Mischling (6 page)

Stasha shut her mouth with a snap, and her hands crept up to cover her ears. I could see that the sound of my feet striking the ground disturbed her. She could feel what I felt, all the pain, all the fatigue. Her voice whittled by fear, she begged Taube to permit me to rest.

“But Pearl's very talented. Don't you agree?”

“Very much so,” Stasha quavered. She wouldn't look up from her feet, and I knew that they were throbbing like my own.

I might have been able to continue if I hadn't seen Stasha's anguish, but it tripped me up and I fell. Bruna offered me her hand, but Taube shoved her away, electing to pick me up by the waistband of my skirt. He then dragged me in the dust over to his stump, took a few steps back—so as to create a fine distance from which to study me where he'd placed me, like a toy on a shelf—and began to clap. It felt as if all our hearts were suspended in the air between his hands.

“Do you girls know Zarah Leander? Star of
The Life and Loves of Tschaikovsky
? The finest actress of all of German cinema?” he asked when the mocking claps finally subsided.

We did not know, but this didn't feel safe to admit. Instead, we gushed about her beauty and talent, and Taube grinned all the while, basking in the compliments as if it were him we praised, and not a distant movie star.

“Zarah is a family friend, and she is always looking for protégées. I am impressed.” He stabbed my cheek with his finger. “You have good feet, and I hear she will be filming a new musical soon. Perhaps, if you work hard enough, your dancing will improve in such a way that I may recommend you to her. Wouldn't that be a nice thing to happen in your life?”

“I suppose so,” I offered.

“We are very lucky to have met here, then,” he said. His face assumed some facsimile of kind excitement. “I'll call Miss Leander immediately. I'm sure she won't hesitate—perhaps she'll get on an airplane and come whisk you away within the hour!”

An answer was expected.

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Perhaps? Such a weak response—where is your conviction, your determination? You should pack your things! Why do you hesitate? Don't you know the life that awaits you?”

Only then did I notice that three other guards had gathered nearby to watch the spectacle—they laughed so hard that their cigarettes tumbled from their mouths. This laughter, combined with the effort of my dancing, left me sick and breathless, and I started to gasp. One of these onlooking wardens leaped to my side in concern—everyone knew that Mengele punished guards who let harm come to any of his twins—and gave me a gentle slap on the back.

“You should hope that the doctor doesn't hear about this,” he warned his fellow guards.

“Just a joke.” Taube shrugged. “Jews love jokes, especially jokes about themselves. You have yet to observe this?”

He placed a proprietary hand on my shoulder and shook me till my teeth clashed with my tongue.

“You love to laugh, don't you? Laugh a little for me now.”

I wanted to appease him, but before I could manage the slightest titter, Bruna started to cackle beside me. She roared and guffawed and snorted with a mocking force.

“Not you!” For once, the whole of Taube's face was animated with disgust. “Communists have no right to laughter!”

He was too easy to bait, that Taube. Clever Bruna increased her cackle and turned and ran, and Taube trailed her, like a dog suddenly distracted by the prospect of a new, more challenging prey. By the wisp of her laughter, she led him away.

It was the sweetest thing she'd ever do in Auschwitz, but it made me never want to laugh again.

Once the yard was emptied of wardens, Stasha sat down beside me. She put my shoes on for me; she wiped my eyes with her sleeve. None of it, she saw, did much good. Deciding that one of our old games was the only thing that could cheer me, she positioned herself so that we sat back to back, spine to spine, hips to hips. It was the game of our youngest years. This game was played by drawing whatever entered our heads, at the same exact moment, and then checking to make sure that we'd drawn the same image.

We took up sticks and etched these images in the dirt. First, we drew birds. We checked. They were the same. Then, moons and stars hovered over the birds. They were perfectly alike. We drew ships. We drew cities. Big cities, little cities, untouched cities, cities without ghettos. We drew roads leading out of these cities. All our roads led in the same direction.

Then, without warning, I had no idea where to go or what to draw. My mind went blank, but I could hear my sister scribbling on with her stick, free of any interruption. I had no choice but to peek over her shoulder. Unfortunately, the shift of my spine from hers gave my intentions away.

“Why do you have to cheat?” she demanded.

“Who says I'm cheating?”

“I felt you move. You peeked.”

I didn't try to defend myself against this charge.

“It's because you're different here, isn't it? They've changed us already.”

She was not wrong, but I wasn't willing to accept this.

“It's not true,” I told her. “We're the same still. Let's try again.”

