Affinity Konar - Mischling

“Zvi,” Miri said. “You will frighten them.” But she herself was undone by the loss. And Twins’ Father would not lay him to rest. The boy appeared changed. I recognized him only by what killed him — the stomach that rose like a hill.

Miri put a hand to the man’s shoulder; she tried to soothe him, but he would not be comforted. He fell to plucking feathers out of the still boy’s hair, and he spoke as if he’d forgotten his troop entirely, as if the dead alone could hear him.

“I must have made at least a dozen sets of false twins,” he said. He glanced at Miri for confirmation.

“Nineteen,” she said quietly. “You made nineteen sets.”

“Nineteen,” Twins’ Father repeated. “But David — and Aron — they were the first.” Miri nodded as she removed her coat. She tried to cover the boy with it, but Twins’ Father wouldn’t loosen his hold on David.

“In the beginning, they had trouble with it — the lie. They were so young — only four and five years of age. And my Dutch is very poor — they spoke no other language — it was difficult to explain to them what I needed. But every morning, before roll call, I would remind them: You are twins! And I made them repeat, over and over again, the birthdate I fabricated for them, and the fact that Aron came first, and David second. The difference between them — I shrank a year into five minutes!”

He ran a finger over the bridge of the boy’s freckled nose, in the manner of Mengele during one of his counts.

And this is where I tried not to listen to Twins’ Father. I couldn’t bear to hear him speak of the longing he’d had to be found out. How often, Twins’ Father wept, had he wanted to corner Mengele in the laboratory and reveal, with a hiss, that the doctor’s research had been tampered with, that his studies were jokes, idiocy easily undone by the lies of juveniles! He acknowledged that Mengele would have shot him on the spot. But it would have been better, he claimed, to die like that than to be doomed to save children only to watch them end like this.

Miri’s face blanched and she tried to shoo us out. Her voice took on an odd pitch as she told us that we should go see if there were any chores we could do for the farmer. Not a peep arose from us. Even the chickens hushed. I tried to trace a path from the still-open eyes of the dead boy to the rafters above. What had he seen as he left us? I had never been dead, but I’d neared it enough to know that it was likely he had focused on that tiny fissure in the barn’s ceiling, a crack just wide enough to accommodate the remote brilliance of a star.

“No need to lie to them,” Twins’ Father said stonily with a sudden, forced composure. The soldier in him had returned. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and straightened the collar of David’s torn sweater. “Let them say good-bye.”

And so it was that we gathered around the little boy who had been felled by the food he’d long been denied. His face was not peaceful. Twins’ Father gathered David into his arms and carried him out to the pasture, past all the frostbitten knots of fallow things, and though the soil was wintered and hard, it opened up to receive him. We filed past the brief grave, each bearing a stone.

But the farmer’s wife interrupted our procession with her own ritual. She scattered poppy seeds on the grave. To feed the dead that come back disguised as birds, she said. I watched the poppy seeds turn in midair and settle in the ice. I didn’t know why those seeds felt so dear to me, but I was lessened by the sight of their dark scatter. Already, the smallness of their lives were cold and stunted, and no sooner had our backs turned to depart than I heard the flap of a bird’s wings slice the air, too eager to seize upon the abundance wrought by David’s death.

In the bed of the farmer’s truck, the troop propped themselves against the wooden slats. Red-eyed, Twins’ Father surveyed us and consulted his list, dragging his finger down the weathered paper.

We waved good-bye to the farmer’s wife, who stood with the bag of poppy seeds at her side, and to the six mothers, who had decided to linger at the farm, convinced that their children were mere steps behind even as the rest of their group had fractured, each of them wandering off on her own desperate quest. Yet still they searched the faces in the back of the truck, as if they had yet to accept that their loved ones were not among us.

Then the truck roared to life, a horn honked, and as we trundled off toward Krakow, I heard Miri say David’s name into the wind — she said it softly, as if he could hear her where he lay, so deaf and cold beneath the earth.

“Forgive me!” I heard her whisper.

Miri’s plea was puzzling — she was not responsible for David’s death. She had cared for him to the end. But as mysterious as it was, it struck something inside of me.

The whole world might be obsessed with revenge.

But for my part — I knew I wanted to forgive. My tormentor would never ask for my forgiveness — this was certain — but I knew it might be the only true power I had left, a means to spare myself his grasp, the one that I felt close on me every morning when I woke. And if I could do this, if I took on this duty of forgiveness — maybe my Someone would return to me. Or at least maybe I would stop seeing my Someone’s face on every refugee we passed, the dead and the living both.

Horse uplifted us. Mile after mile, we burdened this bony hero. In witnessing his enduring gallop, so unlikely for such a hungry animal, one could only believe that he, too, longed for the holy murder of Josef Mengele. But Warsaw would not be easily reached.

After four days of travel, we encountered roads thick with tanks and found ourselves turned about, choiceless, and pressed into Poznan. This had been Zayde’s city; he had taught at the university. Poznan, he liked to declare, was a jewel of scholarly devotion, a maker of great minds, of believers of art. But violence seemed the only lesson we might learn here now. The Wehrmacht stalked through the city, its streets silent but for the warning rattle of their gunfire and the echoes of their songs, rowdy bits of verse that surfaced as they braced themselves for the Russian advance.

Fearing that these soldiers might tire of their music and seek to amuse themselves with the torture of Horse and two refugees, we undertook the utmost stealth in our passage. Feliks took custody of our sacks, and I led Horse by his bridle. Ducking down a street, its lampposts strewn about like uprooted weeds, we found our path interrupted not by a menace of gray uniforms but by a beggar whose palm fell open at the sight of us.

That anyone might see us as prosperous enough to approach for food or coins seemed a wonder. But we decided to strike a deal. Some bread for the date, Feliks offered.

“February,” said the beggar. He said it could be the third day, it could be the fourth. I wanted to ask for our heel of bread back. “All you need to really know is that the Russians are coming. Leave now. This is my advice. And look,” he continued, biting into the bread. “I am not even charging you extra for this wisdom!” Having imparted this information, he limped off into the evening, leaving us to wonder at the sight that loomed behind us.

There it was, the old museum: a collapse of walls, a shudder of brick, a stagger of columns. The remaining windows were pocked and rent, glassy veils. The grand doors had fallen in surrender, and through the jagged entrances in the facade, I glimpsed the museum’s devastated interior. It appeared as if there was nothing to see but ruin. But when I looked still further, into my own memory, I saw the museum restored, its halls traversed by Zayde and Pearl while I lagged behind. I could see my seven-year-old sister pause on tiptoe before a painting while Zayde taught her what perspective meant.