Affinity Konar - Mischling

She slapped him across the cheek with a resounding crack. He looked like he would swoon from the pleasure of the proximity, but her words ended that swiftly.

“I’ll kill you, Feliks. You dumb bear. I may not kill you now. Or even tonight. Hopefully, it won’t be necessary at all. But if one of these Nazis tries to kill you, you can be sure that I will beat them to it. I won’t have my loved ones die at their hands. Only mine.”

We saw the reason in this. We also saw the pistol in the waistband of her skirt. It seemed that Bruna and her fellow rebels had been prepared for this upheaval, even if they had not known, during their weeks of plunder and planning, the secretive missions undertaken in Nazi headquarters for supplies and the endless meetings, the breadth of destruction our freedom might bring.

“So,” Feliks concluded, a forced brightness in his voice, “we will go. Back to the barracks. But only for now. We are leaving here together, yes?”

Bruna lifted her eyes to the flickering sky, as if she expected the flames to deliver her words for her, words she hesitated to give.

“Don’t ever wait for me,” she instructed us.

All of this meant nothing to Feliks. He cared nothing about the future if it didn’t have a reunion with Bruna.

“We won’t wait now. But perhaps — in case we are separated in this — we should establish a meeting place first?” he suggested. “That is what friends do. You are our friend, yes, Bruna? Only a friend would offer to kill you before others can.”

I watched Bruna’s face struggle to maintain its usual stony veneer. She was touched. It seemed likely that the term friend had never been uttered so nakedly alongside her name before.

“Of course,” she said. “But it may be some time. Who knows what waits for us? There could be months of running ahead, years of hiding.”

Feliks would not be deterred.

“Stasha and I will wait for you,” he said. “Just name the place.”

I watched the depth of his determination occur to her, saw it light up one pink eye and then the next. I’d always expected Bruna’s tears to be as blush as her eyes but there they were, as clear and atremble as any I’d ever witnessed. She didn’t seem to care that I saw them and even accepted the sleeve of my sweater for use as a handkerchief.

“I always wanted to go to a real museum,” she said between dabs. “To be a lady for a day and see the art.”

“A real museum, then.” Feliks gulped. “In front of a statue, we’ll meet. And tea afterward, maybe a nice café. I’ll buy your ticket.”

“That would be sweet,” she said, and she gave him a kiss. “You are very sweet, Feliks.”

I’ve never been sure what motivated Bruna to accept this invitation, to bestow this kiss. Perhaps she saw true possibility in it. Perhaps she was just humoring Feliks. Maybe she was sensing — as anyone with eyes and ears would sense — that a protracted conversation in the middle of gunfire and grand-scale selection was unwise for any who might want to leave that place alive. But I think she cared for him, truly.

“It’s a promise,” she swore to us, and then she shook my hand and smiled. I could feel the residue of her tears in that handshake.

Whatever else one could’ve said of our beloved criminal, we all knew that Bruna’s word was true. Theft was not her genuine talent. A promise — that was her real gift. She could not help but dream of fulfillment and creation, even as she dedicated her present to havoc. She meant well, our Bruna. But of course, she did her best to mask her virtue. And so her kindness and generosity were cons, double-dealers; they skulked about, disguised as flaws — and then, suddenly, when you weren’t looking, her tricks trespassed and broke inside you so that they could steal from you, bit by bit, until you hosted an emptiness in which your real goodness could thrive. In this way, she saved you. Bruna, she was our organizing angel.

Only when she let go of my hand was I struck by the stupidity of our pact. How many museums were there? Were we speaking of Poland or Europe or the world entire? It was a foolish plan.

In realizing this mistake, I looked at Bruna’s face, half turned, that goodness on it still apparent, and before I had even a slip of a minute to ask for clarification about our future plans, Taube leaped up behind her and grasped her by the neck. He gave it the famed twist we’d seen him issue so many times before, but now it was visiting our own. As the bones cracked, a rare color rose in her cheeks. Her pale face filled with blood. After Taube finished breaking Bruna’s neck, he snapped his fingers in our direction.

We were on our knees then, having watched her flutter to the ground like a scarf. The newly black hair she’d made for herself bannered with a flag’s defiance. Taube caught up some of the coal-colored tangles and rubbed them between his fingers to reveal the whiteness she’d so desperately tried to conceal.

“She really thought she could be someone else, did she?” he asked no one.

Fearing Feliks might answer, I tried to clap a hand over his mouth, but he was too busy collapsing into the snow to speak. We looked at Bruna together. Her woolen skirt had upended itself, and the jumble of her white legs was exposed.

As Feliks moved to straighten Bruna’s skirt, Taube interfered, placing a foot on the body to indicate that it had been thoroughly conquered. He stooped to draw the pistol from her waistband, balanced it in the palm of his hand, then redirected the muzzle at us.

“You two. You find this something to stare at? On your feet now.”

Feliks offered me his shoulder, but his shoulder wasn’t enough, and his bones were sharp enough to cut me besides. Still I clung to him. My shuffle drew attention to our furs.

“The coats. Where did you get them?” Feliks’s mouth was still drawn into a silent scream. I turned his face away from Bruna, and I told Taube that the coats were a gift from the doctor.

“Tell me”—he laughed—“were you such a good liar before? Or do you have Auschwitz to thank for that?”

I told him I was sure I didn’t know the answer, but it seemed a fair question.

“What is with this obsession with fairness? No matter,” he said with a sudden cheer. “Keep your lousy coats. Who knows how cold it will be where you’re going.” He put Bruna’s pistol at our backs.

There it was — we had lost the chance of escape that our dead beloved had entreated us to take.

Snow fell as flames rose. Both were outpaced by Taube. He was herding us, every last one — children and women and injured all. The usual efficiency had fallen away; it was all pell-mell stomping and dragging, people grasping onto other people, people stumbling, people trying to lift other people up.

Choiceless, we joined the swarm, that ever-enlarging multitude dotted with faces, scarves, bandages. We lost ourselves in it, and the loss was so thorough that the image of dying Bruna that had burned itself into the backs of my eyelids began to fade. It would reappear to me over the years — I would wake and see it in mourning — but in that moment I had to walk.

Feliks, though, I believe he walked with this vision of Bruna. Even as he supported me, he trembled and shook, and he spoke to me as if he were trapped in a dream.

“How many of us are there?” I asked him.

“Not enough” was all he would say.

Later, history would say that more than seven thousand people stayed behind at Auschwitz, emaciated and immobile while the rest of us were turned out in droves, dense marches of death and near-death. We in this particular death march numbered twenty thousand. Among us marchers, the hesitant were shot; the lame were shot too. Our numbers quickly dwindled. The soldiers entertained themselves with a trick of shooting one body so that it fell into another body, and that body toppled another in turn, and so and so pitifully on, bone-crack, hiss of bullet, snap on snap — our people fell, and the SS strode upon them, shooting whoever dared to stir.