Mischling (2 page)

“So you're Pearl?” His hand dipped through her curls too easily, as if it had done so for years.

“She's not Pearl,” I said. I stepped forward to obscure my sister, but Mama pulled me away and told the doctor that, indeed, he had named the right girl.

“So they like to play tricks?” He laughed. “Tell me your secret—how do you know who is who?”

“Pearl doesn't fidget” was all Mama would say. I was grateful that she didn't elaborate on our identifiable differences. Pearl wore a blue pin in her hair. I wore red. Pearl spoke evenly. My speech was rushed, broken in spots, riddled with pause. Pearl's skin was as pale as a dumpling. I had summer flesh, as spotty as a horse. Pearl was all girl. I wanted to be all Pearl, but try as I might, I could only be myself.

The doctor stooped to me so that we could be face to face.

“Why would you lie?” he asked me. Again, there was his laugh, tinged with the familial.

If I was honest, I would have said that Pearl was—to my mind—the weaker of the two of us, and I thought I could protect her if I became her. Instead, I gave him a half-truth.

“I forget which one I am sometimes,” I said lamely.

And this is where I don't remember. This is where I want to wander my mind back and under, past the smell, past the thump-bump of the boots and the suitcases, toward some semblance of a good-bye. Because we should have seen our loves go missing, we should have been able to watch them leave us, should have known the precise moment of our loss. If only we'd seen their faces turning from us, a flash of eye, a curve of cheek! A face turning—they would never give us that. Still, why couldn't we have had a view of their backs to carry with us, just their backs as they left, only that? Just a glimpse of shoulder, a flash of woolen coat? For the sight of Zayde's hand, hanging so heavy at his side—for Mama's braid, lifting in the wind!

But where our loved ones should have been, we had only the introduction to this white-coated man, Josef Mengele, the same Mengele who would become, in all his many years of hiding, Helmut Gregor, G. Helmuth, Fritz Ulmann, Fritz Hollman, Jose Mengele, Peter Hochbicler, Ernst Sebastian Alves, Jose Aspiazi, Lars Balltroem, Friedrich Edler von Breitenbach, Fritz Fischer, Karl Geuske, Ludwig Gregor, Stanislaus Prosky, Fausto Rindon, Fausto Rondon, Gregor Schklastro, Heinz Stobert, and Dr. Henrique Wollman.

The man who would bury his death-dealing within these many names—he told us to call him Uncle Doctor. He made us call him by this name, once, then twice, just so we could all be acquainted, with no mistakes. By the time we finished repeating the name to his satisfaction, our family had vanished.

And when we saw the absence where Mama and Zayde once stood, an awareness collapsed me at the knees, because I saw that this world was inventing a different order of living things. I did not know then what kind of living thing I would become, but the guard didn't let me have a chance to think about it—he grasped my arm and dragged me till Pearl assured him that she'd support me, and she put her arm around my waist as we were led away with the triplets, away from the ramp and into the dust, onto a little road that led past the sauna and toward the crematoria, and as we marched into this new distance with death rising up on either side of us, we saw bodies on a cart, saw them heaped and blackened, and one of the bodies—it was reaching out its hand, it was grasping for something to hold, as if there were some invisible tether in the air that only the near-dead could see. The body's mouth moved. We saw the pinkness of a tongue as it flapped and struggled. Words had abandoned it.

I knew how important words were to a life. If I gave the body some of mine, I thought, it would be restored.

Was I stupid to think this? Or feebleminded? Would the thought have occurred to me in a place free of flame-licked winds and white-winged doctors?

These are fair questions. I think of them often, but I have never tried to answer them. The answers don't belong to me.

All I know: I stared at the body, and the only words I could summon weren't my own. They were from a song I'd heard played on a smuggled record player in our ghetto basement. Whenever I'd heard the song, it had improved me. So I gave these words a try.

“‘Would you like to swing on a star?'” I sang to the body.

Not a sound, not a stir. Was it the fault of my squeaky voice? I tried again.

