Mischling (32 page)

His face? The sadness in it told me we had been family.

I reached again, threw stone after stone. I threw them not to strike but because I needed to no longer carry such burdens. I threw them into the remaining window shards of his house. The stones pleased me with their shatters. The last, in particular, sounded distinguished, almost musical in its destruction. I did not realize the reason for this until my target cried out in dismay.

“Your key!” Feliks shouted.

I looked into my sack. It was true, I had reached into its depths with a careless, raging hand and thrown Pearl's piano key by mistake. Already Feliks was turning to run into the house to retrieve it, and I was at his back.

If Feliks felt the recognition of his old home as he entered, he did not say, but I watched him scan its insides warily from the doorway, I watched him step purposefully on a framed photograph that lay just beyond the threshold. I looked at the photograph, and a younger Feliks looked back at me. His twin looked back at me too. I could not tell how long before the boys were herded into Mengele's Zoo this photograph had been taken. But though their young lives had never been prone to ease, it appeared that once, they had been immaculate; they grinned the same grins, these twins, their hair was parted in the same direction, and their eyes were wide and hopeful.

It was difficult for me to put that past down, but we had to move forward.

We found ourselves in a parlor with armchairs and sofas in disarray, all of it covered in a fine shower of concrete and crockery. The looters had searched the floorboards and pulled the china from the cupboards. The whole of this house was overturned and smashed, but its ruins were not pathetic in the way ruins can be—this place had struggled against those who came to overthrow it.

We climbed to the second floor, bolted up a staircase muddy with footprints, and found rooms aflutter with mosquito nets. They'd been suspended over every summer bed but the looters had ripped them and dragged them to the ground. This tulle, with its drapes and flounces, floated over the floors and furnishings, a ghostly blizzard. We sifted through this tulle foam for that white key; we bumped into this corner and that, and then Feliks stopped with a start.

“Did you hear that?”

I had not.

“A woman—crying,” he said. “Listen.”

And then it soared toward us like an invitation and we hesitated at a stair before bolting upward into the darkness.

“It's coming from the parlor,” Feliks said. “And it sounds as if someone is hurt.”

The weeping increased. I felt so distant from my body while listening to it. I could swear that cry was familiar. It sounded like a cry I'd heard all my life, one that I had once dreaded hearing but now welcomed.

“It's Pearl,” I said to Feliks.

And then, as if in confirmation, there was a crash, a startle, the sound of something falling across a set of piano keys. I pushed past Feliks and, without the aid of candlelight, picked my way over the shattered glass, the furniture outstretching its arms.

In the parlor, I saw the piano. It was intact. Feliks rushed toward it, blocking my view.

“Who is in my house?” he demanded.

We received only more cries. I noticed, then, that these cries had a womanly note; they drifted out of an experience I was quite unfamiliar with. As we neared the piano, I saw their source: a figure swaddled in blankets. I watched Feliks approach this figure, and then slow.

“You have to see this, Stasha,” he whispered.

It was a Roma woman. She was slumped against the side of the piano, but she lifted her face to us. Looking at her, I forgot Pearl's key. I wasn't even trying to look for it. The woman wilted before us—she was not unlike a petal struggling to remain on the stem.

“She's dying, isn't she?” Feliks asked. “That's why her breathing is so strange?”

I wasn't sure if the breaths were dying breaths. They sounded like a different sort of distress, though one just as life-changing as death. I was certain that I had never made such sounds. I was certain Pearl never had either. These moans carried a wisp of future in them—they were aggrieved, but hopeful too, as if the woman had some happy prospect in her mind even as she wept. But I said nothing of this to Feliks. Because I was too busy looking at this pitiable woman with hatred. Instead of my sister, she was this—a woman who had been hunted down, left to wander. A bereaved creature, much like myself, without too many gasps left. I wondered what had been promised her in life—a home, a husband, a child—and how it differed from what had been promised to me, but I couldn't get very far with that thought because I couldn't remember what life had ever owed me in the first place.

