Affinity Konar - Mischling

Miri listed places. Parks, she’d say. Open spaces where you could have a picnic, which was a meal taken outside. Museums, which were places with pictures and statues. Synagogues, places where you could assemble and study and pray. Peter focused on objects. Telescopes that showed you stars. Clocks that showed you time. Boats, which were vessels much like my wheelbarrow, but vessels that moved over water. Instruments, he said, and then added, as if this was supposed to have some meaning to me, pianos.

This was the second mention of this object. It did not have meaning to me. But he could repeat it all he wanted — I loved hearing Peter and Miri overexplain the world to me.

I could have corrected their overexplanations if I wanted to. But I did not, for good reasons.

For one, explaining the world gave them pleasure. For two, it made me whole.

I noticed, though, that neither attempted to explain a train station to me when we slunk onto an emptied platform that evening, Twins’ Father having decided that his little troop could go on no more. The other children slept, cocooned in rags, side by side, but I remained in my wheelbarrow, like an overgrown baby in a filthy cradle. Miri lay on the ground beside me, her hand raised to clutch the lip of the wheelbarrow even as she slept. The snores of my fellow children rose and fell, and I tried to pick out Peter’s snores from the rest, but another sound took priority.

The nightmares of Twins’ Father drifted past my ear as he defended himself in his sleep — who would be so foolish, he said, to create twins where there were none! Hearing his protest, I wondered if it was safe to dream, if there was any way to avoid this white-coated man as I slept. To make myself feel better, I renamed him. I called him No One.

“Good-bye, No One,” I whispered. But the ache in my hobbled feet claimed that he would be with me always, even if I ever managed to take a step.

Day Two

Though morning came, it did not bring a train with it. Yet again, the sun had let us down. On foot and by wheelbarrow, we continued. And on this day, we began to sing a little, but haltingly, and with much argument as to which song we might sing.

None of Twins’ Father’s songs were appropriate, as he was a military man. Miri’s songs were too serious and romantic and sorrowful. The only song we could agree on was “Raisins and Almonds,” because all welcomed the thought of food. The lullaby sank us into our memories as we trod forward, and I felt as if I were not in the wheelbarrow at all but in Mama’s lap. We sang:

Under Baby’s cradle in the night

Stands a goat so soft and snowy white

The goat will go to the market

To bring you wonderful treats

He’ll bring you raisins and almonds

Sleep, my little one, sleep.

On the third rendition of this song, we were swarmed by a dozen women, all of whom had been sitting against trees at the edge of a forest.

“Are you the last of Auschwitz?” a woman asked. “We are waiting for our children.” Her face fell. “Should we wait? Is there reason to wait any longer?”

“There are others still,” Twins’ Father said, his voice hesitant.

The woman nodded at this information, receiving it with a guarded excitement.

“Children among them?”

“There are bound to be some at the camp yet — the Red Army has control. With me, there is thirty-five.”

The woman was awed by this meager number; her face — I would never forget the wince of hope in it.

“Do you have a Hiram among yours? Little Russian boy.”

“I do!” Twins’ Father turned and addressed the crowd. “Hiram! To the front!”

A snippet of boy was pushed to the fore by the rest of the children. And then another small Hiram followed. The woman scanned both Hirams and then sank to her knees.

“Not mine,” she whispered. “Not mine.”

Everyone was too still for too long a time. It was as if all in our caravan were felled by the woman’s grief and silence, and we were able to stir only when she rose and shook the dust from her skirts. She turned to resume her post at the tree trunk.

“Children, they draw other children, you know,” Twins’ Father said to her. “They see their own kind passing by, and they feel safe. You should join us. Maybe they will see us and find you.”

“I leave a sign wherever I go,” the woman said. She pointed to the tree trunk she’d been leaning upon. I assumed that she’d carved her child’s name on it — I could not read it because the effects were indecipherable. Her knife must have been dull, her hand too shaky. “But it’s not enough. Who is to say that they will even try to read it?”

I wanted to reassure her that children in captivity tend to read all they can. I wanted to tell her that as I traveled in my wheelbarrow, I was desperate to see any words on the horizon, words that could blot out the words of the gate I’d left behind two days before. I wished that the carved names could compete with the gate’s power. I wished that they stood as upright and clear. Because the only fault with the woman’s carved message was that it was tired and faint; every letter announced resignation.

Twins’ Father was too good to critique the marks she left, as poor as they were, but he took his own knife and neatly reinscribed her message, and after he was finished with this task, he took up her pack and waved for her to join our procession.

“My friends,” she wondered. “What of them?” And he looked at the women who’d returned to their trees, all of them so varied in age and suffering, and indicated that they should join us too. All he asked, he said, was that they record their facts on his list, to facilitate his communication with any authorities who might question our passage.

The women sprang from the trees and it was then that we saw that each trunk they had leaned against bore a message, a name, a plea. They would have covered the whole forest with the words if they were able. The face of Twins’ Father — this had to be one of the few times I saw it become so overwhelmed with sadness while he was awake, outside the grip of one of his nightmares. But I watched him steady himself and pass about his list, and soon enough, the women fell to the rear of our march. They tried to mother us, and we did our best to resist their attentions politely.

We already had mothers, we wanted to say.

I thought of mine every second. I thought of her, and I begged her and Zayde to show me Someone’s face. But neither responded. Had death forced them to abandon me? Or were they now so worried for my future that they couldn’t bring themselves to rejoice in my survival? My fingers searched my face; they tried to know it so they could know Someone’s too, but all they found were wounds, and two eyes that had seen too much.

We walked beside swarms of refugees. Face after face, body after body, all of them alive and searching, and not a single one of them mine. Was who I searched for already dead? I asked the sun and the sun told me to ask the moon — it claimed that the moon had taken the responsibility of answering inquiries with ugly potential. The sun was quite squirmy on this issue, I thought. It turned its back on me. And then a darkness lowered itself onto my eyes. The darkness was Peter’s hand, attempting protection.

“Don’t look!” Peter instructed. He was pushing my wheelbarrow at the time. I shrugged off the shield of his touch. I wanted to see what he saw. It sounded like horror. And there it was—

The body lay up the road, in a ditch. It was not a whole body.

“I told you not to look,” Peter said.

“It is her,” I whispered.

“It will never be her,” Peter said. And to prove it, he defied Miri’s instructions and veered close to the ditch so that I could peer at this corpse.