Mischling (33 page)

There, on that front page, was a face I knew better than any other. It floated in a sea of other faces, behind the barbs of a captivity I knew too well.

From above, a drop descended to the page, threatening to blot the face out. Thinking it rain, I snatched the paper from the ground, and that's when I heard the crying.

You might wonder how I could recognize a man by his crying when I'd never, in all the years we'd spent together, heard him cry. Laughter had been his chosen sound, and shouts of frustration largely featured too in those last days before his disappearance, when he was trying to negotiate with the other men of the ghetto, all of them so interested in doing good, and all of them bearing conflicting ideas as to how to achieve it. But there, at the steps of the orphanage, it was his cry that solved our long separation.

“You are alive” was all I could say.

My father held me close. He sobbed. His sobs should have made him still stranger to me, but instead, they reintroduced a man who knew what it meant to search and press on, to ignore all doubts that wanted so badly to diminish him. I shouldn't have been surprised by this—Papa was never good at doubting, not for as long as Pearl and I had known him. And now, in our father's eyes, there was all the good I'd ever known, and there was good to come; there were days to see and stories to hear and weapons to abandon. From his threshold, nestled in his basket, Baby went quiet, so quiet, as he observed our reunion. They say the newly born see nothing. They are wrong. I can testify to this fact because in my own way, within Papa's clasp, I was newly born too.

When I saw Papa, the world rolled on for me. In seeing his face, so changed, I felt found by luck, by miracles. All became awe, and rain fell to join our tears. How strange, I thought, that rain remains rain after what we've endured! Some things were unchanged; this was proof. Another unchanged thing: my father lived, and as he pressed me to his chest, I could still hear his heart! It did not know quite what to say.

Papa was similarly speechless. He stroked my face with a bandaged hand, a hand that still knew, through its tribulations, Pearl's face as well as my own. When he tweaked the tip of my nose, I could not help but join him in his tears.

And through these tears, I tried to tell him that Zayde was dead, but all I could say was
Please, Papa, bend so I can see your face, a leaf is caught in your beard.

I tried to tell him that Mama was dead, but I just said,
Mama, Mama.

I tried to tell him that Pearl, our Pearl, my Pearl—he made me stop speaking, and he drew me even closer. I could feel his lips move against my scalp as he spoke.

“I am so happy to find you,” he said. “The article said that the children are scattered all over. Displacement camps, mostly. Some orphanages. Gross-Rosen. Mauthausen. I have been traveling for weeks, one stopped train after another—I thought I might locate someone with information in Lodz, but I found myself in Warsaw. How could it be that I would discover you here?”

Papa laughed and I thought I heard Baby laugh too, in his newborn way. I couldn't laugh with them. I was too busy looking at the photograph in the newspaper that my father now clutched with one hand.

“That is not me,” I said.

I said it not only to my father but to my sister's face, which peered out from the photograph, a look of capture in her eyes even as she floated above the place that tormented her, cradled in the arms of one of our few protectors.

“I thought it was you,” Papa said. “The expression—it is yours.” My father could not stop shaking, and yet he did not know how to move; we stood there, before the door of the orphanage, experiencing a joy so many would not.

“I didn't hear you, Papa,” I whispered. “I am half deaf now.”

It was a lie, somewhat. I just wanted to hear him say those words again. But there was no need to draw this phrase out of him. He was too eager to repeat his joy, to hold me close.

“I thought it was you,” Papa said, and he increased the clasp of his arms around me so that I could hear his heart acknowledge our loss even as his voice refused to. “Look at the expression,” he whispered. And this is where he crushed me, where he drew me so tight that I could not breathe. He held me so close I felt my ribs crowd toward each other, but curiously, there was no pain at all, and I wasn't the least bit worried about the potential suffocation of his embrace. My father was a good doctor, and he could do my breathing for me in a pinch, maybe not as good as Pearl could breathe for me, but I was beginning to think that, when I saw her—

I couldn't believe that I could even think such a thing.

Tell my sister that I,
she had said.

