Mischling (30 page)

Even in that moment, I knew which one meant more.

I heard a shot ring out, and I presumed myself wounded. But it was not me; it would never be me who was truly at risk. I watched Feliks stumble back, watched him forget to hide his nakedness through the pain. I saw him clutch his shoulder, clapping tight a brimming wound.

I looked at Feliks and I looked at the soldier, and I'll confess to this madness—for a minute I thought I saw not the deserter but the doctor, the Angel of Death, standing there, the evils of his experiments so great that he could no longer live on the surface of the earth.

I wish I could blame this on the depths of the salt mine, whose dimensions were known to make people see ghosts and specters and illusions of all kinds. But the fault was with me. I wish, too, that I alone were visited by such a delusion, but so many, year after year, decade after decade, would find themselves followed by this same face. They wouldn't be children anymore and they wouldn't be prisoners either, but always, there would be the sense of his gaze, the prospect of his inspection. How many ways might he disguise himself? we'd wonder. And the world would look at us as if we were mad.

There in the salt mine, I was so sure that I saw him.

And the illusion shattered only when I took in the circularity of Feliks's injury. Mengele would not hurt us like that; he had more profitable and efficient ways to damage us. His brutality was too studious and elegant to leave Feliks bleeding from the shoulder, such a coarse and ineffective wound that contributed nothing to the advancement of his science.

The soldier took aim once more, but already we were fleeing; we tripped up the stairs, our speed quickened by the fact that the soldier who was following us appeared to be nearly blind with spite as he stumbled upon the stairs. I saw his boot slip and his face strike the wooden slats, and I paused too long to study his stupor and his tumble, his body thudding like a toy as it fell. It was as if I believed that in watching the descent of our enemy, all could be reversed—the trains would change direction on their tracks, the numbers would erase themselves, the point of the needle would never know my vein.

Even with a flesh wound, my friend was faster than I; he knew enough to lean his stunned body into mine as we fled up the stairs, he knew that I needed more to urge me on from the death of Horse. Yet again, they had killed a loved one, they had robbed us, left us defenseless. I felt no victory in evading that grasp. I could hardly see the point in continuing. If that poison pill would have ended me, I would have swallowed it with joy.

“Look,” Feliks said with a gasp, and he lifted a tremulous finger to the sky. A dozen people were falling from it. We didn't know if they were friend or foe, but they had the clouds of a waning winter at their backs. My friend had the gleam of a bullet burrow at his shoulder, and yet this is what he saw. I watched his pained face marvel at their flight—the drifting freedom of it—and long for the same.

But what we had, it was only on this troubled and accursed soil. I had the poison pill in the pocket between my teeth and jaw, still intact and full of promise. The rest that we'd collected in our quest—gone.

Farewell, Horse. Our beloved. You were more innocent than Pearl on the day we were born. You were better than the best parts of us. You were who I wished the world could be.

Farewell, hatchet and pistol and three precious knives. You were fiercer and deadlier and sharper than I could ever be.

So long, fur coats. Farewell, Bear. Farewell, Jackal. You made us fearsome and possible, you vaunted us into the Classification of Living Things in a performance that I could not execute alone. In you, we became predatory in the way a survivor sometimes needs to be.

So stripped, I pressed forward in the snow, my friend draped across my side, and I dragged him toward the mercy of a row of cottages in the distance; we stumbled forth, hoping for relief, for someone to dress our nakedness and heal our wounds, while men parachuted above, so light and free. I shook my fist at them in envy. I gave them a reckless cry, not caring who might hear me and repossess my body once more. It had been taken from Pearl and me so many times already, I could not care anymore.

“Stasha,” Feliks begged, “I see that you will die soon if you continue this way.”

It was prophecy, warning, love.

Oh, that I could be a girl who needed to heed it!

From our window at the hospital, I saw them, adrift in the sky like the spores of a dandelion. Parachutists—I counted twelve in number, afloat through our evening, on the edge of Krakow.

