Mischling (13 page)

“It's true. We do look different,” she said, acknowledging my thoughts.

“It's my fault. I parted my hair in the opposite direction,” I explained.

“Why? Parting your hair differently won't bring anyone back,” she said mournfully. And then she lapsed into her usual talk, the business about how she hadn't done right by Patient, that she'd failed thus far at ending Mengele.

Patient would understand, I told her. But there was nothing I could do to save her from her own convictions. So I braided her hair instead. She sat at my feet and I attempted to plait but my hands kept shaking and her hair kept slipping through my fingers.

“I don't know why I can't manage it,” I said after the third try.

“It reminds you too much of Mama.”

“Maybe so.”

She put her book aside. The fact that she could even bring herself to do so startled me. I'd assumed that it had become my replacement, something she could love without the risk of losing it.

“Can we play the game where my arms are your arms?” she suggested.

“No.”

“You forgot how to do it already? But it's so easy. You put your arms back and I put my arms through like they're your arms. And then I do funny things with my hands, like, say, wave and make a cup of tea and lose at cards.”

“No.” I made no attempt to be nice about this.

“Fine, I'll make you win at cards. Now will you?”

“Never.” I shuddered. I had a good reason to refuse; the game no longer had appeal for me. Because while the Zoo had changed many things for us, its most severe alteration might have been the very damage it did to our notions of what it meant to be close to another living being.

The stories of this place, they alone changed our longing for attachment. Here is one such story: In the spring before our arrival, Mengele fastened two Roma boys together, sewed them back to back. First, they disappeared from their camp. Then, screams were heard from the laboratory, screams unlike other screams. The volume of their agonies unnerved the other experiments too much, so Mengele moved the joined boys to another location. Peter had told me this story; he'd watched as the boys were carried out on a single stretcher, and he'd followed the truck that transported them, at a safe distance, through the camp until it stopped. On the stone floor of a cellar, the Roma boys lived as a single entity for three days, each staring in the opposite direction, joined by a seam at their spines, and an infection.

The fact that they could not see each other's suffering was the only good to come of that.

I didn't want to speak of this, so I changed the subject. I had to say good-bye to her somehow, I had to slip it in so it didn't disturb her, I had to sweeten it so she overlooked its sting.

I assumed a cheery tone appropriate to such deceptions. I'd learned this from our mother, after Papa's disappearance, and I'd practiced it to myself down in our ghetto basement whenever I found myself alone and doubtful about our future.

“If you're so good at reading my mind these days,” I said in a bright voice, “then what do I have in my pocket?”

Her eyes livened.

“You have a letter from Mama? From Zayde?”

“Guess again.”

“A knife? A gun? What is it? Wait, don't tell me—I want the fun of a guess.”

But it was too late. I had already pulled the object from my pocket and displayed it in my palm.

“A piano key?”

“More than that,” I informed her.

She turned its whiteness over, and inspected it. Knowing how her mind worked, I understood she was already searching for another, lamenting its loneliness as a single key. She was confused by its lack of siblings.

“What's this for?” Her tone was not just unimpressed; it also carried the splinter of a conviction that said there was nothing I could give her in these times that would be of any use.

I explained that it was more than just a key, it was a key from our old piano—it was a token of our past, a reminder of something important, and whoever had it would be with me forever.

She bounced the piano key up and down in her palm as if handling a coin that she was about to gamble. Whenever the key was in the air she looked bright, thoughtful, anticipatory—but as soon as it fell into her hand, she went grim, as if the simple fact of gravity were enough to dash every hope.

“So if I ever leave you,” I continued, “I'll never leave you. Because you have this, you see.”

“This key, you mean. This is supposed to comfort me?”

I had no response for this. She buried her face in my shoulder, and my sleeve quickly grew damp. She shook a little. Enough to loosen her hands. The key fell, turning one whole revolution before clattering on the ground. Watching its escape, I wondered if the Roma twins died at the same moment, or if life, as it left them, had allowed one to ease the way for the other.

My sister put her lips to my ear and made a half hiss, half sob of despair, but managed nothing in the way of intelligible sound. What came from her was mangled and tortured, an attempt stopped short. I could only imagine what her words wanted to be. I couldn't imagine what the Roma twins had said to each other.

Had a good-bye been possible?

Or did the pain of their union render it unnecessary?

Thinking of these boys, I flushed and chilled; my pain made itself known, and I tried to push my sister away. It was one of those involuntary gestures, the kind that makes a person seem cruel, even though she's not aware of what she's doing. Simple as a reflex. Of course, my sister staggered back toward me; she threw her arms around my neck. My breath tried to leave me. I pushed her again, harder. The ache of this—it lit her face. She probably thought I was disgusted by the urgency of her cling, her pitiable illusions. I might have been, in some small measure, even though both had made the ruse of my piano key possible, but the truth was that, in that moment, I needed her to prove that she could manage without me at her side. The last time I pushed her, my force surprised me—she fell to the ground with a thud and sat there, blinking, as the first snow of the season began to fall.

