Affinity Konar - Mischling

But of course, when I cried out these things, there was only a rattle and an exhalation.

My voice was as good as smoke.

Above me, the beam of the flashlight shuddered.

“Is it dead?” asked the bearer of the light.

“How could it not be?” another answered.

“I swore I heard something. Like it tried to speak.”

“There’s too much to hear in this place. My ears haven’t stopped ringing.”

And he suggested that they move on to the next block, that they should permit someone else to collect my body — and I was sure that they were gone without another thought for me, but then they heard my whimper. The gruff soldier found my padlock and he fiddled with it and then he took up an ax and though I thought I knew that he was there to rescue me, I curled into myself as the blade closed in, and one of the other soldiers, he kept hushing me all the while, he kept saying, “Na, na,” which is a way of saying, “Nothing, nothing”—Zayde used to say this all the time to comfort me to sleep — and I wanted to agree with him, I wanted to say that I was a nothing, or at least that the man had made of me a nothing, he’d turned me into so little that I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to escape that blackness because it seemed certain, as I shivered and bit my tongue and watched the little leak at the roof, that I was no match for living anymore.

But the gruff soldier was not to be reasoned with, he was determined to smash the lock and turn me loose, and so I let him reach down and take me up from my depths, and there I was, I was free.

Was birth like that?

I had to wonder.

There I was, gasping for air and squinting at the light. I was bare as a baby; my hands swung helplessly at my sides. Everything about me was infantile. But what kind of infant had these scars on her face? What baby is emptied of her innermost organs, a procedure indicated by the crude stitches across my abdomen? A newborn can’t walk because she is new. I couldn’t walk for a far different reason.

The gruff soldier clasped me to his front.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

“Don’t cry!” his companion ordered, looking at me.

I opened my mouth again to protest. I might have done terribly within this box, I might have withered and lost the use of my legs, and I knew that there was something even greater in me missing, something so large that it was the equal of a whole other person, or at least a small girl. But I’d never cried. And then a drop lit on my cheek, and I realized that the soldier wasn’t speaking to me but to the gruff man who held me, a man who trembled while my tongue crept from my mouth to find the evidence of his shock and joy.

“Look at it!” he said; he wept. “It is drinking my tears!”

When the woods fell behind us on our third day of wandering, we found ourselves near the village of Julianka, hunched and frost-threatened animals with two potatoes to our names. A vast azure opened up, and the clouds insisted on being formless and unread; they floated high above us and acted lofty, as if they feared nothing, not hunger or cold or the Angel of Death. I wanted to tell the clouds they weren’t so mighty because I didn’t fear him anymore either. Hadn’t they heard of Feliks’s plan? I shouted this for all the sky to hear.

A distant boom answered me. It was faint, but explosive, with a frayed edge.

Feliks’s eyes darted about in panic, and he clapped a hand over my mouth, and he folded me over like I was an empty box. He held me close to the icy ground and glanced about to see if my foolish cries had been overheard. Fortunately, not a soul approached.

“Madness” was all he would say. But empathy shimmered through this statement. He felt mad too, I was quite sure, because we were emptier now than ever before; hunger toured through us during our rare intervals of rest, and winter was threatening to take the toes peeking through our holey shoes. While it seemed likely that we were crazed from all our deprivations, the booms were quite real. The following day, we would learn that these sound bursts were not gunfire but the work of Jewish rebels blowing up the tracks some miles away. In the grasp of that early evening, though, we had no notion of its friendliness.

So when, out of the emptiness, we saw a golden column at the farthest periphery, we ran toward its gleam, encouraged by the change in the scenery.

Like a brass bell sprinkled with snow, this straw temple rose from the earth with a steady determination. As we neared, we saw that we were not the only ones that this golden column had drawn in. It appeared that bales had been removed from the lowermost of this stack to create a burrow — we could see the discarded piles of hay flung about, their golden threads strewn on the ice, and through a flimsy panel of straw at the rear, we could see a peepery of eyes. They were scattered throughout in the manner of constellation, and with equal glitter. The eyes were friendly, I thought, but I’d been wrong about the friendliness of eyes before.

Was this a trap? A trick?

Another boom cried out into the night.

Before we could debate, Feliks parted the wall of straw and scurried inside. He dragged me with him, deep into the itchy burrow, on hands and knees. On all fours, we were rib to rib and so close to each other that I was quite unsure where I ended and he began. You would think this would have been a welcome feeling, considering the compromises of my hearing and vision, but it made me feel only amorphous and undone.

Adding to this discomfort was the general overpopulation of the haystack, which trembled with the shifts of its fugitives. We were not the only ones on hands and knees. Though it was dark, I could make out the forms of five individuals, all seated against the perimeter, and all so small that I assumed them to be children, not a one of them any older than the age of seven. But the curses that confronted us were quite adult; they tumbled toward us in Czech. We do not speak that language, we said. Then a few voices switched to cursing us in Polish. That is the way to curse us, we said. And we apologized for crowding them so.

“You can’t stay here,” a male voice hissed. His Polish was quite good, I thought.

“Why can’t we stay?” we hissed back.

“No room! We did not escape to be crushed by strangers. You must leave!”

“But we are making it warmer in here for you,” I pointed out. The temperature was most hospitable with this crowd of bodies, and the ceiling of this burrow was low, so low that when I moved my head, the hay tickled my scalp in a pleasant way. I cared little whether our hosts welcomed us or not — I could not ignore the welcome of this golden palace.

“It is true that you are warming us,” the male voice conceded. “But we have warmth enough, and you are crowding my mother. This haystack is not as spacious as it appears. And it belongs to us. We carved out this burrow with our bare hands! Do you know how difficult a feat this is in winter? Only the most desperate men are capable of such miracles!”

I respected the speaker’s message, but I did not care to move. It was too lovely in the haystack — like curling up in a summer I’d once known. The perfume of the hay was so sweet, and the perfume of its inhabitants — it was not terrible. For all time, I could live there, and my reluctance to exit made this clear.

A large sigh arose. It sounded as if it came from the depths of a matriarch. The eloquent speaker addressed us again.

“You have to leave, children! I am sorry — we have no room!”

Exhaustion possessed me and I could only weep. And I did not care who my tears fell on in this little crowd.