Affinity Konar - Mischling

“You should finish eating,” Fritzi said. Feliks rose, bumping his head on the table once again in his flurry, and reclaimed his seat. He tucked into his bread with zeal. I followed suit.

“Are those your real names?” Feliks asked.

No answer. They continued to stalk around the room. Fritzi had the attitude of someone at the intermission of a performance she was quite enjoying. Heinrich was equally mild. He took the third seat beside us at the table.

“May I?” Heinrich asked. He walked two fingers toward my plate, as if his hand were a person.

I pushed my plate to him. He didn’t even notice that it was edged with my bile from my encounter with the bread. He was too busy admiring his partner. She took the cap from her head and it was then that I saw that her blond hair was coal-black at its roots. She cracked her knuckles as if preparing for a fight, and then she spat on the woman, on her clouded eyes, on her apron. Not a particle of her escaped this assault. Fritzi even took care to spit on the pool of blood on the floor. She spat and spat until her throat went dry, and then she eyed my milk, sniffed its whiteness suspiciously, and drank it down to the last drop. Her black eyes flashed above the rim of the cup like two ships traveling the horizon.

A great portion of difficulty with deathlessness is that you have an eternity to wonder who you have become. The death of a twin doubles this predicament. Though I would never cease being Pearl’s half, I realized in that moment that I would not mind at all becoming someone like this dark-eyed girl avenger. My look for her must have been too admiring, because she turned from me with a grimace, as if to ward off my reverence, and declared, “You owe your life to no one.”

I started to argue this point with her, because she didn’t know Pearl, she had no notion that my life was owed entirely to my sister, but I could tell that the girl avenger didn’t care to debate; she was too busy rummaging through drawers and cupboards and throwing objects in her sack. All the meat, all the cheese, all the bread. She took a box of cigarettes, handed one to the young man, and lit it for him while the corpse lay at their feet. Between them, there moved a feeling, something sweet and strangely innocent, and they didn’t even seem to remember the corpse that they stood over until the girl avenger began to fuss with a spatter of blood that had lit upon Heinrich’s breast pocket, bright as a boutonniere. Her fingertips lingered there, just for a moment, and then Heinrich returned to our table with a look of satisfaction and winked.

He ate some more, chewing quietly like a gentleman, and then he looked at Feliks and he looked at me. We did not need to show him our numbers. He knew who we were.

“And what will you do with your freedom now? You have plans for your young lives?”

He handed Feliks his cigarette and nodded for him to take a puff.

“My father the rabbi, he liked to say,” Feliks began, attempting a puff before collapsing in a coughing fit. “He liked to say that the dead die so that the living may live. I did not understand that until now. In the case of our torturers, I think it more than applies.”

Heinrich took this in appreciatively and raised his glass to the sentiment. Feliks had the look of one who had met his hero. I can’t say that I felt any different. I wanted to tell the avenger my secret — I wanted him to know that while I appreciated that he had saved me, I hadn’t required saving. It was only Feliks who was in danger. But all of the room was too absorbed with making plans.

“I assume you have had many torturers, though,” Heinrich said. “It is quite ambitious to want to take them all on.”

“We only want one,” Feliks said. “Josef Mengele.”

“You are too young to kill.” This was the girl’s opinion.

“I watched them open my brother,” Feliks protested.

“It would ruin you, to kill. Look at us. We are ruined,” the girl said.

I wanted to argue that they didn’t appear ruined by any measure. To the contrary, they had a glow I hadn’t seen since the war began. Feliks pressed on, determined to secure their blessing for our mission. “My brother was my twin,” he said. “When the knife went through him, it went through me too.”

“You are not strong enough.” Fritzi clucked.

“That knife goes through me every day,” Feliks said. “And still I live.”

Heinrich and Fritzi exchanged glances. Will you think it strange if I say that love strung itself between them at every interval?

“Very well,” Heinrich said. “Who can argue with the determination of the freed?”

So began our training. Heinrich spent the next hour schooling us on the proper use of a revolver. For my first shot, I took aim at the five ceramic figures on the woman’s mantel. Even angels, you see, did not escape my fury, as they’d been quite content to observe our sufferings without intervention. The first angel splintered in the air, obedient. It knew what it had done. Then Feliks took a turn. We picked those angels off, one by one; we doomed their fragile souls to nothingness. After we’d each killed two angels, we turned to each other, both expecting a fight over this last murder. But all this shooting, it had a strangely civilizing effect.

“It is yours,” we said in unison.

The avengers were frustrated by our manners. “On with it!” both cried.

And so Feliks took aim at the last remaining figure; he did so with great relish, and when the bullet struck this final angel, the avengers flung their sacks over their shoulders.

Of course, this made us wish that there were more ceramic angels, enough to keep killing forever, so that our new companions might remain with us, too intrigued by our executions to go. But they were determined to leave us. To soothe our distress, they addressed our need for better weaponry and treated us as peers in their mission. Fritzi said, quite airily, that we could keep the gun. Then Heinrich took the hatchet from the wall and handed it to me.

“It is a bit heavy,” he said.

“We will manage it,” Feliks said. He came up beside me and tested its edge with a fingertip, then he wasted not a minute in stealing it from my hands. “This hatchet didn’t know what it was doing before. I will make it know its place now, in the heart of Mengele. And if not the heart, the guts. And if not the guts, the back.”

I saw them mask their amusement. They were not successful in this. If they thought us a joke, though, they were fully committed to our comedy, because Fritzi bent toward me with a delicate smallness cupped in her hand. At first, I thought it was a pearl. But this misperception was due to my bad eye. Looking closer, I saw that it was a pill. A pill, Fritzi explained, that would kill one instantly after consumption. It was a pea-size ampule, walled with brown rubber, and its core was fatal: a concentrated solution of potassium cyanide. She deposited it into my hand, curled my fingers around it, and advised me to drop it into Mengele’s drink before a toast, first crushing it to release its powers of brain-death and heart-stop.

I was overwhelmed by this. For death to seat itself in a pill held by my own hand! For vengeance to slip down Mengele’s throat unawares! This pill had charms that I did not. It outranked my bread knives and, possibly, Feliks’s new gun and hatchet. In my estimation, its powers matched the amber magic of Mengele’s needle. I could only hope that handling it would not corrupt me as the needle had surely corrupted him.

I nudged the little poison pill along down one of the paths of my open palm, expecting it to unfurl like a beetle. It seemed like a living thing. On impulse, I put my ear to it — I had to decode its whisper. I will always be strong enough, it whispered. In me, there rests a century’s worth of justice.