Mischling (12 page)

Peter's hair had a habit of falling in his eyes. He used this as an excuse not to look at me then.

“I've had some adventures,” he admitted. “But the house slipper! I can only wish. I don't know where these stories come from at all. They sound like some of your sister's inventions.”

“I've heard less wholesome stories too.”

“Oh? Well, perhaps you can convince Stasha to create more flattering fictions about me?”

“Not Stasha. Bruna. She is the one who told me about your visit.”

He stopped short in our walk, disturbed.

“Then I assure you, the account is inaccurate. Bruna has no idea what that was about. You don't believe me?”

I was silent, too embarrassed to address the details of what I'd heard.

“I have been to the Puff only to deliver messages. But on one occasion, it is true that I lingered, because I saw an old friend. Did you know Ivan?” He paused, thoughtful. “No, you couldn't have—he was not here when you arrived. He was a couple of years older than I, but we grew up together, in the same neighborhood. I had not seen him for at least a year. All the men on his block saved up to take him to the Puff. I was shocked, but Ivan was so pleased by his gift—he even made me promise that if I ever saw his father again, I would let him know that he had had that evening.”

“And have you seen his father?”

Distance entered his voice.

“Yes.”

“And did you tell him?”

The distance increased.

“No.”

“So you broke your promise.”

Here, Peter hesitated. I could see that this was a story he was not longing to tell. But—

“Not really. Because when I saw his father, he was dead; he was lying alongside bodies. I don't believe in talking to the dead—if you talk to the dead here, it's not long before you stop speaking your true language, whatever it may be. So I wrote him a note instead. I wrote that Ivan had had a night that would have made him happy to know about, and I put it in his pocket. It was an awkward note to write.” He paused. I wouldn't have taken him for one to blush, but he did then. “Do you think that was the right thing to do?” he wondered. “It bothers me. I think of it all the time.”

I knew what haunted me. Was it terrible to take comfort in knowing what haunted him? Reflective, he ground the toe of his tattered shoe into the dirt, as if to make the thoughts that preyed upon him join the dust.

“Maybe now that I've told you, I can stop thinking of it. I can think of you instead.” I hadn't known that a voice could be that tender. I also hadn't known that one day a boy would draw near and pluck a stray eyelash from my cheek, and I would hope desperately that Stasha would not sense how I felt in that moment.

I watched Peter rub the eyelash between his thumb and forefinger. “Nurse Elma will have to count them all over again tomorrow,” he said, in an attempt at lightness.

I did not go to see Peter with the intention of kissing him. But that is what I did. I want to say that I only pressed my lips against his in manipulation, as a means to an end. I want to say that I maintained this position even as he kissed me back, cupping the side of my face as no one ever had before, that this was not the beginning of anything—not closeness, affection, love, the same wonder that had flourished in doomed lovers like Rozamund and Luca and led to their end.

Because it was wrong, I told myself, to become too human to anyone in this place, to try to imprint myself upon someone's memories, and, most pressingly, to give myself a first that might soon be my last.

When that final thought struck—I pulled away. He wondered why I stopped but took a step back like a gentleman. Of course, this sudden reserve made me regret my action. But there were other matters of concern, and I forced myself to focus on them, despite my wants.

“There is something I need,” I said.

“Oh. I see,” he said wearily, and he sighed. “That is what this is about.”

“You have dealt with this before? With other girls?”

He gave a polite shrug. I saw then that he had been careful to hold my eyelash in the palm of his hand. The wind picked it up and whisked it away.

I stood on the bottom rung of the fence so that I could reach his torn ear, and I put my feelings aside, and then I told him what I wanted. I needed this thing, I said, to keep my sister alive when I left her. And then with this business concluded, I touched the scar at his earlobe, that spot where his skin had struggled to mend.

