Mischling (4 page)

“I was,” I admitted.

As Twins' Father and I continued with the details, Stasha directed her questions to Dr. Miri, who was waiting to collect the finished paperwork and deliver it to the laboratory. Dr. Miri was a beautiful doctor—like a lily, people were fond of saying, a solemn and thoughtful kind of flower. She reminded us of Mama a little, with her dark hair and too-big eyes and crooked mouth, but she was more doll-like, and the expressions that crossed her face often struck me as very strange because they were so distant, so far away. They were not unlike the expressions one might have while underwater watching disturbances occur on the waves above.

Even more remarkable than Dr. Miri's beauty was the fact that Mengele allowed it to remain untouched. Most of the beauties who entered Mengele's view emerged from it much changed, as he could not bear admiring them. He put beauties on one of two paths—the Ibi path or the Orli path. If you were on the Orli path, you might be beautiful on the day of your arrival, but on the very next you'd be given a disguise; Mengele would puff up your belly and swell your legs to sausages, or he'd turn your skin to wax and set it to run with sores. If you were on the Ibi path, you could go to work in the Puff; you could lean from the window and flutter like a rare, colorful bird and listen to the madam negotiate your price with the men knocking at the door. Dr. Miri's path, the path of a Jewish doctor respected by Mengele, was the rarest one of all.

Orli and Ibi were Dr. Miri's sisters. She didn't see them much. If a person wanted to make Miri cry, all he had to do was mention Ibi and Orli. Mengele did this from time to time, whenever he found her work in the laboratory unsatisfactory or wanted to compel her to do things she did not want to do. I would come to witness such exchanges frequently in the days ahead, but on that first day, there was only Dr. Miri, standing there, waiting for our file.

“When do we leave?” Stasha asked her. A pause hung in the air.

“There are plans for that,” Dr. Miri said finally, after exchanging a look with Twins' Father, the kind of look that adults use when approaching delicate subjects that they've approached many times before and still have yet to resolve. “We've started the plans but we don't know—”

She was saved from answering when a woman appeared in the doorway with her infants in her arms, two bundles swaddled in gray cloth, their faces tucked away from view.

Sometimes, when twins were still babies, their mothers were allowed to live in the Zoo alongside them to serve as nursemaids. Clotilde was one such mother. Everyone knew who Clotilde was because her husband had killed an SS man; he'd seized a pistol from the guard, issued a fatal shot, and led a flicker of an uprising. Three SS were felled before the end of this siege, and care was taken to ensure that the hanging of this rebel was witnessed by all. But instead of inspiring fear, his death bred a hero's tale. Her children would always have that legacy, Clotilde was fond of claiming, but their father's fame was apparently of little comfort to the babies. They whimpered and kicked their tiny feet against their dingy wrappings, as if to protest their patriarch's violent end.

Stasha drew close to Clotilde and tried to inspect the bundles. I was afraid she would ask to hold the babies—she tended to think herself more capable than she really was—but thankfully, she remained interested only in her own questions.

“What do we eat?” she asked Clotilde, who passed one of the babies to Dr. Miri to admire. I saw Dr. Miri stiffen at the sight of the child, but Clotilde seemed blissfully unaware of this reaction, too invested in answering Stasha with a tone of educational bitterness.

“Soup that isn't soup!” she proclaimed with glee.

“I've never heard of such a soup before. What's in a soup like that?”

“Today? Boiled roots. Tomorrow? Boiled roots. After that? Boiled roots and a bit of nothing. Does that sound good to you?”

“There are things that sound better.” Stasha nodded at the babies. “Your twins are lucky not to have to eat soup like that.”

“Pray for better, then,” Clotilde instructed. “And if your prayers aren't answered, then eat your prayers. Prayer alone can keep a body full.” The babies saw the absurdity of this, and their whimpers assumed the turbulence of ear-piercing bawls.

“We don't pray,” Stasha told her, raising her voice to be heard above the wails.

We'd stopped praying in the fall of 1939. November 12. Like many who stop praying, it was a familial event, spurred by disappearance. Although, to be most accurate, I should say that prayer experienced a surge for one week, then two, and it wasn't until the first thaw that it died entirely. By the time the bluebells thrust their heads up in the soil, prayer had become a buried thing.

