Mischling (31 page)

This was an argument of proponents of the Bricha, organizers of the flight. We did not know it then, but peace was still over three months away. But who was to say it would come May 8, not July or the next year? While we lived in February's thaw, creeping toward spring, many believed that flight to another, more hospitable land was a necessary risk.

“She will be safer there than she is here,” Jakub assured her. “I will see to it.”

If there was a moment in which everything was decided, I suppose it was that moment.

Because my guardian did not increase her protest, and I did not raise one at all, and so it was assumed, by all three of us, that this was what would become of me. I would be shipped to Italy, where I would board a boat that held its own sea, a sea of numbered people like myself, young and old, survivor and refugee, and every last one a searcher seeking to purchase a new beginning.

Jakub had promised. It was to be a box quite different than the box I'd known—I was to bob within it next to Sophia, the two of us surrounded by the company of supplies: rolls of bandages, vials of medicine, tins of meats, bags of tea. But when the day came for my departure, a wooden box arrived at the hospital. It was a bit glamorous, so far as boxes go. It had a cherry-lacquered top rendered in the goyish style so as not to attract additional suspicion, and it was sized for a large adult. I could have rolled myself up like a blanket and lived in one corner. At the sight of my hiding vessel, Miri wept. Tears big as marbles rolled down her face. She tried to hide them with her hair, as was her custom.

“It's a coffin,” she said.

“A trunk,” Jakub corrected.

“I know coffins,” Miri said.

I would only have to hide myself in order to cross the borders, he assured her. There were holes in the bottom so that I would be able to breathe. And there were other children that would be hidden alongside me, the ones that I knew so well from our journey to Krakow. We were to be quiet, but we would know we were not alone, and this, the man claimed, was a comfort.

Into the truck bed piled eleven of my thirty-two companions. While only a week had passed since I last saw them, they looked different from the children I'd known. Their faces were rounder; their eyes no longer carted hollows beneath them. Sophia had a new hair ribbon. The Blaus had gotten haircuts. One of the Rosens wore a pair of spectacles. They were ragged still, but you could tell that some hand had cared for them. I saw Miri's face as she took in the details of their transformations and I knew that she wished she had been that hand, but she only smiled at each of them and asked if they were excited about this latest journey, and she helped seat me in a corner of the truck bed, where I could lean myself against the coffin box for comfort.

Miri had a gift for me, which she presented with her ever-trembling hands. When I saw this gift, the fact struck me with all its finality. She was not coming with me—not then, and perhaps never.

Like us, the tap shoes were a mismatched pair. One was bigger, younger than the other.

All I knew was that one shoe was blush, the other white. I am not sure how she missed these differences. Maybe she hated the exaltation of symmetry after following Mengele's orders. I couldn't know. Both were kissed by the necessary metal at heel and toe. She shined them for me and caressed the laces with pride. She placed the shoes in my hands. She said she'd see me again.

“In Italy?” I asked.

“If I am well by Italy.”

“And what if you aren't well then?”

“I will be well someday,” she promised.

We would have a dinner, she said, and I could wear my new shoes. I wanted to point out that they were dancing shoes, and I could not walk, let alone dance, but she looked so pleased at the prospect of this reunion that I said not a thing. I put the shoes in the box and did not look at her as she continued to swear that this was not the end for us.

Her form, as the truck trundled off—first, distance diminished her, then the fog swept away her face. I tried to memorize Miri as the expanse between us grew, her eyes, nose, mouth, chin. Wordlessly, I said good-bye to each, until there was nothing left of her to be seen, and I told myself to be happy for this, this chance to say good-bye, to say that I loved her. My affections had found a home in her; she was not my mother, my father, my sister, my Someone, but she was who I wanted to be, she was born kind, but hardship kindled it, and her vulnerabilities did not live apart from her bravery. Miri knew what suffering was and still, she wanted to know restoration too.

I don't know if she ever truly believed that our reunion would come to be. What is more, I don't know if she thought she might live even an hour past my departure. But I believe she knew that she had to become well so that I could see her again, alive and restored. She could not do this with me at her side, as much as she would have loved to have me near. This was not abandonment, I told myself, years later. This was love, her dream for my future.