“Do you know who they are?” I asked Miri. I turned from the window and maneuvered my crutches so I could face her. I asked her who the parachutists were coming for, why they used that method. Miri said it was hard enough to tell, even up close, if someone had good intentions, but she'd been told that many in the Jewish underground used this method of travel in the transport of goods and secrets and weapons.

I did not get to watch the parachutists land—they floated down to a location beyond my eye's reach—but three days later, I would see a reconfiguration of the white silks that had bloomed above them, their soft lengths having fallen into the hands of a seamstress. Now, a bride glided down the streets; she drifted across the cobblestones toward the chuppah in this ruched wartime splendor, the parachute silks draped into a filmy bodice, the train wisping behind her like mist. The two mothers joined her; they led her beneath the lace. If you put your head out the window, you could hear the celebration. The bride circling the groom. The seven blessings. A shatter of glass sang out.

“There are weddings still?” I said in awe.

Miri rose from her bed and came to the open window to watch with me, to cock her ear and listen. She put her arm around me.

“There are weddings still,” she said, a catch in her voice. “And I don't know why I am so surprised.”

One ceremony, and then another.

In the abandoned house, when I had thought Miri was leaving the world, I'd felt as if I were in a different kind of cage. My hands didn't work and my vision blurred. All became distant and impossible. I didn't even consider my crutches as I stumbled out to the street in search of help. My voice moved far better than I could, and my cries drew the neighbors from their homes. Jakub, the giver of onions, our Krakow host, was among them. His was the only face I knew and trusted. I pointed to the open door and watched as he dashed inside.

I knew he would carry her out. But I didn't want to see her state. I didn't look. Not even as Jakub put Miri in an ambulance and placed me beside her. I did not open my eyes until we came to the hospital. I saw her look away from the nurses and the patients both—though they'd seen many with her affliction, she remained ashamed of it, and her shame did not lift as she was tended to and her vitals were taken and she was given a bed. She refused to lie in that bed; she just perched on the edge and studied the curtain that divided the room, and there she remained until a nurse showed Jakub inside.

His entrance was unusually formal; he gave a little bow at the door—it was as if he thought an extreme politesse might conceal his worry, though from my perspective, it only announced an attachment to the doctor. He looked about the room as if he'd never seen the inside of a hospital before, and then he asked me to give them some privacy. I did, in a way. I ducked behind the curtain that divided the room, and there, behind its cover, I still heard everything.

Jakub drew a chair next to the hospital bed and sat beside Miri's hunched form. He did not sigh or speak; he didn't even whisper. In his silence, there was a loss, a too-bright and borderless thing, a loss that understood: the survivor's hour is different from any other; its every minute answers to a history that won't be changed or restored or made bearable. Recognizing Jakub's loss, Miri spoke of her own.

“My husband,” she murmured. “He didn't survive three days in the ghetto. Shot in the street.”

I peered around the curtain's edge. The room was dim, but Miri's face was half bathed in lamplight.

“My sisters, both lost to me. Orli, dead, months after our arrival. Ibi, dispatched to the Puff. But before they were lost—he made me take their wombs myself.”

She looked to Jakub, as if awaiting a response. None came. Jakub bowed his head.

“Of course, mine was not spared either. But I could not mourn it. I was too busy mourning my children. My Noemi, my Daniel. How many times have I wished that they were closer in years so that I might have told Mengele they were twins? In my dreams, I close that gap of time between them, I make them passable as twins. But when I wake, I know this was impossible, and I console myself with this: at least my children will never know what their mother did in Auschwitz.” And here her voice began to slip away from her, as if it had become untethered from her thoughts.

Jakub tried to tell her that in a place where good wasn't permitted to exist, she had nonetheless enabled it. In a place that asked her to be brutal, she brought only kindness, a comfort to the dying, a defiant hope that crept—

But she would not hear it. The mothers, she said—she'd tried to keep the mothers alive, that was the logic of her acts.

