Mischling (26 page)

I couldn't remember, not really. I decided that this would be another question to save for the moon. Its approach was nearing. I would ask it at any moment, even though I suspected that its answer was the same for all of us: We looked like death, one person after another; we were whittled and drawn, our eyes had sunk into our skulls, and the features that had once defined us had fled. Whether we would live long enough to be returned to our true selves—this seemed the greater question, and it followed me until we found our next shelter.

That night, we came upon a stone structure in the woods. It was too small to be a house and too large to be a shack. Inside, there was a constellation of teeth on the floor, and four narrow beds of marble. These marble beds had lids too, but only one remained closed. The other three gaped with empty blackness.

“Tombs,” Twins' Father said before thinking better of it.

This structure was meant to house the dead. But three tombs had been overturned. Whether their disruption was the work of a fellow refugee or a pillager seeking to rob corpses of finery, we couldn't know. The yellow jawbone that had been tossed to the corner of the structure said nothing of this history. It sat, bereft of teeth, a silent, fossilized witness.

Though we were not its usual guests, this house of the dead did just as well to shelter the likes of us. Twins' Father cleared the emptied tombs of leaves and debris. They could fit a pair of children each. Peter stretched out on the lid of the fourth tomb and yawned. From the cradle of my barrow at the open door I watched the moon rise, answerless. Outside, a light snow fell and shook, like tiny white fists in the sky.

A train ambled us a mere three miles toward Krakow. I looked out the window and saw roads filled with refugees, farmers returning home, Red Army soldiers slinking to unknowns. The frosty fields were scarred with the tread of tanks, and then we found ourselves in some untouched place, a row of intact farmhouses, as blocky and white as sugar cubes. Just as these farmhouses appeared, the tracks ended. We were forced to pile out, and as soon as all were accounted for by Twins' Father, we were confronted by a fierce pillar of a Soviet soldier, his face sweaty with enthusiasm.

“Pigs!” this soldier shouted. “Pigs!” He waved his arms about in a frightful manner. One of the arms held a long rifle. His face was gray and his eyes were like red-blue sores or loose buttons fallen from a coat. He kept repeating that word as our ragged troop advanced.

“Pigs!” he insisted. “Stop, pigs.”

Twins' Father brought our procession to a halt. A rare fright overcame him—he looked as if he were about to fold in on himself and collapse.
Have we come so far just to end like this?
his face seemed to say. He began to approach the man with one hand outstretched, offering his list, which shook more in his grasp than any wind could shake it. But the soldier didn't even pause to look at the many names; he just raised his rifle to his shoulder and took aim. Children ducked behind smaller children. Miri's hands quivered atop the wheelbarrow handles. The eye of the soldier's rifle was our sole focus. We stared it down until the shot rang out, a shot that veered to the left of the road.

A pair of massive hogs, spotty beasts round as barrels, their snouts white with foam, were hurtling toward us, full of grunts and confrontations. The soldier's rifle struck them down, first at the forelegs, and then at the temples, and we watched their immense bodies sink to the snow with the moans and whimpers of tiny babies.

We were accustomed to blood-snow. The blood shouldn't have shocked our troop. But the confrontation dislodged something within us, because many began to cry in that silent way that captivity had taught them. The children shuddered and quaked, and then Sophia, a tiny four-year-old known for her queenly stores of dignity, collapsed in an uncharacteristic heap and wailed for us all. The soldier gave her a confused look—shouldn't a hungry girl be pleased by this bounty? He put down his gun, nodded at the kills in a self-congratulatory fashion, and shook Twins' Father's hand, and yes, we ate well that night, children and adults, without a thought to any law above the grumbles of our stomachs, but I could not forget the panic in those animals' eyes, not even as I comforted my hunger with their flesh.

I did not want to have a memory at all, not then.

As dusk fell on that third night, a farmer called to us from the side of the road. We saw him first by his beard, which bannered whitely in a peaceful manner. He offered us the shelter of his barn, and as eager as Twins' Father was for us to make our way to Krakow, which was rumored to be relatively intact, he could not pass up this offer, as his troops had begun to wilt. The Kleins moaned with every step, and the Borowskis complained of cold. Peter's toes had thrust through his shoes.

Most pressingly, David Herschlag was bent with illness—the abundant meal of pig had overwhelmed the poor boy's shrunken stomach. His skeletal body now bore a dangerous protrusion of abdomen, a belly so puffed that it looked to be filled with poison, and for the past ten miles, Twins' Father had taken to carrying David himself. So while our leader was always cautious in his approach to the peasants, he accepted the farmer's offer gladly.

