Mischling (29 page)

Peter, he was the only one of the names on Twins' Father's list that I ever saw again.

All those innocents—I didn't wonder about their futures that day as I left the abandoned house. I couldn't know their destinations, their triumphs, their troubles. The ones who integrated themselves into new cities and forgot themselves in new professions, either forming empires grand enough to blot out a past, or failing to thrive because they couldn't get the sound of their own blood out of their heads. The ones who married other survivors, and the ones who wouldn't marry because they had nothing to offer a marriage bed but night terrors. The ones who took comfort and freedom in the soil of the kibbutz, and the ones who found themselves lying on a different set of tables, granting permission to other doctors to burn the branded memories from their brains, to take away, once and for all, the misery that he had imprinted upon us.

They were children, once.

When the truck bearing a true red cross came, I hid.

I heard the attendants collect the children. Some shrieked, kicked, clung to the doorposts. All thirty-two were forced to surrender their bread knives, and the blades clanged as they joined a pile on the floor. I wished I could have hidden them with me, but I could not risk discovery. I was in the yard, behind a snowdrift, with my wheelbarrow over me. I peered around the hedge to see the children shuffle into the truck. I saw Sophia jaunt merrily, a doll given to her by the attendant beneath her arm. I saw Erik and Eli Fallinger regard the attendants skeptically, their feet rooted to the ground. The Aaldenberg triplets hid behind Miri, and she coaxed them into the attendants' arms, her blank expression shifting with grief. And then—I watched her count the children, call their names, register my absence. I heard her cry out for me. The attendants tried to soothe her, but Miri protested that Krakow wasn't safe, the assaults were happening every day, no one could tell her that the girl would be fine, especially after what the girl had been through, and the girl, she continued, she was crippled besides, the easiest of prey for anyone who might hunt her.

I would listen to my guardian call for me till her voice deserted her.

It was cruel to make Miri wait, especially with such dangers in her mind, but I knew I could stir only once there was no risk of the Red Cross's return. Only without the interference of their presence could I convince her that we had to stay together. After a good hour of caution, I picked up my crutches and hobbled into the abandoned house. It was dark. I lit a candle. But I did not have a free arm to carry it. So I stood in the middle of the room and looked about at what I could see in this scant light. I wanted to tell Miri that we could start again now. But Miri was not herself; she was not even the version who sought forgiveness. This Miri was folded in the corner near the birdcage. She was awake, but absent. I thought that the game that brought me back could bring her back too, that it could make her recover from this want of death.

I dwelled on fish. I thought about species first, then genus, and then I reached the third classification, the one I truly wanted.

Family
was my first thought.

But even family ends
was my second. It was not a thought I wanted. I assured myself that Miri would continue to live simply because I needed her to—but when she would not shift her gaze from the thirty-two injurious reminders of all she'd lost, I recognized that she would end her world if I did not act—this possibility, it made me forget my crutches, and I stumbled forth for help. Desperation alone carried me, two steps, then three, and then I fell and cried out to the city, I cried for all of Krakow to hear.

Here and there, lost, upended things: a bird's nest on a puddle of ice, shattered spectacles on a locket dangling from a fencepost. I opened that locket. One half held a lock of hair, the other rust. I knew how that half felt. I felt that way whenever I looked at the tree trunks and saw those many names, all of them loved and searched for, and mine not among them.

The beggars here were certain it was February 11, 1945. They wanted no payment.

We were in Wieliczka, just outside of Krakow, according to the signs I no longer trusted. Like many a place, we never should have been there at all. Leaving Poznan, we found the roads obscured by tanks, interrupting our path to Warsaw. Whether they were Russian or German, not one of us could tell; the darkness carried too much risk. We told ourselves that the roads would clear in only a moment, any moment, but we rode on Horse's back as we waited, and soon enough, our waiting turned into wandering.

Horse was annoyed; he did not care for the circuitous nature of our travels. Feliks accused me of stalling. While I was usually eager to accept blame, I could not fault myself for this. In all three of us, I knew, there had arisen a hesitation. Our fragile army couldn't possibly be up to such a task. Defeating Mengele! Even my new pistol had taken to mocking me, and its bullets chorused in terrible agreement.

My aim will never be true enough,
the pistol said.
My aim will never be sweet or accurate or good.

But you have your bullets,
I pointed out.
You are not alone. And you have me besides. We are family, all of us. See how much Feliks and I have accomplished already, as brother and sister?

What does it matter?
the bullets murmured to one another.
Stasha's rotten eye has made her aim rot too—she is bound to miss.
I wanted to tell the bullets that they couldn't think this way, they couldn't question me, they had to dream themselves into the heart or the head of our enemy.

Hearing this, the bullets snorted. Pistol remarked on the presence of smoke in a manner of turning the conversation.

The smoke over the city smelled as smoke should—a tang of pine, a touch of balsam. The threads of it didn't write out a welcome, but they weren't the red furies of Auschwitz either. Still, there was evidence that our kind had been endangered there in the days that the Wehrmacht ruled. We stumbled over this evidence while rooting for a place to sleep.