A faint lilt of music cantered over, lifting and swelling from the orchestra practice in the basement. We'd heard music in this place before. It had been there to greet our cattle car at the ramp, and now that the transports had ended and no new prisoners needed its initiation, it accompanied the inmates' work as they built barracks and sorted warehouse goods and trundled carts full of bodies and dug grave after grave—alongside every labor, it rose and insisted and sang,
Come this way, to this, the latest version of your extermination, one that you can survive if you prove your usefulness.

In all the smallness of our life, I had never thought I could hate music before. This place changed that; I cringed at every note, dreaded each swell and start, because when I heard it I could think only of the fatal toil that took place alongside each tune.

But I didn't hate the music then, as I stood with Peter. With him standing beside me, in his tattered sweater, his eyes fixed on the field beyond our fence and the birch trees that lined its perimeter, I welcomed it, because it was the sound of what we'd lost—the strains of those years that should have happened and now never would. I wanted to approximate a piece of those years. I wanted to understand what music meant when two people held each other and moved through the minutes with affection.

Like most boys, Peter couldn't dance. Still, I initiated a waltz, one ill-timed to the creaky melodies. Someone in that orchestra needed to tune our old piano, I could tell. While clasping the bones of one arm around me and treading all over my feet, he addressed my request with a mock-serious tone, as if we were two adults out in the world discussing some complication in our daily routine instead of the desperate captives that we actually were.

“You should know that what you're asking for will be very difficult to procure,” he said. “Ox has taken to following me everywhere I go. And then there's Taube's new guard dog. That brute snores through his duties. But if I try to pass? He will wake.”

I told him that it sounded like a challenge he would enjoy.

“Not for anyone but you,” he said.

His grip on my hand was clumsy and warm; it trembled. Through his thin sweater I felt the rung of a rib. Every day, I saw bones; I saw them expose themselves under the skins of children who were slowly dying. But never before had I felt these bones in a boy so close to me—I blame those bones for what I said next.

“I love you,” I said into his shoulder.

Peter stopped treading on my feet and cocked a half-closed eye at me in suspicion.

“You don't. You could—I think—in time. But you're just saying that to me because you think you won't have a chance to say it truthfully someday, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I confessed. “I am.”

“Then I love you too,” he said, and I know we both wished we meant it. Still, I repeated the phrase into the bony ladder of Peter's chest. I did so soundlessly, shaping the words. I am sure he felt them, somehow. Because it was with great reluctance that, when the song ended, he turned from our waltz and headed off into the violet streaks of evening, assuring me as he left that he would get me what I so badly needed, no further kissing required.

I told him that I'd do as I liked in terms of kissing.

He said that he would never try to stop me from doing so.

Night—it had forgotten that it shouldn't be beautiful in Auschwitz. There was no stopping its velvet sway at the messenger's back.

By day, my pain worsened. Some mornings, I woke to find it fevering in my toes, and on others, it was sulking about in my guts. Every day, a new location, a heightened pitch. I tried not to wonder after the identity of my sickness—what could this matter?—but my mind wanted a name for it. Eventually, I settled for calling my sickness a weakness, with the idea that labeling it as such might motivate me to become stronger. I'd overheard Dr. Miri say that resistance and strength were at the center of this experiment, that the doctor was testing to see which twins were able to defy the travels of the intruders that entered our bodies through his needles.

Whether I'd been visited by typhus or smallpox or whether it was the work of some anonymous germ, I didn't know how I could hide my weakness much longer. I listened to the other children, tried to overhear their recommendations as to what might cure my ills, because I couldn't go to Stasha. They all had their tricks, my fellow experiments. They all knew how to evade questions that might result in being sent to the infirmary; they knew how to transform a cough into a laugh. When Ox inquired after the temperature of my suspiciously beaded forehead, another girl slipped the thermometer in her mouth while her twin distracted the
blokowa
. And so it was that my fever went unread.

Potatoes were commonly upheld as medicine by the whole of the Zoo. I was curious, though, if it was the complex process of procuring them that was the real cure, as it distracted me from my pain. Bruna was a great help in this, of course. We stole into the prisoners' kitchen together under the ruse of helping the cook carry a large vat of soup. As soon as the cook's back was turned, the potatoes went down the waistband of my skirt.