“‘Carry moonbeams home in a jar?'” I sang.

It was pathetic of me to try, I know, but I had always believed in the world's ability to right itself, just like that, with a single kindness. And when kindness is not around, you invent new orders and systems to believe in, and there, in that moment—whether it was stupidity or feeblemindedness—I believed in a body's ability to animate itself with the breath of a word. But it was obvious that these lyrics were not the right words at all. None of them could unlock the life of the body or were powerful enough to repair it. I searched for another word, a good word, to give—there had to be a word, I was sure of it—but the guard wouldn't let me finish. He pulled me away and forced us to press on, anxious to have us showered and processed and numbered so that our time in Mengele's zoo could begin.

Auschwitz was built to imprison us. Birkenau was built to kill us. Mere kilometers bridged their attached evils. What this zoo was designed for, I did not know—I could only swear that Pearl and I, we would never be caged.

The barracks of the Zoo were once stables for horses, but now they were heaped with the likes of us: twins, triplets, quints. Hundreds upon hundreds of us, all packed into beds that weren't beds but matchboxes, little slots to slip bodies into; we were piled from floor to ceiling, forced into these minute structures three or four bodies at a time so that a girl hardly knew where her body ended and another's began.

Everywhere we looked there was a duplicate, an identical. All girls. Sad girls, toddler girls, girls from faraway places, girls who could have been our neighborhood's girls. Some of these girls were quiet; they posed like birds on their straw mattresses and studied us. As we walked past them on their perches, I saw the chosen, the ones selected to suffer in certain ways while their other halves remained untouched. In nearly every pair, one twin had a spine gone awry, a bad leg, a patched eye, a wound, a scar, a crutch.

When Pearl and I sat on our own bunk, the mobile ones descended on us. They scrambled over the rickety corrals with their straw mattresses and appraised our similarities. Demands of our identities were made.

We were from Lodz, we told them. First, a house. Then, a basement in the ghetto. We had a grandpapa, a mother. Once, there had been a father. And Zayde had an old spaniel that could play dead when you pointed a finger at him, but he was easily brought back to life. Did we mention that our father was a doctor who helped others so much that he disappeared one night, that he left us to tend to a sick child and never returned? Yes, we missed him so much we could not even divide the weight of our grief between us. There were other things we dreaded too: germs, unhappy endings, Mama weeping. And there were things we loved: pianos, Judy Garland, Mama weeping less. But who were we really, in the end? There wasn't much to say beyond the fact that one of us was a good dancer, and the other one tried to be good but wasn't really good at anything except being curious. That one was me.

Satisfied by this information, the others offered their own in a clamor of sentence-finishing.

“We get more food here,” began Rachel, a girl so pale that you could nearly see through her.

“But it's not kosher and it eats your insides,” her equally transparent half pointed out.

“We keep our hair,” noted Sharon, pulling on her braid for show.

“Until the lice come,” added her shorn sister.

“We get to keep our clothes too,” contributed one of the Russians.

“But they put crosses on our backs,” finished her double. She turned so I could see the cross that blared in red paint on her dress, but I needed no illustration. A red cross stood between my shoulder blades too.

The children hushed abruptly, and the uninvited silence hung over us all—it was as if a new cloud had installed itself within the rafters of the Zoo. The many doubles looked at each other searchingly—there had to be something, their faces said, something more than food and hair and clothes. Then a voice piped up from the bunk below us. We craned to see the speaker, but she and her twin were curled up together, flush with the brick wall. We never came to know her face, but her words stayed with us always.

“They keep our families safe for us,” said this unseen stranger.

At this, all the girls nodded their approval, and Pearl and I were overwhelmed by a new rush of conversation as everyone congratulated one another on belonging to families who would remain intact, unlike so many.

I didn't want to ask the obvious. So I pinched Pearl to make her ask for us.

“Why are we more important than the others?” Her voice shrank as it approached the end of the question.

A flurry of answers rose, all having something to do with purpose and greatness, with purity and beauty and being of use. We didn't hear a single one that made sense.