I wasn't about to explain this to Clotilde, whose eyebrows were already arching disdainfully at us. She regarded the heads of her babies and covered them with her scarf, as if hoping to protect them from our lack of faith.

“You will reconsider your position when you get hungry enough,” she muttered, and then she and Twins' Father had a quick conversation in Czech, the meaning of which was unknown to us, but my impression from the blunt ends of their words and their shattered delivery was that each was telling the other to know his or her place. As the fray mounted, a torn and fearful look entered Dr. Miri's face—not unlike the expression a child has while witnessing her parents fight—and she stepped between the two quarrelers.

“But maybe,” she suggested to us, her voice winsome despite the fact that she had to shout to be heard, “maybe, instead of praying, you will wish. You do wish, don't you? You can have as many wishes as you want here.”

Her manner was so even, so practiced, that I realized that much of Dr. Miri's work in the Zoo had to involve easing similar conflicts to a halt. She was successful in this case. Clotilde spat on the floor, signaling her surrender in the argument, and Twins' Father smiled a little at the fanciful nature of this proposed resolution before returning to our interview.

“Where have you lived?” he asked us. “Any other siblings? Your parents—both Polish Jews, yes? Your birth—natural? Cesarean? Any complications?”

We could hear the travel of his pen as he sorted out all the details we gave him, and then, right as we were nearly finished, a troop of guards flooded past; the dust rose, the dogs barked, and Twins' Father threw his pen to the ground with a force that made us jump a little. The babies' wails increased. The man put his head in his hands, and we thought he might be going to sleep forever, that he'd decided to stop living altogether, just like that. We'd heard that such phenomena had a habit of occurring in this place. But after we'd watched the top of his prematurely gray head for a minute, he looked back up at us, thoroughly alive.

“Forgive me,” he said with a weak smile. “I ran out of ink. That's all. I am always running out of ink. I am always—” For a second, it appeared as if he might sink again, but then he righted himself, just as suddenly as he had before, and smiled at us broadly while waving his hand. “Go, now, for roll call.”

We began to turn away from him, obedient, but then he gestured for us to wait. He made a point of looking directly into our eyes. It was obvious that what he said to us was something he repeated often, to any child who would listen.

“Your first assignment for class is to learn the other children's names. Recite them to each other. When a new child comes, learn that name too. When a child leaves us, remember the name.”

I swore I would remember. Stasha swore too. And then she asked after his real name.

Twins' Father stared down at the papers for one minute, maybe two. He seemed lost in the answers he'd so carefully composed, as if all the check marks and little boxes he'd inked in black had blacked him out too, and then, just as we'd resigned ourselves to leaving without an answer, he lifted his eyes to us.

“It was Zvi Singer once,” he said. “But that is not important now.”

We stood for roll call in that early-morning light, our noses twitching in an effort to shake the stench of ash and the unwashed. September's heat lingered in the air. It bounced off us in waves, haloed us with dust. This roll call was the first time I saw all of Mengele's subjects gathered together: the multiples, the giants, the Lilliputs, the limbless, the Jews he'd deemed curiously Aryan in appearance. While some regarded us innocently, others held suspicion in their stares, and I had to wonder how long we would be considered
zugangi
. We did our best to ignore these looks as we sawed through our hard heels of breakfast bread and drank our muddy, fake coffee. Most of my bread I gave to Stasha. But I drank all of my fake coffee, which was very sour, like it had been brewed in an old shoe at the bottom of the river, according to my sister. When Stasha drank her coffee, her throat took offense and she was compelled to spit into the distance. Unfortunately, the Rabinowitzes were contained in that distance—they were all lined up to receive their breakfast—and Stasha's spittle insulted the eldest son of the family, as it landed squarely on the lapel of his suit coat.

