Affinity Konar - Mischling

I was tired of these explanations. Again, I insisted — what was this pain that she was keeping from me?

“I couldn’t keep anything from you if I wanted to,” she protested, and then she closed my eyes, her fingertips warm on my lids. “Tell me, what am I thinking of right now?”

My mind was so crowded with anticipation of the concert that it took some doing, but then, with a little focus, I saw constellations of hurt, little sparks of light on a background of numbness. The little lights appeared to glow in a maze that my thoughts couldn’t quite navigate. I turned this corner and that corner and found suffering, but the suffering wasn’t specific enough for me to recognize it. In short, I had no idea what she was thinking.

“I don’t understand,” I admitted.

The beginnings of a tear gleamed in her eye. She tossed her head back so that it wouldn’t fall. And then I understood.

“You’re worried about my ear, aren’t you? You think that I truly am going deaf?”

She nodded, and then bit her bottom lip as she focused on Alize’s hair. As she tugged her comb through the tangles, I saw cause for alarm. I wasn’t sure how it had escaped my notice before, but I wasn’t going to let another minute go by without addressing it.

“Give me your arm,” I ordered.

“I’m working,” she spat, but the child took this moment of distraction to bolt up and make a run for the door. We watched her dash off, saw her form grow smaller and smaller as it gained distance.

“I hope she doesn’t regret that.” Pearl sighed. “But at the very least, she can run.”

“Your arm, please.”

She outstretched it. It was clammy to the touch, bruised here and there. Most notably, it had more needle pricks in it than I’d ever had even when I was a frequent subject in the laboratory. Never had I borne so many marks. Pearl had dozens. Rosy scabs marched up and down the length of her flesh like questing ants. When I inquired about this curious swarm, she withdrew the be-scabbed arm with a start and tried to smile it all away.

“You know how clumsy Elma is,” she said. “She’s always missing my veins.”

She waved me away, dropped her chin. Her shoulders too. The whole of her became limp; it was as if her bones were snapping, collapsing her from within. But as soon as another little girl presented herself for prettying, she resumed her normal posture.

“You’ve been busy,” she said, her voice so bright that it drew my attention to the dullness of her skin. Her complexion wasn’t far from the type I’d seen on children who were here one day and vanished the next. In all her preparations to ensure the safety of the others, she’d failed to fake her own well-being. I’d have to do it for her. I took up a trick I learned from the women who had traveled with us in the cattle car, wise women who knew the value of a rosy face.

With the point of my bread knife, I dug a little well in my wrist. The well offered me two drops of blood. I only needed one, but I didn’t reject the other. Even drops of blood, I knew, liked to travel in pairs. With this redness, I affixed a false health to the apples of her cheeks.

I told Pearl that she had to look her best that evening, that there would be many people in show business at the concert who could discover her and set her free and put her in the American movies. Though I had no desire to live in America myself, I would be sure to follow her there, for the sake of her sunny career, and we’d all live together, Pearl and Mama and Zayde and me, in some place with a hummingbird in it, and a garden, a dog, weather that didn’t want to do us any harm. It could be a fine life. Zayde would have the Pacific to swim in, and Mama would have more than just poppies to paint. A new set of seas and flora and exotics, that is what they needed.

But before I had a chance to tell Pearl any of this, Ox arrived at the door. In a strict line, we marched through our early snow toward an unfamiliar season, one that promised music meant for the living.

Inside, we arranged ourselves against the brick of the rear wall and watched the members of the orchestra tinker and ready themselves, saw them empty valves and adjust their reeds. They were a group of women with close-cropped hair, each aged beyond age, and their premature antiquity was emphasized by the girlishness of their clothes — uniforms of knife-pleated blue skirts, blouses brimming with scalloped collars. Their throats were sinewy, and every arm that held an instrument was elongated, as if their bodies had decided to compensate in length for what they lacked in volume. While the musicians’ hands moved as if all were well with the world, their faces did not forget where they were, and they didn’t let you forget either. Downcast of eye and drawn of lip, these performers were the grimmest figures in the room. Sadder than the Lilliputs, who were mourning the recent loss of their patriarch in their finest clothes. More melancholy than the women of the Puff, faded women in pastel dresses, their heads stooped like too-heavy blooms atop tired stalks, all of them milling about the tables set up for the enjoyment of the SS, tables piled high with cheese and sardines and pastries and meats. Even the aggrieved expression of the smoked pig, his scream plugged in his mouth by a lacquer-red apple, was outdone by the frantic sadness of the musicians.

The women had been playing since the early morning. Even though the transports had ceased, they had orders to play while the prisoners worked, accompanying their struggle with bright music that gave the impression of a hardy and cheerful place none of us were familiar with. It wasn’t music that promised the gas or the grave; it didn’t mention the forgetful-bread, the numbers, or the bones. I don’t know what it was supposed to promise us.

I would’ve asked the Dutch pianist, Anika, her opinion on this matter if I’d had a chance. She had one of those all-knowing faces, eyes that moved in recognition of the unbearable. Many around me were in possession of such eyes, but Anika’s burned a bit brighter at the time, their luminescence a remnant of what she’d attempted at the border of the electric fence days before.

The others had held her back. They said it didn’t matter whether her little boy was alive anymore or not; she had to endure for him still so that she could tell someone someday what they had done to him. Why can’t I tell the devil? she’d asked. It seemed a good question to me, but then again, I figured if there really was a devil, he already knew. And while I had no fear of the inventions Catholics like Anika believed in, I admired her willingness to face such a monster in demand of answers, simply because her pain was so great that it recognized only suicide as her friend.

And you’d think — given what the authorities said my father did — that I would have understood suicide long ago, that I would have known its color, its cry, its scent. And it’s true that I’d been born with thoughts of it within me; it was my only difference from Pearl, and my greatest instinct until Uncle thwarted the very possibility of it. But it wasn’t until I saw Anika’s eyes that I truly knew the suffocation of this notion’s friendship, the way it crept and curled within you, the way it said, Look, here is another way, let me save you.

Years later, the world would learn how common suicide was among these musicians. So few resisted it after they were freed. But I swear, that very day, I had some suspicion of it, the impulse that might follow them. I heard it in every note that the musicians played. The flutist squeaked, the oboist lowed, the drummer snared, and in these sounds there was written something else, a hidden meaning, a doubled message about beauty and its opposite.

Beside me at the wall, Pearl and Peter were ear-deep in whispers. They stood arm to arm, leg to leg; they managed a discreet clasp of hands. Pearl was wearing the sweater Bruna stole for us, and the strawberries on her dress had faded to dull orbs, like planets too pale to sustain life. Peter had slicked his hair back in an attempt to look like a gentleman. I’d heard he performed a thousand push-ups every day but saw no evidence of this. He appeared weak to me, just another moony boy, and I couldn’t help but worry for him. Peter was attached to Pearl, and no good could come of that, because while he was a messenger boy, she was going places as soon as the war ended, and possibly even before that. Perhaps this very evening, I thought, someone would discover her and whisk her away to the new life she deserved, a life as a star or, at the very least, a life as someone who had a future.