Affinity Konar - Mischling

I should’ve been one of the battered lame, one of the shot hesitants, but I fell into another category on the death march.

Of this twenty thousand, there were a fair number of people who managed the impossible, shouldering their supplies and falling into a steady pace. Feliks was one of these. He was able to walk so well that he even managed to whistle. He whistled for my sake, knowing that I enjoyed watching the miniature clouds spindled by his breath. I had a fair view of these whistle-clouds because I wasn’t a marcher. I wasn’t even a stumbler or a limper. I’d managed only a trio of wondrous steps beyond the gate before collapsing in the snow. Feliks responded to my fall by digging the blanket from his pack and unfurling the wool. It lapped at the snow like a red tongue. He’d gestured for me to climb aboard this blanket like a sleigh. In this way, we soon fell to the rear of the march.

People speak a lot about power. They say that it left them, or they summoned it. They talk about it in terms of exchange, of loss. Feliks, he had stores of it. I knew this, though, only because he was saving me. Would I have known it if he had saved someone else? I would like to think so. But when you have been halved and split, when you are torn, when you have been set against yourself by someone who claimed that he did it for your own good, it becomes harder to recognize the goodness of others unless their goodness is visiting you directly.

Feliks’s power was made all the more visible as he slowed. Every fourth step was a stumble, every sixth step was an ache. The whistle-clouds receded. Night fell on us with its unbearable weight.

Still, he continued to drag me forward.

From my blanket, I had a view of many deaths. A woman stooped to drink snow and died. A man paused to ask a question and died. They died swiftly, bullets lodged in their heads.

In a hush, we spoke about where we were going. Would they march us into the sea, drive us off a cliff? Auschwitz had failed them, despite all its many innovations, so it was clear that they’d decided to end us all, to walk us to death, in the simplest of terms. I wondered how I would explain my immortality when a guard put a bullet in my head.

A cough took hold of Feliks’s lungs, and he gasped for air. I ordered him to abandon me. He lurched instead of walked. He wouldn’t let me go. And I wasn’t his only burden. On his back he carried a sack of our possessions. He threw out the scarf filled with flour that he’d organized. The flour hit me and painted me white. He threw out the crusts of bread we’d collected over the weeks; the wind caught up the crusts. He tossed the potatoes out to the ice, but he was so weak that his aim faltered and the potatoes dropped at his feet and his feet tripped themselves up.

I thought it the end — he fell with a thud and a smack of skull, his limbs akimboed onto my blanket, while his parted lips kissed the ice. The procession stepped over us. Skirts and coats fluttered over my cheeks. The marchers were careful not to trample us, and the limpers approached us gingerly, but the pace of all quickened with the warning shots. All the while, we lay there, unmoving.

I whispered to him, I told him that it couldn’t be this way, with him dying here. If you have to die, I begged, don’t do it while I’m watching, and if you have to do it while I’m watching, do it while I’m not feeling.

He coughed, and the snow beside his mouth bloomed. I suppose I should’ve kissed him then, for Bruna. But before the thought even had a chance to occur to me, a boot lowered itself on his neck. Its sole gaped, exposing a grin of sock. I made my heart still. I like to think I made Feliks’s heart still too. I watched his eyelids flutter.

Above us, Taube sighed. The boot moved from Feliks’s neck. He stooped and plucked a stray potato from the snow. He bit into it with a great gnashing of teeth and then swore with disgust. “Rotten!” he declared, and he spat the potato-flesh on my scalp. The potato mustn’t have been too rotten, though, because he took another bite. This, too, he spat out. It struck Feliks’s forehead. He repeated this procedure again, and then once more. The warmth fell onto our cheeks and backs, on the snow beside us. It seemed that there would be no end to this potato.

And then, Taube’s name rang out across the field. His evil was needed elsewhere. He stooped and sniffed us — he knew we were alive; I’m sure of it — and then, with a parting arc of spittle, he turned.

Let me be clear: Taube did not spare us out of a fit of conscience. He did not spare us in defiance of his superiors. He spared us for the same reason that he bothered to do anything — because he could.

Only after his departure did I realize that the rattle of gunfire wasn’t as immense as it had seemed. We had walked surrounded, hemmed in by the noisy spatter of numerous guns. But while pretending myself into death, the curtain was raised on this ruse, the smallness of the rat-a-tat-tat. There were two guns, maybe three at most. An ineffective trinity, low on ammunition. They stuttered into the distance while Feliks and I played possum.

“Is it safe to be alive now?” he whispered.

I cursed him for lifting his head from the snow. What if someone looked back and saw him?

“No one’s looking back.” He laughed bitterly. “The whole world will never look back. And if they do, they’ll probably say that it never really happened.”

I was listening to him only in halves. Taking what I wanted to hear and dismissing the rest. What I wanted to hear was the part about never looking back. As I listened, I watched the velvet blackness of my closed eyelids. If I closed my eyes too suddenly and too tightly, I could see small sparks alight on that velvet, like footlights at the perimeter of a stage. I wanted to send my sister dancing across that stage, wanted to see her attempt something new. Some jump I’d never heard of, some turn that would reverse everything. But no matter how hard I tried to achieve this vision, only the blackness and the scattered lights remained.

“Stasha? Why so quiet? You’re not really dead, are you?”

“I don’t think so.” I could never tell him what Mengele had done to me.

“Because I feel kind of dead myself. What if we are dead? My father the rabbi, he didn’t believe in a heaven. But he didn’t believe people would come and kill us someday either. So what if this is a heaven?”

I told him that this wasn’t a heaven. This lousy, awful blankness — a heaven? This freezing, thunderous tundra — a heaven?

“It could be,” he argued. “It could just be some special heaven-hell for people like us.”

“It isn’t a heaven-hell. It’s not even a hell-heaven.”

“How can you be so sure?”

There were, I figured, two ways of convincing him. The first was by presenting the fact that his brother was not there to greet him. Whether heaven existed at all was uncertain, but if it did, it would have no choice but to reunite us with our flesh, simply because all such systems depend on symmetry. And it was quite clear there was not a brotherly footfall about. But looking at his forlorn face, the cold-bitten hands — I couldn’t speak of the lost brother to Feliks; he was so weak and frail and he had borne me across the vastness of an icy tundra, a white beckoning of fog and uncertainty in a place that still wanted to make us as insignificant as possible. We were nothing but two buttons loosened from the doctor’s coat. Two specks beneath his microscope. Two samples of bone and tissue. As small as we were, Feliks remained the stronger, and I could not risk weakening his resolve with mention of his departed twin.

So I chose the second way to convince him that we were not dead. I spread the blanket, heavy with frost, on the ground.