So many more would have died without you, Jakub insisted, but my guardian drew only bitterness from this, a bitterness that plunged her into the unspeakable.

“A pregnant Jewess,” she said. “Little offended him more. I told the mothers, ‘If you and your baby are discovered, you will not be shot; no, you will not go to the gas. Such ends are considered too gentle for you. If your pregnancy is known to Mengele, you will become research and entertainment both, he will take you to his table, and, with his instruments, he will dissect, bit by bit, he will push you toward death. And as he kills you, he will force you to watch your baby become his experiment. For Mengele, such savagery is a treasured opportunity—as soon as he learns of a pregnancy, he places bets with the guards about the gender of the child, and they plot its death accordingly. If it is a girl, they'll say, we will throw her to the dogs. But if it is a boy, we will crush his skull beneath the wheels of a car. These are only some of the brutalities I can speak of. They are too innumerable and varied, so grotesque—I do not have the words. What I know for certain: the only true delivery he knows is that of misery. For every mother and child, he invents a new murder—in Auschwitz, one need not even be born to experience torture.'”

She closed her eyes as if to shroud the memory. But it would not be shrouded. Opening her eyes, she looked squarely at Jakub with the air of one who can only confess.

“So many times, to save a mother's life—I had to act swiftly, on the floors of filthy barracks, with dull, rusty instruments, and nothing to ease her pain. Alone, I pulled the life from her—my hands bare, bloodied—and I told myself, through the mother's screams, and my own, stifled tears, You are sparing this soul, this baby, the greatest of tortures. And when it was over—oh, it was never over!—but I would speak to the mother, I'd say, ‘Your child is dead, but look, you are strong, you still live, and now there will be a chance, someday, when the world welcomes us back into its wonder, you will have another.' Each time I said this, it was not just for them—it was for me too. The grief was not mine, and yet all I knew was grief! So many little futures—I ended them before he could torment and end them, to enable other futures. And still, myself I cannot forgive.”

Miri's hands fluttered to her face—she did not permit us to see her expression. But we knew she did not want her own future at all.

Jakub looked as if he had witnessed the events she'd described. His face grayed, as if struck by illness, and he struggled to compose himself. He tried to tell her that he knew what it could mean to save a life. That cost, he said, was unending, because in choosing who could be saved, he had also chosen who could not be saved. In failing these lives, he'd selected the color of these deaths, their scents, their violences. Every day, he murmured, he had to save his own life, even as he'd failed the most vibrant, dearest one, the one he'd wanted to save most.

And then he must have found himself unable to say anything at all, because he pulled the curtain back and led me to my guardian's side. She would not look at me, but she drew me close, she held me tight, and as she wept, I wondered if anyone else, the whole world over, could boast a stronger embrace.

Out in the hall, I overheard the nurses approach Jakub. The cost, he repeated. I know it well. I am sure that you know others too, working as you do, I'm sure you see us, desperate to shake these matters from our minds, you see us try to live until we try to die, and when we can't succeed at either, we try to coax ourselves toward death by trying to remember them, the ones we couldn't save, and when we remember them too well, it is terrible, and when we remember them too little, it is worse—

Here, a nurse burst into the room, her eager step announcing an intent to distract me from the conversation in the hall.

This nurse saw my need. She took off my shoes and laid me down in Miri's bed, so white and clean-sheeted, and there I pressed my cheek to my guardian's. That bed suited us so well. I could have stayed there forever, stroking Miri's hair and listening to the nurse's stories and telling some of my own. But the nurse said that I would have to leave someday. It was not good for me, she claimed, to be so surrounded by pain, and we needed to find a place free of it that I could go to.

“A place like that is real?” I asked.

I was asking not for myself, but for Miri.

