Affinity Konar - Mischling

“I’m not like Judy Garland,” I protested.

But my sister remained unconvinced. So I danced in the dust, and Stasha provided some music by whistling. Her whistle was terribly feeble, all starts and stops, but I’ll admit that it took me back, and for a moment, I actually did enjoy dancing, enjoyed it more than I’d ever have thought possible in such a place, and I might have happily danced for hours if my audience hadn’t gained another member, an unwanted spectator who seated himself with a leisurely air on a nearby stump.

It was Taube, a young warden famous for his ability to creep up behind a woman and twist her neck, extracting her heartbeat from her body before she even had a chance to scream. He had yellow eyes and hair, and ruddy apple cheeks that bobbed as he spoke while the rest of his face remained still as stone. At the sight of him, I stopped, but Taube gestured for me to continue, and he crossed his legs neatly at the ankles, as if settling in at a movie theater for a much-anticipated performance. He pulled a bar of chocolate from his pocket and set to work attacking it with oddly dainty nibbles. Even from some distance, I could make out the semicircles of his bites, and it was easy to imagine the sweetness he enjoyed.

“Keep practicing,” he ordered, his teeth coated in darkness.

So I continued. I tried to imagine an audience other than Taube.

“Faster,” he instructed.

Heel and toe, I struck the dust. I thought that if I danced fast enough, hard enough, he might let the dance end. And then, to my relief—

“Stop!” he commanded.

I did. But Taube’s apple cheeks bobbed irritably. It seemed that I’d misunderstood his directive.

“Not you! You keep dancing. Her!” He pointed to Stasha. “Enough with the whistling!”

Stasha shut her mouth with a snap, and her hands crept up to cover her ears. I could see that the sound of my feet striking the ground disturbed her. She could feel what I felt, all the pain, all the fatigue. Her voice whittled by fear, she begged Taube to permit me to rest.

“But Pearl’s very talented. Don’t you agree?”

“Very much so,” Stasha quavered. She wouldn’t look up from her feet, and I knew that they were throbbing like my own.

I might have been able to continue if I hadn’t seen Stasha’s anguish, but it tripped me up and I fell. Bruna offered me her hand, but Taube shoved her away, electing to pick me up by the waistband of my skirt. He then dragged me in the dust over to his stump, took a few steps back — so as to create a fine distance from which to study me where he’d placed me, like a toy on a shelf — and began to clap. It felt as if all our hearts were suspended in the air between his hands.

“Do you girls know Zarah Leander? Star of The Life and Loves of Tschaikovsky ? The finest actress of all of German cinema?” he asked when the mocking claps finally subsided.

We did not know, but this didn’t feel safe to admit. Instead, we gushed about her beauty and talent, and Taube grinned all the while, basking in the compliments as if it were him we praised, and not a distant movie star.

“Zarah is a family friend, and she is always looking for protégées. I am impressed.” He stabbed my cheek with his finger. “You have good feet, and I hear she will be filming a new musical soon. Perhaps, if you work hard enough, your dancing will improve in such a way that I may recommend you to her. Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to happen in your life?”

“I suppose so,” I offered.

“We are very lucky to have met here, then,” he said. His face assumed some facsimile of kind excitement. “I’ll call Miss Leander immediately. I’m sure she won’t hesitate — perhaps she’ll get on an airplane and come whisk you away within the hour!”

An answer was expected.

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Perhaps? Such a weak response — where is your conviction, your determination? You should pack your things! Why do you hesitate? Don’t you know the life that awaits you?”

Only then did I notice that three other guards had gathered nearby to watch the spectacle — they laughed so hard that their cigarettes tumbled from their mouths. This laughter, combined with the effort of my dancing, left me sick and breathless, and I started to gasp. One of these onlooking wardens leaped to my side in concern — everyone knew that Mengele punished guards who let harm come to any of his twins — and gave me a gentle slap on the back.

“You should hope that the doctor doesn’t hear about this,” he warned his fellow guards.

“Just a joke.” Taube shrugged. “Jews love jokes, especially jokes about themselves. You have yet to observe this?”

He placed a proprietary hand on my shoulder and shook me till my teeth clashed with my tongue.

“You love to laugh, don’t you? Laugh a little for me now.”

I wanted to appease him, but before I could manage the slightest titter, Bruna started to cackle beside me. She roared and guffawed and snorted with a mocking force.

“Not you!” For once, the whole of Taube’s face was animated with disgust. “Communists have no right to laughter!”

He was too easy to bait, that Taube. Clever Bruna increased her cackle and turned and ran, and Taube trailed her, like a dog suddenly distracted by the prospect of a new, more challenging prey. By the wisp of her laughter, she led him away.

It was the sweetest thing she’d ever do in Auschwitz, but it made me never want to laugh again.

Once the yard was emptied of wardens, Stasha sat down beside me. She put my shoes on for me; she wiped my eyes with her sleeve. None of it, she saw, did much good. Deciding that one of our old games was the only thing that could cheer me, she positioned herself so that we sat back to back, spine to spine, hips to hips. It was the game of our youngest years. This game was played by drawing whatever entered our heads, at the same exact moment, and then checking to make sure that we’d drawn the same image.

We took up sticks and etched these images in the dirt. First, we drew birds. We checked. They were the same. Then, moons and stars hovered over the birds. They were perfectly alike. We drew ships. We drew cities. Big cities, little cities, untouched cities, cities without ghettos. We drew roads leading out of these cities. All our roads led in the same direction.

Then, without warning, I had no idea where to go or what to draw. My mind went blank, but I could hear my sister scribbling on with her stick, free of any interruption. I had no choice but to peek over her shoulder. Unfortunately, the shift of my spine from hers gave my intentions away.

“Why do you have to cheat?” she demanded.

“Who says I’m cheating?”

“I felt you move. You peeked.”

I didn’t try to defend myself against this charge.

“It’s because you’re different here, isn’t it? They’ve changed us already.”

She was not wrong, but I wasn’t willing to accept this.

“It’s not true,” I told her. “We’re the same still. Let’s try again.”

We would have tried again, we would have tried forever, but before we had a chance to try at all, a white truck with a red cross on its flank arrived. Nurse Elma emerged from the truck’s door, her step so delicate and fussy that she could have been descending the ramp of a cruise ship. We had heard of this Elma from the other children in the Zoo, but this was to be our first encounter.

After spying Elma, Stasha drew a bullet in the dust. I drew bullets too, drew them faster and faster. For every step that brought Elma nearer to us, the bullets multiplied.

I tried not to look up at her, to focus only on the shadow she cast over our drawings, but Elma didn’t give me a choice. Squatting beside us, she thrust her powdered visage into mine and pulled on the tip of my nose as if I were some rubbery thing without feeling. Elma had a fierce-angled face that Stasha would later claim was of an evolutionary design that allowed her to track her prey in the dark, but at that moment, when the nurse was near enough to sink her teeth into me, I noticed only the calculated nature of her beauty, the hair bleached to meringue, the mouth overdrawn with crimson. It was as if she did her best to look like a drop of blood in the snow.