Affinity Konar - Mischling

“Ask me for anything,” he said. “I need to have something to search for in here. Something better to do. Whatever you want, I’ll bring it. Whatever you need, I’ll get it.”

There was a plea in his voice. I wanted to name something. But I couldn’t think of anything. The pain inside of me was blotting out all of my wants.

“Ask like there’s a future,” he said. “Or at least another month, a week!”

The boy I’d known — or had started to know — suddenly, he was so lost, he looked nothing like the leader we children hailed him as.

Unnerved by my silence, Peter transformed it into a challenge.

“I’ll steal real instruments for you,” he said, and he tried to mask the falter in his voice with a jesting tone. “Not just pieces of pianos. Whole pianos! Baby grands! You doubt me?”

I didn’t, I said. But this provided little comfort. I saw him eye what he had given me, and it was as if he wished that he could take that back, and more. He wanted to take back all that we had shared, that feeling, that moment, just so that we could relive it. This is what I suspected, at least. Because it was how I felt too.

But no amount of feeling for another can compete with the need one has to be alone with one’s pain.

Zayde, he’d always told us about animals that crawled off to die, the injured and the weak that separated themselves from the others so as not to affect the endurance of their pack. I knew this was something I would have to do someday, that I should practice for that inevitable moment when I needed to turn my head and shuffle off, for the good of those better suited to survival, people like Peter and Bruna and Stasha, who had not been selected by Josef Mengele for deterioration and ruin. That was my role, my lot. I was glad for it — it meant that I did not have to watch my sister suffer as I did.

But I did not want to practice this abandonment with Peter, not then. I wanted a week with him. I’d settle for days.

“You can steal the whole orchestra for me,” I said.

“Is that all?” He laughed, and he drew me close.

The object seemed too good to be real. I studied it; I turned it over in my hands. I’d thought I had wanted it for Stasha. But now that this object was in my possession, I knew I’d wanted it for myself too. I sat with it for a moment. And then two. Finally, I went to find Stasha.

She was sitting by herself behind the boys’ barracks, scribbling in her little blue book, transferring anatomy diagrams into it. It was strangely quiet, or at least it was what passed for quiet behind the barracks, because only the guard dogs could be heard, and then, if you strained to part their barking, there was the sound of the cremo churning, spitting out its fire and snow with a dreadful efficiency.

Stasha’s eyes were narrowed in study, and her mouth was drawn in a tense line as she penciled in her thoughts. The depth of her concentration drew my attention to how different we looked. It wasn’t that change had touched only me, of course. I couldn’t help but carry all the breakage of illness, but she too had been altered, though perhaps in subtler ways. Our youth had left us, but it had taken no pains to extract itself in equal measures. I said nothing of this, but she heard it still.

“It’s true. We do look different,” she said, acknowledging my thoughts.

“It’s my fault. I parted my hair in the opposite direction,” I explained.

“Why? Parting your hair differently won’t bring anyone back,” she said mournfully. And then she lapsed into her usual talk, the business about how she hadn’t done right by Patient, that she’d failed thus far at ending Mengele.

Patient would understand, I told her. But there was nothing I could do to save her from her own convictions. So I braided her hair instead. She sat at my feet and I attempted to plait but my hands kept shaking and her hair kept slipping through my fingers.

“I don’t know why I can’t manage it,” I said after the third try.

“It reminds you too much of Mama.”

“Maybe so.”

She put her book aside. The fact that she could even bring herself to do so startled me. I’d assumed that it had become my replacement, something she could love without the risk of losing it.

“Can we play the game where my arms are your arms?” she suggested.

“No.”

“You forgot how to do it already? But it’s so easy. You put your arms back and I put my arms through like they’re your arms. And then I do funny things with my hands, like, say, wave and make a cup of tea and lose at cards.”

“No.” I made no attempt to be nice about this.

“Fine, I’ll make you win at cards. Now will you?”

“Never.” I shuddered. I had a good reason to refuse; the game no longer had appeal for me. Because while the Zoo had changed many things for us, its most severe alteration might have been the very damage it did to our notions of what it meant to be close to another living being.

The stories of this place, they alone changed our longing for attachment. Here is one such story: In the spring before our arrival, Mengele fastened two Roma boys together, sewed them back to back. First, they disappeared from their camp. Then, screams were heard from the laboratory, screams unlike other screams. The volume of their agonies unnerved the other experiments too much, so Mengele moved the joined boys to another location. Peter had told me this story; he’d watched as the boys were carried out on a single stretcher, and he’d followed the truck that transported them, at a safe distance, through the camp until it stopped. On the stone floor of a cellar, the Roma boys lived as a single entity for three days, each staring in the opposite direction, joined by a seam at their spines, and an infection.

The fact that they could not see each other’s suffering was the only good to come of that.

I didn’t want to speak of this, so I changed the subject. I had to say good-bye to her somehow, I had to slip it in so it didn’t disturb her, I had to sweeten it so she overlooked its sting.

I assumed a cheery tone appropriate to such deceptions. I’d learned this from our mother, after Papa’s disappearance, and I’d practiced it to myself down in our ghetto basement whenever I found myself alone and doubtful about our future.

“If you’re so good at reading my mind these days,” I said in a bright voice, “then what do I have in my pocket?”

Her eyes livened.

“You have a letter from Mama? From Zayde?”

“Guess again.”

“A knife? A gun? What is it? Wait, don’t tell me — I want the fun of a guess.”

But it was too late. I had already pulled the object from my pocket and displayed it in my palm.

“A piano key?”

“More than that,” I informed her.

She turned its whiteness over, and inspected it. Knowing how her mind worked, I understood she was already searching for another, lamenting its loneliness as a single key. She was confused by its lack of siblings.

“What’s this for?” Her tone was not just unimpressed; it also carried the splinter of a conviction that said there was nothing I could give her in these times that would be of any use.

I explained that it was more than just a key, it was a key from our old piano — it was a token of our past, a reminder of something important, and whoever had it would be with me forever.

She bounced the piano key up and down in her palm as if handling a coin that she was about to gamble. Whenever the key was in the air she looked bright, thoughtful, anticipatory — but as soon as it fell into her hand, she went grim, as if the simple fact of gravity were enough to dash every hope.

“So if I ever leave you,” I continued, “I’ll never leave you. Because you have this, you see.”