We would have tried again, we would have tried forever, but before we had a chance to try at all, a white truck with a red cross on its flank arrived. Nurse Elma emerged from the truck's door, her step so delicate and fussy that she could have been descending the ramp of a cruise ship. We had heard of this Elma from the other children in the Zoo, but this was to be our first encounter.

After spying Elma, Stasha drew a bullet in the dust. I drew bullets too, drew them faster and faster. For every step that brought Elma nearer to us, the bullets multiplied.

I tried not to look up at her, to focus only on the shadow she cast over our drawings, but Elma didn't give me a choice. Squatting beside us, she thrust her powdered visage into mine and pulled on the tip of my nose as if I were some rubbery thing without feeling. Elma had a fierce-angled face that Stasha would later claim was of an evolutionary design that allowed her to track her prey in the dark, but at that moment, when the nurse was near enough to sink her teeth into me, I noticed only the calculated nature of her beauty, the hair bleached to meringue, the mouth overdrawn with crimson. It was as if she did her best to look like a drop of blood in the snow.

“Aren't you too old to play in the dirt?” Elma asked, giving my nose one final tug.

Neither of us knew how to respond, but Elma wasn't looking for an answer. She was content simply admiring the slenderness of her shadow as it fell over our drawings. She pivoted to take in the view and then bent down for a closer look at the images in the dirt.

“What are those?” She pointed at the bullets.

“Teardrops,” Stasha answered.

Nurse Elma cocked her head to one side, and smiled at our drawings. I think she knew that the so-called tears were bullets. She must've been charmed by our subterfuge, though, because she didn't handle us too roughly as she hoisted us up by our collars and steered us toward the red-crossed truck, her hands gripping the backs of our necks as if we were kittens she was dangling over a bucket of water but did not yet have permission to drown.

I want you to know the eyes. The hundreds of them, in a constant stare. They could look at you without ever seeing you and when you met their gaze, it felt as if the sky were tapping at your back in warning.

It was on the day that the eyes saw me that I was changed, made different from Pearl.

But to tell you about the eyes, I must first tell you about his laboratories. There were laboratories for blood-drawing, laboratories for x-rays. One laboratory we never saw, because it sat at the foot of one of the cremos and held the dead. Mirko claimed to have been inside that laboratory once, after a fainting spell. He said he woke beneath Uncle's resuscitating hands and was saved, but others disputed the legitimacy of this account. See for yourself! Mirko always said to these naysayers, but all prayed that they never would.

The laboratories weren't places you entered but places you were taken to, on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, for eight hours at a time. They were filled with not only doctors and nurses but photographers and x-ray techs and artists with brushes, all of them determined to capture the particulars of us for Uncle's medical review. In the hands of these technicians, we became picture after picture, file after file. Materials were extracted from us and colored with dye and placed between slides, set to whorl and fluoresce and live beneath the perspective of a microscope.

Late at night, when Pearl was fast asleep, her consciousness a safe distance from my own, I'd think of these tiny pieces of us and wonder if our feelings remained in them, even though they were mere particles. I wondered if the pieces hated themselves for their participation in the experiments. I imagined that they did. And I longed to tell them that it wasn't their fault, that the collaboration wasn't a willing one, that they'd been stolen, coerced, made to suffer. But then I'd realize how little influence I had over these pieces—after we'd been parted, they answered only to nature and science and the man who called himself Uncle. There was nothing I could do on their numerous, microscopic behalfs.

On the first occasion that these extractions were to be seized from our bodies, Nurse Elma led us down the hall of the laboratory. She held her fingertips to our backs so that we could feel the screw of her nails at our spines, and the airiness of her breath drifted down from on high, and our mouths were gagged by a perfume that made her sweeter than she really was. She escorted us past door after door, and when she trod on my heel I tripped and plunged forward and fell in a heap. When I looked up from this stumble, I saw Dr. Miri.

“Up, up,” she said. Urgency threaded her voice as she offered her hand. It was gloved, but I could feel the warmth of it still, and thrilled to her touch before seeing that she regretted the gesture. She recoiled, and put the hand in her pocket. At the time, I thought she regretted touching me because a show of kindness could compromise her standing with colleagues like Elma. Years later, I would realize her sorrow arose from taking care of the children that Uncle claimed for his own. It must have been like stringing a harp for someone who played his harp with a knife, or binding a book for someone whose idea of reading was feeding pages to a fire.

