Affinity Konar - Mischling

It had Pearl’s voice, I thought. Or was it my voice? Did we still sound the same, now that she had taken on the duty of being dead, and I the role of the bereft?

I was about to ask the poison pill what it meant by this, but then I saw that everyone was watching me. Feliks blushed when I caught his eye, and he redirected his gaze, as if embarrassed by his association with me. The avengers chuckled freely at my haze.

But the corpse? Feliks asked what we were to do with it. That is for you to decide, they said hastily. They were eager to return to killing. From the doorway, we watched them enter a car, a sleek, boot-shiny thing with a Nazi flag waving pitifully from its stalk. Instead of a good-bye, they cried for revenge. “Zemsta!” they shouted, the word encased in blue puffs of cold that burst in midair, and then they sped away, and they no longer belonged to us but to the realm of Nazi impostors who sought justice at every opportunity.

We lingered in the doorway and then we remembered the body on the floor. We looked at the hearth and its severance of angels.

“What now?” Feliks wondered aloud, and he tossed a ceramic wing into the fire.

A shared thought moved between us. It flickered in him; it sparked in me. With the old woman’s broom handle, we fed the flames to the curtains. The whole house was hungry for the fire; the flames moved over it in tongues, and sparks like birds fluoresced in the night. We watched it consume the rug, the table, the wreath, the wishbone. But as soon as it began to nibble at the woman’s body, the flames crowning her temple, we fled without looking back. I was afraid of what I might turn into with such a sight in my mind. So I plodded on with Feliks and our new weapons; we stumbled through the snow, back to the barn that had initially promised comfort. The horse greeted us. He knew how we needed him. He saw the heaviness of our hatchet, our gun, our food — there was no way, his eye argued, that we could continue without him. After all the evil tours of his master, he owed us this, he insisted.

“He is old,” Feliks said sorrowfully, stroking Horse’s flank. “We would do better to eat him.”

“Who would take care of the slaughter?” I wondered. Maybe Fritzi was right. Maybe we weren’t suited to killing at all. I could not confront the fullness of the question, because what could I think of myself if I were unable to execute vengeance on my sister’s behalf?

On Horse’s back, we traveled on, tripping across all the fallen things of the forest, making our way toward a future we weren’t sure wanted us at all.

Day One

I would reacquaint myself with what a day was as we traveled east toward Krakow. During the course of this journey, I’d see the sun and moon alternate, taking turns in their duties.

The sun took the hunger, the mile after mile, the swollen and weary feet. The moon took the nightmare, the unreliable road, the train tracks with the sudden ending, all that was no more. I was not sure which had the worse part of this deal. All I knew was that both shone.

“Look ahead,” Twins’ Father instructed. “I’ll look everywhere else for you.”

So we looked ahead, only ahead. But all I could see was what lay above me. First, I was swaddled in a woolen coat, and then a sheepskin rug, and then another rug, and these protections enwombed me up to my eyes. Above these layers was a sheet of cold air, a snap of frost, and this wintry skyscape was interrupted by my breath-clouds. I watched the little breath-clouds bear themselves into being and float up to Miri. She was most of the sky above me as she pushed my wheelbarrow.

Who needs a sun or a moon when you have Miri?

With myself below her, a dull, injured planet, she was determined to assume the responsibilities of both.

In our exodus, we were determined to make our leader proud, to conduct ourselves like the soldiers he treated us as. Some troops sing as they march, but we did not. In the beginning, we didn’t speak, not even a whisper. All it took, we told ourselves, was attracting the interest of one bad man, or even a man who was not bad but fallen on desperate times. With these thoughts in mind we skittered down the demolished roads.

“How is she?” a boy was asking Miri. She nodded to me.

“Pearl, this is Peter. He is your friend. He has many friends. This is true, isn’t it, Peter?”

Peter affirmed that it was. At least the part that we were friends, he and I. He didn’t know about the other part. Most of his other friends were—

Miri would not let him finish that sentence. “Describe yourself, Peter,” she instructed. “Leave nothing out.”

Peter said his parents were dead. He was fourteen. At Auschwitz—

“Don’t speak of it,” Miri commanded. “Say who you are, what you do with yourself.”

Peter swallowed audibly. He said that once, he had stolen a piano—

“This is Peter,” Miri interrupted, her voice firm. “He is one of those people who is so smart that I’m not sure what he will do with himself. Always helping too,” Miri added. “I’m sure you have faults, Peter? But I can’t think of any right now.”

I caught Peter staring at me with pity. Staring — that might be one of his faults, I thought.

“She is better than she should be,” Miri told him. “Hardly remembers still.”

“She must remember,” he said in hushed disbelief.

“Put yourself in a cage,” Miri tried to whisper, but I heard it all. “And then put the cage in a dark room. Once in a while, have a hand come through the top of the cage. Sometimes, the hand will give you food. Mere crumbs. Other times, the hand might shine a light or ring a bell or douse you with water—”

Miri could not bring herself to fully color the details of this scenario. I watched her grip on the handles tighten. Peter asked what the purpose of such an experiment might be.

Miri gave one explanation: Mengele wanted to know what might happen when identical twins, the ones most bonded to each other, experienced separation.

It was true, in its simplicity. But I could’ve given Peter another explanation: I was put in that cage because I loved too much. I had a great bond with Someone, a connection much envied by this man. He was cold and empty and he could not form attachments, not with his family or wife or children. All that coursed through him was ambition, and this empty man, like so many empty men — he was determined to make history. One day, he decided that the best way to do so was by discovering how two girls who loved each other too much might react to being parted. He tore us accordingly. I went to my cage, and she — I did not know. All I knew was that before he installed me in my cage, he hobbled me at my ankles, like an animal you want to keep but don’t care to chase.

But just by my thinking of this story, the man’s face began to follow me. I could not say a word. To rid me of that face, I asked after Someone’s. If I could see hers, I thought, his would leave me.

“Were we identical?” I wondered aloud.

“The same,” Miri confessed.

“Where is she now?” I asked. I knew of the death marches. I’d heard about the tumult when the Soviets entered, the many lives that had been snuffed out. And there was the unspeakable — Mengele. My Someone was extraordinary — surely he had known this; perhaps he’d taken her? There were so many terrible things that could have happened that it seemed foolish to hope that a good one might arise, but still, I thought Miri might present me with one.

Miri did not speak to any of these possibilities. But in her eyes, there surfaced a sadness, a bright and mournful quiver that said I was the sole survivor of my family. And then, as if she were desperate to change the subject, she enlisted Peter to join her in the task of telling me about things that were in the world we were returning to.