“Get up,” I ordered her. I was so cruel. I thought it necessary. I believed it was the only way in this place. She needed to live for herself; that's what the pain was telling me. I didn't know if she was the stronger or the luckier of us two—I just knew she had to live.

But my sister, she stretched out in the snow. At first I thought she was making a snow angel, but then I saw that this was a most different posture—it was one of surrender, though it was not without its angles of defiance.

“I won't get up,” she whispered.

“Get up, Stasha,” I ordered.

She rolled over like a dumb baby.

“I'll get up when you promise to never leave me,” she insisted, her voice muffled against the snow-flecked ground. How terrible it felt, to stand over her like that, to maintain an impression of strength while she fell to pieces!

“I promise that a part of me will always be with you. Isn't that enough?”

She raised her head from the ground but refused to look at me. Her lips and nose were puffed with sobs, and I watched her bare fingers clutch the earth. They were so desperate, those fingers, to maintain a hold on anything at all that even dirt and snow would do.

“Which part?” She sniffed.

Her old fantasy—I drew on it. Had I ever truly believed in it? If I hadn't before, I certainly did in that moment, while my sister lay at my feet, so reduced.

“The part,” I said, “that knew who we were before we had names or faces. Back in the floating world. Remember the floating world? We were just less than babies then, and still, we knew how to love each other. We knew these times would come, we just didn't know how, much less why. We had a lot of living to do before they came for us. That's why we decided to leave Mama early and start seeing the world as soon as we could.”

“I don't recall making that decision at all,” she said.

Stasha stared at the piano key glumly like it was some hateful thing.

“It's not enough,” she said. But she got up. And in defiance of my pain, I bent myself at the abdomen, stooped to pick the piano key up from the ground. A tiny fracture branched out from one ivory corner. I displayed this new injury to her.

“Take better care of this,” I warned.

I was telling myself that the pain I felt was not Pearl's. Then I realized I was wrong. It had to be her pain. It was too pretty to have originated within me; it launched itself so delicately throughout my body, sending pirouettes of discomfort along my every nerve. Yes, I concluded, this pain belonged to Pearl—but before the fullness of this realization set in, I received a true blow. Bruna cuffed me on my ear.

“You cheated, Stasha!”

Bruna shivered with frost and anger. We'd been playing a game of cards behind our barracks. I'd thought it had been a pleasant one. But now, she leaned into my face so that there was no avoiding her rage. The powdered puffs of her breath smelled like winter and starvation, with a tinge of tin-cup coffee. “Don't deny it,” she snarled between the snowflakes. “You knew exactly what you were doing. You're a cheater!”

I blushed and trembled. She was looking more fearsome than usual in those days. In an attempt to no longer be albino, she'd taken to coloring her white hair with coal so that it flowed down her back in a charcoal glory. This measure not only failed to deter Uncle's interest in her as an experiment but resulted in fierce streaks of black across her white face. This lent her the appearance of a raccoon, and a rabid one at that.

Much as I loved her, I feared her too.

Because it was true—I was a cheater; my survival in the Zoo was a slimy, privileged thing. No work was required on my part, no stealth, no desire—I was doomed to live forever without lifting a finger. The eye of a needle had sealed my immortality, thwarting any chance of release.

None of this bothered me until I realized that Pearl had not been given the same opportunity. Why had he withheld it from her? This was not what I thought we'd planned for at all. We were supposed to be deathless together, side by side, just as we'd been babies and girls together. Had he suspected my plan? Was he countering it with a plan of his own, some plot that would deny Pearl the needle, and me my sister?

And now, here was Bruna, my friend and protector, a lover of violence—she had found me out, she knew there was a fraud in me, a crime that allowed me to flourish. I did not know how to defend myself against such charges.

You could say that it wasn't my fault, the introduction of this lie. You could say that only Uncle could be blamed, because he had flooded my blood with it. And I would say that you were right, but while another child's body might have rejected this fraud, recognized it as a virus, a poison, an undoing, mine had embraced it. I had been too pleased by the prospect that we would survive, always we'd be together, to question what it might mean to outlive others more deserving of life. And now here I was, still the sole bearer of this cure, doomed as of this moment to spend eternity alone unless I was able to undo what he'd done.

Through my carelessness, I had betrayed my sister, and more. I was the lowest of Auschwitz. I had no right to shield myself from scorn, and yet—

“It was all Uncle's idea,” I cried. “I shouldn't have let him do it, I know!”

Confusion set Bruna's eyes at an inquisitive slant. With her free hand, she motioned to the cards scattered across the snow.

