Affinity Konar - Mischling

The boys elbowed one another with glee.

“I’m sure she’ll be dancing for Taube any day now,” said one of the Yagudahs with a titter.

“Tell me,” I said, cheeks burning, “how far does that handkerchief-milk go divided among the four of you? Are you stronger than the rest of us for drinking it?”

They balled their hankies in their hands and glowered, but I couldn’t be deterred by such pettiness. I joined the boys against the wall. A silence followed. The boys and the girls of the Zoo didn’t mix much. Before the cattle car, I’d heard older girls discuss the awkwardness of dances. I figured that this was the closest that I might ever know of that phenomenon. It was so quiet that I could hear my pain traversing new paths inside of me — it trilled as it coiled through me; it burned and sank like a stone. So I was grateful when Adam Yagudah leaned over to speak to me, if only for the distraction.

“You know that business about Taube being friends with Zarah Leander isn’t true, don’t you?”

“I’m not an idiot,” I said.

“Well, your sister seems to believe it.”

“She’s not an idiot either,” I said. “And don’t you have any better tricks to do? If I were you, I’d make myself disappear before the Nazis do.”

This prompted a peal of laughter from Adam’s brothers. Adam himself wasn’t amused.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” I said.

“Of course you weren’t,” Peter said, lowering his face to mine so that our eyes had no choice but to meet. “Being funny is Stasha’s job, isn’t it?” He spoke softly, without mockery, as if we were alone and not surrounded by an audience, as if we were in a real room and not outside by the dusty walls of the barracks. And then, as if embarrassed by his own earnestness, he wound a finger in my curls and pulled. Touch — it had grown so complicated and strange. The curl-pulling was a gesture I’d been familiar with all my life, or at least in the parts of my life where boys sat behind me in school, but this tease felt different. It carried a pleasant thrill, and I knew this was the closest I might ever come to an affectionate touch from a boy. But the fact that this could be my last thrill — it undid me. And Peter’s torn ear — I could not look away from it. I wished for pockets in the skirt of my dress, simply so I could still the twitch of my hands as they longed to touch the badly healed wound.

“I’m only teasing,” Peter said. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell.”

I’d thought Stasha and I had kept our arrangement secret — I couldn’t imagine how Peter knew. The triplets fell stonily silent, as if they themselves were familiar with such a coping tactic in their own lives. Peter must have seen my discomfort because he snapped his fingers, and the other boys scattered. I admit that I was impressed by this power. It was an odd thing, to see a sense of command so genteelly expressed in a place where a boot on the neck was the most common order.

“Will you walk with me?” Peter asked. And he tried to give me his sweater; he pulled it off and attempted to drape it over my shoulders. I shrugged it off, just the instinctive reaction of an awkward girl. It wouldn’t do to take too much from him, and I was happy enough for this amble besides.

As we wandered, I saw that winter would soon approach. In the distance, past the cremo and the soccer fields, you could see the birches shedding the lit amber of their leaves, readying for snow. And beyond those white-limbed trees, I knew there was a river, hills, an escape. Like everyone, I’d heard the story of the rebel lovers — Rozamund and Luca — who were shot as they’d attempted that escape, how they’d died together, entwined in the mud at the fence’s edge, blood flagging their backs in surrender, after a month’s worth of sweet notes and covert courtship. I tried not to think of that then, with Peter; I tried to focus only on the stumps that bordered the length of the fence. I walked ahead of him, jumped from stump to stump so as not to touch the ground. It was easier to speak to him this way, and during this exercise, I forgot my pain too well, and was reminded of it only when I stumbled.

Peter plucked me up from the ground and pulled out a pebble lodged in my knee with his knit-gloved hand. After all the prodding of the nurses and the doctors, I shivered at the feel of a hand that would never want to hurt me.

“I’ve heard the stories about you,” I told him. “About how you organize all sorts of things and taught Taube’s dog to growl at Hitler’s name. About how you put a toad in Nurse Elma’s desk, and an egg in Mengele’s house slipper.”

Peter’s hair had a habit of falling in his eyes. He used this as an excuse not to look at me then.

“I’ve had some adventures,” he admitted. “But the house slipper! I can only wish. I don’t know where these stories come from at all. They sound like some of your sister’s inventions.”

“I’ve heard less wholesome stories too.”

“Oh? Well, perhaps you can convince Stasha to create more flattering fictions about me?”

“Not Stasha. Bruna. She is the one who told me about your visit.”

He stopped short in our walk, disturbed.

“Then I assure you, the account is inaccurate. Bruna has no idea what that was about. You don’t believe me?”

I was silent, too embarrassed to address the details of what I’d heard.

“I have been to the Puff only to deliver messages. But on one occasion, it is true that I lingered, because I saw an old friend. Did you know Ivan?” He paused, thoughtful. “No, you couldn’t have — he was not here when you arrived. He was a couple of years older than I, but we grew up together, in the same neighborhood. I had not seen him for at least a year. All the men on his block saved up to take him to the Puff. I was shocked, but Ivan was so pleased by his gift — he even made me promise that if I ever saw his father again, I would let him know that he had had that evening.”

“And have you seen his father?”

Distance entered his voice.

“Yes.”

“And did you tell him?”

The distance increased.

“No.”

“So you broke your promise.”

Here, Peter hesitated. I could see that this was a story he was not longing to tell. But—

“Not really. Because when I saw his father, he was dead; he was lying alongside bodies. I don’t believe in talking to the dead — if you talk to the dead here, it’s not long before you stop speaking your true language, whatever it may be. So I wrote him a note instead. I wrote that Ivan had had a night that would have made him happy to know about, and I put it in his pocket. It was an awkward note to write.” He paused. I wouldn’t have taken him for one to blush, but he did then. “Do you think that was the right thing to do?” he wondered. “It bothers me. I think of it all the time.”

I knew what haunted me. Was it terrible to take comfort in knowing what haunted him? Reflective, he ground the toe of his tattered shoe into the dirt, as if to make the thoughts that preyed upon him join the dust.

“Maybe now that I’ve told you, I can stop thinking of it. I can think of you instead.” I hadn’t known that a voice could be that tender. I also hadn’t known that one day a boy would draw near and pluck a stray eyelash from my cheek, and I would hope desperately that Stasha would not sense how I felt in that moment.

I watched Peter rub the eyelash between his thumb and forefinger. “Nurse Elma will have to count them all over again tomorrow,” he said, in an attempt at lightness.

I did not go to see Peter with the intention of kissing him. But that is what I did. I want to say that I only pressed my lips against his in manipulation, as a means to an end. I want to say that I maintained this position even as he kissed me back, cupping the side of my face as no one ever had before, that this was not the beginning of anything — not closeness, affection, love, the same wonder that had flourished in doomed lovers like Rozamund and Luca and led to their end.