And before I could even try to understand this concept, the
blokowa
assigned to look after us entered. Behind her prodigious back, we called this person Ox; she had the appearance of a wardrobe with a toupee and tended toward foot-stamping and nostril-flaring when caught in one of her passionate rants, which our supposed disobedience frequently inspired. When Pearl and I were first introduced to her, however, she was just a figure popping her head in at the door, half shrouded in night and offended by our questions.

“Why are we called the Zoo?” I asked. “Who decided this?”

Ox shrugged. “It is not obvious to you?”

I said that it was not. The zoos we'd read about with Zayde were sites of preservation that presented the vastness of life. This place, it cared only for the sinister act of collection.

“It is a name that pleases Dr. Mengele” was all Ox would say. “You won't find many answers here. But sleep! That's something you can have. Now let me have mine!”

If only we could have slept. But the darkness was darker than any I'd known, and the smell clung within my nostrils. A moan drifted from the bunk below, and outside there was the barking of dogs, and my stomach wouldn't stop growling back at them. I tried to amuse myself by playing one of our word games, but the shouts of the guards outside kept overpowering my alphabet. I tried to make Pearl play a game with me, but Pearl was busy tracing her fingertips over the silver web that embroidered our brick corner, the better to ignore my whispered questions.

“Would you rather be a watch that only knows the good times,” I asked her, “or a watch that sings?”

“I don't believe in music anymore.”

“Me neither. But would you rather be a watch—”

“Why do I have to be a watch at all? Is this my only choice?”

I wanted to argue that sometimes, as living things, as human-type people who were presumably still alive, we had to treat ourselves as objects in order to get by; we had to hide ourselves away and seek repair only when repair was safe to seek. But I chose to press on with another query instead.

“Would you rather be the key to a place that will save us or the weapon that will destroy our enemies?”

“I'd rather be a real girl,” Pearl said dully. “Like I used to be.”

I wanted to argue that playing games would help her feel like a real girl again, but even I wasn't sure of this fact. The numbers the Nazis had given us had made life unrecognizable, and in the dark, the numbers were all I could see, and what was worse was that there was no way to pretend them into anything less enduring or severe or blue. Mine were smudged and bleared—I'd kicked and spat; they'd had to hold me down—but they were numbers still. Pearl was numbered too, and I hated her numbers even more than mine, because they pointed out that we were separate people, and when you are separate people, you might be parted.

I told Pearl that I'd tattoo us back to sameness as soon as possible, but she only sighed the sigh traditional to moments of sisterly frustration.

“Enough with the stories. You can't tattoo.”

I told her that I knew how to well enough. A sailor taught me, back in Gdańsk. I'd inked an anchor onto his left biceps.

True, it was a lie. Or a half-lie, since I had seen such an anchor-inking take place. When we'd summered at the sea, I spent my time peering into the gray recess of a tattoo parlor, its walls bordered with outlines of swallows and ships, while Pearl found a boy to hold her hand near the barnacled prow of a boat. So it was that as my sister entered into the secrecies of flesh on flesh, the pang of a palm curled within one's own, I schooled myself in the intimacies of needles, the plunge of a point so fine that only a dream could light upon its tip.

“I'll make us the same again someday,” I insisted. “I just need a needle and some ink. There must be a way to get that, given that we are special here.”

Pearl scowled and made a big show of turning her back to me—the bunk cried out with a creak—and her elbow flew up and jabbed me in the ribs. It was an accident—Pearl would never hurt me on purpose, if only because it would hurt her too. That was one of the biggest stings of this sisterhood—pain never belonged to just one of us. We had no choice but to share our sufferings, and I knew that in this place we'd have to find a way to divide the pain before it began to multiply.

As I realized this, a girl on the other side of the room found a light, a precious book of matches, and she decided that this scarcity would be best put to use making shadow puppets for the audience of multiples. And so it was that we drifted off to sleep with a series of shadow figures crossing the wall, walking two by two, each flanking the other, as if in a procession toward some unseen ark that might secure their safety.