Mischling (9 page)

And we would know nothing more of pain.

In October 1944, our second month of life as prisoners, we were no longer
zugangen;
we'd seen children come and children go like minutes.

Although I was the keeper of time and memory, I couldn't know exactly when something went amiss in my sister, but I think it happened during our first meeting with Mengele. After that day, she was a listless mumbler, her nose always stuck in an anatomy book or her little medical diary, a small blue-stamped volume dedicated to listings of parts and their features. She went on tours of all the systems and their organs, treating each to a diagram and description.

This blue volume was not unlike the ones we'd kept while bird-watching under Zayde's tutelage. But instead of larks and sparrows, she approached the features and functions of lungs and kidneys.

Of all the parts she listed, she seemed most preoccupied with those that appeared in pairs.

As morbid as such entries were, that interest was comforting to me, because though she professed—like all the multiples we lived with—an extreme interest in retaining our sameness, I had begun to feel as if a bit of her had broken off; her detachment reminded me of a crag of ice that frees itself from a floe and sets off, adrift.

Outwardly, she put on a fair show. All the cheeriness was there, the polite inquiries, the routine obedience. But away from the observations of Mengele and Elma, Stasha folded inward. She slumped through interactions, glanced away when addressed. Her attention went to her anatomy book alone, with all her furious scribbles in the margins. And whenever she paused in her studies, she sat with a thumb positioned solidly in her navel, as if it were the potential source of a leak and she was doing her best to hold herself together, to stave off collapse. I'd stick my thumb in my
pupik
too, just to copy her, but it did nothing for me. The sensations she sought were suddenly beyond my grasp—she was either lost or changed; I knew little, I knew nothing, so much of me had already been stripped away that it often felt that all I had was an ability to watch my twin become a stranger.

Mengele must have fastened some illusion to her ready imagination. That was the conclusion I reached. Ever since that visit, her voice was too bright and her eyes were always mid-blink and her mood was never what I thought it should be.

“How do you feel?” I asked her once after we emerged from hours of tests at the laboratory. “Do you feel like I feel?”

“I allow myself to feel only at sunset” was the answer.

“How do you feel at sunset, then?”

“I feel guilty because I get to live forever.”

“What do you mean by that?” I laughed. This was hardly the sort of thing that one took seriously from Stasha. I'd heard so many stories from her over the years—another one didn't faze me.

She'd avoided looking at me since that first visit—that much I could be sure of—but never before that moment had the avoidance been so pronounced. I watched her lashes—all 156 of them, according to Dr. Miri's tally—brush against her cheeks, and saw the blue veins in her eyelids map out her distress.

“I shouldn't have said anything. I promised I wouldn't say anything.”

I tried not to dwell on it, but late at night, as we lay in our bunk, blanketed by the body heat of a third child—a speck of a girl who would disappear in the morning, shuttled off to yet another prodding—I wondered what had put such an odd idea into her head.

My sister's head had always been a mystery to me, even during those brief flashes of connection where I found myself wading through her every fancy and sensation, but this was something new. Traditionally, it hadn't frightened me to conduct such forays—her mind was a sweet, mild place to visit, an island full of gentle animals, varying shades of blue, trees suitable for climbing, the books she wanted to read, the plants she wanted to know.

But when I looked into my sister's thoughts those days, I found them much altered. Where that peaceable island had once been there was new, unmapped territory, a realm where the chromosome held court and cells divided in reverie and the prospect of mutation was comfort, rescue, and the means to vengeance.

It was a place that believed she could be Mengele's undoing. She told herself that if she was clever enough—if she turned herself into the slyest of flatterers, a false protégée, a girl too girlish to draw suspicion—she could repossess what he'd taken from us, and set the Zoo free.

I found this belief, this strange territory in her head, to be nothing less than terrifying.

She called him an experiment, but I knew the boy named Patient Number Blue was more. I knew she thought of him as a brother, a triplet, yet another family member she could not lose. I warned her not to get attached. She accused me of insensitivity. She wasn't wrong to do so, but I couldn't help but be insensitive to Patient because I was so tired of being sensitive to the both of us. My body was overrun by pain; it didn't need Patient's pain too.

But I was helpless to stop her investigations. I could only sit and watch my sister conduct these inquiries outside of the boys' barracks, with her subject seated on a stump, the cremo behind him, looming in the distance. These examinations were redundant affairs, always touching on the same matters, the same explanations.

I remember the first one too clearly. I was sitting cross-legged next to Stasha and knitting a blanket as a cover for my real interest. The other girls in the Zoo, they'd schooled me in this craft, which they found so useful for passing the time between roll call and the laboratory or those inevitable hours in which you were separated from your twin. For needles, we used bits of wire torn from the fence and sharpened on rocks. For yarn, we used a pile of thread gathered from our unraveling sweaters. We had a small supply of this material, and each took a turn knitting a blanket large enough to suit a tiny doll. Once a blanket was finished, it was never used. It was simply dismantled, and the strands given to the next girl.

Finishing my blanket was always a good cover for spying on my sister. Whenever my fingers were busied with this project, Stasha didn't suspect that I listened to her. On that day, I remember that she opened her examination by inquiring after the white streaks in her subject's hair.

“Not always like this,” he answered. “My hair turned old overnight. My brother's too.”

“Overnight?”

“Or over a few nights. I wouldn't know when exactly. It happened on the way here. It's not like we had mirrors in our cattle car.”

Stasha inquired about his background. The boy gave this a good deal of thought, screwing up his face in contemplation, before offering his relevant details.

“I've won five fights in my life. Three with my fists, and two with my teeth. Don't ask me how many I've lost. If you ask me how many I've lost, you'll just start a fight.”

No, she insisted, his
background.

