Affinity Konar - Mischling

Together, the bread knives and I waited. We waited anywhere the doctor might linger; we looked with interest at any footprint that spoke of his whereabouts. But the doctor’s footprints were more reticent than your average footprint — when I looked at their whorls, I could feel only a boot at my neck.

On the thirty-seventh day of my wait, January 15, 1945, I sat on the steps of the hospital with my three knives in one stocking and Pearl’s piano key in my shoe. I’d been waiting six hours, maybe eight, possibly two. Time, I’d noticed, passed differently now. I wondered if I would ever get real time back or if Pearl’s absence would permanently change the function of the minutes, the way they trembled and circled the clock. I was always arguing with myself over which was best, to move forward or to stay still, and it was only when I’d decided on the former that the doctor’s car pulled up.

He stepped out, unusually harried. The part in his hair was mussed and dust streaked the legs of his pants. Every feature on his face was drawn with stress. He ran up the steps, fetched a box, and nearly stumbled at the sight of me.

“Little Deathless? Why are you here?”

“You remember me by that name?”

“Of course I do,” he chided me. “There’s no forgetting you. Even if things here are not what they used to be.”

“Not what they used to be,” echoed the driver of the car, a ruddy man with the whiskered face of a catfish. His lips were slow and overblown and engaged in the consumption of a sandwich. I took notice of them as he spat from the window of his car in an expression of his disgust with some inferior meat. My stomach rumbled at the sight of the rejected food.

“Bolek would know.” Mengele nodded at the driver. “He was here from the beginning. He helped build this place. Tell her, Bolek.”

“It was 1939,” Bolek said with his mouth full. “Back then, this was all swampland. Now look at it!”

He lifted his hand momentarily to sweep it across the length of the windshield. And then spat again, magisterially this time.

“Roads, gardens, music rooms, swimming pools, music rooms,” he intoned lovingly.

“You said music rooms twice,” Mengele pointed out.

“And why shouldn’t I? You think they have those at Buchenwald? At Dachau? Some things bear repeating. Who can say Auschwitz is not a civilized place?” Bolek stared at me warily, as if I were the person to make that very accusation.

Mengele took to fussing with the boxes in the trunk, placing some of the presumably more precious loads into the rear seat. I spied a briefcase back there. The suit of a Wehrmacht officer was draped over it. Catching my glance to this strange costume, he was quick to cover it with his coat, but otherwise he acted like a papa readying the family car for a picnic.

“Just a brief trip. I’ll be back soon. I have to do some rounds first, though — would you like to come with me? Perhaps we can look for Pearl?”

“Pearl is dead,” I said. This was the first time I’d said it. Did the clouds flee when I spoke? Did the horizon march off to the sea while the layers of earth and dust came undone, each peeling itself back to reveal a lake? Did the ash shake hands with the dust while crows presided over the truce? Although such events should’ve been sparked by those words— Pearl is dead, gone, over, Pearl is no more —I didn’t know if any came to pass because the mere saying of such words stole my other senses from me. I stood there, tongue flapping, deaf and blind to all but the sight of Josef Mengele.

“Oh, is she? How funny—” He looked at me meaningfully. “I never signed a death certificate.”

“But you sign so many,” I said. I didn’t say that he could’ve overlooked it; that wouldn’t do. And if he suspected any hint of an implication of forgetfulness, he didn’t acknowledge it.

“So I do.” He sighed. “I do sign so many. But still, it couldn’t hurt to look. You’d be amazed, Stasha, at the ways that people manage to hide in here. They make themselves smaller than you could ever imagine. I’ve found many a child folded in half and shut in a valise! And these are stupid children, not like our clever Pearl. She’s so cunning, she could fit herself into a teapot!”

This praise for my better half resurrected her in my mind, and this resurrection — I admit, I was stupid, foolish, desperate — overshadowed what I knew him to be, just for a moment.

“You are very right,” I said.

“Let’s go find her, then,” he said, and he opened the front door and gestured for me to get in. I did. The car stank of smoke and ash and a leathery oil. Bolek grumpily threw his sandwich out the window and watched the Yagudah triplets fight over it in the dirt. Mengele sat beside me, lighting a cigarette. The car rumbled outside of the Zoo limits.

There was a prolonged silence. It felt dangerous. The doctor moved his hand toward me very suddenly, to the vicinity of my neck. I flinched. I’m sure he noticed, because his affectionate manner with me increased.

“Stasha is my medical student,” he noted to the driver. “She had lovely yellow hair once, but the lice — you know. Brown eyes, though — it is unfortunate.”

“She looks very healthy,” Bolek returned. His tone was familiar and approving, but his eyes in the driver’s mirror told a different story, one that wished me little in the way of good.

I swallowed and fiddled with the key in my pocket. I couldn’t tell you the logic of my nerves. After all, I had no reason to fear death, but the willful proximity to such a death-maker was unnerving. We were thigh to thigh. He directed me to lean my head on his shoulder. Did I obey? Of course I did. For the sake of ending him, I obeyed.

“What did you do with yourself this morning?” he asked.

“Studied,” I lied.

“With Twins’ Father?” His tone was scornful.

“I’m teaching myself.”

“Good. Zvi is a nice man, but I’m not sure that he’s the best teacher. You’d come out with a most inaccurate education. What are you studying?”

“Dr. Miri gave me a book. About surgeries. I’m learning about incisions. I learned about cesareans this morning.”

“Interesting subject,” he said drearily, clearly not interested at all. “You saw me perform that procedure once, didn’t you? A messy business.” There was a wink in his voice — he knew, even as he described it as such, that it was not a cesarean that I witnessed, but a vivisection. The woman — she’d had her child pulled from her, yes, he’d opened her and dispatched the child to a bucket full of water, drowning the baby before its mother’s eyes, but that was not the end of her suffering. He sustained it for as long as he was able and my memory of this — I did not want it; I did not want even Pearl to remember it for me.

But if Mengele chose to remember this killing as a cesarean, then so it was, in Auschwitz.

“Usually, I send them to the gas straightaway,” he added, seemingly for Bolek’s ears. “But taking care of it before it has a chance for a single breath? That can be humane too, under conditions like those. In any case, Stasha, you should be commended for your interest in these procedures.”

He paused thoughtfully, took a bottle from his valise for a drink, and gave my knee a squeeze as he swigged.

“But the arts — that appears to be your real calling. Dancing, isn’t it?”

“That’s Pearl,” I reminded him. “I am a scientist.”

He began to throw up his hands before remembering that he held a bottle in one of them. Liquor met my cheek.

“Of course!” he said. “But it really doesn’t matter. Dancer, scientist — just keep yourself occupied. Dwell on your interests. Maintain your curiosity about the world. Curiosity has gotten me far. You lose your curiosity”—he shook a thick finger before my eyes—“and life, it will abandon you.”