Affinity Konar - Mischling

“Drag me again,” I said. “You will see that my weight is the weight of the living.”

Feliks wiped his eyes and reached for my hand in reply. He looked for the sun, and I swore I heard his heart bow in his chest, as if in recognition of the great feat he was about to pursue.

We could have lain there forever. Because of him, we did not. How we were to survive in such a wasteland, we did not know. We could not even be sure what duties had to be divided on the journey ahead. Someone was going to have to find shelter, someone was going to have to find food, maps, shoes, hope. What it took to survive — even this was growing, and as it did, it diminished us both.

Pearl, I thought, I never should have made you in charge of the past. I cannot endure this future.

I had a face still. I didn’t know my name, but I was aware of others. I knew the name of Auschwitz. I heard it shouted out in whatever world lay beyond the boxes that I lived in. There were three boxes, so far as I could tell. One was a building, the second a room, and the third — that was the cage of wire and lock that kept me. It was the white-coated man who put me there. After he finished inspecting me on his table, he dropped me to the cage bottom with a thud and took away my blanket so I could experience nakedness in such a way that the wires dug into my flesh. He came, he left. He shone lights into my darkness and made notes about my squint, my response. He did more than that, but I chose not to remember this then. I knew his name when this occurred. But I chose to forget that too.

From this time — there is not much I want to recall. What I want to dwell on is different, and it is mine.

This may not be true for the world, but it was true for me, in my cage: There was a brief moment, a slip of rare time, quite unlike any time before it. Because when Auschwitz fell, the lives it took were restored — for the merest of moments — just so our dead could see it founder.

Our dead in this moment — they were not your ordinary spirits. There was nothing of the specter in them, not a bit of ghost. They were simply people who had been tortured but were now allowed to see a justice. I could hear their murmurs, their joys. Theirs was an afterlife of mere moments, a permission to witness the ruin of what had ended them.

Among the shouts and cries of millions as Auschwitz collapsed, two voices made themselves known to me.

I heard an old man try to toast but he couldn’t find the words; he simply uttered the beginnings of them until his voice cracked. I heard a woman comfort him, I heard her assure him that the girls would not end, and that’s when I knew she was my mother. She and my zayde —they watched over me while the camp burned and the guards fled and the prisoners found that they did not know what to do with their freedom.

I heard Mama suggest a game to get me by in this time. I knew games; they were familiar to me, the concept came from whatever sprawl of a life I’d had outside this cage. I told this woman whom I knew to be my mother that I wasn’t sure what game would have me anymore — though I could move a little, I was sure I was a cripple, and though I could think, I was sure that my mind had been broken. But Mama insisted that I try.

My grandfather did too.

Play an ant, he suggested. Ants lift fifty times their own weight. You need that strength.

Play a chimp, Mama suggested. There is no dignity in it, I know, but the intelligence is fair compensation. You must be smart.

Just then, a pigeon landed on the windowsill opposite me, some ten feet away, and began to daven. A silver band flashed at its feet announcing its status as experiment, messenger, or property. I could relate to all three roles.

“I’ll play a pigeon,” I said.

The pigeon has an excellent memory, Zayde murmured in approval. The pigeon navigates and rescues and delivers. This is good, he said. All will be well.

A fine choice, Mama agreed. All will be well, she echoed.

But I could not even lift my arm in imitation of a wing. Simply crooking my finger lit a pain that soared through me. I asked them how I was supposed to treat survival like a game if the game would not have me, but their voices had gone. They’d witnessed the fall, and then they performed their own fall back into nothingness, into what I hoped might be peace.

This was how I knew that I was still alive, because I was not at peace at all.

But I continued with the game long after the voices were no more. Play a mouse, I told myself. Play a fox, a deer, an elephant. I recited the order of living things, and I ended them the way one ends a prayer. This was how my recitations went: species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and all will be well.

When I looked up from my blanket, the parts of the world were before and behind me, the plains of snow extending on either side like the wings of a dove. The death march had slunk on, the guards had continued to torture our fellow prisoners at a distance, and we were left with the sound of despair in our heads. The wasteland chose us, but we didn’t want to be chosen by it. There we were, moving so slowly across this eternal earth, readier for an end than ever; we clung to the winter beneath us, trying to remember that beneath it, there lay the heartbeats and mutters of a floral season. I knew I had to find a way to make Feliks stay alive, to see him through to that spring. I had not even a sense of direction without him.

I was stripped of location. Feliks could remind me all he wanted that we were in the forests of Stare Stawy, a village outside of Auschwitz. But where we were meant nothing to me. The Classification of Living Things, that meant something.

Because we were following the river, like animals do. Away from the death march, we’d been reborn; our instincts had reassembled themselves into a formation better suited to the wanderings of animals. Feliks was Bear — the protective forager, fearsome and charismatic, resistant to any human efforts toward taming. I was Jackal — the doleful creature, clever, stealthy, accustomed to ruin and abandonment. We were hungry, without direction. Little more than an hour stood between us and the death march we’d escaped. Or I should say that I believed it to be an hour. I really wasn’t sure that hours truly existed anymore.

I knew I was not an easy burden, but though his hands were mangled and blistered, Feliks chattered easily, as he dragged me forward, with talk of his beloved city.

I never asked the city’s name. How could I care? All I knew was that it had fallen. Its machines were abandoned, its books were burned, its synagogues turned to ammunition factories, its people stifled, disappeared. Still, Feliks said, he was sure the sun shone there still, and he insisted on spinning the place to me as we crept. He told stories of everyday kindness, stories that valued beauty. I knew he was trying to convince me that we should make a life there as brother and sister, with our brother-ghost and sister-ghost at our sides, and the stories were making me imagine myself into quite a different person, someone who could stop feeling as if her tongue were made of stone. This someone would not be an immediate someone but an eventual one, and I warmed, thinking of her.

“And someday,” he concluded, shaking a fist purpled by cold, “we will leave that city, as beautiful as it is, and we will hunt down all the Nazis; we will make them pay. And after every thrilling capture, we will always return to the city, because it will be a fitting home for heroes like us.”