I'm not sure she thought much of her own future. She couldn't have dreamed of her triumph, I am sure. That she would be allowed a haven in America, that she would be permitted to resume her practice in the halls of a hospital, that she would enter thousands of rooms with her soft step, eyes fixed on the expectant patient.

Dear God,
she'd pray as she washed her hands and pulled on her gloves and turned to the waiting mother.
You owe me this—the chance to deliver a true and vital life, a child that will never have to be known as a survivor.
And thousands would take their first breaths in her hands.

No, she couldn't have even dreamed of that, not then. We don't always know ourselves, who we can become, what we may do, after evil has done what it likes with us.

A decade later, we would find each other in a waiting room at a Manhattan hospital where I was to see a specialist. I recognized her as soon as I saw her back, those dark curls tangling at her shoulders, and her usual stance—a slight tiptoe, as if ready to tend to a new disaster at any moment. And though she'd been well prepared for our meeting, she could not help but call me Stasha when she saw me, and I spent the next minute or so begging her not to apologize for this error, which remained in my mind as a sweetness that I couldn't experience enough.

Stasha,
she'd whispered, as if in memoriam.

And like the mother-sister she'd become, she remained with me as I was led to an examination room, as I was undressed and poked. She bossed the nurses a little, and she directed the doctor to be as gentle as he could, and when this inquiry of my insides were over, after I'd spent an hour reliving my girlish selves, all two of them, one the chosen sufferer, the other an intact half, I laid myself down on a couch in a private waiting room, and when the results were declared to be in, and the doctor took a seat to address me, I put my hand in Miri's.

Miri sat by my side as I was told the details of what he'd done to me, all the undetectable troubles that had begun to plague my health. Together, we learned that parts of me had never fully developed—my kidneys remained the size of a small, starving child's, a child caught on the cusp of adulthood, her growth interrupted by the fact that there'd once lived a man who had no soul, and he'd collected children and those he found odd, acted as if he loved them, marveled at them, and destroyed them. The insides that he'd tampered with—they did not meet the demands of my grown life.

Miri wept for me then. She took on the tears that couldn't pass from my own eyes. She did so as if there were some unspoken pact between us. She looked at me, so still, and wondered aloud after my feelings, and when I didn't answer, she said my name, and Stasha's too. She didn't care who saw her cry, she wanted all to know what he had done to me—she was so different then from the woman who'd forced herself to be stoic during our journey out of Auschwitz.

At our parting, I thought those tap shoes were all she had left me with. But when I was forced to enter the coffin while crossing a border, I found, in the toe of one of the tap shoes, a note. Opening it, I expected to see her say good-bye. I thought she might say that she was sorry, that she might detail how her burdens kept her from joining me in my flight.

But this long-ago letter, the one that wept in her blurred script?

It was not about her life, her loss, her sorrows. It was about mine.

And when we children were waylaid, when the roads clogged with tanks made us travel to the wrong city, and then the wrong village, I'll say this—it was not my will that kept me alive, it was not the canteen of water, the provisions of bread, the company of Sophia beside me or the other twins that rattled in their boxes in the bed of our truck. It was not even our system of communication as we knocked on the linings of what held us whenever we crossed a border or had to hide—one knock to say
I'm here,
two to say
I'm here, but there is little in the way of air
, three to say
I'm here, but I'm not sure I want to be.

It was only what Miri told me about the Someone who had loved me. All the details she wrote about this person—all her games, her fondness for a knife, the way she'd made me dance—those details kept the breath in me for three days of travel, till our truck was detained by a pair of Wehrmacht deserters so desperate for transit that they were not above forcing Jakub from the driver's seat. Seeing their approach, Jakub had warned us to take cover in our boxes. Whether he knew this was the end of his life, I don't know. All I knew was the sound of the pistol, and then the sound of a body hitting the ground beside the truck. I heard, too, the whimpers of Sophia as she lay beside me, and as we sped away, I told her that we had only to bide our time till the soldiers paused in their travels, and as soon as the vehicle stopped, we would slip out, the lot of us, head for the nearest village, and find another rescue. She pointed out that I was on crutches. I pointed out that we were twins, the both of us, even though we'd had our share of loss. I assured her that freedom was something we might achieve together, that my Someone had always said so.

