly. I went to my cage, and she—I did not know. All I knew was that before he installed me in my cage, he hobbled me at my ankles, like an animal you want to keep but don't care to chase.

But just by my thinking of this story, the man's face began to follow me. I could not say a word. To rid me of that face, I asked after Someone's. If I could see hers, I thought, his would leave me.

“Were we identical?” I wondered aloud.

“The same,” Miri confessed.

“Where is she now?” I asked. I knew of the death marches. I'd heard about the tumult when the Soviets entered, the many lives that had been snuffed out. And there was the unspeakable—Mengele. My Someone was extraordinary—surely he had known this; perhaps he'd taken her? There were so many terrible things that could have happened that it seemed foolish to hope that a good one might arise, but still, I thought Miri might present me with one.

Miri did not speak to any of these possibilities. But in her eyes, there surfaced a sadness, a bright and mournful quiver that said I was the sole survivor of my family. And then, as if she were desperate to change the subject, she enlisted Peter to join her in the task of telling me about things that were in the world we were returning to.

Miri listed places. Parks, she'd say. Open spaces where you could have a picnic, which was a meal taken outside. Museums, which were places with pictures and statues. Synagogues, places where you could assemble and study and pray. Peter focused on objects. Telescopes that showed you stars. Clocks that showed you time. Boats, which were vessels much like my wheelbarrow, but vessels that moved over water. Instruments, he said, and then added, as if this was supposed to have some meaning to me, pianos.

This was the second mention of this object. It did not have meaning to me. But he could repeat it all he wanted—I loved hearing Peter and Miri overexplain the world to me.

I could have corrected their overexplanations if I wanted to. But I did not, for good reasons.

For one, explaining the world gave them pleasure. For two, it made me whole.

I noticed, though, that neither attempted to explain a train station to me when we slunk onto an emptied platform that evening, Twins' Father having decided that his little troop could go on no more. The other children slept, cocooned in rags, side by side, but I remained in my wheelbarrow, like an overgrown baby in a filthy cradle. Miri lay on the ground beside me, her hand raised to clutch the lip of the wheelbarrow even as she slept. The snores of my fellow children rose and fell, and I tried to pick out Peter's snores from the rest, but another sound took priority.

The nightmares of Twins' Father drifted past my ear as he defended himself in his sleep—who would be so foolish, he said, to create twins where there were none! Hearing his protest, I wondered if it was safe to dream, if there was any way to avoid this white-coated man as I slept. To make myself feel better, I renamed him. I called him No One.

“Good-bye, No One,” I whispered. But the ache in my hobbled feet claimed that he would be with me always, even if I ever managed to take a step.

Though morning came, it did not bring a train with it. Yet again, the sun had let us down. On foot and by wheelbarrow, we continued. And on this day, we began to sing a little, but haltingly, and with much argument as to which song we might sing.

None of Twins' Father's songs were appropriate, as he was a military man. Miri's songs were too serious and romantic and sorrowful. The only song we could agree on was “Raisins and Almonds,” because all welcomed the thought of food. The lullaby sank us into our memories as we trod forward, and I felt as if I were not in the wheelbarrow at all but in Mama's lap. We sang:

On the third rendition of this song, we were swarmed by a dozen women, all of whom had been sitting against trees at the edge of a forest.

“Are you the last of Auschwitz?” a woman asked. “We are waiting for our children.” Her face fell. “Should we wait? Is there reason to wait any longer?”

“There are others still,” Twins' Father said, his voice hesitant.

The woman nodded at this information, receiving it with a guarded excitement.

“Children among them?”

“There are bound to be some at the camp yet—the Red Army has control. With me, there is thirty-five.”

The woman was awed by this meager number; her face—I would never forget the wince of hope in it.

“Do you have a Hiram among yours? Little Russian boy.”

“I do!” Twins' Father turned and addressed the crowd. “Hiram! To the front!”

A snippet of boy was pushed to the fore by the rest of the children. And then another small Hiram followed. The woman scanned both Hirams and then sank to her knees.