We entered the sanctuary of a barn, occupied only by a speckled flock of chickens and their chicken smells and, here and there, a nest of eggs. It was warm and lively—a skinny rooster stalked to and fro and chased the busty hens. None of the chickens feared us because we still had the remains of the pigs to consume, and when our second hasty meal was finished—one that David could not take part in—Twins' Father shuffled off to a corner of the barn and attempted a fitful sleep while Miri traveled from one child to another, wrapping bandages and soothing feet and tipping canteens into mouths.

After each round, she returned to David, who lay on the straw, colored with illness, his brow thick with sweat. She looked at me with alarm and asked Peter to help her make a bed for the boy. Peter built a sturdy nest, covered it with my woolen blanket, and deposited David within it like a precious egg. David's face stirred with a smile—he stared up into the rafters at some sight we could not see, and Miri, she reprised “Raisins and Almonds.”

Like a bird, she leaned over this nest, and lullabied the boy into something resembling peace.

In the morning, we woke to the sight of Twins' Father kneeling. He bent down beside a form in the hay, and then he took up the form and shook it, as if he were trying to wake a person who refused to be roused. We could see, from the way Twins' Father held the boy, that David was no longer David, but a body.

“Zvi,” Miri said. “You will frighten them.” But she herself was undone by the loss. And Twins' Father would not lay him to rest. The boy appeared changed. I recognized him only by what killed him—the stomach that rose like a hill.

Miri put a hand to the man's shoulder; she tried to soothe him, but he would not be comforted. He fell to plucking feathers out of the still boy's hair, and he spoke as if he'd forgotten his troop entirely, as if the dead alone could hear him.

“I must have made at least a dozen sets of false twins,” he said. He glanced at Miri for confirmation.

“Nineteen,” she said quietly. “You made nineteen sets.”

“Nineteen,” Twins' Father repeated. “But David—and Aron—they were the first.” Miri nodded as she removed her coat. She tried to cover the boy with it, but Twins' Father wouldn't loosen his hold on David.

“In the beginning, they had trouble with it—the lie. They were so young—only four and five years of age. And my Dutch is very poor—they spoke no other language—it was difficult to explain to them what I needed. But every morning, before roll call, I would remind them: You are twins! And I made them repeat, over and over again, the birthdate I fabricated for them, and the fact that Aron came first, and David second. The difference between them—I shrank a year into five minutes!”

He ran a finger over the bridge of the boy's freckled nose, in the manner of Mengele during one of his counts.

And this is where I tried not to listen to Twins' Father. I couldn't bear to hear him speak of the longing he'd had to be found out. How often, Twins' Father wept, had he wanted to corner Mengele in the laboratory and reveal, with a hiss, that the doctor's research had been tampered with, that his studies were jokes, idiocy easily undone by the lies of juveniles! He acknowledged that Mengele would have shot him on the spot. But it would have been better, he claimed, to die like that than to be doomed to save children only to watch them end like this.

Miri's face blanched and she tried to shoo us out. Her voice took on an odd pitch as she told us that we should go see if there were any chores we could do for the farmer. Not a peep arose from us. Even the chickens hushed. I tried to trace a path from the still-open eyes of the dead boy to the rafters above. What had he seen as he left us? I had never been dead, but I'd neared it enough to know that it was likely he had focused on that tiny fissure in the barn's ceiling, a crack just wide enough to accommodate the remote brilliance of a star.

“No need to lie to them,” Twins' Father said stonily with a sudden, forced composure. The soldier in him had returned. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and straightened the collar of David's torn sweater. “Let them say good-bye.”

And so it was that we gathered around the little boy who had been felled by the food he'd long been denied. His face was not peaceful. Twins' Father gathered David into his arms and carried him out to the pasture, past all the frostbitten knots of fallow things, and though the soil was wintered and hard, it opened up to receive him. We filed past the brief grave, each bearing a stone.

But the farmer's wife interrupted our procession with her own ritual. She scattered poppy seeds on the grave. To feed the dead that come back disguised as birds, she said. I watched the poppy seeds turn in midair and settle in the ice. I didn't know why those seeds felt so dear to me, but I was lessened by the sight of their dark scatter. Already, the smallness of their lives were cold and stunted, and no sooner had our backs turned to depart than I heard the flap of a bird's wings slice the air, too eager to seize upon the abundance wrought by David's death.

In the bed of the farmer's truck, the troop propped themselves against the wooden slats. Red-eyed, Twins' Father surveyed us and consulted his list, dragging his finger down the weathered paper.

We waved good-bye to the farmer's wife, who stood with the bag of poppy seeds at her side, and to the six mothers, who had decided to linger at the farm, convinced that their children were mere steps behind even as the rest of their group had fractured, each of them wandering off on her own desperate quest. Yet still they searched the faces in the back of the truck, as if they had yet to accept that their loved ones were not among us.

Then the truck roared to life, a horn honked, and as we trundled off toward Krakow, I heard Miri say David's name into the wind—she said it softly, as if he could hear her where he lay, so deaf and cold beneath the earth.

