Affinity Konar - Mischling

I was stirred from this fantasy by Nurse Elma. She rose with her magazine and, with a barking order for me to behave, banged out the door.

With her exit, the sound of the brush increased. I saw the artist peer around the edge of the canvas, exposing a single eye. The eye was sunken and dark, afflicted, but illness hadn’t starved it of warmth.

“I’d like to see you smile,” the artist said in a voice that matched the friendliness of the eye. There was something familiar in that voice, but I told myself that it was just the rasp it carried — that starved, battered edge that all prisoners eventually acquired. Still, there was something different about the artist’s speech — even the coughing that ended her sentence had a rare charm.

“But Elma—”

“What does Elma know of art? She’s just a monkey, a sham, a silly lady. Come now, give me a smile.”

I gave my best attempt.

“Wider now, show your teeth. Do I need to tell you a joke? How can I make you laugh?”

I told the artist that as hard as I tried to smile, I hadn’t been able to in recent days. Jokes only hurt.

“A story, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you a story about two girls. Would you like that?”

I nodded.

“Well, then,” the artist said. “I’m not so good at telling stories. But I’ll try. There were two girls in Lodz. Twins. Exactly alike in every way. When the midwife left after the birth, their parents couldn’t tell them apart. So their father put their first initials on their feet. The next day, when he bathed them, the letters washed away. The father was distraught. How could he know which girl was which? He tried to convince himself that it didn’t matter. After all, the girls had only had their names for a day. How attached to them could they be? He put fresh letters on the bottoms of their feet and didn’t say a word to his wife. Later that evening, he confessed his error. The wife only laughed. She whistled in front of the babies. The one that stirs at the whistle, she said, should be marked S. She whistled, but neither of the babies stirred. Then the father joined her, and the zayde and the bubbe too. They all whistled together and when the whistling didn’t work, they clanged pots and pans over the cradle; they got out Zayde’s clarinet and played even though no one could play well. They woke the whole neighborhood in their efforts to find out the babies’ names. Still, neither baby responded. Already, both were living in their own world. It was as if they were content watching everyone scramble to tell them apart.”

“That wasn’t a funny story,” I said. Or at least I think that’s what I said; I might have said something else, because I was so overwhelmed by the artist’s voice and her story. “And you should have told me years ago, Mama. Because all this time I have believed that I’m Stasha, but now I might be Pearl?”

The artist laughed the laugh I knew so well, and then she became Mama, my mama, though a Mama far removed from even the Mama of the cattle car.

“Is this your way of saying that you still won’t smile?” she said. Or I think that’s what she said. I’m not sure because her mouth was buried on the top of my head, since she’d risen from her seat to embrace me. Then, realizing the danger of this, she crept back.

We enjoyed the rapture of seeing and hearing and loving each other for the briefest of moments, and then—

“Where is your sister?” she whispered.

I told her I didn’t know. I told her about “Come Make Me Happy.” I told her about Pearl’s footprints and the field of poppies.

Mama dropped her brush. The tip of it was loaded with white; it streaked an ivory swath of erasure across the floor.

“That can’t be,” she said. “I’ve only painted pairs of portraits. In every case, intact pairs only.” And just as her voice began to climb in its despair, she rose and walked toward me and she embraced me with all the remnants of her strength, and she cried with what was left of her tears. “I am so happy to see you, Stasha. I could not be happier.”

I buried my face in the star at her breast. There was so much I wanted to know. Why hadn’t I seen her at the fence like so many of the other twins’ mothers? I could see that Uncle was fulfilling his promise about the paint — though in a roundabout, very strange way — but was she getting enough bread? Was Zayde enjoying his swims at the pool?

As each question was asked, she gave me a kiss on the forehead, but at the last, she crumpled, and she begged me not to look at her — just for a moment, she said, don’t look, she said, let’s not do this this way, let’s do it another way, when we’re in a different world than this, a world that knows not to let such things happen. Don’t look, she said.

I wish I hadn’t disobeyed her.

Because when I saw her face, I saw Zayde. And he wasn’t resting in his barracks; he wasn’t throwing dice or talking politics or trading recipes or toasting the memory of a starling. He wasn’t even dying in a swimming pool. There was no real hold, no center, nothing distinctive about what I saw. What had been done to him was the same that had been done to so many, and it continued still.

Seeing my horror, all Mama could do was say my name. She said it until she couldn’t say it anymore, and then she started to say Pearl’s. She said it over and over, as if in an incantation.

“Don’t let them hear you,” I whispered.

And then the last bleat of her missing daughter’s name shifted into a cough, and we heard steps approaching the door, and Mama jumped a step back from me, tripping over her ill-fitting shoes. We were lucky that she had been quick to move, as Nurse Elma soon sidled through the doorway with her awful face. She was not pleased to see my mother away from her easel and so close to me.

“I had to get a closer look,” she explained to Nurse Elma before scurrying back to her chair. “My eyes aren’t what they should be. I couldn’t get her mouth right.”

“A fine thing — an artist with bad eyes!” Elma scoffed. “Do you think you can get it right now?”

Mother’s voice dropped.

“I swear,” she vowed. “I will make everything right.”

If Nurse Elma had been at all attentive, her curiosity would’ve been aroused by the little catch in my mother’s voice, by the way that she looked at me as she returned to her work. She even managed to sneak a nod and a grin to me while Elma stalked about in search of things to criticize. She paced the brief length of the room, and then stopped.

“Why is there paint on this floor? So clumsy and wasteful.” She made a big show of her patent shoes as she toed the offending splotch of white.

“Clean it,” Elma ordered Mama. “You have made this mess.”

She flung a rag at my mother, who obediently stooped to the floor to pick it up but lapsed into another coughing fit. I took the rag before she could grasp it and moved it over the white paint until the rag was consumed.

The artist — because that was how I had to think of my mother while she was being kicked by Elma — apologized, and swore to be more careful. She greatly appreciated the opportunity to paint rather than work at the factory or in Canada or at the Puff.

Nurse Elma surveyed the canvas.

“I believe this will be adequate for our purposes.”

“I am not finished,” Mama said.

But Nurse Elma’s face said different.

“Mama,” I whispered. “Don’t be frightened when you see Pearl. Because you will see her — she will come back. And we are still the same, all of us—”

“You may leave, Stasha,” Nurse Elma said. She collared me in her usual style and led me out the door, so annoyed by my emotion and the tears of the artist that she failed to notice that I slipped the rag, an object blessed by my mother’s touch, into the waistband of my skirt.