Affinity Konar - Mischling

I looked at Feliks and I looked at the soldier, and I’ll confess to this madness — for a minute I thought I saw not the deserter but the doctor, the Angel of Death, standing there, the evils of his experiments so great that he could no longer live on the surface of the earth.

I wish I could blame this on the depths of the salt mine, whose dimensions were known to make people see ghosts and specters and illusions of all kinds. But the fault was with me. I wish, too, that I alone were visited by such a delusion, but so many, year after year, decade after decade, would find themselves followed by this same face. They wouldn’t be children anymore and they wouldn’t be prisoners either, but always, there would be the sense of his gaze, the prospect of his inspection. How many ways might he disguise himself? we’d wonder. And the world would look at us as if we were mad.

There in the salt mine, I was so sure that I saw him.

And the illusion shattered only when I took in the circularity of Feliks’s injury. Mengele would not hurt us like that; he had more profitable and efficient ways to damage us. His brutality was too studious and elegant to leave Feliks bleeding from the shoulder, such a coarse and ineffective wound that contributed nothing to the advancement of his science.

The soldier took aim once more, but already we were fleeing; we tripped up the stairs, our speed quickened by the fact that the soldier who was following us appeared to be nearly blind with spite as he stumbled upon the stairs. I saw his boot slip and his face strike the wooden slats, and I paused too long to study his stupor and his tumble, his body thudding like a toy as it fell. It was as if I believed that in watching the descent of our enemy, all could be reversed — the trains would change direction on their tracks, the numbers would erase themselves, the point of the needle would never know my vein.

Even with a flesh wound, my friend was faster than I; he knew enough to lean his stunned body into mine as we fled up the stairs, he knew that I needed more to urge me on from the death of Horse. Yet again, they had killed a loved one, they had robbed us, left us defenseless. I felt no victory in evading that grasp. I could hardly see the point in continuing. If that poison pill would have ended me, I would have swallowed it with joy.

“Look,” Feliks said with a gasp, and he lifted a tremulous finger to the sky. A dozen people were falling from it. We didn’t know if they were friend or foe, but they had the clouds of a waning winter at their backs. My friend had the gleam of a bullet burrow at his shoulder, and yet this is what he saw. I watched his pained face marvel at their flight — the drifting freedom of it — and long for the same.

But what we had, it was only on this troubled and accursed soil. I had the poison pill in the pocket between my teeth and jaw, still intact and full of promise. The rest that we’d collected in our quest — gone.

Farewell, Horse. Our beloved. You were more innocent than Pearl on the day we were born. You were better than the best parts of us. You were who I wished the world could be.

Farewell, hatchet and pistol and three precious knives. You were fiercer and deadlier and sharper than I could ever be.

So long, fur coats. Farewell, Bear. Farewell, Jackal. You made us fearsome and possible, you vaunted us into the Classification of Living Things in a performance that I could not execute alone. In you, we became predatory in the way a survivor sometimes needs to be.

So stripped, I pressed forward in the snow, my friend draped across my side, and I dragged him toward the mercy of a row of cottages in the distance; we stumbled forth, hoping for relief, for someone to dress our nakedness and heal our wounds, while men parachuted above, so light and free. I shook my fist at them in envy. I gave them a reckless cry, not caring who might hear me and repossess my body once more. It had been taken from Pearl and me so many times already, I could not care anymore.

“Stasha,” Feliks begged, “I see that you will die soon if you continue this way.”

It was prophecy, warning, love.

Oh, that I could be a girl who needed to heed it!

From our window at the hospital, I saw them, adrift in the sky like the spores of a dandelion. Parachutists — I counted twelve in number, afloat through our evening, on the edge of Krakow.

“Do you know who they are?” I asked Miri. I turned from the window and maneuvered my crutches so I could face her. I asked her who the parachutists were coming for, why they used that method. Miri said it was hard enough to tell, even up close, if someone had good intentions, but she’d been told that many in the Jewish underground used this method of travel in the transport of goods and secrets and weapons.

I did not get to watch the parachutists land — they floated down to a location beyond my eye’s reach — but three days later, I would see a reconfiguration of the white silks that had bloomed above them, their soft lengths having fallen into the hands of a seamstress. Now, a bride glided down the streets; she drifted across the cobblestones toward the chuppah in this ruched wartime splendor, the parachute silks draped into a filmy bodice, the train wisping behind her like mist. The two mothers joined her; they led her beneath the lace. If you put your head out the window, you could hear the celebration. The bride circling the groom. The seven blessings. A shatter of glass sang out.

“There are weddings still?” I said in awe.

Miri rose from her bed and came to the open window to watch with me, to cock her ear and listen. She put her arm around me.

“There are weddings still,” she said, a catch in her voice. “And I don’t know why I am so surprised.”

One ceremony, and then another.

In the abandoned house, when I had thought Miri was leaving the world, I’d felt as if I were in a different kind of cage. My hands didn’t work and my vision blurred. All became distant and impossible. I didn’t even consider my crutches as I stumbled out to the street in search of help. My voice moved far better than I could, and my cries drew the neighbors from their homes. Jakub, the giver of onions, our Krakow host, was among them. His was the only face I knew and trusted. I pointed to the open door and watched as he dashed inside.

I knew he would carry her out. But I didn’t want to see her state. I didn’t look. Not even as Jakub put Miri in an ambulance and placed me beside her. I did not open my eyes until we came to the hospital. I saw her look away from the nurses and the patients both — though they’d seen many with her affliction, she remained ashamed of it, and her shame did not lift as she was tended to and her vitals were taken and she was given a bed. She refused to lie in that bed; she just perched on the edge and studied the curtain that divided the room, and there she remained until a nurse showed Jakub inside.

His entrance was unusually formal; he gave a little bow at the door — it was as if he thought an extreme politesse might conceal his worry, though from my perspective, it only announced an attachment to the doctor. He looked about the room as if he’d never seen the inside of a hospital before, and then he asked me to give them some privacy. I did, in a way. I ducked behind the curtain that divided the room, and there, behind its cover, I still heard everything.

Jakub drew a chair next to the hospital bed and sat beside Miri’s hunched form. He did not sigh or speak; he didn’t even whisper. In his silence, there was a loss, a too-bright and borderless thing, a loss that understood: the survivor’s hour is different from any other; its every minute answers to a history that won’t be changed or restored or made bearable. Recognizing Jakub’s loss, Miri spoke of her own.