“Forgive me!”
I heard her whisper.

Miri's plea was puzzling—she was not responsible for David's death. She had cared for him to the end. But as mysterious as it was, it struck something inside of me.

The whole world might be obsessed with revenge.

But for my part—I knew I wanted to forgive. My tormentor would never ask for my forgiveness—this was certain—but I knew it might be the only true power I had left, a means to spare myself his grasp, the one that I felt close on me every morning when I woke. And if I could do this, if I took on this duty of forgiveness—maybe my Someone would return to me. Or at least maybe I would stop seeing my Someone's face on every refugee we passed, the dead and the living both.

Horse uplifted us. Mile after mile, we burdened this bony hero. In witnessing his enduring gallop, so unlikely for such a hungry animal, one could only believe that he, too, longed for the holy murder of Josef Mengele. But Warsaw would not be easily reached.

After four days of travel, we encountered roads thick with tanks and found ourselves turned about, choiceless, and pressed into Poznan. This had been Zayde's city; he had taught at the university. Poznan, he liked to declare, was a jewel of scholarly devotion, a maker of great minds, of believers of art. But violence seemed the only lesson we might learn here now. The Wehrmacht stalked through the city, its streets silent but for the warning rattle of their gunfire and the echoes of their songs, rowdy bits of verse that surfaced as they braced themselves for the Russian advance.

Fearing that these soldiers might tire of their music and seek to amuse themselves with the torture of Horse and two refugees, we undertook the utmost stealth in our passage. Feliks took custody of our sacks, and I led Horse by his bridle. Ducking down a street, its lampposts strewn about like uprooted weeds, we found our path interrupted not by a menace of gray uniforms but by a beggar whose palm fell open at the sight of us.

That anyone might see us as prosperous enough to approach for food or coins seemed a wonder. But we decided to strike a deal. Some bread for the date, Feliks offered.

“February,” said the beggar. He said it could be the third day, it could be the fourth. I wanted to ask for our heel of bread back. “All you need to really know is that the Russians are coming. Leave now. This is my advice. And look,” he continued, biting into the bread. “I am not even charging you extra for this wisdom!” Having imparted this information, he limped off into the evening, leaving us to wonder at the sight that loomed behind us.

There it was, the old museum: a collapse of walls, a shudder of brick, a stagger of columns. The remaining windows were pocked and rent, glassy veils. The grand doors had fallen in surrender, and through the jagged entrances in the facade, I glimpsed the museum's devastated interior. It appeared as if there was nothing to see but ruin. But when I looked still further, into my own memory, I saw the museum restored, its halls traversed by Zayde and Pearl while I lagged behind. I could see my seven-year-old sister pause on tiptoe before a painting while Zayde taught her what perspective meant.

Memory, it drove me into the museum.

I lied to myself and to Feliks, I said that we could find supplies in that building—in truth, this mattered little to me; what mattered was that I thought Zayde would be by my side if I entered. I might hear his whistle. I might smell the mothballs of his coat.

So we sat upon Horse's back, our heads held high, for entry into this wasteland. Horse picked his way delicately up the crumbled stairs, his white flanks flashing silver in the evening light. On the fragmented marble of the threshold, his front hooves slipped—he threatened to founder, his whinny draped the devastated foyer with echoes, and then, as Horse always did, he pressed on.

There should have been paintings for us to see. Pictures of things real and not real, of landscapes and people. But in that museum, we could find only a portrait of ruin. We watched a hurricane of black pigeons swoop through a hole in the eaves. The floor opened wide and threatened to swallow us. Where it didn't open, it hosted black pools of water. Light winced across the crumbled walls; rats philosophized from their holes.

“Blessed are the rats, for they at least believe in blood,” Feliks intoned. “That's what my father the rabbi would have said.”

As if angered by this blessing, the theories of the rats increased in volume.

“Turn back.” Feliks shuddered. “That's what my brother would say. Turn back!”

But I couldn't turn back, because even in the shambles, I had this treasure: I was surrounded by what Zayde had loved. Though devastated, the museum still spoke of Zayde's compassionate logic, his will, his science, all that he loved. And what Zayde had loved, they could not smash or burn or plunder. What he had loved was my tradition.

And as we moved through the savage disarray, we kept a vigilant watch. Horse's eyes flickered in the dark. We let our path be informed by traces of brass, coins that pillagers had left behind, snippets of wire. Bits of antiquity minnowed among the gravel that peppered the floors, and we soon found ourselves in a room where a chandelier swung. Horse startled us by shattering a teacup beneath his foot, and we saw then that we were in a grand tearoom, the very kind we'd heard our pale friend say she longed to visit as a true lady, before Taube snapped her neck.

