Mischling (15 page)

As I watched this confrontation, I felt for the piano key in my pocket. And when my fingertips lit on its surface—I tried to help it but I couldn't—I shrieked.

Anika breathed deep, Taube frowned, Pearl fidgeted beside me. And then Uncle, once again bouncing that boy on his knee, addressed me from across the room.

“What is it, Stasha? Why are you crying?”

But words had left me. I could only fidget with the hidden key in my pocket as he approached me.

“Tell me,” Uncle insisted. He came to me, passed the flat of his hand over my forehead, and, finding no evidence of a fever, stooped to inspect my eyes. Finally, he withdrew and sighed. “You must not interrupt,” he advised me. “Especially in matters you don't understand.”

I promised that I would keep quiet from then on. He looked as if he didn't quite believe me, but he patted me on the head before striding to the piano, where Anika's hands still shook.

“Let the woman go,” he instructed the guard.

“You are too kind, Doctor.” Taube made no effort to conceal his surprise. It lifted every plane of his red face.

Uncle sauntered up to Taube so closely that his mustache must have tickled the guard. It was an unsettling proximity. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the corner of Taube's lips, where a bit of angry spittle had gathered. Taube went as white as the handkerchief.

“You are upsetting the children,” Uncle said. His voice was slow and precise with anger. Chastened, Taube wove the belt back around his waist with fumbling fingers, but his face betrayed the fact that he would carry this insult with him long into the evening. Uncle folded his handkerchief, but just as he was about to put it in his pocket, he snorted with disgust to fully convey how much he loathed any further contact with Taube. Pinching the soiled hankie between his fingertips, he circled Taube like prey, all the while issuing that same half-smile that so many of us had received while we were being inspected by him and found lacking. Finally, when his intimidation was complete, he leaned into Taube's face for a long hiss, one so loud and pronounced that we could hear it from across the room.

“I never liked that song anyway,” he said.

It was only then that I noticed that the piano key was slick within my hand. I marveled at this for a moment, thinking it had wept, before realizing that this was only the result of my guilty, sweating palm.

Uncle stalked back to his seat. We could hear the precision of his every footfall.

“I thought we were here to listen to music,” he said merrily to the conductor, and she bowed her head obediently and gave the signal to the musicians to begin again, and then the famous singer entered the room, causing an immediate stir. She was a recent transport, so the guards had not yet had the time to get accustomed to the glow of her presence, and even they parted for her as she walked.

“Mama's favorite,” Pearl whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “It is too bad that Mama wasn't invited too.”

She would have loved to be there, I knew. These songs—they were her friends after Papa left. He didn't mean to leave forever, I was sure of it. He only stepped out because there was a sick child down the street, a boy overcome by fever, and Papa was a good doctor, he couldn't deny anyone his attention. I'd spent so much of my time wishing that he had. Because he never arrived at the boy's house. The child died, and my father—he died too. He left too close to curfew, and the Gestapo caught him up in their clutches—that is what I think happened. But the authorities gave another story. They had a story for every disappearance. We didn't ask Mama what she believed. She'd shut herself up in the ghetto basement and refused to eat or change her clothes. We left food for her on plates, took it back in the morning, untouched. Playing the singer's music was the only thing she was able to do, and though the strains of it were sad, they uplifted her somehow. I know she was lonely, lonelier than any of us. She was a woman who had never had a twin, and before our very eyes, by and by, she became less motherly, and then less womanly, until she was reduced to a girl even younger than we were. She was restored to herself only when Zayde, the papa to our papa, arrived, his hearty embrace and booming voice a cover for the mourning of his son, and ordered that the music end.

I'd never wanted to remember such things—these images were Pearl's responsibility. But I suppose it wasn't her fault that my memory was so insistent. Looking at her, I saw that she was recalling the same things.

“She'd fall asleep listening to that music with her boots still on,” Pearl mused.

“And her soup barely touched,” I said.

“We were always putting a mirror to her mouth,” Pearl said.

“To see that she still breathed,” I finished.

We hadn't completed each other's sentences in some time—I leaned against the brick wall with a fresh contentment. I didn't even mind that Peter was standing next to Pearl and managing furtive grabs at her hand. All that mattered was the music.

It was a song I'd never heard before, an original piece that the conductor had created. Listening to it, I wondered if she had access to a window that the rest of us didn't. She must have been fed better, must've slept better, must've been allowed a letter from home, one unmarked by censors and full of good news. The song bore me up; it gave me a fuzzy feeling and a picture of the future I would someday have.

