Affinity Konar - Mischling

I could hardly bear to look at it. I focused instead on the signs and the names.

Once, I saw Feliks scrape his name into the seat before us when he thought I wasn’t looking. He performed this task with a hurried shame, embarrassed by the futility of the gesture and his compulsion to perform it. Because nobody was looking for us. Nobody even wrote our names anywhere. Nobody wrote, If you are reading this, my greatest prayers have been answered, because it will mean that you are not dead after all, you are just away from me, which is the same thing, but somewhat more remediable. I always wanted to write that to Pearl. But there was no room for such a lengthy message among those many names and scrawls. So many names — they darted across every available surface with violent urgency.

I would be lying if I said that I did not look for my name among them, written in Mengele’s script. Because I was certain that he was looking for me still. On any one of these message depots — at the stations, on the backs of train seats — I told myself, he would have to be looking for us. I was happy that he was gone, yes, happy that I had to hunt him down, because this would be a greater demonstration of my love for Pearl. But I couldn’t imagine why he was so willing to abandon me, his most special experiment. I was beginning to think I had never mattered at all.

I was a broken half afloat in a great nowhere, and the trains were determined to keep me this way. Let me say this about those days, when the war was still a war, but one soon to end, when refugees were roaming and tanks lay overturned on their backs like great tortoises and one was wise to avoid the marching streams of any soldiers, be they Soviet or German: These trains we never should have trusted again, they appeared to be our only way home. And so people packed themselves into the cars quite willingly and looked the other way when they failed to arrive at their stated destinations. I marveled at our collective belief in an eventual safety.

While the trains did not take us back to Auschwitz, they appeared determined to strand and confuse us. Their only real benefit was that they sheltered us from the snow, and we paid nothing for them. Feliks and I, we’d sit two in a seat, and when a conductor happened along to squint at us, we had only to shove up the arms of our furred sleeves and show him our numbers. Their blueness purchased whatever direction the train cared to carry us.

After leaving the straw temple, we had days of halts and reversals. We went east, and then west, our heads bobbing listlessly on our necks, our bodies jostled in our seats. And when morning slipped into dusk and we entered Kolo, we witnessed yet another ending: the tracks. A conductor urged us out. This was not a hotel, he explained. We huddled into each other, tried to act as if we didn’t understand his Polish, tried to bargain this stalled train car into a place to sleep. But though the conductors weren’t bothered by letting refugees ride the cars for free, our true comfort was another matter. We were plucked up by our ears, led to the car door, and forced out into the ice, where we wasted no time tumbling down an embankment. For once, even Feliks was slow to stand. The contents of Bruna’s precious sack spilled out over the snow, and we leaped about, retrieving the one and a half potatoes and the bottle of water, the remnants of our sustenance.

Defeated, we trudged into the woods and found a barn. It appeared innocent. A pig lived there, fatter than even a pig had any right to be, and a sad-eyed Blenheim cow who mooed in pain, her udders overwhelmed by milk. Feliks showed me how to milk her, and I was impressed by this skill. We were cheered by the spaciousness of our accommodations — the cow and pig occupied two of the four stalls, and we claimed the furthermost slot, with the blankness of a vacant stall beside us. So sheltered, we drew our furs fast around us and dreamed of a morning when we no longer had to be Bear and Jackal.

Sleep comes so easy when you know you will wake to milk.

But when we did wake, it was not to sustenance but panic, to the neigh of a horse and the sight of a pair of boots, their muddy heels visible through the crack between the wall and the floor. As the owner of the boots secured the horse, Feliks and I tried to make ourselves very still; we flattened ourselves against the floor and possumed, and we would have gotten away with this, I’m sure, if it were not for Feliks’s sneeze. This noise sent the wearer of the boots shuttling out of the horse’s stall and into ours. She was an older woman in clean clothes and a decent coat. Her round cheeks bobbed like suns on her face, and the eyes above them were cloudy blue and suggested near blindness. I did not like the look of them, but when she approached us I convinced myself that they were kind, because we were lost and starving, living on beggar’s time, and you can only live on beggar’s time for so long until everyone starts to look like your salvation. She regarded us thoughtfully, as if calculating a move, and then, having reached her decision, plunged toward us with an open embrace.

“Children!” the woman cried. “I have been looking for you! I thought I’d never see you again!” She took us into her arms. She was a large woman, but she’d been diminished still — one could tell from her grasp; loose wings of flesh were enfolded in her sleeves. “Never run off again!”

I wriggled from her arms, huddled myself tightly against the wall of the barn.

“We are not yours,” I said, calm. “I am Stasha Zamorski. Pearl’s twin.”

“Oh? Forgive me. And this is Pearl, you say?” She gave Feliks a punch on the arm.

“Hardly. He is a boy. But you’re right to recognize him as a twin.”

“I could’ve sworn you were my own lost children,” she lamented. “I thought you’d returned. But maybe you can help me find them? I will give you food and shelter in exchange.”

Feliks gave me a look, the kind of look that said this was my decision. For all the woman’s suspiciousness, he had been disarmed by the prospect of comforts. If we had not been tossed about by trains and weather, if we had full bellies and proper shoes, and if the world hadn’t been overwhelmed by white, I’m sure he would not have considered it at all. He pulled me aside for a consultation.

“If need be,” he said, “do you think we could overtake her?”

I vowed that I would never allow harm to come to either of us. He received this skeptically but turned to the woman to present his plan.

“We will stay for an evening,” he told her. “Just long enough — the girl is weak, you see. A meal too? We are hungry. And perhaps some bread when we go?”

“My home and bread are yours,” the woman soothed.

“It is a deal, then,” Feliks declared. “Madame, we will be eager to assist you in the search for your children.” He gave a little bow, one shockingly graceful in its bent. And we followed the woman as she picked her way through the snow flanking the barn and onto a little path, where there stood a cottage so humble and white, like a child’s overturned top, that I couldn’t imagine any harm might come to us within it. Still, I knew that trusting such a stranger was a gamble. The woman’s milky eyes did not warm to us, and as we walked in the company of her detached and blighted stare, I began to wonder if her true flaw was not a matter of her sight but her disposition.

My deathlessness was useful in situations like these. But Feliks? I had to make certain that no harm befell him.

The woman’s lodging was simple. She had a rag-covered bed, snowshoes by the door. A drab braided rug, the usual harvest wreath. A bucket posed to capture a leak. The low ceiling made giants of us both, and the woman walked at a curvature so as not to crack her head. What must it be like, living at such an angle? She was crooked, I thought, but she must have been a good mother still, because the cottage was without spot or stain. The bench was cherry and polished, the cupboards plain and clean. A shiny hatchet lorded over the table from its nail on the wall.