Affinity Konar - Mischling

“This key, you mean. This is supposed to comfort me?”

I had no response for this. She buried her face in my shoulder, and my sleeve quickly grew damp. She shook a little. Enough to loosen her hands. The key fell, turning one whole revolution before clattering on the ground. Watching its escape, I wondered if the Roma twins died at the same moment, or if life, as it left them, had allowed one to ease the way for the other.

My sister put her lips to my ear and made a half hiss, half sob of despair, but managed nothing in the way of intelligible sound. What came from her was mangled and tortured, an attempt stopped short. I could only imagine what her words wanted to be. I couldn’t imagine what the Roma twins had said to each other.

Had a good-bye been possible?

Or did the pain of their union render it unnecessary?

Thinking of these boys, I flushed and chilled; my pain made itself known, and I tried to push my sister away. It was one of those involuntary gestures, the kind that makes a person seem cruel, even though she’s not aware of what she’s doing. Simple as a reflex. Of course, my sister staggered back toward me; she threw her arms around my neck. My breath tried to leave me. I pushed her again, harder. The ache of this — it lit her face. She probably thought I was disgusted by the urgency of her cling, her pitiable illusions. I might have been, in some small measure, even though both had made the ruse of my piano key possible, but the truth was that, in that moment, I needed her to prove that she could manage without me at her side. The last time I pushed her, my force surprised me — she fell to the ground with a thud and sat there, blinking, as the first snow of the season began to fall.

“Get up,” I ordered her. I was so cruel. I thought it necessary. I believed it was the only way in this place. She needed to live for herself; that’s what the pain was telling me. I didn’t know if she was the stronger or the luckier of us two — I just knew she had to live.

But my sister, she stretched out in the snow. At first I thought she was making a snow angel, but then I saw that this was a most different posture — it was one of surrender, though it was not without its angles of defiance.

“I won’t get up,” she whispered.

“Get up, Stasha,” I ordered.

She rolled over like a dumb baby.

“I’ll get up when you promise to never leave me,” she insisted, her voice muffled against the snow-flecked ground. How terrible it felt, to stand over her like that, to maintain an impression of strength while she fell to pieces!

“I promise that a part of me will always be with you. Isn’t that enough?”

She raised her head from the ground but refused to look at me. Her lips and nose were puffed with sobs, and I watched her bare fingers clutch the earth. They were so desperate, those fingers, to maintain a hold on anything at all that even dirt and snow would do.

“Which part?” She sniffed.

Her old fantasy — I drew on it. Had I ever truly believed in it? If I hadn’t before, I certainly did in that moment, while my sister lay at my feet, so reduced.

“The part,” I said, “that knew who we were before we had names or faces. Back in the floating world. Remember the floating world? We were just less than babies then, and still, we knew how to love each other. We knew these times would come, we just didn’t know how, much less why. We had a lot of living to do before they came for us. That’s why we decided to leave Mama early and start seeing the world as soon as we could.”

“I don’t recall making that decision at all,” she said.

Stasha stared at the piano key glumly like it was some hateful thing.

“It’s not enough,” she said. But she got up. And in defiance of my pain, I bent myself at the abdomen, stooped to pick the piano key up from the ground. A tiny fracture branched out from one ivory corner. I displayed this new injury to her.

“Take better care of this,” I warned.

I was telling myself that the pain I felt was not Pearl’s. Then I realized I was wrong. It had to be her pain. It was too pretty to have originated within me; it launched itself so delicately throughout my body, sending pirouettes of discomfort along my every nerve. Yes, I concluded, this pain belonged to Pearl — but before the fullness of this realization set in, I received a true blow. Bruna cuffed me on my ear.

“You cheated, Stasha!”

Bruna shivered with frost and anger. We’d been playing a game of cards behind our barracks. I’d thought it had been a pleasant one. But now, she leaned into my face so that there was no avoiding her rage. The powdered puffs of her breath smelled like winter and starvation, with a tinge of tin-cup coffee. “Don’t deny it,” she snarled between the snowflakes. “You knew exactly what you were doing. You’re a cheater!”

I blushed and trembled. She was looking more fearsome than usual in those days. In an attempt to no longer be albino, she’d taken to coloring her white hair with coal so that it flowed down her back in a charcoal glory. This measure not only failed to deter Uncle’s interest in her as an experiment but resulted in fierce streaks of black across her white face. This lent her the appearance of a raccoon, and a rabid one at that.

Much as I loved her, I feared her too.

Because it was true — I was a cheater; my survival in the Zoo was a slimy, privileged thing. No work was required on my part, no stealth, no desire — I was doomed to live forever without lifting a finger. The eye of a needle had sealed my immortality, thwarting any chance of release.

None of this bothered me until I realized that Pearl had not been given the same opportunity. Why had he withheld it from her? This was not what I thought we’d planned for at all. We were supposed to be deathless together, side by side, just as we’d been babies and girls together. Had he suspected my plan? Was he countering it with a plan of his own, some plot that would deny Pearl the needle, and me my sister?

And now, here was Bruna, my friend and protector, a lover of violence — she had found me out, she knew there was a fraud in me, a crime that allowed me to flourish. I did not know how to defend myself against such charges.

You could say that it wasn’t my fault, the introduction of this lie. You could say that only Uncle could be blamed, because he had flooded my blood with it. And I would say that you were right, but while another child’s body might have rejected this fraud, recognized it as a virus, a poison, an undoing, mine had embraced it. I had been too pleased by the prospect that we would survive, always we’d be together, to question what it might mean to outlive others more deserving of life. And now here I was, still the sole bearer of this cure, doomed as of this moment to spend eternity alone unless I was able to undo what he’d done.

Through my carelessness, I had betrayed my sister, and more. I was the lowest of Auschwitz. I had no right to shield myself from scorn, and yet—

“It was all Uncle’s idea,” I cried. “I shouldn’t have let him do it, I know!”

Confusion set Bruna’s eyes at an inquisitive slant. With her free hand, she motioned to the cards scattered across the snow.

“I don’t know what Mengele has to do with this. All I know is that you peeked at my cards just now. I saw you! Admit it! Or don’t admit it and you’ll find a king in your mouth!”

She crumpled the monarch in her fist and tried to pry my mouth open. Only when she peeled my lips back and lowered the card into my throat, crown first, did I realize that her anger was about a different game, not the one I’d been playing with Uncle. Strengthened by this epiphany, I spat out the king and with it a splinter of confession, a mere fraction of my misdeed.