Feliks peeled back one of the blankets in search of a wound, and the woman exhaled with startling force. She flurried her hands at us—begging for pause—and then she reached behind herself and produced the arc of an immense knife. It may as well have been a miracle, that blade; we forgot ourselves looking at it and were impressed by her unforeseeable power. Surely, anyone who possessed such a weapon should be the true vanquisher of Josef Mengele. Though prostrate and beaded at the forehead with illness, she shamed us both with her smiting potential.

We told her how impressed we were. If only, we told her, if only we'd had such a knife at our disposal in the wilds of the Zoo.

She was confused—drops of sweat were tossed from her brow as it furrowed.

“Not this zoo,” Feliks said. “Another zoo, the one that made—”

The woman exhaled sharply. At first, I thought it was frustration. But when that exhalation multiplied into a series, I saw that it was pain, and in the midst of these spasms, she gestured for Feliks to lean in toward her. And into his grimy palm she placed the long blade with a ceremonial flourish.

“I thank you,” he finally managed to say. “And I swear that I will kill a Nazi someday, in your name.”

The woman cocked her head at him, gave another ragged exhale, and, by some miracle, capped it with a girlish laugh. It seemed that there were two words that she recognized. They were
Nazi
and
kill,
and though neither appeared to be relevant to her wishes, she seemed to appreciate their usage. She clapped as if we'd just performed for her, and then she crooked her finger at us apologetically, and pointed to her abdomen.

“We have nothing—” I started, but it didn't matter what I said because she was pulling up the hem of her ragged jumper to reveal a belly that was not the starved belly that we were accustomed to seeing but one of an unfamiliar fullness. A prick of movement encircled her navel. A ripple of life, that's what it was.

I moved to sit beside her, to hold her hand. I did this not out of familiarity but out of a desire not to faint. And then she drew my hand in a neat line beneath her abdomen. Her manner was instructive, her movements precise. There was no mistaking her petition. Feliks grasped me by the arm; he tried to force me back.

“You will kill her,” he whispered.

I told the woman that I couldn't use the knife as she asked. She smiled at me and repeated the motion. She wanted to be my teacher, my reason to continue; she wanted to show me birth.

I told her I couldn't. But already, I was wondering if I could—she was dying, this woman, she was leaving the world with a life inside her, a life that could go on to know nothing of the suffering we had endured. A life with a real childhood. Didn't I owe something to a life like that?

“You won't forgive yourself,” Feliks warned me.

I thought back to Mengele's charts. Once, I'd seen him open up a woman while I lay in the examination room. It was an unusual procedure, he'd claimed, a favor for a friend. I'm not sure what kind of favor sees a newly born child plunged into a bucket behind its mother's back, but he insisted on speaking of this as a charitable act, even though the cesarean soon turned into a vivisection before my very eyes. Before I had a chance to look away I had learned from this experience—I'd chosen to forget the bereaved mother's face, but I remembered the scars of such deliveries, their position, their length, their arc; I knew that such incisions could end children just as easily as they could deliver them.

And then I sank my knife in the way the woman wanted, the way my memory told me to, the way that Mengele never would have—I did it with care and the remnants of my love, and as she stopped crying, a new cry began.

For all my vengeful ambition, this was the first time I had had blood on my hands. We watched the woman's eyes dim, her posture slacken.

I think she saw the squirmer before she left. Its face was so humorous, shrimp pink and ancient. Why else would she have died smiling?

I passed my knife to Feliks and told him how to cut the cord.
Let him,
I thought,
be responsible for this final severance.

“What do we do with it?” he asked.

I wiped the membrane of the floating world from the baby's skin.

This baby was so different than the camp babies. Its problem was not that someone was trying to kill it, but that no one in this house knew how to make it live.

In the morning, Baby wailed in my arms as I walked. I was on my way to the orphanage, crossing this street and that in my quest to put Baby where it belonged. Baby needed to be in hands that could properly care for it and see it grow into a child who could someday be more than an orphan. I knew this plan would be met with disagreement from my companion, so I'd crept out before Feliks could wake. His love of the impossible would make him want to keep the sweet unfortunate. And I did not want to be convinced. Because, you see, a new plan for my future had formulated within me as I'd spent the evening rocking Baby and watching Feliks dig a grave for the Roma mother.