This future was at the movies—it had matinee tickets and a silver screen and a newsreel full of confetti and liberation. The future was Zayde and Mama and me, the three of us seated in blue velvet chairs waiting for the show to begin. I sat between them, surrounded by Mama's violet perfume on one side and Zayde's smell of old books on the other. The scents collaborated to create their own nature. Mama's hand was consumed by bandages, but she cupped my knee, and I saw her opal ring glint amid the gauze. We were trying to act as normal people act, but I still kept my ticket beside my tongue for safekeeping. I had all sorts of goods stored there, in a pocket of my mouth, and this disgusted my mother, who thought it no longer necessary for her daughter to carry razor blades in her mouth. But Zayde came to my defense; he kept telling her that the doctor had altered me in such a way that I might never be the same again, that I had impulses different than those of a girl who had not stared into the bright lights of a surgeon's table. Mama argued that yes, this was terrible, what had been done to me, what had been done to all of us, but it did no good to walk about always with one eye anticipating the next disaster.

And then the usher hushed us all because the movie was beginning. My sister was onscreen with all the greats.

It was a musical and Pearl played the part of me as well as the part of herself. Predictably, she was quite good in both roles, though I thought she could've been a little more mournful when she poisoned Mengele, because as bent on vengeance as I was, I was not a monster. The only element that troubled me more than this was the fact that the writers made us into orphans. This departure from the facts was a real insult. But I couldn't deny that Pearl excelled at the part since we'd come so close to being orphans ourselves—her tears were perfect splinters of grief that held real triumph.

What I loved most? The final sequence. After Mengele was felled, Pearl wore a white fur and clutched a tabby kitten while tap-dancing on top of a piano as lustrous as her name, and the camera loved her so much that it zoomed in on her repeatedly throughout.

This imagined scene—I knew it would be enough to pull me through, to make me survive the Zoo. I wanted it to go on forever. But it ended as soon as the singer stopped singing.

I turned to Pearl. I wanted to know if she'd seen what I'd seen, if she'd imagined it all too. But just as I was about to tap on her shoulder, my thoughts were flooded by gray, and my heart contorted. Was this a fit? I wondered. Was it a side effect of my deathlessness, some phenomenon where I'd find myself assailed by half-consciousness? When I woke from this state, I was on the floor with a number of faces floating over me, all of them angled with concern.

Pearl's was not among them.

I fumbled about to raise myself, and I pushed the faces away without knowing who they were, demanding all the while to know the location of my sister. And then I saw for myself—her absence, in full.

Where she had stood—now there was only a brick leaning out of the wall like a child's loose tooth. I called my sister's name. I called her by every name I knew, and then I invented new names for her. I even called her by my own name, just in case. She didn't answer to any of these. The music was too loud. She couldn't hear me. This is what I told myself while I screamed.

Then I saw her muddy footprints studding the floor. There were dirty quotation marks at the heels, brief flecks of mud that indicated that Pearl's departure had not been so sudden as to allow her to leave without a smudge. Such tracks are the marks of a stolen person. These imprints testified that Pearl was steadfast in her love for me, even as our tormentors removed her from this life. I wondered if—wherever she was—she saw the vision too, the vision of what I'd so dreaded, in all its multiplication.

Auschwitz never forgot me. I begged it to. But even as I wept and bargained and withered it took care to know my number, and to count every soul that it claimed. We were so innumerable, we should have overwhelmed this land beneath us into nothingness. But this patch of earth would not be overwhelmed. Some claimed that we might overwhelm it when we fully understood its evil. But whenever we began to understand evil, evil itself increased. Others believed that hope might overwhelm it. But whenever hope flourished, so did our tortures. This was my belief: Auschwitz would end when Pearl returned. Where she had gone, I didn't know. I only knew that she was not with me.

And I also knew that I spent most of my time in an old sauerkraut barrel, which was an advantageous spot for my vigil, despite the cabbage stink I soon acquired. A perfect circle of isolation to enable a lookout for my sister. No
blokowa,
no Zoo fellows, no Twins' Father. Just me, my lice, and a peephole that held my view of the world.

“Are you in there?” Peter's fist knocked on the wood of my home.

I should note here that I believe that three days had passed since Pearl's disappearance, though we both know that time was not my strength, but my sister's.

At first, I wasn't alone. Right after the music of the orchestra swept Pearl away, the lice came to keep me company. White lice, each thick as your fingertip, with black crosses splayed on their backs. I didn't mind them so much because they bit me and their bites kept me awake and I needed to be awake in order to find my sister. We struck a deal, those lice and I—I gave them my flesh in exchange for awareness, and by the grace of their jaws I kept a constant eye to the peephole of my barrel. I'm sure that we could've lived together quite beneficially for some time if it were not for the intervention of Nurse Elma.

