Affinity Konar - Mischling

Taube directed Anika to lay her hands out on the wing of the piano. They quivered like two baby mice on the black lacquer while he took his time removing his belt, and the leather hissed like a snake in the grass as it whipped round his waist and entered his grip.

All was too quiet. I saw the belt. I saw her hands. I had never seen a room in such silence.

As I watched this confrontation, I felt for the piano key in my pocket. And when my fingertips lit on its surface — I tried to help it but I couldn’t — I shrieked.

Anika breathed deep, Taube frowned, Pearl fidgeted beside me. And then Uncle, once again bouncing that boy on his knee, addressed me from across the room.

“What is it, Stasha? Why are you crying?”

But words had left me. I could only fidget with the hidden key in my pocket as he approached me.

“Tell me,” Uncle insisted. He came to me, passed the flat of his hand over my forehead, and, finding no evidence of a fever, stooped to inspect my eyes. Finally, he withdrew and sighed. “You must not interrupt,” he advised me. “Especially in matters you don’t understand.”

I promised that I would keep quiet from then on. He looked as if he didn’t quite believe me, but he patted me on the head before striding to the piano, where Anika’s hands still shook.

“Let the woman go,” he instructed the guard.

“You are too kind, Doctor.” Taube made no effort to conceal his surprise. It lifted every plane of his red face.

Uncle sauntered up to Taube so closely that his mustache must have tickled the guard. It was an unsettling proximity. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the corner of Taube’s lips, where a bit of angry spittle had gathered. Taube went as white as the handkerchief.

“You are upsetting the children,” Uncle said. His voice was slow and precise with anger. Chastened, Taube wove the belt back around his waist with fumbling fingers, but his face betrayed the fact that he would carry this insult with him long into the evening. Uncle folded his handkerchief, but just as he was about to put it in his pocket, he snorted with disgust to fully convey how much he loathed any further contact with Taube. Pinching the soiled hankie between his fingertips, he circled Taube like prey, all the while issuing that same half-smile that so many of us had received while we were being inspected by him and found lacking. Finally, when his intimidation was complete, he leaned into Taube’s face for a long hiss, one so loud and pronounced that we could hear it from across the room.

“I never liked that song anyway,” he said.

It was only then that I noticed that the piano key was slick within my hand. I marveled at this for a moment, thinking it had wept, before realizing that this was only the result of my guilty, sweating palm.

Uncle stalked back to his seat. We could hear the precision of his every footfall.

“I thought we were here to listen to music,” he said merrily to the conductor, and she bowed her head obediently and gave the signal to the musicians to begin again, and then the famous singer entered the room, causing an immediate stir. She was a recent transport, so the guards had not yet had the time to get accustomed to the glow of her presence, and even they parted for her as she walked.

“Mama’s favorite,” Pearl whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “It is too bad that Mama wasn’t invited too.”

She would have loved to be there, I knew. These songs — they were her friends after Papa left. He didn’t mean to leave forever, I was sure of it. He only stepped out because there was a sick child down the street, a boy overcome by fever, and Papa was a good doctor, he couldn’t deny anyone his attention. I’d spent so much of my time wishing that he had. Because he never arrived at the boy’s house. The child died, and my father — he died too. He left too close to curfew, and the Gestapo caught him up in their clutches — that is what I think happened. But the authorities gave another story. They had a story for every disappearance. We didn’t ask Mama what she believed. She’d shut herself up in the ghetto basement and refused to eat or change her clothes. We left food for her on plates, took it back in the morning, untouched. Playing the singer’s music was the only thing she was able to do, and though the strains of it were sad, they uplifted her somehow. I know she was lonely, lonelier than any of us. She was a woman who had never had a twin, and before our very eyes, by and by, she became less motherly, and then less womanly, until she was reduced to a girl even younger than we were. She was restored to herself only when Zayde, the papa to our papa, arrived, his hearty embrace and booming voice a cover for the mourning of his son, and ordered that the music end.

I’d never wanted to remember such things — these images were Pearl’s responsibility. But I suppose it wasn’t her fault that my memory was so insistent. Looking at her, I saw that she was recalling the same things.

“She’d fall asleep listening to that music with her boots still on,” Pearl mused.

“And her soup barely touched,” I said.

“We were always putting a mirror to her mouth,” Pearl said.

“To see that she still breathed,” I finished.

We hadn’t completed each other’s sentences in some time — I leaned against the brick wall with a fresh contentment. I didn’t even mind that Peter was standing next to Pearl and managing furtive grabs at her hand. All that mattered was the music.

It was a song I’d never heard before, an original piece that the conductor had created. Listening to it, I wondered if she had access to a window that the rest of us didn’t. She must have been fed better, must’ve slept better, must’ve been allowed a letter from home, one unmarked by censors and full of good news. The song bore me up; it gave me a fuzzy feeling and a picture of the future I would someday have.

This future was at the movies — it had matinee tickets and a silver screen and a newsreel full of confetti and liberation. The future was Zayde and Mama and me, the three of us seated in blue velvet chairs waiting for the show to begin. I sat between them, surrounded by Mama’s violet perfume on one side and Zayde’s smell of old books on the other. The scents collaborated to create their own nature. Mama’s hand was consumed by bandages, but she cupped my knee, and I saw her opal ring glint amid the gauze. We were trying to act as normal people act, but I still kept my ticket beside my tongue for safekeeping. I had all sorts of goods stored there, in a pocket of my mouth, and this disgusted my mother, who thought it no longer necessary for her daughter to carry razor blades in her mouth. But Zayde came to my defense; he kept telling her that the doctor had altered me in such a way that I might never be the same again, that I had impulses different than those of a girl who had not stared into the bright lights of a surgeon’s table. Mama argued that yes, this was terrible, what had been done to me, what had been done to all of us, but it did no good to walk about always with one eye anticipating the next disaster.

And then the usher hushed us all because the movie was beginning. My sister was onscreen with all the greats.

It was a musical and Pearl played the part of me as well as the part of herself. Predictably, she was quite good in both roles, though I thought she could’ve been a little more mournful when she poisoned Mengele, because as bent on vengeance as I was, I was not a monster. The only element that troubled me more than this was the fact that the writers made us into orphans. This departure from the facts was a real insult. But I couldn’t deny that Pearl excelled at the part since we’d come so close to being orphans ourselves — her tears were perfect splinters of grief that held real triumph.