Affinity Konar - Mischling

If I hadn’t been so lost over the death beside me, I might have defended myself, but I cared little at that moment. The Stepanovs exchanged wily glances with each other, and then Serafima winked at me, as if to acknowledge the great favor she was about to perform on my behalf. Without a word of negotiation between them, the two took hold of the girl’s body by its head and its feet and slid its meager weight from our bed.

“She can stay.” I reached out and put a hand on the still-warm chest.

“She is dead,” they argued. “See the trickle from her mouth? Dead!”

“So? She still needs a place to sleep, doesn’t she?”

“It’s against our law, zugang .”

“What law?”

They were too busy carting the body down the ladder to the floor to answer, their movements illuminated by the same scant light that produced the shadowy animals. I wished for utter darkness then. Because I saw the girl’s eyes fly open as her body thumped past the rungs and to the floor. All of the children turned in their beds so as not to witness the exodus, but I saw the girl’s hair fan over the threshold as her bearers dragged her out, and I tried, as she disappeared from view, to remember her eyes.

I thought they were brown eyes, as brown as my own, but our acquaintance had been so brief, I couldn’t be sure.

All I could be sure of was the sprightliness of the twins. When they reappeared at the door, they were clapping the grime from their hands. Nina twirled in the skirt, and Esfir plucked lint from the stolen sweater. They were enlivened by these new possessions. Nina ambled over with a bundle in her hand and tossed it in Stasha’s direction.

“Take the stockings,” she spat at my sister. “Don’t act so superior.”

Stasha regarded the stockings where they lay, so limp and forlorn, in her lap. I advised her to give them back, but Stasha had never been good at taking anyone’s advice, even mine. She thrust them onto her hands like mittens, much to Nina’s pleasure.

“You’re resourceful,” Nina said approvingly before retiring with her sister to the bunk below, where the two of them rustled about in their straw like the scavengers they were, doubtless planning their next acquisition of goods.

Everyone survived by planning. I could see that. I realized that Stasha and I would have to divide the responsibilities of living between us. Such divisions had always come naturally to us, and so there, in the early-morning dark, we divvied up the necessities:

Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. I would take the sad, the past, the good.

There were overlaps between these categories, but we’d negotiated such overlaps before. It seemed fair to me, but when we were done with the partitioning of these duties, Stasha had misgivings.

“You got the worse deal,” she said. “I’ll trade you. I’ll take the past, and you take the future. The future is more hopeful.”

“I am happy with the way things are,” I said.

“Take the future. I already have the funny — you should have the future. It will make things more even between us.”

I thought of all the years we’d spent trying to match every gesture. When we were small, we’d practiced walking the same amount of steps every day, speaking the same number of words, smiling the same smiles. I started to retreat into these memories, but just as I’d begun to calm, Ox resurrected our dread. Cool and efficient, a drab figure in an oatmeal-colored cloak, she picked her way through the barracks with the dead child, now clothed in mud, held aloft in her arms. Wordlessly, she carried the girl over to our bunk and laid her back beside me, placing the cold hands over the concave chest and crossing the legs at their ankles. Tongue thrust between her teeth in concentration, she performed this endeavor with the manner of one arranging flowers for the room of a beloved houseguest.

“Who did this?” Ox demanded after she’d completed her work and the girl stared sightlessly up at the rafters.

No one would answer, but Ox didn’t much care for answers, preferring any opportunity for intimidation. “I recommend that you children find a better way to amuse yourselves than by dumping bodies by the latrines. You all know that Dr. Mengele requires that every child in the Zoo must be counted in the morning. If this body goes missing again—”

She allowed the possibilities to dangle in the air, all the better to frighten us, and then, her mission completed, she turned and left with a dramatic flap of oatmeal-colored cloak, pausing only to confiscate the matches from the girl making the shadow puppets. All was dark once more, though not dark enough to obscure the death that lay beside us.

“She looks hungry even now,” Stasha observed. She skipped a stockinged finger across the girl’s still cheek. “Do you think she has feelings anymore?”

“No one has feelings when they are dead,” I told her. But I wasn’t quite convinced of this myself. If there was ever a place where the dead might still feel their tortures, it had to be the Zoo.

Stasha took the stockings from her hands and tried to pull them over the girl’s feet. First the left foot, then the right. One stocking crowned at midcalf, while the other slipped easily over the knee. Frustrated by this difference, Stasha tugged at the woolens to make them align, and I had to point out to her that the pair were mismatched, that there was no way to force them into sameness. Nothing was fixable; we could only make do.

“Please,” I whispered to Stasha as her efforts inspired a new hole in one of the stockings, “let me have the past, and I’ll take the present too. I just don’t want the future.”

That was how the role of keeper of time and memory came to be mine. From then on, the acknowledgment of days was my responsibility alone.

September 3, 1944

In our former life, I was used to doing the talking for us. I had been the outgoing one, the one with proven methods of getting us out of trouble, the one who negotiated exchanges with peers and authority figures alike. This role suited me. I was everyone’s friend, and a fair representative for us both.

We soon found out that Stasha was better fit for socializing in our new world. A fearlessness had entered her. She set her teeth with severity when she smiled, and she walked with a girlish approximation of a swagger, like a movie cowboy or a comic-book hero.

On our first morning, her chatter was endless. She asked questions of anyone she could, to try to ease our adjustment. The first to receive her inquiry was a man who introduced himself to us as Zwillingesvater, or Twins’ Father. He saw us respond to the oddity of this name with curious faces, but he did not try to explain it except to say that all of the children called him this — the Zoo, we would find, had a habit of assigning people new names and identities, and even adults were no exception to this rule.

“When do we see our families?” Stasha asked Twins’ Father as he sat on a crate recording all our facts for Mengele’s use. We were sitting with him behind the boys’ barracks with an irrelevant globe idling at his feet in the dirt. The travels of this globe — a relic that was usually kept in the storehouse — were much envied by us all, as the object was able to move from camp to camp, while we remained pinned within the Zoo. One of the boys — a Peter Abraham, whom Mengele had dubbed “a member of the intelligentsia”—served as one of the doctor’s messengers, and in this position, he was able to steal this little globe, to tuck it beneath his coat and toddle from block to block as if afflicted with some strange pregnancy. Peter stole it in the mornings, and in the evenings, one of the guards stole it back. In this way, the world was possessed and repossessed, and over time, it grew more battered in its travels. Holes appeared, borders were blurred, whole countries faded away altogether. Still, it was a globe, and it tended to be a useful thing to have around, because during interviews like these, one could focus on its surface instead of Twins’ Father’s face, though I suppose both were equally worn and discouraged in appearance.