Affinity Konar - Mischling

“Your plans for this city aren’t convincing me,” I told him. We were deep in the woods now, with the stillness of the river in our ears.

“Who says it’s you I’m trying to convince?” he spat.

He dropped the corner of my blanket and wiped his hands in an exaggerated gesture of disgust. From the parcel Bruna had assembled for us, he drew two bottles of water and a potato and planted them in the ground beside me. I watched his form retreat, watched his bear coat waver and blur before blending into the trees. I put my finger on the speck that was him in the distance. Ever since the cattle car, I had been denied good-byes. This was the first real good-bye I could have had, and yet I refused it. I didn’t shout after him, I didn’t even whimper. All I could do was stare at the dullard of a sun, so high above me, but penitent still.

It stood like a guilty trickster with his hands in his pockets. A sun with such a conscience — you’d think it could be easily manipulated. I thought if I stared at it long enough it might correct my vision.

Because what Mengele had done to my eye — it grew grimmer by the day. A consequence of the tamper with my vision: Shadows lilted around the edges of everything I saw. My shoes. My cup, my hat. Our sacks. I didn’t understand the intention of this shadow. Why it insisted on cradling all I needed, I didn’t know. Would it ever leave me?

“No, Stasha — I can never leave you.” Because he’d returned and heard me speaking to myself, as usual. When he extended his arm to me, I saw his hand was outlined by that ever-present black. “I wasted time walking away from you,” he said. “And even more trudging back. Now it is your turn to carry me, but you are unable. What do you propose that we do in such a situation?”

I promised that I would make him laugh at some point.

“I’m sure you will,” he scolded, “but will it be for the right reasons?”

I stretched out my hand, and he hoisted me up. He shouldn’t have had the strength even for this simple motion — he was stooped and twisted, and his hands were raw; he faltered a little at my grasp, and when he smiled, the force of his expression made the frost leap from his eyebrows.

“For Pearl,” he said, and he gestured impatiently for me to walk.

I thought of my sister dancing. The tap-tap of Pearl’s feet, the clap-clap of my hands as I watched. All of it in pairs, in repetition.

This is how I walk, I told myself. One step, then another. This is how I walk with the sun, this is how I walk through the snow. This is how I walk in memory of Pearl, the girl whose every step could have been musical, and for all time, if only Mengele had fulfilled his promise and given her the deathlessness too . That last thought — it made me stop walking again. But not walking would not do. I studied my feet and began once more.

This is how I walk beside someone I love who lives still, I thought, someone who should abandon me, but together, we walked until we found shelter — deep in the woods, a wall of fallen logs, and with the paws of jackal and bear we dug a shallow ditch beside this wall; we lay down and covered ourselves with leafy branches and decided that we would take turns sleeping and keeping watch so that no one could creep up on us in this feeble shelter and throw a match into our nest.

Feliks huddled beside me in his bear fur with all the closeness of a brother. Even in his sleep, he made vows. But they were not the vows of vengeance I expected to hear. Instead, he vowed to himself that he would never be alone again, he would never be parted from me, he would not permit separation to alight between us. When he began to panic in these vows, gnashing his gummy jaws together in grief, I saw fit to wake him.

“Your turn,” he said, rubbing his eyes and peering into the darkness for intruders.

I tried to sleep. I begged my mind to give me a dream of Pearl. Not the best dream, the one in which the world never knew war at all, or even the second-best dream, the one in which Auschwitz remained swampland, but the third-best dream, the one in which Mengele gave Pearl and me this deathlessness at the same time, in unison; he plunged the needle down and we turned to each other and knew that while living forever was a terrible burden, this was something we could do together, in our usual style.

She would take the best, the brightest, the funniest.

I would take the guilt, the blame, the burden. And if she ever couldn’t walk, I would do all the walking for her. Because now that I could walk again, I did not want to stop. It seemed a triumph to me, and yet both my ankles were braceleted by an ache that I knew not to be frostbite. It was an odd sensation, and not entirely unpleasant, due to the fact that it let me know I could still feel, and someday, I knew too, my walk would increase its pace, someday soon, I might even jump.

Papa, the good doctor — he’d told me that people who lost limbs and fingers and toes, they continued to perceive sensations in them long after, in the form of pangs and tickles, and to such an extreme that it felt as if they’d never lost any flesh at all.

But he never warned me about this.

The next morning, we heard the Vistula River crack, heard it shuffle its sheets of ice like a deck of cards. The morning was blue on blue; trees thrust their limbs into the clouds. The sky rustled like Pearl’s blue hair ribbon when she turned her head. We shook off the blanket of snowfall and wondered at the fact that we still lived.

The river, fissured, was a great white expanse, and the cracks watched over us as we knelt toward the ice. Its surface was so milky that I felt welcomed by it — it seemed to me the freshest, most innocent surface on the earth. Despite the darkness crouching in the canopied trees, we found a rabbit struggling in a hollow.

“Cripple,” Feliks said, noting a wounded leg. I looked away while the bread knife sank, but I made myself watch him hang the rabbit from a branch and strip the tufts of its fur. He popped the eyes in his mouth, wrenched the bones bare.

“Eat!”

“Why can’t we build a fire? Just for a minute.”

“You know why. There are people who would be happy to catch us in these woods. You don’t even have to be a Nazi to enjoy capturing a Jew.”

He was becoming like a father, this Feliks. He was impatient with me; his tone often dipped into severe registers. I didn’t doubt that he would stuff my mouth with the raw rabbit if I continued to decline. It was better to be agreeable.

I watched him struggle to chew the bloody meat. His tooth loss made this difficult. So I chewed for him, then spat it out into my hand. Embarrassed gratitude — that was the look he gave me, but he accepted the chewed food from my hand and popped it into his mouth, swallowed as if it were medicine. He urged me to eat for my own sake, and this was harder to do — still, I was tired of arguing and gave it a try.

“We have to keep up your strength.” Feliks nodded. “We can’t achieve the vengeance we’ve sworn ourselves to if you are bones.”

I agreed. Vengeance, it was what I longed for most, but I’d begun to doubt how it might be handed down from experiments like us. I’d made attempts before. Mengele was slippery, beyond cornering. In him, I saw a little boy life had long indulged. Life didn’t always indulge, though, did it? Was there any chance that we, in such diminished states, might ever truly finish him? We did not even have a clue as to his location.

My companion stabbed a tree trunk with his bread knife. He issued pairs of gashes — one, two; one, two — in a meditative fashion. Then, inspired, he turned and looked at me curiously.

“There is something I must tell you,” he said, cautious. “This city I speak of — it is not my city at all, I have been lying, but for good reason, to persuade you. It is Warsaw, and I have been trying, from the very beginning, to take you there.”