Mischling (8 page)

“Does your grandfather like to swim?”

Oh yes, we said. Zayde swims and flips and dives like a fish.

“That is settled, then. We do have a swimming pool here, you know. I will arrange for an escort for him and inform his block supervisor.”

I pointed out that Zayde would require swimming trunks.

“Of course! How could I forget? I'm sure it's unlikely that he brought a pair with him. We can't have that elderly bum-bum frightening off the other bathers, can we?”

I didn't find the thought of my naked
zayde
funny, but he did, so I joined him again in laughing, much to Pearl's alarm. I could only hope that she saw the strategy in my laughter, because when it finally subsided I made another request.

“There is someone else,” I said. “Our mother.”

“Yes?”

“She is our mother” was all I could say at first, because thinking of her emptied me.

“And?”

“She draws and paints. Animals and plants, mostly. She makes a history of the living things and the things that don't live anymore. It keeps her happy.”

This was a polite way of putting it. I'm not sure that it kept her happy so much as it lessened her tears. I thought of the poppy on the wall of the cattle car, how the flimsiness of the petals supported her. But it didn't seem to be the time to hash out such particulars with Uncle. Already, a glaze of boredom was threatening to wash over his face, and I knew I wouldn't have much more time to barter with him.

“Brushes, then,” he decided. “And an easel. Obviously, some paint.”

We thanked him, we said that Mama and Zayde would be so grateful. It was more than enough, we said. Or, not more than enough, but—

“I know what you are trying to say.” His voice was solemn. “It is good that you think of others, but your family should be entitled to advantages for bringing you into the world. Because you are special, you twins.”

“I've been trying to tell Pearl that for years,” I said.

“Maybe she finally believes you.” His face was serious. “Do you believe now, Pearl?”

“I believe,” she said. But I knew that this was not the whole of her sentiment.

Charmed, Uncle issued us both head pats, and then he rifled through a glass jar in a cabinet and handed me a sugar cube. Such a rare little igloo of sweetness—I couldn't waste it on myself. So I gave it to Pearl. He furrowed his brow, then handed me another sugar cube. I gave that one to her too.

“This is for you,” he said, dropping a third cube into my palm and folding my fingers over it. “It serves a medicinal purpose.”

“In that case—can I give it to Patient Number Blue?”

Confusion crossed his face and then soured into irritation. So I waved my words away and popped the sugar cube in my mouth. Pleasing him, I was discovering, was a great deal of work.

Uncle then plunged into an extended line of questioning that ventured into my most uncomfortable territories. He said he just wanted to know the fundamentals. Who we were because of who we came from. Or, more specifically, why didn't we have a father? Pearl eased the information out somehow. While she talked, I hummed in my mind so I didn't have to hear what she said. I hummed “Blue Danube” till its blueness began to cloak my thoughts, but even this blueness wasn't enough to drown out the whole story.

Pearl told Uncle that one night, Papa didn't return from the task he'd told Mama he had to attend to. She had tried to make him stay—it was past curfew, she'd argued, and why couldn't another doctor take care of our neighbor's ill child? Didn't Stasha and Pearl matter? she had asked. Papa did not argue, but he forgot his umbrella in his hurry out the door. We stood there, Mama with the umbrella in hand, waiting for him to fetch it. But he didn't come back that night. And then, Papa didn't return for day after day, month after month. Mama went to the authorities, who provided little in the way of explanation initially but later said that a man matching Papa's description had been found floating in the Ner River. Mama insisted that this couldn't be him, that some other violation must've occurred, and she was not going to believe it without documentation.

Uncle wasn't one to be put off by messy paperwork, though. Proof or not, he favored this explanation. Suicide was a Jewish epidemic, he claimed.

“Do you ever feel overwhelmed by sadness?” he asked us while shining a light in first Pearl's mouth, then mine.

“We never do,” I said.

“What about you?” He gave Pearl another sugar cube, which she popped into her mouth to avoid conversation.

“Pearl is too good to feel sad,” I said.

“I see.”

“Pearl is so good—she can't even feel pain. See?”

