Affinity Konar - Mischling

I did not know if it was male or female. I had no notion of its age — it was faceless and scalpless, and someone had cut off its legs so as to repossess its boots. That’s what Peter told me when he saw that I refused to avert my gaze. He said that the Soviets had superior boots, and whenever the Wehrmacht found them, they took these boots for themselves in the most desecrating way possible.

“So, you see,” he assured me, “it can’t be your Someone. Your Someone would never have such boots.”

I tried to find comfort in this. I could not. Did this mean that Someone was out in this winter with thin shoes?

“Look ahead, only ahead!” Twins’ Father warned us.

“What does she look like?” I asked Peter as we left the body behind.

“She looked like you.”

“I don’t know what I look like.”

“I bet you look like your mother,” Peter said. “Do you remember what your mother looked like?”

I couldn’t remember, not really. I decided that this would be another question to save for the moon. Its approach was nearing. I would ask it at any moment, even though I suspected that its answer was the same for all of us: We looked like death, one person after another; we were whittled and drawn, our eyes had sunk into our skulls, and the features that had once defined us had fled. Whether we would live long enough to be returned to our true selves — this seemed the greater question, and it followed me until we found our next shelter.

That night, we came upon a stone structure in the woods. It was too small to be a house and too large to be a shack. Inside, there was a constellation of teeth on the floor, and four narrow beds of marble. These marble beds had lids too, but only one remained closed. The other three gaped with empty blackness.

“Tombs,” Twins’ Father said before thinking better of it.

This structure was meant to house the dead. But three tombs had been overturned. Whether their disruption was the work of a fellow refugee or a pillager seeking to rob corpses of finery, we couldn’t know. The yellow jawbone that had been tossed to the corner of the structure said nothing of this history. It sat, bereft of teeth, a silent, fossilized witness.

Though we were not its usual guests, this house of the dead did just as well to shelter the likes of us. Twins’ Father cleared the emptied tombs of leaves and debris. They could fit a pair of children each. Peter stretched out on the lid of the fourth tomb and yawned. From the cradle of my barrow at the open door I watched the moon rise, answerless. Outside, a light snow fell and shook, like tiny white fists in the sky.

Day Three

A train ambled us a mere three miles toward Krakow. I looked out the window and saw roads filled with refugees, farmers returning home, Red Army soldiers slinking to unknowns. The frosty fields were scarred with the tread of tanks, and then we found ourselves in some untouched place, a row of intact farmhouses, as blocky and white as sugar cubes. Just as these farmhouses appeared, the tracks ended. We were forced to pile out, and as soon as all were accounted for by Twins’ Father, we were confronted by a fierce pillar of a Soviet soldier, his face sweaty with enthusiasm.

“Pigs!” this soldier shouted. “Pigs!” He waved his arms about in a frightful manner. One of the arms held a long rifle. His face was gray and his eyes were like red-blue sores or loose buttons fallen from a coat. He kept repeating that word as our ragged troop advanced.

“Pigs!” he insisted. “Stop, pigs.”

Twins’ Father brought our procession to a halt. A rare fright overcame him — he looked as if he were about to fold in on himself and collapse. Have we come so far just to end like this? his face seemed to say. He began to approach the man with one hand outstretched, offering his list, which shook more in his grasp than any wind could shake it. But the soldier didn’t even pause to look at the many names; he just raised his rifle to his shoulder and took aim. Children ducked behind smaller children. Miri’s hands quivered atop the wheelbarrow handles. The eye of the soldier’s rifle was our sole focus. We stared it down until the shot rang out, a shot that veered to the left of the road.

A pair of massive hogs, spotty beasts round as barrels, their snouts white with foam, were hurtling toward us, full of grunts and confrontations. The soldier’s rifle struck them down, first at the forelegs, and then at the temples, and we watched their immense bodies sink to the snow with the moans and whimpers of tiny babies.

We were accustomed to blood-snow. The blood shouldn’t have shocked our troop. But the confrontation dislodged something within us, because many began to cry in that silent way that captivity had taught them. The children shuddered and quaked, and then Sophia, a tiny four-year-old known for her queenly stores of dignity, collapsed in an uncharacteristic heap and wailed for us all. The soldier gave her a confused look — shouldn’t a hungry girl be pleased by this bounty? He put down his gun, nodded at the kills in a self-congratulatory fashion, and shook Twins’ Father’s hand, and yes, we ate well that night, children and adults, without a thought to any law above the grumbles of our stomachs, but I could not forget the panic in those animals’ eyes, not even as I comforted my hunger with their flesh.

I did not want to have a memory at all, not then.

As dusk fell on that third night, a farmer called to us from the side of the road. We saw him first by his beard, which bannered whitely in a peaceful manner. He offered us the shelter of his barn, and as eager as Twins’ Father was for us to make our way to Krakow, which was rumored to be relatively intact, he could not pass up this offer, as his troops had begun to wilt. The Kleins moaned with every step, and the Borowskis complained of cold. Peter’s toes had thrust through his shoes.

Most pressingly, David Herschlag was bent with illness — the abundant meal of pig had overwhelmed the poor boy’s shrunken stomach. His skeletal body now bore a dangerous protrusion of abdomen, a belly so puffed that it looked to be filled with poison, and for the past ten miles, Twins’ Father had taken to carrying David himself. So while our leader was always cautious in his approach to the peasants, he accepted the farmer’s offer gladly.

We entered the sanctuary of a barn, occupied only by a speckled flock of chickens and their chicken smells and, here and there, a nest of eggs. It was warm and lively — a skinny rooster stalked to and fro and chased the busty hens. None of the chickens feared us because we still had the remains of the pigs to consume, and when our second hasty meal was finished — one that David could not take part in — Twins’ Father shuffled off to a corner of the barn and attempted a fitful sleep while Miri traveled from one child to another, wrapping bandages and soothing feet and tipping canteens into mouths.

After each round, she returned to David, who lay on the straw, colored with illness, his brow thick with sweat. She looked at me with alarm and asked Peter to help her make a bed for the boy. Peter built a sturdy nest, covered it with my woolen blanket, and deposited David within it like a precious egg. David’s face stirred with a smile — he stared up into the rafters at some sight we could not see, and Miri, she reprised “Raisins and Almonds.”

Sleep, my little one, sleep.

Like a bird, she leaned over this nest, and lullabied the boy into something resembling peace.

Day Four

In the morning, we woke to the sight of Twins’ Father kneeling. He bent down beside a form in the hay, and then he took up the form and shook it, as if he were trying to wake a person who refused to be roused. We could see, from the way Twins’ Father held the boy, that David was no longer David, but a body.