Affinity Konar - Mischling

I could not bear to look at him any longer, and I told Feliks that we had to leave. He responded by reaching into our sacks and thrusting one of the precious bottles of water at the matriarch. To this sacrifice, he added half of our potato, divided with his bread knife.

“You are leaving?” Paulina cried. “But it is not safe!” And she entreated her brother to stop us, to invite us to stay.

“We have to find a man,” I told her. “We have to find him now more than ever.”

And I ignored their pleas, their warnings. A jackal had no use for the likes of those. But I was human too. Here is proof of it: I put Mirko’s note in my pocket, next to Pearl’s piano key, and with every good-bye I said to the Rabinowitzes, I felt a tear knock on the door of my eye, a tear that acknowledged my sister’s death and Mirko’s proximity to her final hours. He pulled on the sleeve of my coat, indicating that I should lean down and lend him my ear. On tiptoe, he stood, so intent on the delivery of his parting message.

“Pearl is free now,” he whispered, and then his voice divided itself beneath the weight of his grief. “Try to think of her, Stasha, as free.”

And then, with his story told, we left our benevolent hero and his golden temple and traveled out into what the Rabinowitzes surely thought was our end.

I would wander into my body and try to know it, to stake my claim within it. It was weak, this body; I was ashamed of it. It had none of the strengths I’d imagined it might have while still in the tomb of my box. I did not have the strength of an ant. I did not have the memory of a pigeon. All I owned was breath, really, and a single thought: that the numbers on my arm represented how many times I would have to prove myself useful in the world in order to remain in it. But even I knew that this was untrue; it was the logic of my cage and my keeper, and I had to overcome it.

It took bread to make me find my fingers and my hands. When the bread rolled down my throat, I found that I had a belly. I became reacquainted with my back again when the Russian laid me down on a bed within the infirmary. There, I looked out the window and occasionally faced the wall and sometimes the ceiling, and though there was no leak to converse with, I was the happiest girl one could know.

And though I took all of this in once I was out of the darkness of my cage, I didn’t truly know I had eyes until I met the camera later that day. That is to say, I knew I had eyes, but I didn’t know what they could do, as they were still adjusting to a world of light.

The cameraman in charge of the Russians’ movie was a solemn, thin-lipped man. While many other members of the Red Army gave themselves to some wide-roaming emotion, he remained stoic. I imagined that the camera saw too much for him, or perhaps it provided details that he would rather have avoided. Strangely, the first time I saw him smile was when that camera attracted my interest.

He was moving a white cloth over the lens so tenderly. He held the camera to the light, took a look, cleaned it some more, and I found myself stretching out a hand, as if stroking the air that held such a magical instrument was contact enough.

“She doesn’t reach for anything,” the woman said, with awe. The woman — she had been the first to hold me after my retrieval, and she refused to leave my side. I remembered her doll eyes and her touch, but nothing more — I was told, though, that she was a doctor, that she could be trusted, that I didn’t need to be afraid. I accepted this because I liked how she said my name, as if she’d known me for years.

The cameraman and the woman collaborated to give me a look through the lens. I passed from her arms into his, and I put my eye to the glass. I think I expected to see someone I loved in the eye of that camera. Someone I loved who still lived. But there was no one there.

Disappointment, that’s what that camera held. I don’t know why I’d expected the little black box to contain something better than a view of this place. All I could see were prisoners, tiny little prisoners whom the Russians had dressed in the gray-striped, voluminous uniforms of adults for the atmospheric purposes of their film. They were cold and sad and their faces said nothing of freedom.

Still, though I was unfamiliar with my personality, I had the impression that I had been an acquiescent sort, one interested in guarding the feelings of others, so I made a point of acting impressed as I looked in the camera, and when I was done, the woman picked me up, commenting on my lightness, and we joined the crowd of children to make the Russians’ movie. We milled about near the fences, shivered in the snow. All us actors, so young and unskilled, were in a state of confusion. Why do we have to wear these clothes? we kept asking. We never wore these clothes before! we cried. Why are we marching but not leaving? But the moviemakers didn’t care for our opinions — they wanted only to see us march in a tidy procession as proof of how free we had become.

We were lit with a snowy blur; all of us moved as if shaken from a long sleep. The camera loved two faces in particular, two small girls of ten, Romanians, who were pushed to the fore. Though these identical girls clung to each other as they walked before the lens, their postures were different. One was sober and demure, but the other tossed her head in the air and, ever so briefly, stuck out her tongue. Whether the gesture was deliberate, a cheeky reproach to the cameraman, or done out of thirst or reflex or simple girlish fun is uncertain. What is certain: Those twins would one day tell the world of the man who was not angel or doctor or uncle or friend or genius. They would speak of the man we experiments would banish from our thoughts except for when we had to warn others that people like him existed, that they walked among us without souls, seeking to harm others for sport and perfection and the satisfaction of some inborn cruelty. Someday, Eva and Miriam Mozes, they would not let the world forget what had been done to us.

But then, as the camera rolled, they clung to each other, so fearful of being parted, comforted only by their sisterhood. They were as bewildered as the rest of us. Confusion was the dominant expression of the photographed children. We were walking down a path, fences rising on either side of it, as if we were free — these gates were not the famed gates the world is so familiar with now, but another opening, unadorned by language — and then we retreated back as if we were not. By the time the movie was declared perfect, we weren’t sure in which direction our true future lay, but the Soviets assured us that we would be in every paper, in every movie house. People would see us; they would know that we lived.

And I noticed something during this constant march, back and forth and cut from and cut to: nearly every child was part of a pair. Each was like the other in looks and manner and voice, and they marched together, step by step, in unison; they moved as if one could not move without the other. It was then that I knew I was not whole.

What I knew was small, but it enlarged itself quickly. We were in a place where we’d been meant to die, but we’d lived. For what, I wasn’t sure — but I was hardly alone in this. No one could tell me, not really, and there were so many sources of information too, all of them chatterboxes. They’d been bossed and corralled so often that they went wild in the infirmary; they spent their time shouting and jumping from bed to bed.

I envied that jumping. It was something I wanted for myself, someday, to leap and jump and run and dance, yet whenever I peeked beneath the bandages on my feet, the possibility of any of these seemed doubtful.