Pearl was alive. Or at least, she had escaped the cage that Mirko told me of. She had been carried through the gates we had entered together. What happened after that, I couldn't know, but I was certain that her legs were moving faster than anyone's in her efforts to reach me.

I should have shouted, I should have danced, but this discovery was too sacred to be commemorated by anything we could humanly do. I picked up Baby, and Papa and I walked back to the zoo; we kicked up pebbles and watched them stonily confront the rain. We handed Baby back and forth, and we spoke to each other as friends invested in futures speak. Papa told me of Dachau, the camp the secret police had taken him to so long ago. There was more to the story, bits that Mama had never disclosed. Because the sick child he'd left us to tend to that night existed, yes, but so did the Jewish resistance, and Papa had been a part of that shadowy movement. With Mama's blessing he'd risked himself, smuggling weapons from the border of the city into the ghetto, and on that night, he'd risked himself too well; he was captured and beaten and then—he did not want to say, but I could imagine him being tossed onto the back of a truck or onto a train, traveling farther and farther away from us, till he arrived at a place that claimed, like so many others, that work might set him free.

I told him what the Gestapo said, that he'd plunged his body willfully into the Ner.

“I would never do such a thing!” he said. And then he hung his head and admitted that before the Russian newspaper gave him the company of that beautiful image, he'd thought of doing that very thing every day, soon as he woke, but with a rope, not a river. It was the inclusion of that last detail—rope, not river—that set my mind to realize that this returner was not the Papa of old but a new, broken man, one who no longer insisted on revealing the horrors of the world in discrete increments to his daughter, as they had already made themselves as plain as the new scar that careened across his forehead.

Papa asked me about what had happened to me, to us, to Pearl. I could not speak of such things. I simply told him that I wasn't fit to take care of this baby, as much as he thought we owed him a home. I had impaired vision, a bad ear. I was useless in matters of assisting another's survival.

Papa took out our beloved newspaper and unfurled it pointedly so I could not escape the face of my sister. She was ours, even in that picture.

“We will find her alive,” he swore. “She would not leave this earth without you.”

Already, the old nature of our relationship was returning to us, though with alterations. Our walk, that was new. For the first time I could remember, I strode directly by his side. I knew he would have lofted me onto his shoulders if I'd let him; he would have held me high enough for all the city to see so that they could know that Janusz Zamorski was not only still a man, but also a father not entirely bereft of family, a man with two daughters, twin girls that he loved for all their differences.

But he did not try the old shoulder stroll of our younger years, because if I were to be carried in such a capricious manner, who would look after the safety of Baby?

Papa was immediately taken by the infant, you see. He appraised him as a good doctor does, admiring the broadness of his newborn chest, the steady intake of his lungs. You would hardly know, he said in wonder as he tickled Baby, that this was the face of a wartime child.

I could see that Baby would never be left in a basket at an orphanage, not as long as Papa had some say. I did not want him. Or at least, I did not want him until I had Pearl by my side, because only then would I know that my life truly could continue. Baby must have seen my thoughts, he must have known in that way that infants do, because he escalated his handsomeness in a snap; he parted his lips and made his need for food known so discreetly. I had to admit the child was a charmer, but his comely manners could not overwhelm my doubts, and I assessed the matter as we picked our way through the streets.

“He is hungry,” Papa said, pointing to Baby's mouth, open with want. “We must find him something to eat.”

Papa and me, we'd always spoken in bargains and bets. If I were to do this, I said, to take care of this baby, you must do one thing for me. What is this? he asked. He expected something playful. He expected me to make a joke. But I had none to make.

Please take this pill from me, I begged, please bury it where I can't find it.

We kept a list; we crossed off names. The names were of orphanages, displacement camps, nunneries, and monasteries, all the places one had to look in those days. A farmer gave us rides around the towns bordering Warsaw. We went to Zabki, Zielonka, and Marki.

“Have you seen a girl,” Papa would say, pushing me forward, “who looks like this?”

