Mischling (28 page)

In answer to our knock, a scarfed head poked out of the doorway. The woman's mouth was jam red and she had curls to match—a colorful person, to be sure, and behind her form, we could spy glimpses of a room that was once very fine, a parlor with gilt paper and furniture whose shimmer had been dulled by age and neglect.

The woman squinted at us curiously, and just as she was about to address us, a drunken man tripped down the steps with promises to return for fun the next day. That was how we knew this was not an ordinary house. Miri turned away, but the woman slipped down the steps and clasped the doctor's shoulders. With warmth, she studied my guardian.

“Very pretty,” the woman said approvingly. “And I see you have a daughter to feed.” She regarded me with pity. “But I'm afraid I have too many girls already—”

“I'm so sorry,” Miri said to the woman. “We are in quite the wrong place.”

She glanced down at the paper, and the woman took note of it too. Her eyes went wide with recognition. “If these names mean anything to you”—and she took the slip of paper gravely from Miri's hands—“then you are precious. We must speak.” Introducing herself as Gabriella, she gestured for us to enter. “Do not worry,” she said, spying Miri's dubious expression. “Nothing untoward for your daughter to see. Just a matron and her girls and a cup of tea.”

So we followed the woman up the stairs, through the parlor, and into the kitchen, where a dour teenager, her limbs spotty with bruises, glared at Miri as if she believed her to be an old enemy. With a mocking bow, she pulled out a chair for my guardian.

“Away with you, Eugenia!” our hostess ordered, bewildered by this display, and the girl fled to join a trio lounging on the stairs, but not before casting a final look of disgust at Miri.

In the sweetly perfumed kitchen, Gabriella's softness increased; she lifted me from the wheelbarrow and onto a chair as if she performed this task every day of her life. Then she placed the note on the kitchen table and smoothed it lovingly with her hand, as if doing so achieved some proximity not just to the names, but to their owners.

“I left the note for my nieces,” she said. “I do not expect their mother to be alive. She was lame, like your girl. I know that the cripples did not last.”

Miri asked the woman if she had been at Auschwitz.

“I was in hiding here,” Gabriella said. “This place—it was not my choice. I used to be a dressmaker. But who needs pretty dresses in war? What I know of Auschwitz I learned from my girls. Two of them came here from…the Puff, I think they called it.”

Miri glanced at the girls on the stairs, the frills of their pastel underthings lending them the look of half-dressed parakeets. I knew she searched for Ibi. She did not find her.

“I have heard that twins were precious at Auschwitz. From Eugenia.” She indicated the bruised teenager, whose sulkiness had yet to abate. “She insisted there could be hope if one was a twin. I assumed my nieces to be dead even as I left that note. But now you come here with their names in your hand—and you would not bring bad news?”

I thought Miri's silence strange. It seemed simple enough to reveal herself as the guardian of Auschwitz's twins, a caretaker who was losing pieces of herself to the stress of keeping them whole. But she said nothing. I took this as a chance to act on her behalf. And so, with an adult tone borrowed from my caretaker, I asked Gabriella her nieces' names.

“Esfir and Nina,” the woman said, her voice wistful. Again, she caressed the note.

Esfir and Nina—these names brought back the memory of my first night in the Zoo. I thought of them dragging a dead girl from our bunk and stealing her clothes.

“Resourceful girls,” Miri said carefully. “I was their doctor.”

Gabriella was beautiful in this renewal of her hope. Her eyes shone; her cheeks pinked.

“Where are they now? Can I see them?” Her gaze darted about the house, taking in all that would have to change to make this place into environs befitting the two refugees.

Before Miri could say a word, Eugenia began to speak.

“A doctor in Auschwitz was not a doctor at all,” she declared angrily. “Ask her who she answered to. Ask her what she did.”

