Affinity Konar - Mischling

Maybe, I thought, if we flattered her, she would be nice.

“Tell her she’s pretty,” I whispered to Pearl.

“You tell her, if you think she’s so pretty.”

It was as if Nurse Elma detected our psychic efforts to like her, because she then crossed to the other side of the room and busied herself with the polishing of a pair of silver scissors, their legs gleamy in the light falling from the blocky window above. Though small, this window let in too much light for girls who had just been stripped. We crossed our legs tight, covered the buds on our chests with our hands; we clutched at these signs of growth as if hoping to make them feel so unwelcome that they might voluntarily up and disappear.

“They’re more frightened of you than you are of them,” I whispered to my sister, because there seemed nothing left to do but joke. Pearl giggled, so I giggled too. Naturally, our giggles soured Elma. She threw her scissors down on the surgeon’s table with a clatter.

“Do you see any of the other children laughing?”

We didn’t. In fact, we hadn’t seen the other children at all, because the strangeness of this place had so dimmed our perception. But with Elma’s direction, we saw that we were not alone.

There were five other children in the room.

Lino and Artur Ammerling were ten-year-olds from Galicia. Like us, they were new arrivals and had been subjected to some scorn by the Old Numbers. Hedvah — a girl who slept three bunks over from us and held the honor of being the most respected girl in the Zoo, due to her long tenure and ability to assert herself with Ox — had started a rumor that the Ammerlings weren’t twins at all, but were merely passing in order to receive the benefits afforded to those of our station. Twins’ Father had been known to pull such tricks, she’d said, changing the paperwork so that young boys could enjoy the salvation of twin status. Hedvah cited their different hair colors — Lino was a redhead, Artur a brunet — as evidence that they were impostors. But they had to be twins. I could tell by the way that they sat in their chairs. They showed the same shock, the same trembles, as the nurses counted and measured their every feature. Not a single gesture toward identicality was overlooked — their eyelashes were counted, their eyebrow hairs, the flecks in their eyes, the dimples at their knees and cheeks. They were added and subtracted and compared, two human equations who could only squirm in their seats.

And there were Margit and Lenci Klein, from Hungary. Six years of age. Whenever Pearl and I were immeasurably sad we looked for them, because they reminded us of how we’d been as younger girls — hands entwined, full of secrets and the occasional elbow-jab of annoyance. They were always combing each other’s hair with their fingers till their strands shone and making whistles out of blades of grass. Their mother had left them with instructions to always wear purple hair ribbons to make it easier for her to spy them in a crowd, so they fastened them atop their heads every day, first thing, propping them up so that they stood like velvet ears on their heads. We watched as the nurses diagrammed their pale, goose-bumped forms with red ink, circling a piece here, a bit there, until their bodies were rivered with scarlet.

The fifth subject stood alone, his thumb hooked in his mouth. He could have been thirteen or thirty-five or sixty, he was so whittled, so beyond age. His nurse was leafing through files with an air of boredom, as if there were nothing left to be done with him. Before her on a table were two folders, two sets of photographs, two sets of diagrams, two sets of x-rays. But there was only one boy.

And he was an iota of boy, a frail-boned brevity with an overbite and teeth that splayed themselves over his lips like a crooked fence. Tufts of white-streaked hair nested on his scalp and obscured his eyes, which seemed unable to focus on anything but the ceiling above. His veins stood so close to the surface of this boy that in the hospital’s faulty lights, their clusters lent his skin a pronounced hue of illness. In his chill and suffering, he was near blue.

I fixed my eyes on him, hoping he might sense me and stare back, the way twins often do, but the boy only coughed showily, making no effort to disguise his sickness. The nurse frowned at him disapprovingly and boxed up half of the file — this action appeared to disturb the boy. I watched him sway where he stood and falter at the knees, and though I was sure that he was about to collapse, he simply stared at the box with all the reverence one might have for a grave, and then he reached toward it and tried to run a finger over the lid but the nurse slapped his hand away, and he withdrew like a wounded thing and inserted his thumb in his mouth again. The nurse declared him finished and gestured to him to dress, but he refused to accept his clothes, even as she thrust the garments forcefully at his sunken chest. It was as if he’d decided that nothing was graspable anymore, that there was no point in trying to hold anything other than a thumb to one’s mouth. Agitated, the nurse threw the garments at his feet and stalked off. And still, he stood bluely naked, refusing to follow her orders. He turned only to cough in her direction, and that’s when our gazes finally met.

I looked away as fast as I could, which was slow enough to receive his friendly nod and quick enough that I could avoid returning it. I couldn’t face what he had endured, the horrors of which were made too obvious by the empty chair at his side.

“I understand what you are saying,” he said to the empty seat beside him. “But our father, if he were here, he would say that curses curse their utterers. And our mother, if she were here, she would say—” And then he fell to coughing again.

It was the boy and his empty chair that moved me to decide: I would be more than an experiment in this world. I was not as smart as Uncle Doctor, but I could study his movements without him knowing, and learn about medicine, and use him to my advantage. Pearl had her dancing to look forward to — I needed my own ambition. After all, when the war ended, someone was going to have to take care of people. Someone was going to have to find the lost and put all the halves together. I saw no reason why that someone could not be me.

I planned to begin my practice with the boy. Not knowing his name, I decided to call him Patient Number Blue. I studied him, taking in what I could from a distance, but before I could think too much on his particulars, I was interrupted by a high, trilling note.

Uncle Doctor. He entered whistling with a sprightly step, smelling of peppermint and starch, the long white wings of his coat trailing against each surface he passed and erasing them. I’d come to learn that he considered himself an expert at whistling, just as he considered himself an expert on hygiene and culture and art and writing. But while his whistle was errorless, there was no mistaking its robotic lean. Even as it leaped about the scale, it was monotone at the core, a hollowed thing that couldn’t know a feeling.

I tried to mimic this hollow whistle, but I found myself unable to copy the doctor’s trill — when I put my lips together to blow, I could only sputter.

Uncle saw this mishap and smiled. It was an amused expression that might have seemed harmless to an outsider, but the arc of it made me shudder. After all, we were in his laboratory for tests, some of which were surely designed to ferret out our inferiorities and determine how long we might be permitted to live. It didn’t seem impossible that one such test might be how well one could whistle. These Nazis had such stupidly vicious ideas of what constituted a person — I knew well enough to never underestimate their whims.