Affinity Konar - Mischling

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.

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.