Affinity Konar - Mischling

We watched the prisoners slouch across the field. But their slouch was determined in the first round and valiant in the second. Some were whittled sleepwalkers, while others were enlivened by the possibility of victory, summoning strength that was sure to dissipate. The ball didn’t care how feeble the kicks were, how sleepy the plays. It flew between the prisoner and the head guard as if trying to negotiate some impossible treaty. In the third round, a guard laughingly booted the ball off the field and replaced it with a sourdough boule, kicking it off from the starting point with a spray of crumbs. Even the crows perched in the trees knew better than to scavenge these crumbs; they turned their sooty heads toward the sun and ignored it. I saw that they were wise and followed their example, and Patient followed mine.

We looked to the sky instead of the match and we watched the clouds be clouds in their own way. Together, we read the shapes, in the style of children more innocent than ourselves.

“A clock,” I said, pointing to a cloud.

“A Nazi!” Patient said.

I pointed to another cloud.

“A rabbit,” I said.

“A Nazi,” said Patient.

This pattern continued. Where I saw a bride, a ghost, a tooth, a spoon, Patient saw only Nazis. Sometimes his Nazis were sleeping or picking their teeth, but mostly they were dying Nazis. The dying Nazis died of an array of diseases, of run-ins with wild animals, run-ins with Patient’s grandmother, and run-ins with the point of a bread knife held by Patient himself.

I tried to see what he saw, tried to follow his gaze from where he lay, his cheeks streaked with dirt. He coughed, but politely turned his face to direct this nasty exhalation into the ground.

“Explain to me how that looks like a Nazi,” I said. I pointed to the latest puff, which he’d declared to be a Nazi dying of a poisoned arrow.

In answer, the boy took his bread knife from his pocket and dwelled on the blade. All of us in the Zoo were given these knives to cut our rations with; most were dull and leaned weakly from their hilts. But Patient’s bread knife had a danger to its edge, a sharpness that he had cultivated from the backs of rocks.

“Someday I’m going to kill a Nazi,” he whispered. And then he bolted upright.

“I want to kill one too,” I whispered back. “But a very specific one. You know who.”

Patient fell to stabbing the soil around him.

“They are all the same,” he said. “I’ll take any I can.”

As he spoke, I felt a sudden pain. It was an interloper, one unknown to me. It tried to present itself as warmth, but really, what it carried was a sting so strong it was a wonder that I did not faint. Above me, the clouds rollicked without a care. Stupid clouds. I was beginning to tire of them. Not only were they unsympathetic to our plight, but not a single one was talented enough to attempt an imitation of my sister. As I felt this pain, I thought of Pearl in the laboratory. But I couldn’t think of Pearl in the laboratory, not like that.

She was stronger than me, I thought, she would endure.

I forced myself to take a brighter view of things.

“Someday,” I told my friend, “killing won’t be necessary at all. Because the war, it will end.”

“The world?” Patient furrowed his brow.

“No, the war,” I said. “The war will end.”

Patient shrugged. I wasn’t sure if he shrugged at the sentiment or if he was reacting to the fact that the guards had scored another goal.

“World, war. These are also the same,” he said.

It was then, in a fit of anger roused by the guards’ victory, that he stood and thrust his bread knife at the Nazi-clouds, and his beleaguered body must not have been able to support even this small gesture, because he stumbled back, fell with a thud, and struck his head on a stone. His body shuddered and seized. Ox did nothing; I did less. I was afraid. I called for Twins’ Father, for Dr. Miri. Patient continued to shake; his eyes flashed. The prisoner-goalie let out a cry and dashed over; he tried to cradle Patient, and he tried to fit a stick in the boy’s seizing mouth so as to save his tongue. Seeing this rescue, one of the guards drew his pistol. Shots were fired. Two in the air, and one toward the flesh. Gut shot, the prisoner-goalie fell beside the twitching boy.

Uncle pushed his way through the crowd with a stretcher. He shouted furiously at all he passed, and he stepped over the body of the fallen goalie to retrieve Patient.

A premonition ran through my head as the boy was carted off on a stretcher: This was the last I would ever see of my friend. I looked down at my arms, which trembled around Patient’s gift. I didn’t need the ear horn to hear the shouts of Uncle as he screamed into Patient’s still face in some hopeless attempt at revival.

And in the midst of these screams and cries, I felt the pain of my sister that I’d tried to dismiss because she was stronger, because she would want it that way, because I couldn’t live with any other. Pearl’s pain, it insisted within me; it ran and coiled and it said: Do what you like with your share, but I will not be ignored, reconfigured, or endured.

Hearing this, I dropped the ear horn.

It fell some feet away from where the wounded prisoner-goalie lay on the field, clutching his belly with one hand. How can it be possible that we remain so curious to the end, so intent on knowing and experiencing even as we are dying? Because, you see, when the prisoner-goalie spied that precious object, so strange and foreign on that soccer field, he dragged himself forward in his dying haze — it was as if he wanted to see if that ivory ear horn held something final for him, a message, a sound, a cry. But the guard, spying this interest, took him down with a shot to the back just as he grasped hold of it. Only then did the wounded man lie still. Red clouds bloomed between the bars of his uniform — I watched them seep and travel across the horizon of his shoulders.

When Patient was borne away from us, so lifeless, my sister hushed. If she said a word about her grief, I did not hear it. But perhaps I missed this — after all, grief was difficult to distinguish from the other sounds of Auschwitz. It was late October 1944—planes plowed the sky above us; they drowned out the barking of the dogs and the gunfire from the concrete towers.

“Russians,” Taube remarked bitterly to no one, his face tilted to take in the view. “If only I were coward enough to desert this hell now, before all of Poland falls to pieces.”

“Such a shame!” Bruna mocked. “That you are so burdened by bravery!”

I held my breath, waited for the retaliation for her insult. But none came. Taube was too busy with his musings.

“We should bomb this place immediately,” he continued. “Leave the whole lot of you writhing in the rubble. Let the Russians try to free your corpses.”

“What is stopping you, then?” Bruna taunted him. “You miserable lump of deformity!”

Taube was so distracted by the planes that he did not even chase her. Or perhaps the engine’s roars made Bruna’s insults inaudible. In any case, she took advantage of this opportunity. “Foul pudding!” she cried. “You tedious sore! More worthless than a fish’s ass!”

She had such fun with this, it gave us even more reason to hope the planes might continue their paths. But while the appearance of the Russians was useful to the dreams of many, they meant nothing to my sister.

Without her friend to tend to, Stasha found herself overwhelmed by open swaths of time. Everyone had a suggestion as to how she should put herself to use, but she turned down Bruna’s appeals to organize as a team and the Lilliput matriarch’s invitations to tea. Knowing my sister’s love of babies, Clotilde gave her the honor of plucking the lice from her twins’ heads, but even this enviable show of trust failed to move Stasha.