To demonstrate, I pinched my sister's arm. But instead of her remaining silent, we both cried out at the same time. Uncle took note of this with great interest, but I don't think he could have understood what was truly happening. Pearl didn't cry because of my pinch; it was pure coincidence. At the very moment that my fingers twisted Pearl's flesh, we'd sensed the sorrows of Mama, who missed us so much that she was finding life too hard to bear. She had no idea of the blessings that were about to be visited on her because of our value as experiments. Mama was so fragile—we could only hope that the paint and brushes would reach her before it was too late.

I was about to impress upon Uncle the urgency of all this, but he grabbed my shoulder before I had a chance. His touch was firm, instructive—I tried to hunch over to hide my nakedness, but he was intent on making me rise and steering me through the room.

“Pearl will stay there and wait for you,” he told me as we passed the other children and the nurses and made our way behind a screen that partitioned us from the room. There, he laid me down on a steel table and flashed on a light overhead. We were alone—it was just he and I and the white wings of his coat and the bright beam of the light—but I discerned another presence.

I sensed the gaze of the eyes looking down on me, even as I knew that not a single one had stirred from its pin. I knew those eyes saw what I saw. With them, I watched Uncle perform the magic of loading a needle with some luminous liquid. It was as amber as the amber stones Pearl and I had once collected from the Baltic Sea, and the color took me back to that time, shortly before Papa's disappearance, when we'd taken a boat and rowed out onto the waves—and then I forced myself to stop remembering because Pearl was in charge of time and memory, and I was in danger of trespassing on a history I wasn't sure belonged to me anymore. Yet I was glad it did not belong to me. Because as I lay there on the table, beneath the stream of light, I knew myself to be in a place where time and memory brought only pain, and I was so grateful to my sister, my dearest friend from the floating world, for sparing me this affliction.

“I know what you're thinking,” Uncle said as he approached me with the needle.

I told him that was very funny, because in the past, only Pearl had had that ability.

He smiled his laboratory smile, but I could tell that already, he was tiring of my jokes. So I made my face intellectual and severe, and peered at the needle with interest, as if I were in the front row of a schoolroom with a teacher I very much wanted to impress.

He tested the point of the needle on his fingertip.

“You're thinking that this is going to hurt. I promise—it won't. Well, it might hurt a little. But so little! And that will be a small price to pay for the reward you'll get.”

What reward? I wondered.

He whispered it in my ear and then begged my permission. That is how I remember it, at least. Or how I remembered it for some time, before I regained my full ability to reason. But of course, it is likely he never asked at all.

Even still, desperation can riddle a heart with consent. Mine was heavy with it. This consent must seem odd—but in a place where a person could end so abruptly without a chance to save her loved ones, how could I hesitate when he offered me the contents of a needle that would make me deathless?

Yes, I said. I would like to be deathless, if only for a little while.

And Uncle coaxed one of my veins into cooperation, and the needle, it wheedled in, and as it wheedled I felt my cells divide and conquer other cells, and I went suitably cold.

As my memory lingers there, on that steel table, piled with its many instruments and confusions, you might ask:
Stasha, this deathlessness you believed you were dealt—did it dive into you like an arrow, or sink like a knife? Did it skip through you like a stone? Did it pour salt on your heart and shrink it like a snail?

I would like to speak to the physical sensations of deathlessness, but in fact, I can't. After he plunged in that needle, I did not feel my body at all. I would continue not to feel for some time. The first moment I felt even a particle of this numbness lift? I was leaving the steps of an orphanage in Warsaw in 1945. I was failing and weary; there was a poison pill in my kneesock and a wail at my back, and just as I approached the gate, I saw the tears of a near-stranger mingle with the rain.

But we will return to that episode later. For now, let's look at the needle. Such a simple pinnacle of Uncle's aims, with its fine sting and steady thrust into my veins. I could have lost myself watching it perform its labors, but I watched Uncle instead. His face was stiller than any face I'd known before. I wondered what feelings might leap behind his forced, placid expression, and then I stopped myself from wondering because I knew that it would not do me any good to know such feelings.

Once emptied of its amber, the needle withdrew. Uncle put a tiny cloud of cotton on the point of entry, brimming with a blood drop of sun.

“Your face is too white. How do you feel?”

Guilty,
I wanted to say. Like I'd deserted all that was good and worthy. Like I'd escaped death by turning my back on life. All the cells in my body cried out, and I knew they cried not for me, but for all those who had been lost, and those who were to become lost, and there I was, someone who should not exist in the doctor's world, and yet—Uncle interrupted my thoughts; he was snapping his fingers beneath my nose.