But these realizations weren't available to me then as a semi-child, a hider-in-coats, a shrinking pretender to adulthood. There, in the laboratory, I knew only that we were flanked by two women who seemed to fall in interesting positions in the order of living things. They looked to be entirely without feeling, their soft forms walled with protective layers. In Nurse Elma, this seemed a natural state; she was an exoskeletal creature, all her bones and thorns mounted on the outside—a perfect, glossy specimen of a crab. I assumed that she was born this way, numb to everyone around her. Dr. Miri was differently armored—though she was gilded with hard plates, it was a poor protection, one that hadn't warded off all wounds, and like the starfish, she was gifted at regeneration. When a piece of her met with tragedy, it grew back threefold, and the tissues multiplied themselves into an advanced sort of flesh with its own genius for survival.

How long, I wondered, would it take for me to become like her?

I hadn't meant to wonder it aloud, but that's exactly what I did, because Elma's hand closed on my shoulder, and she gave me a shake.

“Are you talking about me?” the nurse chided.

“About her.” I pointed to Dr. Miri, who blushed. But she was adept at covering for us children and negotiating Elma's moods.

“She only means that she wants to be a doctor someday too,” she said, and her face, with its telling eyes, telegraphed that I should follow her lead. “Isn't that right?”

I nodded, and rocked back and forth on my heels as I stood before them, made myself smaller, more girlish. People usually found the gesture quite charming, for whatever reason. It worked for Pearl and Shirley Temple both, and it worked for me then, because the nurse released me.

“Well, then,” she boomed, and she rapped her knuckles on my head. “Maybe if you work hard enough you will become a great doctor someday. Anything is possible here, yes?”

Will you believe me when I say that the weather saved me from having to answer this absurd question? We heard a knocking at the windows of the laboratory, a sound like thousands of tiny fists pummeling the glass. A scatter of nurses and doctors rushed about, closing the windows, fastening them shut, while beads of hail spilled down onto the floors. It was as if a sea's worth of oysters had been pried open in the sky and released the treasures that were my sister's namesake into the halls of the laboratory.

In this white tumult of hail, Pearl and I found ourselves unattended, and our interest was drawn to a room a few steps away, its door ajar. I stepped forward for a closer look at what lay within. Through the door slit, I saw walls lined with books, and I had a finger-twitch to steal one of the volumes. Surely, a laboratory book would be able to advise me on how to make my body withstand a place like this, how to fortress it and put the pain out. Books had never led me in the wrong direction. It seemed foolish to try to endure without such counsel by my side.

On tiptoe, I approached the room and pushed on the knob gently, but the sweat on my palm made it too slick, and the door swung open and the hinges tattled on me with a creak—Nurse Elma, her cap askew, stormed in and yanked me from the doorway, but as she did so, the door opened still further. And that's when I met the eyes, or when the eyes met me.

I remain uncertain as to how to classify the exchange of glances that took place.

All I know was that rows of eyes presided over the desk on the rear wall. They were fastened through the iris, pierced with pins, all assembled as neatly as children at roll call. They were colored like a pretty season: green and hazel and brown and ocher. A lone blue eye stood at attention on the periphery. All the eyes were faded in the way only living things that no longer live can be, their irises veiled with husks of tissue that stirred when a breeze lilted through the window. At their centers, the silvery winks of pins assured their captivity.

Though just a girl, I had ideas about violence. Violence had a horizon, a scent, a color. I'd seen it in books and newsreels, but I didn't truly know it until I saw the effects of it on Zayde, saw him come to our basement home in the ghetto with a red rag over his face, saw Mama go soundless as she bound his nose with the scrap torn from the hem of her nightgown. Pearl held the lamp during this procedure so that Mama could see, but I was shuddering so much that I couldn't assist her. I should be able to say that I saw violence happen to Mama when a guard came to our door with news about the disappearance, but I kept my eyes closed tight the whole time, sealed them shut while Pearl stared straight ahead, and because my sister saw it all, I felt the images secondhand, felt them burn on the backs of my eyelids—I saw the guard's boot glow and furrow itself in Mama's side as she lay on the floor. Pearl was angry that I was not an active witness, and so she forced me to take it all in, and when I begged her to stop subjecting me to such sights, she informed me that I had no say in the matter, because she would never look away, not ever, no matter how much it hurt me, because in looking away, she said, we would lose ourselves so thoroughly that our loss would require another name.