And in that moment, having no one to share my duties with, I took them all on. I took the hope and the risk, the reckless determination, the stubborn belief that yet again, I would survive.

Inside my latest box, I put on the tap shoes and waited for the moment that my kick at the ceiling of my confines might turn into a leap.

What kind of welcome did I expect from the ruins of Warsaw? In the place where Mengele's life was to end and lend a new beginning to ours, there was only the echo of peasants spitting in the streets, emptying their lungs of dust. And look at us—our weapons were gone, our furs had been stripped. Near naked, defenseless, we wore burlap sacks begged from a roadside farmer; we wrapped our exposed legs and arms in woolen rags discarded on the side of the road, we stumbled forth in too-large shoes, and my friend winced with every step, his hand constantly returning to worry at the wound on his shoulder, which had surrendered its bullet into my hand. With two fingers I'd pried it from his flesh as he shrieked, cursing the fact that my own affliction could not enjoy the same bloody and swift extraction. That, I told myself, was the last doctoring I would ever do. Destruction was all I cared for now, and Feliks shared this with me—together, we improvised fresh and clumsy methods of persecution. We collected a new sackful of stones to lob at our torturer's skull, we clutched sticks beneath our arms, makeshift spears, the ends of them whittled to points fine enough to pierce his chest, and we trusted that the meek power of these humble instruments would be transformed by our fury when, at last, we came upon Mengele, cornering him in the cages of his hideout at the Warsaw Zoo.

Warsaw did not recognize our destructive aims, as it was too possessed by its own restoration to know us. But although it did not note our entry, I trusted the city to host our mission. It had been destroyed like we had been destroyed. It was gutted and drawn; vacancies had been cleared until the city was little more than a cellar, a tomb, a waiting room with a telephone that said only good-bye, but everywhere, I saw people crushing themselves to revive it, I saw them expelling every breath they had into the foundations of the felled synagogues. They had the power specific to natives—they compelled the leaves to remain on the trees, coaxed the flowers to bloom and the skulls to stay in the ground, buried where no dog might unearth them—but we had the gifts of outside avengers. While they entrusted the city with life, we were there to ensure a death. Only when Mengele was finished would the leaves remain, the flowers bloom, and the skulls go back to sleep.

A violet night was falling and we heard a clock ticking in the air, addressing us, telling us that we were running out of time. Two steps farther, I realized that this sound was only the pound of my heart, though the message remained the same. The ticks quickened when we rounded a corner and saw a Red Army soldier paring an apple with a nail file and leaning against a wall alongside a broom. I wondered if that broom was so young that it had only the experience of sweeping ash and rubble. The soldier was so airy and nonchalant that I assumed everything had ended.

“You have captured him already?” I asked.

The soldier peered at me over his nail file.

“Hitler?” he wondered.

“Not him,” I said. “The other him. The Angel of Death—have you found him?”

“I don't understand the question,” he said. “Your Russian—very poor.”

I knew that he understood well enough. But I pantomimed so that he could claim no excuse for not answering; I pretended as if we were playing the Classification of Living Things.

With my hands, I tried to depict a person born to German industrialists and affectionately known as Beppo. This was easy enough to convey. I stood on tiptoe and made myself look vast; I twirled a mustache, plucked a hair from it, and popped it into my mouth to approximate Mengele's nasty habit. Also easy to get across was the fact of his doctorhood. I swung the white wings of an invisible coat about; I plunged a needle, removed an organ, sewed children together, and caged a Lilliput. More difficult, however, was the degree of his evils. This I was unable to communicate in all its lowdown fullness, its beastly disrespect for all living creatures and their variety.

Yes, I failed at this as badly as I had failed in my cattle-car portrayal of an amoeba.

So I wasn't surprised when the soldier shook his head in confusion. I begged his forgiveness about the complicated message. I tried again. I left nothing out. The experiments, the shared pain, the Zoo, the days, the nights, the smell. All the dead tossed to the mud banks of the latrines. I did my best, but I realized that those who had not seen what we'd seen would never truly understand.

