Affinity Konar - Mischling

“Stasha!” Feliks whispered. “Collect yourself!”

All of the haystack hushed after this command.

“Stasha?” said the male voice. “Pearl’s sister?”

At first, I confess, I did not know him, even as he expressed familiarity.

“Have you seen Pearl?” I blurted out, and my desperation nearly felled the haystack. “Or did you see what happened to her?”

“No, I haven’t seen her,” the male voice said.

A lie, that’s what it sounded like to me.

“Who are you?” Feliks demanded. He was truly a bear in the tradition of the Classification of Living Things. A defensive lining, part growl, had entered his voice. Bruna and Zayde both, they would have been proud of this performance. But the speaker was not put off at all by this inquiry.

“I’m the one you call Sardine,” he said.

His voice was even and brave. It had none of the oily flavor or shrunken nature of a canned fish. I couldn’t imagine a more inaccurate term for this gentlemanly Lilliput, and I hung my head in recognition of the taunts he had so stoically faced.

“We’re sorry,” Feliks said. “Truly. We can’t beg for your forgiveness enough!”

Because it was Mirko who presided over this straw temple alongside his family. Apologies were owed to the lot of them, because the children of the Zoo had referred to all the Lilliputs as sardines, at Bruna’s instruction. Now, it seemed, sardines would be the preservation of us.

Upon realizing that we’d been reunited with fellow survivors, we felt as if the whole world might be held within this haystack; it was all that mattered. In this pile of straw, I thought, there may not be happiness, but there is a hope that may impersonate happiness, if only for a small while. We had lived through death together — how could we not want the intimacy of this haystack?

“This girl is my friend,” Mirko told the other inhabitants. “I might not think much of her companion, but the girl — a gem. And she has lost so much.”

Something in his voice made me want to ask how exactly he knew how much I had lost. There was a mournfulness, a knowing that indicated he was familiar with the workings of my grief.

“You hardly know her,” another voice said. I recognized it as his mother’s. “It’s as if everyone from Auschwitz is a friend these days, no matter that they lived beside us for so long without a care for us. Is this how we will live — picking up every stray and pretending a friendship?”

The other inhabitants of the haystack appeared to agree with this statement. I could feel the straw tremble with the force of their nodding.

“She was Mengele’s pet,” Mirko said firmly. “She knows what it is to be us.”

Even though he spoke in defense of me, I couldn’t help but take issue with his words.

“I wasn’t Mengele’s pet,” I said. “Not Pearl. Not me.”

“I don’t know what you were.” Mirko sighed. “But he mixed his terrors with favors. How is that?”

“True,” I said. Still, I felt defensive. I might have chided Mirko about the radio Mengele had given him. I might have reminded his mother about the lace tablecloth she’d eaten off of and confronted the whole lot of them with the palace of a room they’d been given while the rest of us were pierced by the splinters of our boxy little beds and given those black-crossed lice as company. I didn’t say these things, though, and not just because Pearl wouldn’t have approved of such an outburst. I had a more important question.

“Did you ever see Pearl?” I asked. “You had to have seen her.”

Mirko acted as if he hadn’t heard the question and breezed into another line of conversation.

“My grandfather, you know that he could recite all the passages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ? It seemed such a feat to me, impossible. But in my captivity, I tried to do the same. Already I have the story of creation down pat. The beginning of the world, Stasha — what do you think of that?”

“I think you lie,” I whispered. “I think you are lying about not having seen Pearl, and I don’t appreciate it. You are trying to spare me her pain. But her pain after death — that is mine to take!”

I swore I could hear some of the haystack voices murmur in agreement. But Mirko remained firm, as if he knew my sister better than I did. I wondered what time they had spent together to allow him to form such a conviction.

“Pearl would want you to live anew,” he whispered mournfully. “She would approve of this — she would want you to need the beginning of the world again.”

I told him I was liking the ending just fine.

My friend replied with a recitation:

Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven,

Nature was all alike, a shapelessness,

Chaos, so-called, all rude and lumpy matter,

Nothing but bulk, inert, in whose confusion

Discordant atoms warred.

As he narrated our supposed new beginning, I pared a little hole in the side of my haystack and looked out with my good eye. The heavens I saw, they had never been captured, but they were haunted like I was. Did they know the details of my sister’s death? Those stars, they knew what suffering and renewal meant, they were forged from collapse and dust and fire. That wisdom should have been enough to justify their existence, I’d think.

But they insisted on being beautiful too.

“Do you see what I see?” Feliks whispered. Because he’d made his own porthole too.

“I see stars” was all I would say.

“I don’t see the cremo” was all he would say.

Pre-morning glistened through the peepholes of our haystack. Like a litter of kittens, we’d slept, curled back to back into the family that adopted us, confronted only by the temple’s golden lining. I rubbed my eyes and saw that it was true — there was hardly any room with the additions of us. The hollowed-out sections of haystack provided three square feet of space, but when I sat up straight, my head struck the ceiling of frozen straw.

Still, I told Feliks that I wanted to stay. I was earnest, but he laughed. I could’ve told him that I’d lived in situations just as trying. The floating world, opposite Pearl. Inside the folds of Zayde’s coat. The vinegary confines of my barrel. And did I even need to mention the Zoo? But I chose to keep this logic to myself — I knew he’d mock me, and now we had company besides.

Mirko’s sister Paulina was sitting opposite us with her two children, a boy and a girl, sleepy-faced charmers only as big as crumbs. Paulina was braiding the girl’s hair, and I watched her fingers weave back and forth. Seeing me study this, she gave me a smile, and I was about to apologize for staring, to explain the longing it aroused in me, for touch, for family, but I was saved from having to do so when Mirko and his mother entered through the little thatch, each with a tin cup of snow, which one person passed to the next, lapping up any moisture that one could. Then Mirko took a roll of meat from his pocket.

“From the Soviets,” Mirko explained to me and Feliks, opening his bread knife and sectioning the meat into pieces. “We charmed them after they entered. Sang to them a little. And they permitted us a ride in one of their tanks, took us all the way past Stare Stawy and into this field. It seemed as good a place as any to hide and plan. Mother, she was quite ill with exhaustion, but she has improved after a week’s rest. If the trains are willing, we are going to go to Prague. We will be going back to the theater. Do you two have interest in joining us?”

I couldn’t answer because my mouth was too full of food. I had tried to refuse it, but the matriarch would not allow this. She hopped over with a square of meat and insisted it between my lips, and then, as if I were a baby prone to spitting out foodstuffs, she held my mouth shut until I swallowed. When she’d decided I’d had enough, she cleaned my face with the corner of her shawl and tried to pinch the life back into my cheeks.