Bewildered by this outburst, Gabriella looked at Miri, whose eyes were needlessly lit with shame. Gabriella reached out her hand and tried to take the doctor's in it, as if the touch might prompt better news. Miri responded to this gesture with a start. Her tears were soundless, and they slid from eye to lips without the accompaniment of any expression at all. But in number, these tears—I have never seen them matched. One followed the other; they multiplied themselves; they became innumerable. I wondered how I might defend Miri.

And then the words presented themselves to me. At the time, they seemed to arise from a sweet nowhere, some place within me that I didn't know I had. I told Gabriella that I'd known her nieces too. They were good girls, kind girls, and their last act had been a brave one of which any auntie could be proud. I said that no sooner had the girls found themselves in the Zoo than they began to plot as to how to thwart the death-doctor. These plans consumed them down to the second. Always, they were sly, sidling up to him like little foxes and applying thick layers of flattery to his willing ego. They pretended to like what he liked, to think what he thought, and when they had him alone in a vulnerable moment, isolated within the confines of a car, they grasped the hilts of their bread knives, which were secreted in their pockets, and even though this plan proved unsuccessful, they had been more alive than anyone in that moment, and their plots to kill the doctor—however naive, however foolish—were the stuff of legend. Every day, I said, I thought of them. I thought of them with such an intensity that they often merged into a single person and I thought of this person as if she were my own heart.

Gabriella kissed the top of my head and held me tight; her embrace was such that I knew, in our closeness, that she imagined me into the girls she had lost. Her touch carried heartbreak, but her voice held only resolve.

“You have made life livable,” she whispered. I thought her grip might never ease, but she suddenly released me, and she walked across the room and then back, as if proving to herself that she could continue, and then an idea must have seized her because she darted to a closet by the entry. Out of it tumbled all manner of things: scarves, umbrellas, hats, even the tuft of a toupee. She sifted through this pile, reached to the back of the closet, and, triumphant, she presented to me what no one else in Krakow could.

“Left by a soldier,” she said. “A shrimp of a boy, and so ill—he is not coming back. Better for you to have these than some drunken lout!”

Though old, these crutches made me new. They made a version of me that could walk. Or at least, one that could do more than stumble. I could sidle a crutch forward and swing my feet before me, and even within a few steps, I saw the potential of what I might do. That I might remain broken, but I could be swift and broken, adaptable and broken, able and broken.

With these crutches at my sides, I could take better care of Miri.

As we left that place, Miri asked me where I'd summoned such a story, about plots and vengeance and dreaming this most impossible dream of Mengele's death, and I told her that it was something imprinted within me, and while I couldn't locate its origin, I knew it to be real, or half-real, or at least the warmth that ran through me—so intense that it cast a shadow I could pretend into family—felt realer than anything.

“Remember that,” she advised me. And so, it was official: this became my first true memory of my sister, the twin that I'd once had.

On our final morning I woke to the sun peering through the cracks in the boarded windows, tossing its ribbons over the rows of sleeping children on the floor, all of us cocooned in blankets and rags. Sophia lay on my left, snoring mightily, her arms flung over my chest. My crutches were on my right, and seeing them, I remembered: I could go anywhere by myself, and take Miri with me.

But on that day, they would try to turn me over to the Red Cross.

As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw the preparations for our parting. Miri and Twins' Father, they were huddled on the kitchen floor, a pile of our many shoes between them. Miri was stuffing the holes with paper, and Twins' Father was binding them with twine. Shoe after shoe they mended in silence, and with hands that shook, both unsteadied by the nearing good-bye. I saw Miri glance at the packs stationed by the door, one for Peter, another for Twins' Father. She studied them as if she was trying to gather courage to speak, and then she addressed Twins' Father, her face downturned, her eyes still low.

“You never questioned my actions, Zvi. Why was this? The others—I would hear stories about myself, what I had done. And the stories, they follow me, even now.”

She sealed the shoe's injury shut, tied the twine in a final knot.

“You were only ever good,” he said simply. He faced her as he spoke, seemingly hoping that she might welcome this truth, and when she did not, he bent to arrange the mended shoes in rows, as if this could put matters to rights. But when he turned his back, Miri took the opportunity to slip past him, to the door. Spying my wakefulness, she gestured for me to join her, but Twins' Father was not willing to forgo the formality of a farewell. Looking up from the rows of shoes, he gave her the only one the ex-doctor might accept.