It is a particular madness, yes, to long for a cage, and for the sounds of isolation—rat-scratch, leak-drip, my fingertips drumming on the bars—but there, at least, I had some expectation of suffering. I could speculate reasonably about how I might feel pain and how I might be torn, how I could die in a flash, or slowly, bit by bit, in increments so small that I was unable to tell the difference between my life ending and my death beginning. In that space, I'd kept my hope fast. But in places like the hospital, with their white sheets and scrubbed floors and modest stores of food, I was suspended in a perpetual wait. Everything that was good, clean, and plentiful reminded me, once again, how swiftly I could be diminished, and without a single warning. I could be underfoot and powerless in mere seconds, and the anticipation of this made the struggle to remain seem utterly pointless. What work there is, I thought, in being a real person after death!

I wondered how being a real person might feel after leaving the hospital. I assumed that one of us would be leaving soon, as a nurse had given us a suitcase. I also assumed that this person would be me. I would never be ready, I confessed to the nurse after receiving this gift. Ever patient, the nurse explained—Miri was ill, she could not take care of me. Polite, I protested—it was I who would take care of Miri now.

The nurse was not convinced. She merely folded two pairs of socks and placed them neatly within the suitcase. Then she left me with that dreaded object.

How odd it was, to own a real suitcase. We had become a people of sacks invented out of threadbare jumpers or emptied potato bags. These were easily slung over the back and were well proven in their utility. But a proper suitcase! When I took it up by the handle, I felt surrounded. By people and by wall. I felt as if I were boxed in, dust-covered; sweat pooled at my ankles and my ears rang with shouts and a panic burned too bright in my chest. I dropped the suitcase at my feet like a hot piece of coal.

Miri saw what I had seen, and drew me close.

“Believe that you are safe,” she whispered, and she spent the evening scratching out the monogram—
JM,
it said, in silvery script—with a pin, and there was no mistaking that her efforts had such a roughness to them that she nearly put a hole in the leather.

Better a hole, she claimed, than a memory. I did not argue with this—Miri had more to forget than anyone, and it would do her good to impose large swaths of absence on her mind. But I hoped that as she pursued forgetfulness, a little memory of me might remain. Just a tiny bit, just enough so that if we were ever truly parted, she might seek me out again, someday.

I looked out my window while Jakub and Miri had one of their discussions. There were no parachutists in the sky, but the heavens were assuming a different blue, and the frost seemed soon to end. I consulted a piece of paper that one of the nurses had given me. On it, there was a series of boxes, little cages that represented days. We were halfway through the month of February. Did my Someone know this? I wondered.

Miri and Jakub spoke in hushed tones; they tried to conceal their plans. Jakub claimed that the time for worry was not ending, but it was changing a bit—the problems were different now, but so were the solutions, and he himself could escort the children toward one that was rare and brilliant. The authorities at the Red Cross confirmed the desirability of this scenario—already, they had selected eleven of Miri's children to participate in this plan. And, of course, there was Pearl—surely she would join this exodus toward safety? The good doctor was in favor of this venture, wasn't she?

Miri was not stirred by Jakub's excitement. She muttered something beneath her breath, something wholly unintelligible to me aside from the mention of my name. She said it longingly, or so I believed. Perhaps I imagined this. But when I turned at the window, I caught the trail of her gaze—it was fastened on me; her eyes, they appeared fixed on my injured legs.

Palestine, Jakub continued, insistent. First, a trip to Italy, which could be dangerous—some concealment was necessary—and then a ship that did not have room for everyone but would surely accommodate the twins. Hearing this, Miri faded still further—the voice I'd not believed capable of becoming any smaller lilted softly in query.

“This flight—it is our only hope?” she asked. “Still?”

I knew the tone she used. It was the tone I heard on all the streets when people turned and asked each other if it was safe to resume living.

“Would you like to take the risk?” Jakub whispered. “Is there ever a moment when you are not looking behind your back? Yes, it is over—we are free. Until they decide that we are no longer free—the war is not over, everything remains undetermined—”