Why had no one defended it? Or had its defenders been overcome? This wooden synagogue—I could only imagine the flames it had seen. I am not sure that we would have known our shelter to be a synagogue at all if it were not for the singed
parochet
—the curtain of the ark; blue velvet, its lions smote by soot, its Torah crown still agleam—that lay in the snow some feet away, as if it had managed to flee the pillage under its own power. When Feliks saw the
parochet,
he said not a thing, he didn't even say what his father the rabbi would have said, but he stooped and kissed it and he draped it over a singed post in the midst of the collapse to protect it from the earth. But the
parochet
fell once more, leaving us with no choice but to carry its sacred length with us.

Fallen rafters black as pitch thatched themselves across a floor that shimmered with broken glass. A corner of this structure remained intact, and it was into its shelter that we retreated, hitching Horse to a charred birch at the perimeter. Horse looked as if he could restore the synagogue to its former glory with his beauty alone. Though the protrusions of his ribs upheld their prominence, so, too, did the black spark of his eye, which he fixed on us with a vigilant stare, and whenever the slightest sound arose on the wind, his ears shifted with worry. In the sweet protection of Horse's observance, we were comforted.

We huddled together beneath the blue velvet and guarded ourselves. If one were to look in our distant direction, all he might see was a thatchery of torched wood, a luminescing horse shifting from foot to foot, and the briefest field of azure that was our
parochet
. It felt as if no harm could ever come to us. I was about to ask Feliks what his father would think of us using the
parochet
as a blanket, if he would praise our endurance or curse us for blasphemy, but already, he was fast asleep.

And so it was decided that Horse and me would keep watch. Feliks snored while we counted stars to stay awake. There were too few that night to outpace my thoughts, so I expanded on the usual by giving them names, and then futures. I gave them futures in all sorts of places that I'd never seen, and when these futures were complete, I took them away, because why should a star have a future when Pearl did not?

Eventually, the watchfulness of Horse's eye convinced me that it was safe to sleep.

A simple belief, the kind I needed.

I would like to say that although we woke to find Horse gone, nothing else was amiss, but more than his absence struck us in the morning. Where our pale hero should have stood, nodding his head while sleepily rousing, a red ribbon began. This trail of blood wove itself around the ruins and escaped across the field like a loose serpent, and we followed its path, all the stops and starts of it, for half a mile, until it flurried to finale before the arch of a stony-mouthed tunnel. Into the ensuing darkness, we peered.

“It continues,” Feliks said. I was not sure if he was referring to pain or to the red path. He caught me by the arm and made an attempt to hold me back, but his grip was not earnest. He wanted answers as much as I did. We didn't care that it was to take place in the depths of a salt mine, that we were to follow a red path neither narrow nor straight into a briny underground, a place beneath the earth that seemed most hospitable to evil.

We were both blinded, I think, by this bloody ribbon that stretched before us, or, rather, we were blinded by what it might mean to our many losses. I took it as a message even as it was leading me toward horror. I knew I would not find my sister alive, I knew violence had seized Horse, but I thought perhaps I was being led toward understanding and restoration. How could I not think that while surrounded by such beauty?

Because the entry of this salt mine—imagine stepping into the tilted entry of a lily; consider slipping into coils of white, luminous beyond compare. Following the mine's wooden staircase, we turned into one gleaming corridor after another; we dead-ended ourselves in tiny cells strewn with tinsel; we stumbled into frosted dens of sodium that hosted flutteries of bats. Through these subterranean halls, we walked in witness to awe at the core of our world.

But even awe bottoms out. At the end of the wooden staircase, we saw that the lily that we traveled in held some nectar that had attracted an army of ants. The soldiers were all so alike in their uniforms and their misery. One would think, after all their crimes, that some godly, glowering hand might descend from the ceiling and lay them out, one by one, like gray dominoes. But no hand descended. Even if it had, it was far too late for Horse.

Because I was never an expert in bones, but I knew, seeing the scatter and the threads of red ribbon that led to a boiling pot propped on a primitive lattice of bricks, that we would not be riding into Warsaw on horseback, that Horse, this dear animal that had lent us his service had met with the same ineloquent brutality we knew so well.

The depths of the salt mine repeated my horror to the center of the earth.

Some people, they have heard so many gasps, screams, cries that they are deaf to them, no matter how much a salt mine enlarges their volume or reach. This seemed to be the case with these Wehrmacht soldiers. The six of them were too busy squatting here and there, picking at their plates, drinking. They had no fear or interest in bears and jackals. Only one turned to acknowledge us, the one manning the stew pot. He had a shuffled, disorganized bearing and metallic eyes that stood in his face like medals rewarded for terrible deeds.

“He wasn't yours to take,” I whispered. I was certain that Horse had alerted his captors to this fact. After all, it is known that all animals speak while in the throes of de-creation. Horse must have shrieked that he belonged to us, that the three of us were on a sacred mission for the restoration of our souls, the taking of another's, and the avenging of Pearl.

I stumbled forward in rage. Feliks tried to pull me back.

