Affinity Konar - Mischling

I dwelled on fish. I thought about species first, then genus, and then I reached the third classification, the one I truly wanted.

Family was my first thought.

But even family ends was my second. It was not a thought I wanted. I assured myself that Miri would continue to live simply because I needed her to — but when she would not shift her gaze from the thirty-two injurious reminders of all she’d lost, I recognized that she would end her world if I did not act — this possibility, it made me forget my crutches, and I stumbled forth for help. Desperation alone carried me, two steps, then three, and then I fell and cried out to the city, I cried for all of Krakow to hear.

Here and there, lost, upended things: a bird’s nest on a puddle of ice, shattered spectacles on a locket dangling from a fencepost. I opened that locket. One half held a lock of hair, the other rust. I knew how that half felt. I felt that way whenever I looked at the tree trunks and saw those many names, all of them loved and searched for, and mine not among them.

The beggars here were certain it was February 11, 1945. They wanted no payment.

We were in Wieliczka, just outside of Krakow, according to the signs I no longer trusted. Like many a place, we never should have been there at all. Leaving Poznan, we found the roads obscured by tanks, interrupting our path to Warsaw. Whether they were Russian or German, not one of us could tell; the darkness carried too much risk. We told ourselves that the roads would clear in only a moment, any moment, but we rode on Horse’s back as we waited, and soon enough, our waiting turned into wandering.

Horse was annoyed; he did not care for the circuitous nature of our travels. Feliks accused me of stalling. While I was usually eager to accept blame, I could not fault myself for this. In all three of us, I knew, there had arisen a hesitation. Our fragile army couldn’t possibly be up to such a task. Defeating Mengele! Even my new pistol had taken to mocking me, and its bullets chorused in terrible agreement.

My aim will never be true enough, the pistol said. My aim will never be sweet or accurate or good.

But you have your bullets, I pointed out. You are not alone. And you have me besides. We are family, all of us. See how much Feliks and I have accomplished already, as brother and sister?

What does it matter? the bullets murmured to one another. Stasha’s rotten eye has made her aim rot too — she is bound to miss. I wanted to tell the bullets that they couldn’t think this way, they couldn’t question me, they had to dream themselves into the heart or the head of our enemy.

Hearing this, the bullets snorted. Pistol remarked on the presence of smoke in a manner of turning the conversation.

The smoke over the city smelled as smoke should — a tang of pine, a touch of balsam. The threads of it didn’t write out a welcome, but they weren’t the red furies of Auschwitz either. Still, there was evidence that our kind had been endangered there in the days that the Wehrmacht ruled. We stumbled over this evidence while rooting for a place to sleep.

Why had no one defended it? Or had its defenders been overcome? This wooden synagogue — I could only imagine the flames it had seen. I am not sure that we would have known our shelter to be a synagogue at all if it were not for the singed parochet —the curtain of the ark; blue velvet, its lions smote by soot, its Torah crown still agleam — that lay in the snow some feet away, as if it had managed to flee the pillage under its own power. When Feliks saw the parochet, he said not a thing, he didn’t even say what his father the rabbi would have said, but he stooped and kissed it and he draped it over a singed post in the midst of the collapse to protect it from the earth. But the parochet fell once more, leaving us with no choice but to carry its sacred length with us.

Fallen rafters black as pitch thatched themselves across a floor that shimmered with broken glass. A corner of this structure remained intact, and it was into its shelter that we retreated, hitching Horse to a charred birch at the perimeter. Horse looked as if he could restore the synagogue to its former glory with his beauty alone. Though the protrusions of his ribs upheld their prominence, so, too, did the black spark of his eye, which he fixed on us with a vigilant stare, and whenever the slightest sound arose on the wind, his ears shifted with worry. In the sweet protection of Horse’s observance, we were comforted.

We huddled together beneath the blue velvet and guarded ourselves. If one were to look in our distant direction, all he might see was a thatchery of torched wood, a luminescing horse shifting from foot to foot, and the briefest field of azure that was our parochet . It felt as if no harm could ever come to us. I was about to ask Feliks what his father would think of us using the parochet as a blanket, if he would praise our endurance or curse us for blasphemy, but already, he was fast asleep.

And so it was decided that Horse and me would keep watch. Feliks snored while we counted stars to stay awake. There were too few that night to outpace my thoughts, so I expanded on the usual by giving them names, and then futures. I gave them futures in all sorts of places that I’d never seen, and when these futures were complete, I took them away, because why should a star have a future when Pearl did not?

Eventually, the watchfulness of Horse’s eye convinced me that it was safe to sleep.

A simple belief, the kind I needed.

I would like to say that although we woke to find Horse gone, nothing else was amiss, but more than his absence struck us in the morning. Where our pale hero should have stood, nodding his head while sleepily rousing, a red ribbon began. This trail of blood wove itself around the ruins and escaped across the field like a loose serpent, and we followed its path, all the stops and starts of it, for half a mile, until it flurried to finale before the arch of a stony-mouthed tunnel. Into the ensuing darkness, we peered.

“It continues,” Feliks said. I was not sure if he was referring to pain or to the red path. He caught me by the arm and made an attempt to hold me back, but his grip was not earnest. He wanted answers as much as I did. We didn’t care that it was to take place in the depths of a salt mine, that we were to follow a red path neither narrow nor straight into a briny underground, a place beneath the earth that seemed most hospitable to evil.

We were both blinded, I think, by this bloody ribbon that stretched before us, or, rather, we were blinded by what it might mean to our many losses. I took it as a message even as it was leading me toward horror. I knew I would not find my sister alive, I knew violence had seized Horse, but I thought perhaps I was being led toward understanding and restoration. How could I not think that while surrounded by such beauty?

Because the entry of this salt mine — imagine stepping into the tilted entry of a lily; consider slipping into coils of white, luminous beyond compare. Following the mine’s wooden staircase, we turned into one gleaming corridor after another; we dead-ended ourselves in tiny cells strewn with tinsel; we stumbled into frosted dens of sodium that hosted flutteries of bats. Through these subterranean halls, we walked in witness to awe at the core of our world.

But even awe bottoms out. At the end of the wooden staircase, we saw that the lily that we traveled in held some nectar that had attracted an army of ants. The soldiers were all so alike in their uniforms and their misery. One would think, after all their crimes, that some godly, glowering hand might descend from the ceiling and lay them out, one by one, like gray dominoes. But no hand descended. Even if it had, it was far too late for Horse.