Mischling (3 page)

So much world in the shadows there! The figures feathered and crept and crawled toward the ark. Not a single life was too small. The leech asserted itself, the centipede sauntered, the cricket sang by. Representatives of the swamp, the mountain, the desert—all of them ducked and squiggled and forayed in shadow. I classified them, two by two, and the neatness of my ability to do so gave me comfort. But as their journey lengthened, and the flames began to dim, the shadows were visited by distortions. Humps rose on their backs, and their limbs scattered and their spines dissolved. They became changed and monstrous. They couldn't recognize themselves.

Still, for as long as the light lived, the shadows endured. That was something, wasn't it?

Stasha didn't know it, but always, from the very beginning, we were more than we. I was older by only ten minutes, but it was enough to teach me how different we were.

It was only in Mengele's Zoo that we became too different.

For example: On that first night, the marching shadows comforted Stasha, but I could find no peace in them. Because those matches illuminated another sight, one accompanied by a death rattle. Did Stasha mention the dying girl?

We weren't alone in our bunk that night. There was a third child with us on the straw mattress, a feverish, black-tongued mite who curled up beside me and pressed her cheek to my cheek as she died. This wasn't a gesture of affection—our proximity rose only from the fact that there wasn't an inch of room to be spared in our matchbox beds—but in the days ahead I found myself often hoping that this twinless, nameless girl took some comfort in being close to me. I had to believe that it was not a lack of room alone that put her cheek to mine.

When the rattle stopped, the Stepanov twins, Esfir and Nina, the eleven-year-olds in the bed slot below us, leaped up to our mattress and stripped the girl of her clothes. They performed this task with an unnerving deftness, as if they'd been undressing corpses all their lives. Esfir joyously flung a sweater around her shoulders; Nina shimmied into a woolen skirt. The disapproval on my face must've been obvious, because Esfir offered me the girl's stockings, thrusting the unraveled, grayed toe beneath my nose, in a gesture of appeasement. When I waved this gift away, she—a veteran, or Old Number—employed the insult used for us New Numbers, or newcomers.

“
Zugang!”
she hissed at me.

If I hadn't been so lost over the death beside me, I might have defended myself, but I cared little at that moment. The Stepanovs exchanged wily glances with each other, and then Serafima winked at me, as if to acknowledge the great favor she was about to perform on my behalf. Without a word of negotiation between them, the two took hold of the girl's body by its head and its feet and slid its meager weight from our bed.

“She can stay.” I reached out and put a hand on the still-warm chest.

“She is dead,” they argued. “See the trickle from her mouth? Dead!”

“So? She still needs a place to sleep, doesn't she?”

“It's against our law,
zugang
.”

“What law?”

They were too busy carting the body down the ladder to the floor to answer, their movements illuminated by the same scant light that produced the shadowy animals. I wished for utter darkness then. Because I saw the girl's eyes fly open as her body thumped past the rungs and to the floor. All of the children turned in their beds so as not to witness the exodus, but I saw the girl's hair fan over the threshold as her bearers dragged her out, and I tried, as she disappeared from view, to remember her eyes.

I thought they were brown eyes, as brown as my own, but our acquaintance had been so brief, I couldn't be sure.

All I could be sure of was the sprightliness of the twins. When they reappeared at the door, they were clapping the grime from their hands. Nina twirled in the skirt, and Esfir plucked lint from the stolen sweater. They were enlivened by these new possessions. Nina ambled over with a bundle in her hand and tossed it in Stasha's direction.

“Take the stockings,” she spat at my sister. “Don't act so superior.”

Stasha regarded the stockings where they lay, so limp and forlorn, in her lap. I advised her to give them back, but Stasha had never been good at taking anyone's advice, even mine. She thrust them onto her hands like mittens, much to Nina's pleasure.

“You're resourceful,” Nina said approvingly before retiring with her sister to the bunk below, where the two of them rustled about in their straw like the scavengers they were, doubtless planning their next acquisition of goods.

Everyone survived by planning. I could see that. I realized that Stasha and I would have to divide the responsibilities of living between us. Such divisions had always come naturally to us, and so there, in the early-morning dark, we divvied up the necessities:

Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. I would take the sad, the past, the good.

There were overlaps between these categories, but we'd negotiated such overlaps before. It seemed fair to me, but when we were done with the partitioning of these duties, Stasha had misgivings.

“You got the worse deal,” she said. “I'll trade you. I'll take the past, and you take the future. The future is more hopeful.”

“I am happy with the way things are,” I said.

“Take the future. I already have the funny—you should have the future. It will make things more even between us.”

I thought of all the years we'd spent trying to match every gesture. When we were small, we'd practiced walking the same amount of steps every day, speaking the same number of words, smiling the same smiles. I started to retreat into these memories, but just as I'd begun to calm, Ox resurrected our dread. Cool and efficient, a drab figure in an oatmeal-colored cloak, she picked her way through the barracks with the dead child, now clothed in mud, held aloft in her arms. Wordlessly, she carried the girl over to our bunk and laid her back beside me, placing the cold hands over the concave chest and crossing the legs at their ankles. Tongue thrust between her teeth in concentration, she performed this endeavor with the manner of one arranging flowers for the room of a beloved houseguest.

“Who did this?” Ox demanded after she'd completed her work and the girl stared sightlessly up at the rafters.