“We've seen so many girls,” the nun or the official or the monk or the guard would say.

“She has a number,” I'd bleat, and I'd show them my own.

“This doesn't help us,” they'd say, staring into the blue. Often, they seemed to lose themselves looking at it.

“She has other identifying marks,” I'd say. “If she still has hair, she wears a blue pin in it. If she still has legs, they are knobby at the knee. You can't miss her—if you've seen her.”

And they would smile and say that we should go to this place or that place. She was sure to turn up, they said. If she was alive, they said.

“Of course she is alive,” we'd say, pointing to the photograph. “Look at this face!”

All we could do after the conclusion of these visits was look at the newspaper. There Pearl was, nesting in Dr. Miri's arms, with fences rising on either side of them, as if they were trapped in a garden with hedges of wire. If you looked at the picture long enough, you could sense the grip of the doctor's hands, or feel the prick of the frost. Whenever we returned to Feliks's house, the newspaper lived in Papa's dresser drawer, alongside our guns. He kept it there because I looked at it too much, he said. There were rules, he said, and they were imposed for my own health. He was not wrong in this. If I looked at the picture in the morning, I couldn't bring myself to eat. If I looked at it in the evening, I could not sleep. And so my visits with the pictured Pearl were confined to the afternoon. If I looked at her with both eyes blurred, it was easy to imagine that she looked at me too.

Tears must have been invented for that reason, I thought.

On the first day of March, I confessed my stupidity about Mengele and my deathlessness to Papa. It was the weather's fault—it coaxed me with its beauty. Crocuses began to thrust up their heads in the animal houses. Birds returned. Buildings began to hold themselves high. Baby became round and hardy at the breast of a wet nurse. Humbled by this splendor, I could only hang my head and tell my secrets—I was sure that Papa would be ashamed. But he assured me that I did what I did in order to survive. And then he called Feliks over for a story.

“It is only because of a curse, or many curses, that I survived,” Papa said. “When they first took me from Lodz, I marched with the other captives, on the roadsides, through fields. Often, we would come upon fellow Jews in disguise. I told myself that they would save us if they could. It didn't matter to me that they did nothing to support this belief. I took care not to look at them. I feared that if I did, they would crumble and be forced to join us. On a day I was sure I would starve to death, we were led through the field of a priest. Peasants were gathering potatoes, piling them in a wagon. On top of the potato pile sat an old Jewish man. Unlike others in disguise, he had never bothered to clip his earlocks. Seeing us, he suddenly crossed himself, as if horrified by the proximity to our kind—the gesture was unnatural; it was a wonder to me that he had managed to pass for so long without capture. But his next action made me realize I'd been wrong to question his resourcefulness, because he put a hand beneath his bottom, searched about the wagon bed, pulled out a potato, and flung it at me with a curse! Then again. One after another. For every curse, he threw a potato. His curses followed us until we reached the end of the field and came to the road, but we knew what they meant—these were the kind of curses that would keep us alive.”

I wanted to ask Papa how he could be sure of this, but I didn't want to admit my uncertainty. So I pinched Feliks. He asked for me. Papa was unnerved by this connection that thrummed between us but he answered all the same.

“I saw it in his face,” he said. “The curses were merely blessings in disguise. He meant for me to take up those potatoes and live.”

He pulled on the end of his nose, as he always had in a thoughtful moment, and then he sank his head into his hands so I was forced to study the new seam that wound itself over his face and scalp.

“I know that Mengele's curse—there was no good intention in it, not at all. But I just want to say that you were not wrong to take that fool's curse—with all his lies and manipulations—and twist it so that you could survive by it. Understand?”

I did. And I lied and told my father that I would take comfort in his cursed-vegetable story. I know that he did. Because when Papa died many years later, eyes shrouded in illness, stretched out on his bed, Feliks and I saw him raise his hands in the air as if trying to catch an object. His fingers lifted with a strange urgency, unnatural to any deathbed, and we watched his sightless eyes dart back and forth, following the holy path of a potato in flight.