The soldier didn't understand. So I took another approach. Realizing that Mengele was a man that could become fully known only through his victims, I began to list them all in the dust. I wrote all the names that I knew. I wrote Pearl's. I wrote mine too, and then I crossed it out. The soldier bent to inspect the names, shrugged, gave Feliks his half-eaten apple, and then stalked off into the rubble chasing the vision of a pretty girl who'd begun to hang her wash on the ruins of a butcher shop.

“You didn't even try to help,” I said.

“Not true,” Feliks said through a mouthful of apple. “I stood by your side the whole time.”

I told him I was beginning to think that he didn't want any outside assistance.

“You are right,” he confessed. “I want it to be you and me, no one else. We are the only ones entitled to kill him.”

For once, I could not argue. And we walked on in our quest, picking our way through these ruins. Men were crawling out from holes, puffs of dust and soot haloing their heads. Faces were covered with soot and ash and dust, but beneath these layers, determination peeked. They were singing to the city, these people, trucking their wheelbarrows to and fro. Children perched on fallen stoops with buckets. Cats surveyed the efforts with suspicion and made sudden moves to escape stew pots. Mugwort hung on the remaining houses, warding off traditional evils.

Feliks had a strange familiarity with this place, or as much familiarity as one can have with a city that has fallen. He'd had an auntie here once, he claimed, and so he knew the streets, and he took me through what remained of them. We found tattered clothing to replace our burlap bags, ragged socks and mismatched shoes for our feet. We inquired about the zoo to any who would pause to answer us. The inquiry always put people into fits of headshaking. We used to love the shriek of the cormorants, they'd say. We used to admire the canter of the zebras. And our downcast eyes told us that we would know this zoo by its destruction.

We came upon signs. The signs told of lives that should have been, lives that had burst or been diminished, lives that had wandered into the forest. Here, an aviary stripped of its feathers. There, the elephant house with its emptied swimming pools. Over there, in the middle of the green, tigers should have familied themselves into magnificence. Peacocks should have glinted, geese should have gaggled, apes mocked monkeys. The lynx should have given chase.

But where the grandeur of the animal kingdom should have made itself known, there was only scatter—an upturned moat, tufts of fur clinging to bars wrenched wide. The pheasant house fluttered with pages torn from a book; tourist maps clung to the mud. The polar bear's pool hid beneath a blanket of scum and moss. The only pride in the lions' house was now a litter of shells. In the monkey habitat, rope swings hung freely, ungripped by primate hands, suggestive only of the noose.

I traced my finger around the print of a hoof, laid myself beside it in the mud. Did anyone ever truly manage escape? The hoofprint did not seem to think so.

I'd come for Mengele, yes. But I'd hoped for life too. I hadn't known this, though, till I saw nothing of it.

To the left of the hoofprint, I spied a small mound of earth, a fresh heap of soil capping the ground. I turned over the soil and plunged my hand in. What did I expect to find at the bottom of this tunnel? My hand dreamed of discovering another hand; it wanted to find my sister sitting in a patient vigil beneath Warsaw's mud. But my fingers struck tin instead, and I smuggled out a glass jar populated with names.

I spilled its contents over the ground like seed, little slips of yellowed paper. There was Alexander and Nora. There was Moishe and Samuel and Beryl. Agathe, Jan, Rina, Seidel, Bartholomew, Elisha, Chaya, Israel. Not a Pearl among them. Feliks looked at the names and mourned. I was glad he did, because I didn't have any mourning to spare. We couldn't have known then that the names belonged to the children smuggled by the Jewish underground, children who had been assigned new identities and homes and faces, children who sank their selves into objects—a bolt of fabric, a pile of medicine, a slew of bottles—children who lived in their mother's skirts, beneath floorboards, under beds, behind false walls, so that they might someday rejoin life. But instinctually, he knew enough to sweep up these names with his hand and bury the jar again, admonishing me all the while for disrupting their hibernation.

We crept through the habitats; we asked ourselves where a Mengele might lurk.

I wondered if he'd learned the art of camouflage, taken a suggestion from some animal at the zoo, an innocent that believed, as I had, that goodness could be found within him. Chameleons could be optimistic like that. But Mengele—he'd think too highly of himself to blend with stone, dust, earth. Still, with every step, I expected him to leap up beneath our feet, to bolt from an underground hiding place. I couldn't be too cautious. I kept one hand fishing about in my sack of stones and readied the other with foul gestures.

