Affinity Konar - Mischling

I slept that night with that rag pressed to my cheek. Some might think that strange, but I did it because my mother had just told me her belief. She believed us to be the last remaining members of our family. She hadn’t told me in words but in the way that she’d painted my face. She’d painted it untrue, with hardly a real resemblance at all — this was a nice gesture toward subterfuge that I appreciated, but there was also an unmistakable element of mourning in it, the specific pierce of a mother’s lamentation.

December 18, 1944

Dear Pearl,

Mama is alive. Are you too?

It was true, Mama was with us still. She painted our face, and, for a second or so, she and I had been restored to our real selves; we sat in our seats as if they were the chairs in our old house, and we looked at each other in a way that concealed our pain.

After I finished writing, I turned to the essential study of my anatomy book — this would keep me on my vengeful path. But before I could find my page, an ancient but boyish face appeared from above.

“Did he get your tongue?” Feliks asked.

I told him I was quiet because I’d seen my mother, and I hadn’t seen my grandfather, but I’d heard of him.

Feliks responded with his own quiet, a quiet so still that it roused me.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” I asked in earnest. “For having thought I might outsmart him, change him, make him into who he should have been?”

Seeing that he had no intention of answering this, I climbed out of the barrel to face him directly.

“I think you like to see the good in people because there’s been so much bad that you have to believe in good,” he opined.

“Do you do that too?”

“No. I see the good in knives instead of people. Although there’s really no such thing as a bad knife or a good knife, so long as it cuts.”

“You sound like Bruna.”

“I have arrived at my viciousness over time.”

“I think I’m arriving there too.”

He grew excited.

“We can have a lot of fun that way,” he said.

“I’m not sure it will be fun at all,” I said. “But it will be necessary.”

He handed me one of Bruna’s precious newspapers, a bit of contraband that circulated among the communists till it inevitably fell into the hands of a guard.

“I can teach you how to hate,” Feliks said. “Step one: Read this. It says that they are coming for us, the Russians — those planes we have seen are theirs. It also warns that the heads of Auschwitz will flee at any minute, that they will try to destroy the place and us with it. This means that we have little time left to take care of Mengele.” He shook the page at me meaningfully, urging me to read.

“I don’t know Russian.”

“I can teach you that too. It is a good language for hating Nazis in. Perhaps better than Polish. We can save Polish for other things — that would make our fathers happy, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t need your instruction. I hate them all. I always have. It is just that I hate Mengele the most.”

Never again, I swore, would I call him Uncle, not even in the interest of appearing innocent.

I saw that Feliks had a new respect for me as I spoke so nakedly of my hatreds, without the slightest attempt at concealment. He clung to every word I said, and wanted more.

“You should do something about this hate while he still trusts you,” he suggested.

“That has been my notion all along. I have just been waiting for my moment.”

“Do it now. You have an access to him that I envy. You know who else envies it? The whole of the Russian army; the American one too. We should exploit it.”

He handed me two bread knives.

“Now you have three weapons,” he said triumphantly. “That should be enough, I would think. I would recommend plunging the first into his thigh, the second into his neck, and the third into his heart. And when you get to the heart — give it a little twist and then kick it with your foot. Kick it till the heart squeaks and then you will know that he is dead.”

I was too overwhelmed by the presence of the knives themselves to even think of the noises a heart could make. I made a point of writing this fact down in my anatomy book before returning to our plans and admiring the new trio of my weaponry.

“Why did you have two bread knives, Feliks?”

“One was my brother’s. He would have been honored for you to have it. It hasn’t been easy, holding on to it. Bruna looked after my weapons when I was in the infirmary, though. She knew what these bread knives meant to me, and what the cause is. It’s too bad that Bruna isn’t close to Mengele — she would be sure to get the job done. No hesitation with her.” He lingered around the sentence admiringly, as if simply speaking of her brought him closer in his conquest of the whitest angel.

“I can be just as fearsome as Bruna,” I said. I did not believe this, but I hoped I could make it true.

We conjured a plan. The plan was this: I would get Mengele alone somehow, preferably in an enclosed area. This was important, Feliks pointed out, because while the doctor was stupid—

“He’s not stupid.”

“So! He’s not stupid. But isn’t evil a form of stupidity?”

“Who told you that?”

“It is something I arrived at. I did a lot of thinking in the infirmary. More thinking than you know. I thought about good and I thought about people and I thought about evil. Evil was the easiest one to think about, since we are around it all the time. I know evil. It comes and sits inside me whenever I am in the laboratory. The idea that evil makes a person stronger than good people — this is a popular misconception. But while Mengele doesn’t have certain strengths that you have, he is stronger than you, more able, so it would be best to have him in a corner. Or on the ground. You must have the upper hand in these situations or someone will cut your hand off and then the rest of you will follow. Understand?”

It was then that I realized how misspent my education in this place had truly been. My hours had gone to Mengele, intent as I was on learning how to heal and fuse, how to stop the blood and start the heart, and, most important, how to make one thing match another, how to impose symmetry where none existed, all with the goal of impressing him enough so that I might gain the required closeness to fell him. In truth, though, Feliks was the real expert, the one I should’ve consulted. Because he’d schooled himself — through exposures to violent encounters that befell all of us, through the literature of rebel factions, through the scenarios he played out in his head — in how a body could be undone. He knew the place to stick so that one’s victim might bleed out the quickest, the spot to target if one wanted to stun. He just didn’t have the ruse, he claimed, to carry it out.

In me, he believed, there was a real opportunity for vengeance.

But Mengele wasn’t as available as he’d once been. When the frequency of the planes increased, so too did the time he spent holed up in his office, shutting out his once-beloved subjects. According to Dr. Miri, he neglected new work, tended to the organization of files and slides, drafted frantic letters to his mentors. Boxes rose in front of the windows of the brick laboratory. Cars idled at the laboratory doors, and attendants shuffled in and out, bearing those boxes into the backseats.

For thirty-six days after Mama painted my portrait, I lay in wait for him. I replayed Feliks’s plan for Mengele’s death in my head, sifted through every move and shuffle. I whet the bread knives against the stairs. We will never be sharp enough, they sang. We will never slash deep enough to get to the bottom of all this misery! But I told them they would have to do.