“I don't know what Mengele has to do with this. All I know is that you peeked at my cards just now. I saw you! Admit it! Or don't admit it and you'll find a king in your mouth!”

She crumpled the monarch in her fist and tried to pry my mouth open. Only when she peeled my lips back and lowered the card into my throat, crown first, did I realize that her anger was about a different game, not the one I'd been playing with Uncle. Strengthened by this epiphany, I spat out the king and with it a splinter of confession, a mere fraction of my misdeed.

“You are never wrong, Bruna. I am a cheater.”

“This is true. Don't you go forgetting it.”

“I won't, I promise. You are the real winner here.”

Bruna regarded the crumpled card in the snow, and the rarest of regrets crossed her face.

“I'm sorry for shoving the king in your mouth.”

“It should've been the joker.” I laughed, but it was a laugh unfamiliar to me. A desperate one, a bit ragged at the edges. A real beggar of a chortle. “But even a joker is too good for me! You would have to invent a card to suit my kind. The rot. The cheat. The germ. The disease—”

Bruna cocked her head in contemplation. I couldn't tell if she was disarmed or pleased by my abasement. That sort of innermost hatred? It wasn't common in the Zoo. Most of the others, they did not have the luxury of disliking themselves because they were too consumed with survival. This was not among my problems.

“The germ, maybe,” Bruna concluded. “But the rest? You take things too far, as usual!”

I can imagine how I hung my head, but I couldn't feel it. I was numb. I assumed this to be a side effect of deathlessness, nothing more, because after the doctor had meddled with my ear, his toying with me had ceased. He took photographs of me to put next to photographs of Pearl, but this was the extent of his inquiry. Occasionally, I wished that my numbness might overtake me so that I could rally enough to see a new way to preserve Pearl, to finagle a switch at the labs and take her place as the chosen one.

Though I'd told my friend nothing of this sorrow, my face surely displayed it, because Bruna suddenly pulled me toward her in pity; she held me close and stroked my cheek with her own, as if I were just another swan in need of her rescue.

“Don't make me feel sorry for you now, Smidgen. You get me so angry!”

I apologized.

“Stop apologizing! You'll apologize yourself into the cremo.”

I told Bruna she was right.

“Stop telling me I'm right! What if I'm not right?” She sank back onto her stump and stamped her boots, restless. I saw her eyes; they were sinking into her face. I saw her hands; the little bones in them were rising to the surface. “Let me tell you—I just don't know anymore. I am finding myself with nothing to say, nothing to look forward to. Stealing doesn't have the same satisfaction when it's stealing crumbs. Beating people doesn't mean much when they're already beaten.”

I wasn't sure what I could say, so I said only:

“I miss Patient.”

Bruna broke from the embrace and returned to her cards with a furious shuffle.

“I won't say that I miss him. But I'll let you say that without spitting in your face. That's pretty much the same thing, isn't it?”

I agreed that it was. Bruna pocketed her cards and glanced about to see if anyone was lurking. She waited for Ox to lumber past before confiding in a low voice, “Don't tell anyone that I miss him. People here, they need to see me in a certain way. They need to see my new sweater and know how I got it. You know how I got it, Stasha?”

“You stole it.”

“Why, of course! But I'm not sure if it is quite stealing because I stole it for you. Just don't tell anyone. Not even Pearl.”

“We don't have secrets, Pearl and me.” This, of course, was me denying the fact that I was quite sure that Pearl was harboring the most terrible secret of all.

“Everyone has a secret here,” Bruna scoffed. And then she draped her sweater over my back and gestured for me to join her on her walk. When I refused, she trotted off through the snow, eager to keep her daily appointment of teasing the Lilliputs.

The sweater was the finest I'd ever seen among prisoners, and it was large too; it hung from me so voluminously that I was sure that it could sleep Pearl and me through the night in an unusual degree of comfort. I should have been happier for this acquisition. It was proof that Bruna loved me. But happiness wouldn't have me, not then. Movement wouldn't have me either. And of course, there was that dull whine in my bad ear that made me want to shriek.

I sat watching the snow fall, watched it erase me. Surely, my captors envied the snow this talent. I was thinking about them more in those days. In earlier times, I'd been able to block them from my mind with my wild,
mischling
hope, but as Pearl's pain swelled and begged within me, as it fevered and limped through my every corner, searching for another solution and mocking my inability to save her, I'd found it impossible to continue without dwelling on what our captors had done to us, and in such an organized fashion that they made us turn on each other. I swore I would never turn on anyone but Uncle, and I solidified this vow by kissing Pearl's piano key.

