Affinity Konar - Mischling

“You are never wrong, Bruna. I am a cheater.”

“This is true. Don’t you go forgetting it.”

“I won’t, I promise. You are the real winner here.”

Bruna regarded the crumpled card in the snow, and the rarest of regrets crossed her face.

“I’m sorry for shoving the king in your mouth.”

“It should’ve been the joker.” I laughed, but it was a laugh unfamiliar to me. A desperate one, a bit ragged at the edges. A real beggar of a chortle. “But even a joker is too good for me! You would have to invent a card to suit my kind. The rot. The cheat. The germ. The disease—”

Bruna cocked her head in contemplation. I couldn’t tell if she was disarmed or pleased by my abasement. That sort of innermost hatred? It wasn’t common in the Zoo. Most of the others, they did not have the luxury of disliking themselves because they were too consumed with survival. This was not among my problems.

“The germ, maybe,” Bruna concluded. “But the rest? You take things too far, as usual!”

I can imagine how I hung my head, but I couldn’t feel it. I was numb. I assumed this to be a side effect of deathlessness, nothing more, because after the doctor had meddled with my ear, his toying with me had ceased. He took photographs of me to put next to photographs of Pearl, but this was the extent of his inquiry. Occasionally, I wished that my numbness might overtake me so that I could rally enough to see a new way to preserve Pearl, to finagle a switch at the labs and take her place as the chosen one.

Though I’d told my friend nothing of this sorrow, my face surely displayed it, because Bruna suddenly pulled me toward her in pity; she held me close and stroked my cheek with her own, as if I were just another swan in need of her rescue.

“Don’t make me feel sorry for you now, Smidgen. You get me so angry!”

I apologized.

“Stop apologizing! You’ll apologize yourself into the cremo.”

I told Bruna she was right.

“Stop telling me I’m right! What if I’m not right?” She sank back onto her stump and stamped her boots, restless. I saw her eyes; they were sinking into her face. I saw her hands; the little bones in them were rising to the surface. “Let me tell you — I just don’t know anymore. I am finding myself with nothing to say, nothing to look forward to. Stealing doesn’t have the same satisfaction when it’s stealing crumbs. Beating people doesn’t mean much when they’re already beaten.”

I wasn’t sure what I could say, so I said only:

“I miss Patient.”

Bruna broke from the embrace and returned to her cards with a furious shuffle.

“I won’t say that I miss him. But I’ll let you say that without spitting in your face. That’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?”

I agreed that it was. Bruna pocketed her cards and glanced about to see if anyone was lurking. She waited for Ox to lumber past before confiding in a low voice, “Don’t tell anyone that I miss him. People here, they need to see me in a certain way. They need to see my new sweater and know how I got it. You know how I got it, Stasha?”

“You stole it.”

“Why, of course! But I’m not sure if it is quite stealing because I stole it for you. Just don’t tell anyone. Not even Pearl.”

“We don’t have secrets, Pearl and me.” This, of course, was me denying the fact that I was quite sure that Pearl was harboring the most terrible secret of all.

“Everyone has a secret here,” Bruna scoffed. And then she draped her sweater over my back and gestured for me to join her on her walk. When I refused, she trotted off through the snow, eager to keep her daily appointment of teasing the Lilliputs.

The sweater was the finest I’d ever seen among prisoners, and it was large too; it hung from me so voluminously that I was sure that it could sleep Pearl and me through the night in an unusual degree of comfort. I should have been happier for this acquisition. It was proof that Bruna loved me. But happiness wouldn’t have me, not then. Movement wouldn’t have me either. And of course, there was that dull whine in my bad ear that made me want to shriek.

I sat watching the snow fall, watched it erase me. Surely, my captors envied the snow this talent. I was thinking about them more in those days. In earlier times, I’d been able to block them from my mind with my wild, mischling hope, but as Pearl’s pain swelled and begged within me, as it fevered and limped through my every corner, searching for another solution and mocking my inability to save her, I’d found it impossible to continue without dwelling on what our captors had done to us, and in such an organized fashion that they made us turn on each other. I swore I would never turn on anyone but Uncle, and I solidified this vow by kissing Pearl’s piano key.

One of Uncle’s promises had come to pass — we were to be entertained the way that real living people were entertained. For an evening, we wouldn’t have to amuse ourselves with another round of Tickle the Corpse or hour after hour of knitting a useless blanket out of barbed wire. No, on that late-October evening, shortly before the women’s orchestra was to be dispersed, we were going to be able to listen to the music not from the distant barracks, but in the room of its origin. I knew that I was undeserving of such a pleasure, but I hoped that perhaps I’d be able to listen intently enough that I might later describe the music to Mama and Zayde.

“Stay still,” Pearl commanded Sophia as the little girl squirmed. My sister had a tin cup full of snow that she dipped her fingers in to wash away the accumulations on the children’s cheeks. A whole row of them lined up at our bunk to be cleaned.

Pearl had her doubts about this concert.

“It’s a trick,” she said. “Probably a selection in disguise. If they are presentable”—she nodded toward others in line behind Sophia—“their chances will be better.”

For the past several hours, my sister had dedicated herself to the hygiene of any small girl who would permit such a fuss. She scrubbed their cheeks and chins, cleared their nails of grime with the edge of a pin. Watching her worry over prettiness, I was reminded of Mama, who loved to embellish us even though she neglected herself.

I wondered what Mama would have thought of how we looked, of the distinctions that had spread themselves across our faces.

Pearl had a grayness to her; silver moons had crept beneath her eyes, and when I caught sight of her tongue, I saw that it had grown its own fur. Pearl’s tongue had always been much wiser than mine. I told myself that it had donned this ugly coat as a protective measure, to shield it from saying ugly things, and that my own tongue could benefit from such a precaution. But I could not trick myself into thinking that fur on a tongue was a good thing.

I hoped that I looked as ill as she did.

Naturally, Pearl detected these hopes.

“But it is good that you don’t look ill,” she told me as she dismissed Sophia and put her fingers to work on yet another set of cheeks. Alize, the tiny recipient of her attentions, regarded her dolefully, as if even she doubted that Pearl was strong enough to complete this simple operation.

I asked Pearl if there was anything I didn’t know, and I warned her not to lie. I knew she was keeping a much larger suffering hidden from me. My insides told me so.

“Are you playing doctor again?” She laughed.

I told her that I’d put such pursuits — or, rather, the ruse of them — to rest after killing Patient.

“You didn’t kill him,” she argued.

And then she lapsed into the same narrative we’d lullabied ourselves to at bedtime for weeks, the one about how some live and die, some sacrifice and die, some cheat and die, and some simply escape and are never heard from again, and, yes, they probably died too.