Affinity Konar - Mischling

I didn’t want to ask the obvious. So I pinched Pearl to make her ask for us.

“Why are we more important than the others?” Her voice shrank as it approached the end of the question.

A flurry of answers rose, all having something to do with purpose and greatness, with purity and beauty and being of use. We didn’t hear a single one that made sense.

And before I could even try to understand this concept, the blokowa assigned to look after us entered. Behind her prodigious back, we called this person Ox; she had the appearance of a wardrobe with a toupee and tended toward foot-stamping and nostril-flaring when caught in one of her passionate rants, which our supposed disobedience frequently inspired. When Pearl and I were first introduced to her, however, she was just a figure popping her head in at the door, half shrouded in night and offended by our questions.

“Why are we called the Zoo?” I asked. “Who decided this?”

Ox shrugged. “It is not obvious to you?”

I said that it was not. The zoos we’d read about with Zayde were sites of preservation that presented the vastness of life. This place, it cared only for the sinister act of collection.

“It is a name that pleases Dr. Mengele” was all Ox would say. “You won’t find many answers here. But sleep! That’s something you can have. Now let me have mine!”

If only we could have slept. But the darkness was darker than any I’d known, and the smell clung within my nostrils. A moan drifted from the bunk below, and outside there was the barking of dogs, and my stomach wouldn’t stop growling back at them. I tried to amuse myself by playing one of our word games, but the shouts of the guards outside kept overpowering my alphabet. I tried to make Pearl play a game with me, but Pearl was busy tracing her fingertips over the silver web that embroidered our brick corner, the better to ignore my whispered questions.

“Would you rather be a watch that only knows the good times,” I asked her, “or a watch that sings?”

“I don’t believe in music anymore.”

“Me neither. But would you rather be a watch—”

“Why do I have to be a watch at all? Is this my only choice?”

I wanted to argue that sometimes, as living things, as human-type people who were presumably still alive, we had to treat ourselves as objects in order to get by; we had to hide ourselves away and seek repair only when repair was safe to seek. But I chose to press on with another query instead.

“Would you rather be the key to a place that will save us or the weapon that will destroy our enemies?”

“I’d rather be a real girl,” Pearl said dully. “Like I used to be.”

I wanted to argue that playing games would help her feel like a real girl again, but even I wasn’t sure of this fact. The numbers the Nazis had given us had made life unrecognizable, and in the dark, the numbers were all I could see, and what was worse was that there was no way to pretend them into anything less enduring or severe or blue. Mine were smudged and bleared — I’d kicked and spat; they’d had to hold me down — but they were numbers still. Pearl was numbered too, and I hated her numbers even more than mine, because they pointed out that we were separate people, and when you are separate people, you might be parted.

I told Pearl that I’d tattoo us back to sameness as soon as possible, but she only sighed the sigh traditional to moments of sisterly frustration.

“Enough with the stories. You can’t tattoo.”

I told her that I knew how to well enough. A sailor taught me, back in Gdańsk. I’d inked an anchor onto his left biceps.

True, it was a lie. Or a half-lie, since I had seen such an anchor-inking take place. When we’d summered at the sea, I spent my time peering into the gray recess of a tattoo parlor, its walls bordered with outlines of swallows and ships, while Pearl found a boy to hold her hand near the barnacled prow of a boat. So it was that as my sister entered into the secrecies of flesh on flesh, the pang of a palm curled within one’s own, I schooled myself in the intimacies of needles, the plunge of a point so fine that only a dream could light upon its tip.

“I’ll make us the same again someday,” I insisted. “I just need a needle and some ink. There must be a way to get that, given that we are special here.”

Pearl scowled and made a big show of turning her back to me — the bunk cried out with a creak — and her elbow flew up and jabbed me in the ribs. It was an accident — Pearl would never hurt me on purpose, if only because it would hurt her too. That was one of the biggest stings of this sisterhood — pain never belonged to just one of us. We had no choice but to share our sufferings, and I knew that in this place we’d have to find a way to divide the pain before it began to multiply.

As I realized this, a girl on the other side of the room found a light, a precious book of matches, and she decided that this scarcity would be best put to use making shadow puppets for the audience of multiples. And so it was that we drifted off to sleep with a series of shadow figures crossing the wall, walking two by two, each flanking the other, as if in a procession toward some unseen ark that might secure their safety.

So much world in the shadows there! The figures feathered and crept and crawled toward the ark. Not a single life was too small. The leech asserted itself, the centipede sauntered, the cricket sang by. Representatives of the swamp, the mountain, the desert — all of them ducked and squiggled and forayed in shadow. I classified them, two by two, and the neatness of my ability to do so gave me comfort. But as their journey lengthened, and the flames began to dim, the shadows were visited by distortions. Humps rose on their backs, and their limbs scattered and their spines dissolved. They became changed and monstrous. They couldn’t recognize themselves.

Still, for as long as the light lived, the shadows endured. That was something, wasn’t it?

Stasha didn’t know it, but always, from the very beginning, we were more than we. I was older by only ten minutes, but it was enough to teach me how different we were.

It was only in Mengele’s Zoo that we became too different.

For example: On that first night, the marching shadows comforted Stasha, but I could find no peace in them. Because those matches illuminated another sight, one accompanied by a death rattle. Did Stasha mention the dying girl?

We weren’t alone in our bunk that night. There was a third child with us on the straw mattress, a feverish, black-tongued mite who curled up beside me and pressed her cheek to my cheek as she died. This wasn’t a gesture of affection — our proximity rose only from the fact that there wasn’t an inch of room to be spared in our matchbox beds — but in the days ahead I found myself often hoping that this twinless, nameless girl took some comfort in being close to me. I had to believe that it was not a lack of room alone that put her cheek to mine.

When the rattle stopped, the Stepanov twins, Esfir and Nina, the eleven-year-olds in the bed slot below us, leaped up to our mattress and stripped the girl of her clothes. They performed this task with an unnerving deftness, as if they’d been undressing corpses all their lives. Esfir joyously flung a sweater around her shoulders; Nina shimmied into a woolen skirt. The disapproval on my face must’ve been obvious, because Esfir offered me the girl’s stockings, thrusting the unraveled, grayed toe beneath my nose, in a gesture of appeasement. When I waved this gift away, she — a veteran, or Old Number — employed the insult used for us New Numbers, or newcomers.

“Zugang!” she hissed at me.