One of Uncle's promises had come to pass—we were to be entertained the way that real living people were entertained. For an evening, we wouldn't have to amuse ourselves with another round of Tickle the Corpse or hour after hour of knitting a useless blanket out of barbed wire. No, on that late-October evening, shortly before the women's orchestra was to be dispersed, we were going to be able to listen to the music not from the distant barracks, but in the room of its origin. I knew that I was undeserving of such a pleasure, but I hoped that perhaps I'd be able to listen intently enough that I might later describe the music to Mama and Zayde.

“Stay still,” Pearl commanded Sophia as the little girl squirmed. My sister had a tin cup full of snow that she dipped her fingers in to wash away the accumulations on the children's cheeks. A whole row of them lined up at our bunk to be cleaned.

Pearl had her doubts about this concert.

“It's a trick,” she said. “Probably a selection in disguise. If they are presentable”—she nodded toward others in line behind Sophia—“their chances will be better.”

For the past several hours, my sister had dedicated herself to the hygiene of any small girl who would permit such a fuss. She scrubbed their cheeks and chins, cleared their nails of grime with the edge of a pin. Watching her worry over prettiness, I was reminded of Mama, who loved to embellish us even though she neglected herself.

I wondered what Mama would have thought of how we looked, of the distinctions that had spread themselves across our faces.

Pearl had a grayness to her; silver moons had crept beneath her eyes, and when I caught sight of her tongue, I saw that it had grown its own fur. Pearl's tongue had always been much wiser than mine. I told myself that it had donned this ugly coat as a protective measure, to shield it from saying ugly things, and that my own tongue could benefit from such a precaution. But I could not trick myself into thinking that fur on a tongue was a good thing.

I hoped that I looked as ill as she did.

Naturally, Pearl detected these hopes.

“But it is good that you don't look ill,” she told me as she dismissed Sophia and put her fingers to work on yet another set of cheeks. Alize, the tiny recipient of her attentions, regarded her dolefully, as if even she doubted that Pearl was strong enough to complete this simple operation.

I asked Pearl if there was anything I didn't know, and I warned her not to lie. I knew she was keeping a much larger suffering hidden from me. My insides told me so.

“Are you playing doctor again?” She laughed.

I told her that I'd put such pursuits—or, rather, the ruse of them—to rest after killing Patient.

“You didn't kill him,” she argued.

And then she lapsed into the same narrative we'd lullabied ourselves to at bedtime for weeks, the one about how some live and die, some sacrifice and die, some cheat and die, and some simply escape and are never heard from again, and, yes, they probably died too.

I was tired of these explanations. Again, I insisted—what was this pain that she was keeping from me?

“I couldn't keep anything from you if I wanted to,” she protested, and then she closed my eyes, her fingertips warm on my lids. “Tell me, what am I thinking of right now?”

My mind was so crowded with anticipation of the concert that it took some doing, but then, with a little focus, I saw constellations of hurt, little sparks of light on a background of numbness. The little lights appeared to glow in a maze that my thoughts couldn't quite navigate. I turned this corner and that corner and found suffering, but the suffering wasn't specific enough for me to recognize it. In short, I had no idea what she was thinking.

“I don't understand,” I admitted.

The beginnings of a tear gleamed in her eye. She tossed her head back so that it wouldn't fall. And then I understood.

“You're worried about my ear, aren't you? You think that I truly am going deaf?”

She nodded, and then bit her bottom lip as she focused on Alize's hair. As she tugged her comb through the tangles, I saw cause for alarm. I wasn't sure how it had escaped my notice before, but I wasn't going to let another minute go by without addressing it.

“Give me your arm,” I ordered.

“I'm working,” she spat, but the child took this moment of distraction to bolt up and make a run for the door. We watched her dash off, saw her form grow smaller and smaller as it gained distance.

“I hope she doesn't regret that.” Pearl sighed. “But at the very least, she can run.”

“Your arm, please.”

She outstretched it. It was clammy to the touch, bruised here and there. Most notably, it had more needle pricks in it than I'd ever had even when I was a frequent subject in the laboratory. Never had I borne so many marks. Pearl had dozens. Rosy scabs marched up and down the length of her flesh like questing ants. When I inquired about this curious swarm, she withdrew the be-scabbed arm with a start and tried to smile it all away.

“You know how clumsy Elma is,” she said. “She's always missing my veins.”

She waved me away, dropped her chin. Her shoulders too. The whole of her became limp; it was as if her bones were snapping, collapsing her from within. But as soon as another little girl presented herself for prettying, she resumed her normal posture.

“You've been busy,” she said, her voice so bright that it drew my attention to the dullness of her skin. Her complexion wasn't far from the type I'd seen on children who were here one day and vanished the next. In all her preparations to ensure the safety of the others, she'd failed to fake her own well-being. I'd have to do it for her. I took up a trick I learned from the women who had traveled with us in the cattle car, wise women who knew the value of a rosy face.