“My father was a rabbi. My mother was a rabbi's wife. My father, the rabbi, he is alive still, probably. He was always saying that in the dark, all cats are gray. He had a lot of good sayings like that.”

Stasha clarified: It was his medical background that she was interested in. And so they proceeded to discuss what Mengele had taken, punctured, and tinkered with. He spoke of instruments that clinked and saws that whirred, and when he was finished, he told us both to pray that we were never visited by these intrusions to the abdomen.

“You sound like Clotilde,” Stasha said. “We don't pray. Our
zayde,
he prayed from time to time, but mostly he prayed to science.”

Patient found the force of her protest amusing. He flexed his right biceps for show, biceps that resembled nothing more than a huddled pile of peas.

“I don't let prayer put me on my knees,” he said. “But there's nothing wrong with asking to become a tiger, a lion, a wildcat, especially since I will be thirteen soon. I pray for the murderous stuff within me to overtake the damage that he does, so I can leave here someday and satisfy a Russian woman. And even if she isn't satisfied—well, she'll likely give me another go because I will be charming, and charismatic, a real gent. I wasn't always this way, this determined. But my twin—I have to carry on his legacy. You didn't know him, Stasha. But you can be sure that he didn't spend his time mooning after Mengele's lack of conscience. Even in his death, my double, the one so peaceful in life, so popular, so affectionate—now that he is gone, I believe he dreams about stringing Nazis up and setting their guts free of their bodies. Now, his dreams of vengeance live on in me. You can play nurse all you want, Stasha, but I can only be a killer.”

“I'm not playing nurse—there is something else I am doing.” Stasha pouted. She rested her book on her knee, glanced about to see if anyone might have overheard this confession. “Can you imagine that maybe I have the same interests too?”

“Tell me, what are you trying to do? What is this big thing, this plan that you have? Are you going to escape? You saw what happened to Rozamund and Luca.”

“I didn't see.”

“Shot!” He threw up his arms, staggered backward, and sank to the ground, mimicking the fall of the martyrs. “Shot for nothing. No good came of it.”

“Well, it is a good thing that my plan is different, isn't it?” Stasha walked over to where he lay in the dust and took in the configurations of his bones.

“There are only two kinds of plans here,” Patient claimed. “There used to be three plans, but that third plan—the plan to get enough to eat—has become impossible.”

Stasha paused to consider this statement and then scribbled away in her book before declaring the examination finished. She said this in an overly loud voice in the hopes that Mengele might pass through the yard on his way to his tortures and stumble upon this testament to her nascent genius. To Patient, she said nothing of her observations about his health except that he shouldn't abstain from eating rats, given his condition.

“They're not kosher,” he sniffed.

“Neither is the bread,” she retorted. I was starting to think that the book was her way of avoiding eye contact; she ducked into it immediately, as if shamed by her own words.

Her charge just looked at her sympathetically. It was then that it became obvious to me: Patient was being her patient just so he could keep her alive.

And Patient needed saving himself.

The problem was this: Patient's brother was dead and so he wasn't a twin anymore. The twinless were expendable. When you became twinless, you had days, maybe a week, before you were reunited with your twin in the mortuary for study. These reunions never announced themselves, but we all saw the pattern: We knew Mischa had died, and we saw Augustus disappear soon after. We learned that Herman was no more, and we waved good-bye to Ari, his nose pressed against the window of the ambulance. Disappearances were inevitable, marked with red crosses on the sides of the vehicles that carried our companions away.

As the keeper of time and memory, I saw fit to put notches in the wooden arm of our bunk to record each day that Patient remained with us.

“What are these for?” Stasha had asked, moving her fingertip over the initial four indentations.

“The members of our family,” I'd answered.

And when the notches numbered five?

“For the members of our family including our dead,” I told her.

Satisfied, she ran her fingers over the grooves to indicate her approval. As the notches increased, I came up with new explanations. I said that they were for the things I missed, the favors I owed Bruna, the kindnesses Stasha had shown me.

Fortunately, the forgetful-bread made this deception easy. Every new explanation rang true to her so long as the bromide continued to line her stomach.

When the notches on the bunk recorded more than nine days, I couldn't imagine why he'd been spared for so long. I figured that Mengele was so busy with so many other bodies, he had momentarily forgotten about the boy. Or maybe he truly did have some respect for Stasha and was allowing her the fun of her own experiment. After all, Mengele was known for breaking the rules to foster his own amusements, and no one appeared to amuse him more than Stasha.

The white truck came to carry us off, chuffing up in the dust like some important beast with its false Red Cross insignia blazing over one side. And under the supervision of that false cross, stitched on the uniforms of nurses and doctors, splayed over the walls of the laboratory, Stasha's blood was taken and given back to me; my blood was taken and given to a bucket; Stasha's spine was prodded with needles while mine sang out with sympathy; we were photographed and drawn; we heard the cries of others down the hallway, saw the flash of the camera, and when the light got too bright, Mengele took Stasha from me with his usual long-dawning smile and a whistle of equal length. She looked back at me, over her shoulder, as they entered a private room.

The doctor would take special care of Stasha, Nurse Elma said.

Whether hours or minutes passed, I couldn't be sure. I knew only that when Stasha emerged from that room she held her head at a tilt, like a marionette with a broken string, and she cupped her left ear with one hand as if trying to prevent the entry of a single sound.

But even before I saw Stasha's injury I knew what made it.

I knew because as I'd waited in my chair I'd felt something pour and bubble down the canal of my ear; I'd felt it course and stream in a way that defied my understanding, and I cried out in recognition of this shared pain, which was very unfortunate indeed, because it attracted Nurse Elma's attention. She turned from the reflective surface of the medicine cabinet, where she'd been passing the wait stabbing at her gums with a pick and smoothing her curls.