No one would answer, but Ox didn't much care for answers, preferring any opportunity for intimidation. “I recommend that you children find a better way to amuse yourselves than by dumping bodies by the latrines. You all know that Dr. Mengele requires that every child in the Zoo must be counted in the morning. If this body goes missing again—”

She allowed the possibilities to dangle in the air, all the better to frighten us, and then, her mission completed, she turned and left with a dramatic flap of oatmeal-colored cloak, pausing only to confiscate the matches from the girl making the shadow puppets. All was dark once more, though not dark enough to obscure the death that lay beside us.

“She looks hungry even now,” Stasha observed. She skipped a stockinged finger across the girl's still cheek. “Do you think she has feelings anymore?”

“No one has feelings when they are dead,” I told her. But I wasn't quite convinced of this myself. If there was ever a place where the dead might still feel their tortures, it had to be the Zoo.

Stasha took the stockings from her hands and tried to pull them over the girl's feet. First the left foot, then the right. One stocking crowned at midcalf, while the other slipped easily over the knee. Frustrated by this difference, Stasha tugged at the woolens to make them align, and I had to point out to her that the pair were mismatched, that there was no way to force them into sameness. Nothing was fixable; we could only make do.

“Please,” I whispered to Stasha as her efforts inspired a new hole in one of the stockings, “let me have the past, and I'll take the present too. I just don't want the future.”

That was how the role of keeper of time and memory came to be mine. From then on, the acknowledgment of days was my responsibility alone.

In our former life, I was used to doing the talking for us. I had been the outgoing one, the one with proven methods of getting us out of trouble, the one who negotiated exchanges with peers and authority figures alike. This role suited me. I was everyone's friend, and a fair representative for us both.

We soon found out that Stasha was better fit for socializing in our new world. A fearlessness had entered her. She set her teeth with severity when she smiled, and she walked with a girlish approximation of a swagger, like a movie cowboy or a comic-book hero.

On our first morning, her chatter was endless. She asked questions of anyone she could, to try to ease our adjustment. The first to receive her inquiry was a man who introduced himself to us as Zwillingesvater, or Twins' Father. He saw us respond to the oddity of this name with curious faces, but he did not try to explain it except to say that all of the children called him this—the Zoo, we would find, had a habit of assigning people new names and identities, and even adults were no exception to this rule.

“When do we see our families?” Stasha asked Twins' Father as he sat on a crate recording all our facts for Mengele's use. We were sitting with him behind the boys' barracks with an irrelevant globe idling at his feet in the dirt. The travels of this globe—a relic that was usually kept in the storehouse—were much envied by us all, as the object was able to move from camp to camp, while we remained pinned within the Zoo. One of the boys—a Peter Abraham, whom Mengele had dubbed “a member of the intelligentsia”—served as one of the doctor's messengers, and in this position, he was able to steal this little globe, to tuck it beneath his coat and toddle from block to block as if afflicted with some strange pregnancy. Peter stole it in the mornings, and in the evenings, one of the guards stole it back. In this way, the world was possessed and repossessed, and over time, it grew more battered in its travels. Holes appeared, borders were blurred, whole countries faded away altogether. Still, it was a globe, and it tended to be a useful thing to have around, because during interviews like these, one could focus on its surface instead of Twins' Father's face, though I suppose both were equally worn and discouraged in appearance.

“We see our families on holidays,” Twins' Father told her in his patient way. “Or so Mengele says.”

Twins' Father was twenty-nine years old and a veteran of the Czech army. He carried himself like a soldier still but had a weariness that was likely exacerbated by his charges. Impressed by his military pedigree and German fluency, Mengele had entrusted him with overseeing the boys' barracks and processing the paperwork of all the incoming twins, paperwork that was later sent to the genetics department at Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

If it could be said that Mengele ever did a good thing, that good thing was appointing Twins' Father to his post. The boys loved him; they clung to him as he taught them lessons—German and geography, mostly—and he kicked a rag ball around the soccer field with them in odd little fits of games. There were mothers of newborn multiples who were permitted to live in the Zoo in the interest of assisting the development of their babies, and they cooed over Twins' Father, saying that he would make a fine head of the family someday, but the man winced at this praise, and just carried on in his gentle and resourceful way. We girls were quite jealous of the boys for this ally, having only Ox as our designated authority. We learned nothing of where we were from Ox. From other girls in the barracks, we learned that Mengele's Zoo had once been near the Romany camp. But now, the Romanies were dead, as every last one had been exterminated on August 2, 1944; their eradication was seen as a necessity by camp authorities, who were appalled by the rampant disease and starvation among them. This was not a problem of proper rations—the adults were clearly withholding food from the children. Romanies would rather sing and dance all day than address their filth. All that could be done with such a people was to end them.

There were rumors that Mengele tried to intervene. Whether this was true, no one knew. We knew only that the Romanies were gassed, and we, the twins of Auschwitz, remained. Directly before our compound, there was an empty plot of land where the Germans collected the dead and the near-dead. This plot filled and emptied in terrible repetition. This was our immediate view.

We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high electric fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else's in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of the camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada's structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn't imagine the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculated it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.

The day after our arrival, Twins' Father remained efficient and stoic as he approached our paperwork, but there were times in which his uncertainties seemed to surface as he considered the import of every answer and the effect it might have on our lives. I watched his hand waver between one box and another before imposing a hesitant check mark.

“Now tell me,” he asked, “which of you came first?”

“This matters?” Stasha had never been fond of this question.

“To him, it all matters. My sister Magda and I, we don't know who came first. But we say that I did, just to please him. So tell me, Pearl, who was first?”