Affinity Konar - Mischling

Don’t weep, said my mother’s tearful, wide-open eyes as they stared back at me.

And I knew better than to argue with my mother’s eyes, but deep within me, hidden from her all-knowing view, my vow for vengeance renewed itself and I began to shake and I felt the cold kisses of the knives in my stockings as they pressed against my skin.

“Are you unwell?” he wondered. “So quiet, suddenly. Don’t worry. You’ll be with your family someday. We’ll all have dinner together; Pearl will dance. How will that be?”

I thanked him, and as I did so, I nodded to my mother in an acknowledgment of the vengeance I would bring.

Mengele prattled on, but I could not converse. It was safer not to speak, because if I spoke I would have said to him:

Because you couldn’t kill my mother twice, you keep me in this place to want and suffer a hundred times over.

Because you couldn’t make my zayde less than ash, you leave me gray and small, a twisted thing to be blown by whatever wind will have me.

Because you had no power over the fact that I was born, you took from me what I was born with — the person who was my love, the half that made me entire — and now I am lessened into this dull thing, a divided person who will live forever, wandering in search of some nothing, some nowhere, some no-feeling, to mend my pain.

The blood he’d given me fled from my brain and collected itself into a fist. He might have made me immortal, I told myself, he might have doomed me to outlive everyone, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t find some end, a death, a termination, in him. The knives in my stockings nodded in agreement. He leaned away from me to shout through the window at a passing nurse, making his back vulnerable. His neck was turned, his attentions were elsewhere. Now would be as fine a moment as any, the knives pointed out. But before I had a chance to act on this advice, he swiveled in his seat and regarded me solemnly.

“The future,” he said. “We must always look forward to it. Understand?”

I nodded. In my pocket, I felt for Pearl’s key. It was luminous, covered with shine; my fingertips felt glazed with light when they rested on it.

“I want to show you something,” he said suddenly as the car found itself before the Zoo. He removed a box from the floor of the car. It was one of the boxes I’d seen at the laboratory, a box he apparently loved above all the others, because while those receptacles were marked with the usual inscription of War Materials, Urgent, this one was deemed good enough to bear his name. Dr. Josef Mengele it declared in script so fine and practiced that I could imagine him rehearsing the curve of every letter. He clung to this box like a child with a teddy bear, a boy with a kite, and when he lifted the lid, it was with a careful affection, as if he didn’t trust even himself with the marvels contained within.

“All of this here,” he said. “Genetic material. You can’t begin to imagine what we might achieve with these tiny samples. A different kind of human, a perfect person.”

The slides clinked musically together in the box. I ran my finger over their edges.

“A perfect person,” I repeated. “Like Pearl.”

He grabbed the box away from me, closed the lid on all the little lives before I had a chance to memorize them. He took me by my neck, gripped it with his fingers, tilted my head back, and then, with a movement so deft that it seemed like a magic trick pulled on a stage, he drew a dropper from his pocket and squeezed a little bead of liquid into my left eye.

Oh, how it blinded and stung! That little bead of liquid — it embellished my tears.

“What is this for?” I gasped, and my hand crept to cover my pained eye as if to protect it from further shock.

“It is to remember me by,” he said.

Through my tears, I told him that I didn’t want to remember him, I wouldn’t remember him. I refused to. Because he was so memorable, I feared that he would crowd out all the other memories. I said this as I reached for my bread knife. I fumbled blindly. All before me ran black, then white.

“You flatter me, Stasha. That’s too bad.” I could not see him, but I’m sure he winked. “Now, tell me — before I go — what do you see?”

I saw nothing. Oh, nothing!

“Don’t worry, Stasha — it will be blue by tomorrow, I promise.”

Then he opened the car door and pushed me from my seat and I tumbled out like some cast-off thing.

Soon after, on a night unknown to us, he left his Zoo behind. I did not know the time of his departure, what he bore with him, or if he ever glanced back.

I only knew that when next I saw him, it would all be different. We would be in a place that could prove one of two things: that the whole world had become Auschwitz, or that the world was no longer whole at all, that it, too, had split and sundered and ceased to be. On that mid-January day, I had no glimmer of that event, not an inkling. I could only retreat to the Zoo, like any poor and beaten animal, half blind, one hand held to my weeping eye while the other searched for the burrow of my barrel. I wasn’t thinking of Mama’s death; I couldn’t think of Zayde’s death either — I would never think of them, I swore, until I was able to avenge them both, and Pearl.

In that eye, there remained a blackness. For many days or weeks, it was just black on black. I tried to see the bright side of this. The bright side was that if I closed my good eye, I was blind, and if I was blind, every human that remained had the potential to be my Pearl. It was only when someone spoke to me that this illusion was ruined.

After my eye went useless, Dr. Miri pulled me from my barrel and installed me in the infirmary. She thought it would scare me into trying to live, and she put me in a private room in the back, with three other children.

“You know it is not a good thing,” she said. “To be in the infirmary. They take people from the infirmary to the trucks.”

I nodded.

“And the trucks — you know where they go—”

I did not make her finish this sentence. I indicated my understanding — I knew that the trucks took people to the gas. Dr. Miri couldn’t know why the threat of this meant nothing to me. But I think she realized that I would go on any vehicle that might lead to my sister, and that was why she worried so and began to hover over me at any available moment.

In the night, I woke and traveled among the bunks of the greater infirmary in search of my sister. This thronged, howling place — it surpassed our Zoo barracks in its ability to pile one human atop another.

Row after row of bodies rested on bunks, in slots so tiny that the effect was of insects resting in a hive. The bodies were covered with white sheets and resembled clouds with heads affixed to them. Most of the heads were turned away from me, or buried in the mattresses, but all the bodies outstretched their hands, knots of bone and bramble, in a plea for food and water.

“I don’t have anything,” I’d cry.

The clouds didn’t believe me, but they weren’t angry either. They were too sick to be angry. They had dysentery and fever and germs that could kill. They had blood loss and family loss, and their hearts were slipping away from the standard heart-seat in the chest, more and more every day. What did these human-clouds have to live for? They merely rolled over and went back to sleeping or coughing or dreaming or whatever human-clouds do best.

As I trudged back to my room, a burst of light sparked against the window.

It was a rebuke, I knew. Wherever they were, Mama and Zayde, they were telling me not to be weak. They were ashamed that I had not fulfilled my purpose, and they emphasized this with a series of rat-a-tat-tats, as forceful and repetitive as gunfire. I didn’t blame them for such extreme measures.