Affinity Konar - Mischling

What I loved most? The final sequence. After Mengele was felled, Pearl wore a white fur and clutched a tabby kitten while tap-dancing on top of a piano as lustrous as her name, and the camera loved her so much that it zoomed in on her repeatedly throughout.

This imagined scene — I knew it would be enough to pull me through, to make me survive the Zoo. I wanted it to go on forever. But it ended as soon as the singer stopped singing.

I turned to Pearl. I wanted to know if she’d seen what I’d seen, if she’d imagined it all too. But just as I was about to tap on her shoulder, my thoughts were flooded by gray, and my heart contorted. Was this a fit? I wondered. Was it a side effect of my deathlessness, some phenomenon where I’d find myself assailed by half-consciousness? When I woke from this state, I was on the floor with a number of faces floating over me, all of them angled with concern.

Pearl’s was not among them.

I fumbled about to raise myself, and I pushed the faces away without knowing who they were, demanding all the while to know the location of my sister. And then I saw for myself — her absence, in full.

Where she had stood — now there was only a brick leaning out of the wall like a child’s loose tooth. I called my sister’s name. I called her by every name I knew, and then I invented new names for her. I even called her by my own name, just in case. She didn’t answer to any of these. The music was too loud. She couldn’t hear me. This is what I told myself while I screamed.

Then I saw her muddy footprints studding the floor. There were dirty quotation marks at the heels, brief flecks of mud that indicated that Pearl’s departure had not been so sudden as to allow her to leave without a smudge. Such tracks are the marks of a stolen person. These imprints testified that Pearl was steadfast in her love for me, even as our tormentors removed her from this life. I wondered if — wherever she was — she saw the vision too, the vision of what I’d so dreaded, in all its multiplication.

Auschwitz never forgot me. I begged it to. But even as I wept and bargained and withered it took care to know my number, and to count every soul that it claimed. We were so innumerable, we should have overwhelmed this land beneath us into nothingness. But this patch of earth would not be overwhelmed. Some claimed that we might overwhelm it when we fully understood its evil. But whenever we began to understand evil, evil itself increased. Others believed that hope might overwhelm it. But whenever hope flourished, so did our tortures. This was my belief: Auschwitz would end when Pearl returned. Where she had gone, I didn’t know. I only knew that she was not with me.

And I also knew that I spent most of my time in an old sauerkraut barrel, which was an advantageous spot for my vigil, despite the cabbage stink I soon acquired. A perfect circle of isolation to enable a lookout for my sister. No blokowa, no Zoo fellows, no Twins’ Father. Just me, my lice, and a peephole that held my view of the world.

“Are you in there?” Peter’s fist knocked on the wood of my home.

I should note here that I believe that three days had passed since Pearl’s disappearance, though we both know that time was not my strength, but my sister’s.

At first, I wasn’t alone. Right after the music of the orchestra swept Pearl away, the lice came to keep me company. White lice, each thick as your fingertip, with black crosses splayed on their backs. I didn’t mind them so much because they bit me and their bites kept me awake and I needed to be awake in order to find my sister. We struck a deal, those lice and I–I gave them my flesh in exchange for awareness, and by the grace of their jaws I kept a constant eye to the peephole of my barrel. I’m sure that we could’ve lived together quite beneficially for some time if it were not for the intervention of Nurse Elma.

Because those lice couldn’t help but fall in love with Nurse Elma. They were always pacing my scalp, racked with longing for her. They oohed over her hips, her leather gloves, the cascade of her hair over her eye. The lice and I would get into frequent debates over her beauty. They likened her to perfection and I likened her to a parasite, which they took as a favorable comparison. At one point, a particularly tubby hustler had the temerity to pirouette up and away from the barrel as he professed his desire. Quite a leap for such a small insect. As soon as that louse said that he loved her, Elma grabbed me out of my barrel, hauled me to the laboratory, and reached for the razor. I’m sure he wasn’t the first fellow to experience such a reaction, but I felt sorry for him all the same. Beneath her hand, the curls that had belonged to us gleamed in midair, then fell, and when my scalp was stripped, I saw my reflection in a steel cabinet. I did not recognize us in it. This frightened me, because maybe Pearl wouldn’t be able to recognize me either. I slunk back to my odorous lair and slept. The guards knew of my presence in those barrel depths, but they let me be. I wondered if Uncle had told them to grant me this leniency or if they were intimidated by the sounds leaking from the barrel, because I spent all my time in that darkness sharpening my fingernails with my bread knife and practicing my snarl. The more I snarled, the faster my fingernails grew. The faster my fingernails grew, the more the guards trembled. They couldn’t imagine the truth, which was that I sharpened my fingernails in the interest of words, not weaponry. I was writing letters to Pearl on the wooden slats of my home, inscribing it all against the grain. I wrote her once, sometimes twice a day.

November 7, 1944

Dear Pearl,

Is there music where you are?

Dear Pearl,

I know what you’re thinking. Stop thinking that. There is no way that you can be dead.

Mere days into my epistolary captivity, I was already running out of barrel, even though I took care never to sign my name. And yes, I knew that there was no way for me to send letters written on this material. I just hoped that wherever Pearl might be, she could sense the scratch of every word and longing.

One day, bread crumbs flew through the hole of the barrel. I caught them like flies and threw them back.

“You bother me,” I said to the visitor. This was my standard greeting at the time.

Because I had a lot of visitors. The other children visited my barrel to ask me questions; it seemed that my reputation as a smart girl had doubled in the wake of my sister’s disappearance, as if I had been allotted all her genius. They had many questions, but none of them were meaningful, just talk-talk to take up space and time. They asked me what poultices were made of, how to cure a dog of crying, what it meant to dream of a swarm of bees. To everything, I answered, “Pearl!” That made them leave me alone. They didn’t want to talk about my sister, because they all believed her to be dead.

In my pocket, hidden from view, my fingers clenched the piano key. I had no idea what to believe. I resented its presence, because it was a sad thing to have a piano key as the sole vestige of my sister. I hated how still it was, how mute, how inanimate. But I was becoming like that too. And like me, the key had no use for crumbs or visitors either. Still, the crumbs — they kept insisting themselves into my barrel.

“Save your crumbs,” I said to the visitor.

“Stasha!” the visitor hissed. “You have to eat. You know what happens if you don’t eat!”