“Your children will miss you,” he said.

Miri's eyes said that she believed him.

And as I hobbled out on my crutches, I saw Peter's head rise from where he slept, at the crackle of the fireplace, saw the hair ruffled on the back of his scalp. He looked at me in the haze of a partial dream. I had tried to prepare for this good-bye. “When we see each other again,” I said, but I couldn't complete the sentence the way I wanted to. I couldn't say:
It will be better, I will be walking, you will be well, all will be found, we won't be imprisoned or without a country, we won't be hunted or starving, we won't be witnesses to pain.

I couldn't finish that sentence, not then.

Twenty years later, I would have a chance to finish, but there was no need for it. We would be grown adults, waiting in a courtyard in Frankfurt. Peter would show me pictures of his wife, the one who understood why he bolted in the night following the ring of the telephone, why he kept boxes stacked beneath the bed filled with speculations as to the whereabouts of a criminal more slippery than most, a man whose initial escape from Auschwitz led to a transfer to Gross-Rosen, and then a flight into Rosenheim, where he found work as a farmhand, separating the good potatoes from the bad potatoes, putting them into neat little piles for the farmer's inspection, before settling into the ease of his final hideout in Brazil, where he wrote his memoirs and listened to music and swam in the sea.

But this is not about that man, as much as he would have liked it to be.

This is about Peter. As Miri had predicted, he was good at many things, so many that he found himself a bit lost after the war. He ran away from his guardian's custody and traveled; he roamed from country to country as if he would never shed the role of a messenger, a delivery boy, but his travels stopped when a woman loved him and married him, despite her family's warnings that he was damaged beyond repair, that she should not be surprised when their children were stillborn or, worse, born with mutations issued by the doctor's hands. But they had children. Two boys. They were healthy and beautiful; you could see their father in their faces. I could have studied that photograph all day, but we were in that courtyard with a greater purpose.

Her trial was over. We would be permitted to see Elma in her confines; we would be allowed to confront her with the facts of what she had done. Germany had given her a life sentence plus thirteen years. One of the more severe sentences handed down in the course of the country's prosecution of the criminals of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it determined that Elma's death would occur on the cold floor of her cell.

Peter went in first. What he said, I don't know. When he returned, he simply nodded me forward, without a word. Somehow, he had never stopped knowing what I needed.

Elma's cage was more spacious than the one I had lived in. And no one drove a needle into her spine, no one hobbled her at the ankles, no one broke into her body and sifted through its insides, seizing her ability to have children while still a child herself, before sealing her shut with a ragged stitch. Her hair was close-cropped, but she had not been shaved. Her fine clothes were gone, but she was not naked. She had been captured, but no one had taken her childhood, as she'd taken mine, and even from behind her bars, she tried to take more from me; she gave a little laugh at the sight of my cane, eager for me to know her defiance. But I knew that she would spend her days hearing nothing but the sound of her own thoughts. She had no Zayde or Mama to soothe her—she had not even the davening of a pigeon at her window. This seemed a rightful misery. I felt no pity for Elma, and yet—the sight of her troubled me. I could have given her a game or two, to help her preserve herself within her cage, but I doubted she would see the value of such things. Instead, I gave her something that was of value to me: my forgiveness. She spat in disgust. I forgave her that too.

Forgiving her did not restore my family; it did not remove my pain or blunt my nightmares. It was not a new beginning. It was not, in the slightest, an end. My forgiveness was a constant repetition, an acknowledgment of the fact that I still lived; it was proof that their experiments, their numbers, their samples, was all for naught—I remained, a tribute to their underestimations of what a girl can endure. In my forgiveness, their failure to obliterate me was made clear.

And after I was finished telling Elma that I forgave her, I reminded her of those who didn't have the opportunity to do so. I said their names.