This ruin reminded us like no other ruin had—we still lived while our friend did not. With respect to her loss, we climbed down from Horse to pay tribute.

“I would like to buy another day for the lovely Bruna,” Feliks whispered to the sky.

The wind offered nothing in reply.

“I don't accept your answer,” he said, his voice dangerously veering from its whisper. “She was the bravest soul in all of Poland, and you let the world take her down.”

He leaped onto a pedestal bereft of its statuary, and on this surface he posed and flexed and shook his fist at the God he believed in. Looking at this monument he'd made to our anger, I saw that we were children still, but mercenary children, half-murdered troublers. I had to wonder what such a child looked like. I stalked about the velvets of this tearoom looking for some opportune reflection. But the darkness was unrelenting; the shards of glass said nothing about appearances at all. I remarked on the blackness of this evening to Feliks but received no answer. Seeing that he had left his pedestal, I looked about in a panic. Whenever Feliks left my sight, even for a moment, all feeling but loss fled me. Distraught, I searched in the dimness for a single hair of his bear-fur coat.

This is when I felt a tap at my back. The touch was musical; it clinked.

And when I turned, it was to the sight of a silver fist, brandished high by an armored individual. It lingered above my head; its enmeshed fingers stabbed the sky. In the confusion of this darkness, I was certain that this was a warrior who was aware of my dealings with Mengele. I could tell by this warrior's bearing that he or she had a great love of justice and an awareness of my accidental crimes.

In my bewilderment, it didn't occur to me to call for Feliks. It didn't even occur to me to mount any defense on my behalf. I could've pointed to my greater scheme, my plans to thwart Mengele, my assumption that Pearl, too, would benefit from the needle.

Instead, I fell to my knees in the rubble, and I bent low. I made my neck vulnerable and ready for penalty. So bowed, I begged this warrior to punish me, to deliver me the greatest judgment of all, if he were able. I'd be happier dead, I declared, so long as I could be near my sister. I would bring death to myself, I swore, if I could!

“But I could never kill you!” the warrior proclaimed. He had a terribly pitchy voice for such a fearsome spectacle. It was the unmistakable squeak of Feliks. How could it be—was I so desperate to be delivered from my life that I mistook my gentle friend, clad in pilfered armor, for some divine hand of vengeance?

“Why would you make such a joke?” Feliks queried. “After all that we have endured! I understand your need for humor. But this?” He shook his silver head dolefully.

“I am not funny,” I agreed.

Fortunately, he was too enraptured with his latest acquisition to pursue this further. He turned so I could appreciate his appearance as one of the old Polish winged hussars, but the armor was creaky and ill-fitting. The torso piece swung and gaped over his bear-fur coat, and he had only to take a step before the silver piece fastened at his legs loosened and fell with a piteous clink. Still, my friend desired praise for his ferocity.

Naturally, I informed him that he looked a grand figure. If I were a Nazi, I said, I'd take one glance and flee. To this, he thrilled. I wished that I could have shared his delight, but I felt only anguish. Spying my mood, Feliks did his best to cheer me with another find from the depths of the rubble. In the air, he raised a tiny flask. I caught it up greedily and took a sip. The embered sensation in my throat made it known: this was not water.

“Vodka,” Feliks declared, repossessing the flask. “Good for bartering, but we could use some now.” He attempted a tipple and I snatched it away. But just as my hand closed on the flask, I heard Zayde.

To Pearl!
Zayde toasted.
Keeper of time and memory!

I had to honor this toast. So I let Feliks take a swig on my behalf, but he was not familiar with swigs. He knew only indulgence, and drink promptly overtook the emptiness of his stomach. He staggered about like a tin fool, then collapsed in a silver heap. For a moment, it appeared as if I would have to drag him up. But then he peeled the armor off in disgust and swung himself up onto the back of Horse, who looked askance at his tipsy burden.

“You aren't fit to ride,” I protested, but he would have none of it.

And what could we do but ride? The soldiers patrolling the streets outside cared nothing for the condition of a thirteen-year-old boy.

“Fine,” I conceded, “let us go now.”

With the ruins behind, distant villages floated before us. On horseback, we picked our way across the puddles of black pocking the snow, Horse sinking midstep into the mud. The same sky that had witnessed our imprisonment winked innocently above us. Such a naive sky seemed at risk of forgetting its involvement with our dead. Would it use the alibi of a cloud to deny all that it had seen? I hoped it would not. But doubt was beginning to overtake me. We were hungry, tired, lost—only bereavement bent us forward as we traveled on. We were forced by the Russian tanks advancing into Poznan to go in any direction available to us; we were turned and turned about in our passage toward the Warsaw Zoo, and as we rode, we begged our respective authorities—God for Feliks, fate for me—for the strength to end the man who'd lured such a wild hatred into our hearts.