Because those lice couldn't help but fall in love with Nurse Elma. They were always pacing my scalp, racked with longing for her. They oohed over her hips, her leather gloves, the cascade of her hair over her eye. The lice and I would get into frequent debates over her beauty. They likened her to perfection and I likened her to a parasite, which they took as a favorable comparison. At one point, a particularly tubby hustler had the temerity to pirouette up and away from the barrel as he professed his desire. Quite a leap for such a small insect. As soon as that louse said that he loved her, Elma grabbed me out of my barrel, hauled me to the laboratory, and reached for the razor. I'm sure he wasn't the first fellow to experience such a reaction, but I felt sorry for him all the same. Beneath her hand, the curls that had belonged to us gleamed in midair, then fell, and when my scalp was stripped, I saw my reflection in a steel cabinet. I did not recognize us in it. This frightened me, because maybe Pearl wouldn't be able to recognize me either. I slunk back to my odorous lair and slept. The guards knew of my presence in those barrel depths, but they let me be. I wondered if Uncle had told them to grant me this leniency or if they were intimidated by the sounds leaking from the barrel, because I spent all my time in that darkness sharpening my fingernails with my bread knife and practicing my snarl. The more I snarled, the faster my fingernails grew. The faster my fingernails grew, the more the guards trembled. They couldn't imagine the truth, which was that I sharpened my fingernails in the interest of words, not weaponry. I was writing letters to Pearl on the wooden slats of my home, inscribing it all against the grain. I wrote her once, sometimes twice a day.

Mere days into my epistolary captivity, I was already running out of barrel, even though I took care never to sign my name. And yes, I knew that there was no way for me to send letters written on this material. I just hoped that wherever Pearl might be, she could sense the scratch of every word and longing.

One day, bread crumbs flew through the hole of the barrel. I caught them like flies and threw them back.

“You bother me,” I said to the visitor. This was my standard greeting at the time.

Because I had a lot of visitors. The other children visited my barrel to ask me questions; it seemed that my reputation as a smart girl had doubled in the wake of my sister's disappearance, as if I had been allotted all her genius. They had many questions, but none of them were meaningful, just talk-talk to take up space and time. They asked me what poultices were made of, how to cure a dog of crying, what it meant to dream of a swarm of bees. To everything, I answered, “Pearl!” That made them leave me alone. They didn't want to talk about my sister, because they all believed her to be dead.

In my pocket, hidden from view, my fingers clenched the piano key. I had no idea what to believe. I resented its presence, because it was a sad thing to have a piano key as the sole vestige of my sister. I hated how still it was, how mute, how inanimate. But I was becoming like that too. And like me, the key had no use for crumbs or visitors either. Still, the crumbs—they kept insisting themselves into my barrel.

“Save your crumbs,” I said to the visitor.

“Stasha!” the visitor hissed. “You have to eat. You know what happens if you don't eat!”

It was Peter's voice. I'd heard from Bruna that he too had been suffering since Pearl's absence, that his stride had changed, that he no longer took pleasure in the freedom of his movements about the camp but tended to sit in the schoolroom all day, staring at the maps.

I told him I'd eat when Pearl came back.

“That may be a while. Long enough for you to starve more than you're already starving. Don't you want to be healthy when she returns?”

He threw another crumb. I caught it up in my hand and put it in my pocket. I told him that I knew Pearl would love this crumb when she returned and thanked him in advance.

“Fine. Wash, then. You have to wash. You know what will happen if you don't wash.”

“Are you saying that Pearl will die if I don't wash?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, then,” I said. I could've added that there was nothing strong enough to cleanse me of certain filths that had been imposed on me through the experiments, but I didn't.

“Do you want to be
kaputt?
” Peter demanded.

I wasn't about to address the center of my concerns: I could never be
kaputt
. Through the eye of his needle, Uncle had prevented this. Never would I die. On his icy table, I'd thought I was doing what I needed to do to ensure the survival of Pearl and me. But Pearl was gone. I did not know if she was dead or not-dead, but I knew that he had never given her that needle, and I knew, too, that she would be ashamed of what I had done. Because after all this time in the barrel, I'd begun to suspect a few things. I suspected that my endurance was made possible by the deaths of others. My blood was thick with the thwarted survival of masses; it carried the words they'd never say, the loves they'd never know, the poems they'd never make. It bore the colors of the paintings they'd never paint, the laughs of the children they'd never bear. This blood made living so hard that sometimes I wondered if it was good that Pearl was spared deathlessness. Knowing the fullness of what I had chosen, I would not have wished her this fate—to live alone, a twinless half, forever burdened by the futures torn from others.

“Stasha? Are you crying in there?” Peter's knocks increased.

It was only my barrel creaking, I said. That barrel, it would insist on creaking for weeks.