“Check the trees,” I whispered.

But Feliks was not interested in my instruction. He threw his makeshift spear into a copse of birches and shrugged. He considered his sack of stones, and then laid the stones down, one by one, as gently as if he were handling birds' eggs. Then he sank to the ground and let the wind play over his face as he stared into the evening sky above, with all its dusky drifts of clouds, and with an odd air of resignation he played the game we'd played so long ago, on the soccer field.

“I don't see a single Nazi among you,” he said to the gathering cumuli.

I said there was no time for this game. I promised that as soon as we found Mengele, we could rest and read the clouds. We didn't even have to kill him right away, I reasoned. We could secure him in the tiger pen and take care of him later, to maximize our viciousness.

“I'm tired,” he claimed, and he did not move.

In all our travels, this was the first statement of weariness I'd heard. I'd seen Feliks struggle to walk, to lift his head, to open his eyes, to swallow a morsel of food—but never had he voiced his fatigue. This concerned me. I put a hand to his forehead, but he wrenched it away.

“We should sleep and look for him in the morning,” I said brightly. “It would be stupid for us to confront him when we are not at our best. Like your father the rabbi would say—”

“My father was never a rabbi,” he said dully. “I lied.”

He confessed this to me, but he said it to the clouds above.

“I forgive you,” I said. “I lie too. I lie all the time since Pearl left. Actually, that's a lie—I lied before she was gone. I always have.”

This revelation did not bring him the comfort I thought it might. I watched a tear slip from his eye and plummet down the side of his face. He didn't bother to wipe it away.

“I am the biggest liar of all,” he said. “My father was a drunk, a criminal, an indigent. We lived with him in graveyards, back alleys, anywhere we could find. He didn't even survive the invasion. My mother—dead long ago. I don't know how. My brother—after our father died, we went to live with a woman, a kind woman, she took us in—”

I told Feliks that he could stop. This was not a contest about who was the biggest liar. This was a contest about who could be the best killer of Josef Mengele, Angel of—

He sat bolt upright, mouth twisted with confrontation.

“Let me finish! We lived here in Warsaw. Behind this zoo, in fact. See that house there, so close? It was ours, once.”

I looked at the remains of the house, its insides exposed like the nest of a wasp. The sight of its skeleton laid everything bare. I thought of his odd familiarity with the city, the way the people nodded at him as he passed, how he knew the name of every street. I told Feliks that I forgave him, none of these falsehoods mattered. The one thing I didn't understand was why he had acted as if this was a new place, as if he'd never been here before—

He did not look at me as he explained.

“I thought you'd love the zoo. I thought that once you saw the animals, you'd want to live again, and maybe you'd want to live with me. I thought—if you had that chance, that hope, it might even be possible for you to put this deathlessness aside. That ridiculous story he gave everyone! He told all of us that fib, you know. A bigger liar than myself!”

I don't know what my face looked like but I'm sure it showed my foolishness. For so long, I'd hoped that others would forgive me my survival. Just a moment before, I'd believed that the years of children and mothers were in me, the minutes of violinists and farmers and professors, every refugee who never managed to return from the seething country that war had put them in. And now it had come down to this: not science or God or art or reason. Just a boy—a traitor, friend, brother—who wanted to show me a tiger.

“You know that it isn't true? How could you believe it? Mengele told all of us, you know, every last—you were not the only one he put evil into.”

Hearing this, I put my spear down too. I dropped my sack of stones, which thudded on the ground with finality. The stones took my side in this matter. The stones cried out, they agreed with me that, yes, I'd been a fool, but Mengele thought I was special, Mengele singled me out, he said I was a rare girl, the only worthy one.

My friend's mouth twisted with pity.

“If I had ever thought you believed that, Stasha—”

Seeing my distress, Feliks hurried to my side, and he went on to say that all I needed was a good night's dreaming and then a new family, maybe an adopted family, and then a new country, complete with a future. The soothing nature of his voice only riled me. I covered my ears to protect them against the force of his good wishes, and I removed my hands only to reach down into my sack and pull out a stone. It careened past his ear, toward the carnage of his home.