“Stasha? I asked you a question—how do you feel?”

“I feel like I am a real person now,” I lied, my guilt tucked away behind my shivers. “Not just a twin. But my own person. Stasha. Only Stasha.”

“How interesting!” he mused, flattered by this development. I assumed that it made him feel powerful to undo the miracle of our doubled birth, to disrupt the bond nature itself had given us. I am sure, too, that he believed I might be easier to control in the absence of my twinhood. He thought me simpler and unfettered, a perfect experiment. As blasphemous as my words were, I saw that continuing this lie might be greatly beneficial.

“My own self,” I declared. “I never dreamed that this was what I wanted to be—but now I know it. An individual, that's what I am. Not part of a pair, not just Pearl's sister. Just a normal girl, all alone and by myself, with no one else that I am compelled to love and live beside.”

Showily, I renounced all that I held most dear and—do you know what this did to the innermost of me? My heart was visited by a trembling anger, and my lungs became aloof—they pretended they didn't know me at all. I could only hope that all of me, myself entire, would soon recognize my objective, that this was a deception undertaken to achieve the survival of us both. It was for Pearl and me, this sham. My sister, for so long, had upheld and polished me; she made me decent, lovable, significant—now, it was my turn to uphold her.

Mengele was fooled well enough. He was so amused by my declaration that he ruffled my curls with his fingers.

“Little deathless Stasha.” He laughed. “You'll outlive us all.”

As he placed the needle back on its tray, I realized that he'd complicated me; he'd imposed divisions on the matter I shared with Pearl, all that we'd both collaborated on in our floating little world. The needle made me a
mischling,
but the word took on a meaning different than the term the Nazis imposed upon us, all those cold and gruesome equations of blood and worship and heritage. No, I was a hybrid of a different sort, a powerful hybrid forged by my suffering. I was now composed of two parts.

One part was loss and despair. Such darkness should make life impossible, I know. But my other part? It was wild hope. And no one could extract or cut or drain it from me. No one could burn it from my flesh or puncture it with a needle.

This hopeful part, it twisted me, gave me a new form. The girl who'd licked an onion in the cattle car was dead, and the
mischling
I'd become was an oddity, a thwarted person, a creature—but a creature capable of tricking her enemies and rescuing her loved ones.

“You are the first, you know,” Uncle said, and he prattled on, telling me that I was the latest in inventions, a girlish carrier of a startling future. He took out a magnifying glass and inspected my eyes, but no matter how closely he looked, he suspected nothing of my plans. Already, I was adept at trickery.

“Because I did this—my sister will be next?” In a world of questions, this was the only one that mattered to me. “You will make her deathless too?”

Uncle took a moment to line up the instruments on his tray. I could tell that he was stalling for time; he was trying to decide the best way to handle a Jew like me, a potential double-dealer, a probable spy. He told me that if I proved myself a worthy patient, Pearl would receive the same treatment, just like any identical twin should.

I promised that I would prove myself. Anything for Pearl, I said, and he nodded in an absent way and noted that he was happy to hear that, because it would not do to create a race of children who would live forever if such children could never outgrow the inferior origins of their blood.

As he spoke, I sensed what the needle had done. Within me, there was a twitch, a fever. It was as if my cells recognized the sound of his voice—I could feel them branch and unfurl in their deathlessness, like blooms acknowledging an untrustworthy source of light—and I swore, on Pearl and her approaching deathlessness, that no child would have to listen to that doctor-beast much longer. She would join me as a
mischling;
we would be two hybrids together, two girls mutated beyond the laws of life and death, victory and sorrow. With our sophisticated gifts we would plot to overthrow him, we would wait and wait and then, in a vulnerable moment, catch him unawares, and we'd have the means to end him hiding behind our backs—perhaps we'd use the very bread knives they allowed us prisoners so that we could cut our morning meal, maybe we'd turn these dull blades away from our rations, toward flesh—and in the blessed minute of his death, Uncle wouldn't even know who was who, which was which; we would not identify which twin was freeing the world of him. All the duties that we'd partitioned between us for the sake of our endurance would unspool and mingle. In this act, we would both take responsibility for the funny, the future, the bad, the good, the past, and the sad.