He'd buried her near the glass jar of names.

The newborn cared nothing about this grave, but I knew Baby could feel the thoughts in me as I'd stood over the mound and placed the plume of a peacock feather where a headstone should have been. When the wind blew that feather away, Baby wailed. It wailed not only in grief, but as a negotiating tactic. It wanted to be known to me as a real human, and it saw that I respected grief more than anything. This was a shrewd plan, one much advanced for an infant, but as a hardened girl, I required more.

I looked down at its face now, wiped the sleep from its dark eyes with my shirtsleeve, and hoped that this attention to hygiene could serve as a substitute for love, but the infant mistook it for a gesture of true affection and blushed. Already, it wanted me as family. I felt sorry for it for choosing to love me even as I moved toward its abandonment, holding it at arm's length while footing through the rubble.

During this walk, I noted what I was leaving behind. Once, I was Mengele's experiment. And now, it seemed that I would be an experiment for the war-torn countries, the disassembled, the displaced—how do you restore everything to its rightful home? everyone was asking. Of course, I wasn't alone in being an experiment in this way. There were so many like me, and I wondered how many among them would make the choice that I was going to make.

You see, the pill the avengers left me with, the poison intended for Mengele that I'd carried in my mouth out of the depths of the salt mine—it was secured in my sock. It took every step with me, whispering all the while into my ankle, which just so happened to carry nerves and veins that sided with my heart. This poison wasn't the bully I'd expected it to be but a strange comfort, a modern invention that knew my pain. It was wiser than I was; its chemicals had passed over the earth for centuries, and it was a well-traveled substance, practiced in human dismissal. From time to time, it tried to escape my ragged sock, but I only pushed it back and kept walking. The distance between myself and the orphanage was growing ever shorter, and I wanted to appreciate the walk because, though the city was gray and rubbled, it was the last city I'd see, and so I saw all I could—the old woman blowing dust from her photographs, the children collecting husks of bullets in a heap, the shop window full of stopped clocks and my reflection.

I pretended that the clocks had stopped for Pearl and me. I had failed at protecting her in life, but there was a chance, I believed, of finding her in death. She would want it that way, I told myself, and not just because she wanted to see me. Pearl would want me to die because she knew me, she knew how intolerable it was to my spirit that Mengele would escape unavenged, wholly beyond my desperate reach, my every wish for justice. Even if I was never reunited with her—I could not live with that failure.

And if there was a life for us beyond this death, we could embark on a new set of tasks and divisions.

Pearl could take the hope that the world would never forget what it had done to us.

I could take the belief that it would never happen again.

No one would know us as
mischlinge.
In that life, there would be no need for such a word.

And then I came to my destination. A red mitten was impaled on the iron gate, like a pierced heart. The paving stones before the remaining walls of the orphanage were upturned, the earthworms were surfacing in the exposed soil, the rosebushes were showing their roots, and the thorns were pointing the way to the iron knocker on the red door, a bold but tarnished lion. I wiped the dew from the doormat and laid Baby down upon it. I was no savage—I was careful to keep it wrapped in the blanket that had belonged to its mother. Baby appeared content—there were coos, a pleased thrashing of fist. I placed its thumb in its mouth. It was the least that I could do, I thought, though it began to wail a moment later. I started to leave, and I would've done so quickly, I would've passed through the gate and headed down the street to take my poison pill in a quiet corner, but I did not look where I was going and I collided with a man. He was coatless; his clothes were ragged, and his shoes were in pieces. He had no face—at least, none that I could see, because he held a Soviet newspaper before his head. The print shrieked across the front page. I begged his pardon. He begged mine. Or he almost did. For some reason, he stopped short in his apology. Then he clutched my numbered arm, and the paper fell at my feet.