Affinity Konar - Mischling

“I’m trying not to.”

“But your voice — it says that your efforts don’t come naturally to you. I imagine that you’ve found it very difficult to get on without your sister? I’ve seen many twins experience similar. I’m actually quite interested in that particular phenomenon — how one survives without the other after years of inseparability. So fascinating.”

I offered the answer that I thought would keep me intact.

“I don’t miss her at all.”

“You don’t have to be brave with me.”

“I know she’s just hiding,” I said. “Until it’s safe to come out.”

“A good guess, that’s what that is. You are a better detective than that, I’m sure. Now, take it further. Where do you think she might be hiding? Bolek, here, he’ll take us there.”

And so we traveled through the men’s barracks and the women’s. We crunched along the perimeter of the gates. I sat with my face pressed to the glass, and Mengele stared straight ahead. Everywhere, I saw Pearl. I saw her so many times that the true purpose of my trip grew muddled. I convinced myself, as the wheels rolled on, that my sister was merely in disguise, that she was one of any of the figures we passed. Her theatrical background and perceptive nature had likely conspired to create the perfect costume.

“That one,” I said, pointing to a figure in the distance.

“That is a boy child. And a criminal at that.”

“There’s Pearl,” I said of a different figure. “I was born with her. I’d know her anywhere.”

“I’m afraid I know that woman,” Mengele said. “She is a fine guard, but she isn’t Pearl.”

I had hoped that some revealing information might slip as we traveled. I’d hoped that he’d confess to his crimes, or at least to the deceptions he’d practiced on me. Zayde was not eating or swimming or living. Mama was starving; she painted only portraits of experiments for Mengele’s archives. But as we continued to circle the camp, I knew that there was no sanity in that car. Not in him. And not in myself either, because every time I pointed to a person, I actually believed in the possibility that this he or she was my sister.

“It’s her,” I said. I pointed to a kapo with a cigarette, a boy with a shovel, a cook with a ladle.

“Who?” he’d always query.

“Pearl!” I would cry through the window. “It’s Pearl acting as though she isn’t Pearl.”

And Mengele would command the person in question to come to our window, where it would become obvious — through an accent, a snarl, a scar — that the subject was not the loved one I searched for. It was only a kapo, a boy, a cook.

He seemed not to enjoy my disappointment, but I believe that he did like watching me inspect them. I performed this inspection just as he always had, employing similar gestures, asking questions of their origins.

“You should’ve been in our employ,” he said with a chortle after I let the cook go.

I was about to ask Bolek to return me to the Zoo when I saw a woman. She was coated in soot, but even in their darkness, her cheeks shone innocent. A basket hung from her arms at an elegant angle. Seeing my stare, Mengele motioned to the woman to come to our window, and his interest caused her to drop the basket at her feet.

“Inspect her, Stasha.”

I opened the door and stepped before her and I did as Mengele had done with us, lifting her chin with one finger. Beneath her jaw was a neat expanse of white, a brief reprieve from the soot.

“It has to be her,” I said.

It would be like Pearl to disguise herself so humbly. This was, in my view, a clever move.

“You call those eyes?” he scoffed. “Just bits of tin or raisins. Hardly human at all.”

Mengele gestured to the woman to turn around, to give us a show. She spun, slow but obedient, shuffling through each revolution.

“It’s Pearl,” I insisted.

“And does she speak?” he asked me. “Can she answer your questions, share a childhood memory?”

The woman blinked, her eyes snow-white against the soot. I saw then the milky cloud that veiled her irises.

“Glaucoma,” he announced. “This is a Greek woman, midfifties. Probably birthed three children, at the very least. Widowed more than once, and miserable all the way through. Cleans the cremos here. Looks to have a fever, and she’s going blind. Not much left of her, I’d think. Look at the scabs on her hands. Likely covered in them. What an infection.”

I looked at the woman’s fingers, speckled with injury.

“You are useless, yes?” Mengele said to the woman in a bright voice, his face giving the false impression of kindness. “You are an animal, correct? A low, stinking animal?”

And the woman simply bowed her head low and nodded, exposing a scalp riddled with bruises.

“You will get an infection, Stasha. Get back in the car.”

But I wasn’t convinced. So I told this mysterious human that I didn’t care that she’d tried to go without me, leaving me only a piano key for comfort. If she was happier, that’s all I wanted. I told her in Polish and Yiddish and German, and then I told her in the secret language special to our own two skulls and studded my affectionate plea with images of all the things that joined us in love — toward the blackness of her mind I threw the softness of a litter of kittens, the cherry-blossomed sleeve of Mother’s dressing gown, the books on Zayde’s desk. And when that didn’t work, my efforts increased and I became resentful; I cast into her mind’s eye the bleakness of my Zoo, the knotty curl of my spine against the barrack bed. Surely, I thought, these desolate images would rouse her, they would compel her to discard this flimsy disguise and vault back into her position as my better half.

They did not.

Instead, the monstrous version of my sister bulged her eyes in fright, and she inserted an elderly thumb into the puckers of her mouth, sucking like a frightened baby.

I ordered this demi-Pearl to stop. Thumb-sucking was no way to deal with pain. But the thumb-sucking continued.

So I stooped and searched the ground for stones. To this day, I remain grateful for the absence of them, because I know that I would have thrown them at her if I could; I would have tried to force her from the strange husk through injury. Mengele noted the trembling of my hands and drew me back into the leathery recesses of the car, but I was able to peer past his form to see the woman scamper off with an athleticism enabled by fear. She then huddled behind the bed of a truck.

Mengele sighed and clucked in a show of sympathy. He then produced a tin of candies from his pocket. These were not his usual gems of butterscotch, I noted, but a more evolved species of sweet. After administering this candy, he took up my hand and petted it comfortingly.

“So — she’s not your Pearl. But the good news is that you may keep looking for the real Pearl. And here is the better news: You have forever to look for her. Your life will not end before you find her. How many may say this?”

I told him that this was not lost on me. He gave Bolek orders to drive back.

As the car roared from its idle, I gave one last searching glance toward the Pearl impostor, and it was then that I saw what I shouldn’t have seen. I shouldn’t have seen it because it should’ve been too dark, she should’ve been changed beyond recognition — by starvation, by anguish, by loneliness — she should’ve been obscured by those she rested with, those she’d likely come to know as family, her fellow dead whose outstretched arms should’ve covered the stillness of her eyes.

There, in a heap of others on the bed of the truck, was our mother, or the body that had belonged to the person who’d been our mother. The keeper of the poppies who once held within her a whole world of floating. I’d long accepted that to return to the floating world was impossible, but I’d never imagined that the woman who created it would end so savagely. The form on the pile — it was changed. I had no idea if she was supposed to be our mother still or if the death they’d dealt her had changed her into some unreachable thing — a star, a flower, a wave on the sea — that the surviving likes of me had no right to care for.