At our barracks, I bit into their brown jackets raw and felt my teeth wiggle in their sockets, keening like birds on a wire about to be toppled by the wind.

Day by day, potato after potato, I became weaker. And each day I went to Peter after roll call and he showed me the empty linings of his pockets. Then he'd tell me stories. About how he'd been asked to recite a poem at one of the SS parties and had passed off some Whitman as his own, with no one the wiser. About how the women of the Puff said that Taube was a crier and a drunk, a big cabbage-faced baby who proposed to the Jewesses when no one was looking. About the hollow book he'd been given by a member of the underground that held a secret store of gunpowder. He told the stories in an attempt to lessen the anxieties of the wait, but I think he could see, even as I did my best to listen, that I was pinned by some unseeable wound, some disaster that was biding its time within me.

A week after the initiation of his quest, he came to me, his fingers curled around what I wanted.

“I wonder,” he said, “if you'll have any use for me after this.”

He pressed it into my palm with ceremony. I couldn't believe he'd managed to sneak it from our captors. I tucked it into the waistband of my skirt for safekeeping, thanked Peter, and said good-bye. He didn't want good-bye. He wanted a new mission, he wanted to have to look for something; it was better for him, he claimed, to have this purpose.

“Ask me for anything,” he said. “I need to have something to search for in here. Something better to do. Whatever you want, I'll bring it. Whatever you need, I'll get it.”

There was a plea in his voice. I wanted to name something. But I couldn't think of anything. The pain inside of me was blotting out all of my wants.

“Ask like there's a future,” he said. “Or at least another month, a week!”

The boy I'd known—or had started to know—suddenly, he was so lost, he looked nothing like the leader we children hailed him as.

Unnerved by my silence, Peter transformed it into a challenge.

“I'll steal real instruments for you,” he said, and he tried to mask the falter in his voice with a jesting tone. “Not just pieces of pianos. Whole pianos! Baby grands! You doubt me?”

I didn't, I said. But this provided little comfort. I saw him eye what he had given me, and it was as if he wished that he could take that back, and more. He wanted to take back all that we had shared, that feeling, that moment, just so that we could relive it. This is what I suspected, at least. Because it was how I felt too.

But no amount of feeling for another can compete with the need one has to be alone with one's pain.

Zayde, he'd always told us about animals that crawled off to die, the injured and the weak that separated themselves from the others so as not to affect the endurance of their pack. I knew this was something I would have to do someday, that I should practice for that inevitable moment when I needed to turn my head and shuffle off, for the good of those better suited to survival, people like Peter and Bruna and Stasha, who had not been selected by Josef Mengele for deterioration and ruin. That was my role, my lot. I was glad for it—it meant that I did not have to watch my sister suffer as I did.

But I did not want to practice this abandonment with Peter, not then. I wanted a week with him. I'd settle for days.

“You can steal the whole orchestra for me,” I said.

“Is that all?” He laughed, and he drew me close.

The object seemed too good to be real. I studied it; I turned it over in my hands. I'd thought I had wanted it for Stasha. But now that this object was in my possession, I knew I'd wanted it for myself too. I sat with it for a moment. And then two. Finally, I went to find Stasha.

She was sitting by herself behind the boys' barracks, scribbling in her little blue book, transferring anatomy diagrams into it. It was strangely quiet, or at least it was what passed for quiet behind the barracks, because only the guard dogs could be heard, and then, if you strained to part their barking, there was the sound of the cremo churning, spitting out its fire and snow with a dreadful efficiency.

Stasha's eyes were narrowed in study, and her mouth was drawn in a tense line as she penciled in her thoughts. The depth of her concentration drew my attention to how different we looked. It wasn't that change had touched only me, of course. I couldn't help but carry all the breakage of illness, but she too had been altered, though perhaps in subtler ways. Our youth had left us, but it had taken no pains to extract itself in equal measures. I said nothing of this, but she heard it still.