So, I knew violence. Or I knew it well enough to understand that it had happened to the eyes. I knew they'd been torn from bodies that belonged to people who deserved such better sights than what they'd last seen. And even though I was unaware of what the most beautiful sight could be, I wanted to give it to them. I wanted to travel the whole world over, from sea to mountain and back, and bring to them an object, an animal, a view, an instrument, a person—anything that might reassure them that even as violence tore on, beauty remained, and it remembered them still. Realizing the impossibility of this, I gave the eyes the only thing I could: a tear crept down my cheek.

“Why are you crying?” Nurse Elma demanded. She shut the door on the eyes, but not before they saw my tear.

“We're not crying,” I claimed.

“Your sister's not crying”—she jerked her snowy head at Pearl and then crouched to face me—“but you are. What did you see in there?”

The truth was that I couldn't describe what I saw. But I knew that I'd never stop seeing those eyes, that they'd follow me for all the days I'd live, wide open and blinkless, hoping for another fate. I knew that I'd sense their stare the most whenever I heard of someone being born or wed or found. I knew that I'd try to shut my own eyes, just to have some peace, but I never would be able to shut them entirely. True closure, I was sure, would escape all of us.

“I saw nothing,” I protested.

Drops of moisture from the hailstorm beaded Nurse Elma's face and they dove to the floor, one by one, while she resorted to her standard tactics.

“I know you saw something,” she insisted as she shook me. “I just want to be certain that we saw the same thing. I want to know this, because I do not want the other children to be frightened by any of your wild stories. I am familiar with children like you. Lovers of fiction! There was a girl here once, she told a story about what she saw, a story that was not true, and do you know what happened to her?”

I told Nurse Elma that I did not.

“I can't recall either, not specifically. How can I be expected to remember? There are so many of you to look after. But know this: What came of her wild stories—it wasn't good. Do you understand my meaning?”

I nodded. This gesture served a dual purpose. Not only did it secure Elma's approval, but it allowed a second tear to descend my cheek without her notice.

“Now tell me, then. What did you see in that room?”

Searching for a suitable answer, I thought about rows mounted on the wall—even in their capture, the eyes had fluttered their pretty colors with a flighty animation, and the dust that coated them had the appearance of pollen. Many had likely migrated long distances. All received the treatment of pests. They'd been lured in, trapped, starved, pinched into submission, and then, when life had been sufficiently drained from them, they'd been pinned into place, mounted as curiosities for study.

“Butterflies,” I blurted out. “I saw butterflies. Only butterflies. They weren't eyes at all. Just butterflies.”

“Butterflies?”

“Yes. Row after row of butterflies. A class of insects. In the moth order Lepidoptera.”

Elma put a finger beneath my chin and lifted my jaw toward the ceiling. I wondered if she would halve me, and just when I figured that she surely would, she released me and assumed the tone of a frustrated and imperious revisionist.

“But they are not butterflies,” she informed me. “They are beetles. The doctor has collected them for years. Understand?”

I said I did understand.

“Say they are beetles, Stasha, I want to hear it. You made an error in describing what you saw. Correct yourself so Pearl understands too.”

“I saw beetles,” I said to Pearl. I did not look at my sister while I spoke.

“You don't convince me.”

“I saw beetles, nothing more. Not butterflies. Beetles. Order Coleoptera. Two sets of wings.”

Satisfied, she turned and walked on, her stride enlivened by the interrogation, and when we reached the end of the hall, she swung open the door to a room that would alter us forever. It is easy to think that there are many such rooms in one's life.
This room,
you might say,
that was the room where I fell in love.
Or,
This was the room where I learned that I was more than my sadness, my pride, my strength.

But in Auschwitz, I found that the room that really changes you is the one that can make you feel nothing at all. It is the room that says,
Come sit in me, and you will know no pain; your suffering isn't real, and your struggles? They're only slightly more real than you are, but not by much. Save yourself,
the room advises,
by feeling nothing, and if you must feel something, don't doom yourself by showing it.

Elma stripped us after we entered this room. Into her arms went the dresses Mama had sewn; Elma regarded the strawberry print with scorn. Even fruit could not avoid offending her.

“So childish,” she observed while stabbing one of the strawberries with a red-lacquered finger. “Do you like being children?”

“Yes,” we said. It would be the last word that we would ever speak in unison. I wish I had known that at the time, but I was too overwhelmed by the task of pleasing Elma, whose powdery face lit up with disbelief.

“How funny. I can't imagine why.”

“I've never wanted to grow up,” I said. This was true. Growing up held too much risk of growing away from Pearl.

Nurse Elma smiled her too-straight smile.

“Then you are in the right place,” she said.