I left my barrel for a limited number of reasons: roll call, bread-eating, washing, and retiring to my bunk upon Ox's orders. The only time I left my barrel uncompelled by these chores was to see Uncle. I referred to him by this name still because I had yet to surrender my ruse—I still held hope that I might exterminate him yet, by the skin of my charm. Was it strange, the relief I had in revisiting the cold sterility of his laboratory? Even I was alarmed by the fact that I was comforted by it, until I realized that it had become familiar to my life, just as a schoolyard might be familiar to another. Where my sister would have sat, there was only an empty chair, but it was easy enough to pretend a person into a chair. Patient had taught me that, so long ago.

As I pretended, I could hear my sister shaking, her quivers setting the steel legs of the chair atremble. But no sooner was I closing in on summoning some mirage of her than Uncle Doctor made his presence overly known. Leaning over my shoulder to apply a stethoscope to my back, he breathed too freely on the side of my face, and the scent of his breath—sweet, but with an acrid tang—made me wonder after his lunch, and I soon found myself adrift in thoughts of food and was jolted out of my musing only by the intrusion of an instrument. He then tested the reflexes of my knees. Left, right, left, right. And when he was finished, he inquired as to how I'd been.

I told Uncle that I wasn't sure if he'd noticed, but Pearl was missing.

“You don't say?” he said absently. “Now put on your clothes.”

I expected him to turn to me with some suggestion of where to look for my sister, but he only went to the sink and washed his hands and combed his hair and popped a mint in his mouth. I obeyed his orders and put on my clothes. The fit of my skirt was predictably loose, so when I restored the piano key to its usual hiding place within my waistband, it clattered to the floor. He picked it up and eyed it with a curious smile.

“Explain this to me, Stasha.”

I said only that I was sorry.

“Children like you often are. But what are you doing with this?”

I required a souvenir, I said, because I was afraid that I might forget this place one day. Seeing as I would live forever, that seemed a reasonable risk—how much could the deathless remember, anyway? So I'd taken the key from the piano before the concert. He drew his lips together in an exaggeration of a frown, as if he'd studied portraits of parental disapproval and found ones to emulate. There was nothing human in it, but I responded to it appropriately and hung my head in shame.

“You do realize that Anika was nearly beaten for your theft, don't you?”

I nodded.

“And you felt no guilt over this?”

“My sister” was all I could say. And then my voice gave out, or, rather, it pulled itself away from me as if tethered by some length of rope, the end of which was surely held by Uncle.

“There, there,” he said, a flurry of mock sympathy contorting his face. “You have nothing to be afraid of.”

I merely stared into his shoes, hoping that their gloss might reveal her location. But their usual shine was dressed in mud, and a tuft of dog's fur rose comically from the tip of one, like a clown's pom-pom. This was the first sign that something was awry. The second was his glass full of ice and whiskey. The glass itself was not unusual, but the many times it was emptied and refilled was alarming.

He left me sitting on the table, swinging my legs and dabbing at my eye with his handkerchief. His monogram was staked out at the corner, and I was careful not to let it touch my skin. As I dabbed, I allowed myself to peep around the handkerchief and take in the chaos that surrounded us. Never had I seen the laboratory in such disarray. Herds of folders were shoved into boxes, and the boxes were shoved into bigger boxes, and it appeared as if he were planning some great migration with all the pieces of us that he'd collected.

It is difficult to realize that part of you might travel for a lifetime with someone you hate, entirely against your own will. You may know what I speak of—maybe someone remembers you when you'd rather be forgotten; maybe someone has a piece of you that is impossible to retrieve. I can only say for myself that it was then that I knew that we were linked forever, the doctor and I, and I fainted before I could inquire about his future plans of escape.

The inside of my barrel became all but indecipherable, so thickly was it covered in letters to Pearl. I knew that if she did not return soon—actually, I knew nothing beyond the fact that my letters were growing angry and their lack of signature was erasing me. No one was counting bits of me in the laboratory anymore. No one was totting up the pieces of me. I did not know if this was because the doctor told people not to or because the best part of me was gone. Once, Bruna asked me, in her brutal and friendly way, why he bothered keeping me alive at all, and because I could not tell her that the doctor couldn't kill me ever, not even if he wanted to, I said that I expected him to end me any day, and she drew me close to her chest and vowed to spear him as soon as she had the chance.

I didn't know if she would ever have the chance. His presence was diminishing in those days. Here and there, from behind a curtain, I saw glimpses of him. He'd waggle his fingers at me pleasantly, give me a whistle. I had to find a way not to cringe at that whistle. In order to do so, I thought of my insides, all the tributaries of my blood, the inlets of my nerves, and wondered how hope fit into such a body. Because I had it still, that wild hope; it was as steady as a spine, and so pronounced I marveled that the nurses and technicians did not take note of this development within me and mark it on their charts.

There was only one other person besides Peter and the doctor's staff who reminded me that I was real, alive, a girl, Pearl's sister.