The soldier tending the pot was dazed on horse meat and drunk on whiskey. He staggered forward and drew his pistol and then took another step. He tilted his head to regard us. He couldn't understand why we didn't run; he appeared to find our behavior novel, and he treated us like we were curiosities sent to interrupt his boredom and doom. I knew why I didn't run. I had nothing to fear. But Feliks—why was he so rooted to the floor? He stood as if he had no choice but to stand by me. Both of us, we'd dropped our sacks, and we should have been lifting them in our arms and running, we should have been bolting up those stairs. The soldier stepped forward to inspect their contents.

We had a hatchet, three knives, two pistols, one poison pill meant for Mengele. We had a crust of bread, a bit of sausage, a bouquet of rags to bind our wounds. We had Pearl's piano key in a bag full of stones. I couldn't imagine they would be interested in any of this. He looked at the weapons in amusement. I worried not for myself but for Feliks.
Run!
I mouthed. He did not.

“You two are well armed,” the man observed. “Have you come to kill me?”

“Another,” I declared. “A real Nazi. You are all turning on each other now, yes? We can give you information about his whereabouts. You can make a deal with the Russians, with the Americans. Can't you? And maybe, in exchange, you will let us go and give us back our weapons? This person—he would be a fine capture for you. He's better than Himmler. Bigger than Goebbels. Greater than Hitler himself—”

“Josef Mengele,” Feliks interrupted, breathless. “She is talking about Josef Mengele.”

Not a single reverberation attached itself to his voice. Even echoes, it seemed, were not on our side that day, though they lent themselves freely to the soldier, who was inspecting our weapons, turning them over with metallic clinks that repeated themselves through the salty halls.

“We can tell you where he is—just let us go,” I pleaded. “Anyone who captures him—they will be heroes. He is a prize—after what he has done, the whole world will want him.”

But the soldier was unimpressed with this little speech. He was more interested in pointing one of our pistols at us. We watched the eye of the pistol waver in its focus. He shifted it back and forth. First Feliks. Then me. As if the pistol alone could decide. And then it chose Feliks—he leveled the muzzle at my friend.

My friend, with all his many vulnerabilities and braveries, the one who was now the root of my many dreams, the one who could tame a winter and lessen hundreds of miles and make sorrow eat from the palm of his hand. My brother. My twin. I knew I'd need Feliks all my life. I wanted to watch him grow and be a boy for all time, even as he shifted into an adult. I wanted to see the hair drift from his head as my own turned gray, I wanted to get him a new set of teeth so he could chew someday, and if he still couldn't chew, then I guess I'd continue to chew for him. When I looked at Feliks, my vision was only good.

I stepped in front of Feliks in hopes of absorbing this bullet. A bullet couldn't hurt me. But Feliks didn't know this. He pushed me aside. The soldier nodded the barrel of our pistol at us.

“The two of you—strip.”

So it was that we shed the skins of Bear and Jackal, the outer layers that had protected us from night and winter and any misgivings about the nature of our true strengths. The bravado on loan from these predators—now it was gone. What an ache it was to watch the plush warmth of our borrowed skins fall into enemy hands! My dress followed, and then my two sweaters. I stood, feebly covering myself once again, and my body, it remembered everything for me, it took on Pearl's duty of the past, and it pointed out the march of needle pricks down my arms. I looked up at the ceiling of the salt mine because I could not look at myself or at Feliks. I knew that he was likely overcome by gooseflesh, that perhaps he'd wet himself in fear, and I heard him sniffle. When Feliks slipped off his pants, the soldier laughed at his tail and teased its tip with the butt of his rifle.

I wondered if this soldier knew Taube, if he had heard of the guard's merciful act and was determined to correct the situation. Because he did not show any sign of sparing us. Taube, he had done so in a moment of insanity and confusion; he had taken his boot from my back. But this soldier was not confused as to what to do with us.

“Who said you could keep your shoes?” he barked at me. “Socks too,” he added.

My poison pill was in my left sock. I thought of what the avengers would have done, and so as I bent to unroll the woolen sock, I extracted that ampule and slipped it into my mouth. I carried it neatly in the pocket between jaw and cheek.

And as we stood so bare, in the distance, I could see pieces of Horse's pelt, scattered like a torn blanket. How had I let Horse carry me for so long without noticing that he was piano-white, like the piano in Pearl's film? My good eye reported this fact, and curiously, for the first time since Mengele's drop entered my vision, my bad eye agreed. Its traditional veil of blackness had lifted. Both eyes were able to see the same white. There was no variation in it, no shades of gray, not a single suggestion of ambiguity. All was too clear.

This is what I saw: The soldier was touching all that I had left of my sister. Pearl's key. He'd taken it up from the sack, regarded it without interest, and then allowed it to slip from his fingers.

I could not let that piano key fall; I could not let it meet this dust. Pearl was dead, and that was my fault. But this—if I could not catch a key, I thought, I deserved all I'd been dealt. So I made a naked dash to catch it and threw myself at the soldier's feet, and it was such a glory having it in my hands, I wept with happiness even as he gave me a kick in the ribs. And then another. And another. I felt the little poison pill stammer between my teeth, the ampule's walls threatening to cave at the point of my canine. In my hand, there was my sister's life, and in my mouth, there was Mengele's death.