Affinity Konar - Mischling

It was Peter’s voice. I’d heard from Bruna that he too had been suffering since Pearl’s absence, that his stride had changed, that he no longer took pleasure in the freedom of his movements about the camp but tended to sit in the schoolroom all day, staring at the maps.

I told him I’d eat when Pearl came back.

“That may be a while. Long enough for you to starve more than you’re already starving. Don’t you want to be healthy when she returns?”

He threw another crumb. I caught it up in my hand and put it in my pocket. I told him that I knew Pearl would love this crumb when she returned and thanked him in advance.

“Fine. Wash, then. You have to wash. You know what will happen if you don’t wash.”

“Are you saying that Pearl will die if I don’t wash?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, then,” I said. I could’ve added that there was nothing strong enough to cleanse me of certain filths that had been imposed on me through the experiments, but I didn’t.

“Do you want to be kaputt? ” Peter demanded.

I wasn’t about to address the center of my concerns: I could never be kaputt . Through the eye of his needle, Uncle had prevented this. Never would I die. On his icy table, I’d thought I was doing what I needed to do to ensure the survival of Pearl and me. But Pearl was gone. I did not know if she was dead or not-dead, but I knew that he had never given her that needle, and I knew, too, that she would be ashamed of what I had done. Because after all this time in the barrel, I’d begun to suspect a few things. I suspected that my endurance was made possible by the deaths of others. My blood was thick with the thwarted survival of masses; it carried the words they’d never say, the loves they’d never know, the poems they’d never make. It bore the colors of the paintings they’d never paint, the laughs of the children they’d never bear. This blood made living so hard that sometimes I wondered if it was good that Pearl was spared deathlessness. Knowing the fullness of what I had chosen, I would not have wished her this fate — to live alone, a twinless half, forever burdened by the futures torn from others.

“Stasha? Are you crying in there?” Peter’s knocks increased.

It was only my barrel creaking, I said. That barrel, it would insist on creaking for weeks.

November 20, 1944

Dear Pearl,

The war is over. The Zoo is over. Mama and Zayde are living with me now. We are planning a party for your return and installing a carousel for the occasion. The guards are building it because they do what we say now. There’s a white horse for you. A mermaid for me. When you return, we’ll ride together, and when we go backward, it’ll be as if you never disappeared.

I left my barrel for a limited number of reasons: roll call, bread-eating, washing, and retiring to my bunk upon Ox’s orders. The only time I left my barrel uncompelled by these chores was to see Uncle. I referred to him by this name still because I had yet to surrender my ruse — I still held hope that I might exterminate him yet, by the skin of my charm. Was it strange, the relief I had in revisiting the cold sterility of his laboratory? Even I was alarmed by the fact that I was comforted by it, until I realized that it had become familiar to my life, just as a schoolyard might be familiar to another. Where my sister would have sat, there was only an empty chair, but it was easy enough to pretend a person into a chair. Patient had taught me that, so long ago.

As I pretended, I could hear my sister shaking, her quivers setting the steel legs of the chair atremble. But no sooner was I closing in on summoning some mirage of her than Uncle Doctor made his presence overly known. Leaning over my shoulder to apply a stethoscope to my back, he breathed too freely on the side of my face, and the scent of his breath — sweet, but with an acrid tang — made me wonder after his lunch, and I soon found myself adrift in thoughts of food and was jolted out of my musing only by the intrusion of an instrument. He then tested the reflexes of my knees. Left, right, left, right. And when he was finished, he inquired as to how I’d been.

I told Uncle that I wasn’t sure if he’d noticed, but Pearl was missing.

“You don’t say?” he said absently. “Now put on your clothes.”

I expected him to turn to me with some suggestion of where to look for my sister, but he only went to the sink and washed his hands and combed his hair and popped a mint in his mouth. I obeyed his orders and put on my clothes. The fit of my skirt was predictably loose, so when I restored the piano key to its usual hiding place within my waistband, it clattered to the floor. He picked it up and eyed it with a curious smile.

“Explain this to me, Stasha.”

I said only that I was sorry.

“Children like you often are. But what are you doing with this?”

I required a souvenir, I said, because I was afraid that I might forget this place one day. Seeing as I would live forever, that seemed a reasonable risk — how much could the deathless remember, anyway? So I’d taken the key from the piano before the concert. He drew his lips together in an exaggeration of a frown, as if he’d studied portraits of parental disapproval and found ones to emulate. There was nothing human in it, but I responded to it appropriately and hung my head in shame.

“You do realize that Anika was nearly beaten for your theft, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“And you felt no guilt over this?”

“My sister” was all I could say. And then my voice gave out, or, rather, it pulled itself away from me as if tethered by some length of rope, the end of which was surely held by Uncle.

“There, there,” he said, a flurry of mock sympathy contorting his face. “You have nothing to be afraid of.”

I merely stared into his shoes, hoping that their gloss might reveal her location. But their usual shine was dressed in mud, and a tuft of dog’s fur rose comically from the tip of one, like a clown’s pom-pom. This was the first sign that something was awry. The second was his glass full of ice and whiskey. The glass itself was not unusual, but the many times it was emptied and refilled was alarming.

He left me sitting on the table, swinging my legs and dabbing at my eye with his handkerchief. His monogram was staked out at the corner, and I was careful not to let it touch my skin. As I dabbed, I allowed myself to peep around the handkerchief and take in the chaos that surrounded us. Never had I seen the laboratory in such disarray. Herds of folders were shoved into boxes, and the boxes were shoved into bigger boxes, and it appeared as if he were planning some great migration with all the pieces of us that he’d collected.

It is difficult to realize that part of you might travel for a lifetime with someone you hate, entirely against your own will. You may know what I speak of — maybe someone remembers you when you’d rather be forgotten; maybe someone has a piece of you that is impossible to retrieve. I can only say for myself that it was then that I knew that we were linked forever, the doctor and I, and I fainted before I could inquire about his future plans of escape.

The inside of my barrel became all but indecipherable, so thickly was it covered in letters to Pearl. I knew that if she did not return soon — actually, I knew nothing beyond the fact that my letters were growing angry and their lack of signature was erasing me. No one was counting bits of me in the laboratory anymore. No one was totting up the pieces of me. I did not know if this was because the doctor told people not to or because the best part of me was gone. Once, Bruna asked me, in her brutal and friendly way, why he bothered keeping me alive at all, and because I could not tell her that the doctor couldn’t kill me ever, not even if he wanted to, I said that I expected him to end me any day, and she drew me close to her chest and vowed to spear him as soon as she had the chance.