The Rabinowitzes were Lilliputs. There was a whole family of them, complete with a baton-wielding patriarch, and they all still dressed in the velvets and silks of their performance costumes, colorful garments edged with gilt and lace and swinging with tassels. The hair of the women was pompadoured high, and the wavy beards of the men streamed behind them like banners in a parade. They were an ostentatious sight, and though I didn't share the sentiment, I could see why others resented them. For one, where else could one find an intact family in Auschwitz? And for two, they were among the grandest beneficiaries of Mengele's attentions. His marvel over the family not only put them in a superior state of mind but blessed them with a spacious room to themselves in the infirmary, and their quarters brimmed with elusive comforts: Tables draped with lace and a window frilled with pink voile curtains. A full tea set painted with a willow-tree pattern. A miniature armchair in plush leather, big enough to seat a lamb. Mengele had even given them a radio, which Mirko, the eldest son, a teenager, was entrusted with. Mirko always sang along with that radio, even when there weren't words to the music; he'd invent words, just to have something to sing. He was the one Stasha was unfortunate enough to strike with spittle.

“You take care who you spit on,
zugang
,” Mirko said to her through gritted teeth.

I tried to wipe the spittle from his coat as I apologized, but he withdrew, as if doubly insulted by my efforts, and addressed the fabric with a swipe of his hat brim. Stasha stared at him all the while, mesmerized, her eyes spreading themselves wider than I'd thought our eyes could go. They grew as if to make more room to inspect the curiosity before her, and her appraisal was obvious, verging on ill-mannered.

“Haven't seen my kind before, have you?” Mirko challenged.

“You are not our first,” Stasha lied. “We've seen shows, lots of shows. We used to go to the theater all the time. We saw a whole troupe of people like you once.”

I often had to wonder where she summoned these lies from. They came so easily to her, as if she had another nature devoted strictly to fabrication. I can't say that I wasn't unnerved by her deceit, but she appeared to know how to draw in people like Mirko, who suddenly lost his defensive stance. His balled-up hands relaxed at his sides, and once the disgust left his face, I saw how handsome it was. He had features that a girl reading a romance novel would have projected onto the imaginary hero, and I'm sure he was well aware of its powers, because he made a gentlemanly point of turning to Stasha, and allowed me to blush with some degree of privacy.

“I would hardly have mistaken you for sophisticates,” he said to her. “But I suppose that even young ones like you may have use for the theater. Do you have any talent between you?”

“My sister is a dancer,” Stasha said. She made her usual mistake of pointing to herself while saying this. I grasped her pointing finger and put it in my direction.

“Oh?” Mirko's gaze then focused solely on me. “Where have you danced? May I suggest a collaboration? Performing keeps the doctor very happy. We give him private shows from time to time, entertain his friends. Like Verschuer. Have you heard of Verschuer? He is the doctor's mentor. Even Mengele, yes, he has a mentor. If you are a good dancer, perhaps I could mentor you?”

He performed an impromptu jig and then concluded with a proud bow.

“I come from a long line of dancers, and my grandmother, she was a tall woman, like you. We've danced all over, for kings and queens. We tell jokes too. Would you care to hear one? You would? What kind of joke would you prefer?”

Before we had a chance to answer, the palest woman we'd ever seen, white hair blazing at her back like winter, descended upon this small person in a colorless and incandescent glory. She swooped down and pummeled him; she stomped on his tiny feet as he yowled. She asked him who he was to think himself better than tall people, human people like us, even if we were just a pair of weak
zugangi
. Stasha tried to intervene—she pointed out that he wasn't bothering us in the least—but the insulting angel was too preoccupied with her torture to listen. She chased him off, stepping on his heels as he ran, and threw a couple of rocks at him for good measure.

“You ugly ghost! You better watch yourself in your sleep,” Mirko threatened before retreating behind the boys' barracks.

“Try it, tadpole!” his tormentor shouted. “I'd like to see you make me hate my life. If they can't do it, how will you? Every day, I wake ready to burst, because I am filled with poison and vigor and plans for revenge. Just try to complete my suffering! Try!”

After concluding this outburst, the angel beamed triumphant and then fell to dusting off her sullied clothes with an aggravated sweep of her hands. She wore once-white pajamas of frayed silk and was so lean and tall that she resembled a pillar of salt. The eyes in her pale face were bordered by bruises that lent her the look of a panda. This was curious enough until one noticed that the eyes themselves were pink as roses.