“Not mine,” she whispered. “Not mine.”

Everyone was too still for too long a time. It was as if all in our caravan were felled by the woman's grief and silence, and we were able to stir only when she rose and shook the dust from her skirts. She turned to resume her post at the tree trunk.

“Children, they draw other children, you know,” Twins' Father said to her. “They see their own kind passing by, and they feel safe. You should join us. Maybe they will see us and find you.”

“I leave a sign wherever I go,” the woman said. She pointed to the tree trunk she'd been leaning upon. I assumed that she'd carved her child's name on it—I could not read it because the effects were indecipherable. Her knife must have been dull, her hand too shaky. “But it's not enough. Who is to say that they will even try to read it?”

I wanted to reassure her that children in captivity tend to read all they can. I wanted to tell her that as I traveled in my wheelbarrow, I was desperate to see any words on the horizon, words that could blot out the words of the gate I'd left behind two days before. I wished that the carved names could compete with the gate's power. I wished that they stood as upright and clear. Because the only fault with the woman's carved message was that it was tired and faint; every letter announced resignation.

Twins' Father was too good to critique the marks she left, as poor as they were, but he took his own knife and neatly reinscribed her message, and after he was finished with this task, he took up her pack and waved for her to join our procession.

“My friends,” she wondered. “What of them?” And he looked at the women who'd returned to their trees, all of them so varied in age and suffering, and indicated that they should join us too. All he asked, he said, was that they record their facts on his list, to facilitate his communication with any authorities who might question our passage.

The women sprang from the trees and it was then that we saw that each trunk they had leaned against bore a message, a name, a plea. They would have covered the whole forest with the words if they were able. The face of Twins' Father—this had to be one of the few times I saw it become so overwhelmed with sadness while he was awake, outside the grip of one of his nightmares. But I watched him steady himself and pass about his list, and soon enough, the women fell to the rear of our march. They tried to mother us, and we did our best to resist their attentions politely.

We already had mothers, we wanted to say.

I thought of mine every second. I thought of her, and I begged her and Zayde to show me Someone's face. But neither responded. Had death forced them to abandon me? Or were they now so worried for my future that they couldn't bring themselves to rejoice in my survival? My fingers searched my face; they tried to know it so they could know Someone's too, but all they found were wounds, and two eyes that had seen too much.

We walked beside swarms of refugees. Face after face, body after body, all of them alive and searching, and not a single one of them mine. Was who I searched for already dead? I asked the sun and the sun told me to ask the moon—it claimed that the moon had taken the responsibility of answering inquiries with ugly potential. The sun was quite squirmy on this issue, I thought. It turned its back on me. And then a darkness lowered itself onto my eyes. The darkness was Peter's hand, attempting protection.

“Don't look!” Peter instructed. He was pushing my wheelbarrow at the time. I shrugged off the shield of his touch. I wanted to see what he saw. It sounded like horror. And there it was—

The body lay up the road, in a ditch. It was not a whole body.

“I told you not to look,” Peter said.

“It is her,” I whispered.

“It will never be her,” Peter said. And to prove it, he defied Miri's instructions and veered close to the ditch so that I could peer at this corpse.

I did not know if it was male or female. I had no notion of its age—it was faceless and scalpless, and someone had cut off its legs so as to repossess its boots. That's what Peter told me when he saw that I refused to avert my gaze. He said that the Soviets had superior boots, and whenever the Wehrmacht found them, they took these boots for themselves in the most desecrating way possible.

“So, you see,” he assured me, “it can't be your Someone. Your Someone would never have such boots.”

I tried to find comfort in this. I could not. Did this mean that Someone was out in this winter with thin shoes?

“Look ahead, only ahead!” Twins' Father warned us.

“What does she look like?” I asked Peter as we left the body behind.

“She looked like you.”

“I don't know what I look like.”

“I bet you look like your mother,” Peter said. “Do you remember what your mother looked like?”