Affinity Konar - Mischling

“My husband,” she murmured. “He didn’t survive three days in the ghetto. Shot in the street.”

I peered around the curtain’s edge. The room was dim, but Miri’s face was half bathed in lamplight.

“My sisters, both lost to me. Orli, dead, months after our arrival. Ibi, dispatched to the Puff. But before they were lost — he made me take their wombs myself.”

She looked to Jakub, as if awaiting a response. None came. Jakub bowed his head.

“Of course, mine was not spared either. But I could not mourn it. I was too busy mourning my children. My Noemi, my Daniel. How many times have I wished that they were closer in years so that I might have told Mengele they were twins? In my dreams, I close that gap of time between them, I make them passable as twins. But when I wake, I know this was impossible, and I console myself with this: at least my children will never know what their mother did in Auschwitz.” And here her voice began to slip away from her, as if it had become untethered from her thoughts.

Jakub tried to tell her that in a place where good wasn’t permitted to exist, she had nonetheless enabled it. In a place that asked her to be brutal, she brought only kindness, a comfort to the dying, a defiant hope that crept—

But she would not hear it. The mothers, she said — she’d tried to keep the mothers alive, that was the logic of her acts.

So many more would have died without you, Jakub insisted, but my guardian drew only bitterness from this, a bitterness that plunged her into the unspeakable.

“A pregnant Jewess,” she said. “Little offended him more. I told the mothers, ‘If you and your baby are discovered, you will not be shot; no, you will not go to the gas. Such ends are considered too gentle for you. If your pregnancy is known to Mengele, you will become research and entertainment both, he will take you to his table, and, with his instruments, he will dissect, bit by bit, he will push you toward death. And as he kills you, he will force you to watch your baby become his experiment. For Mengele, such savagery is a treasured opportunity — as soon as he learns of a pregnancy, he places bets with the guards about the gender of the child, and they plot its death accordingly. If it is a girl, they’ll say, we will throw her to the dogs. But if it is a boy, we will crush his skull beneath the wheels of a car. These are only some of the brutalities I can speak of. They are too innumerable and varied, so grotesque — I do not have the words. What I know for certain: the only true delivery he knows is that of misery. For every mother and child, he invents a new murder — in Auschwitz, one need not even be born to experience torture.’”

She closed her eyes as if to shroud the memory. But it would not be shrouded. Opening her eyes, she looked squarely at Jakub with the air of one who can only confess.

“So many times, to save a mother’s life — I had to act swiftly, on the floors of filthy barracks, with dull, rusty instruments, and nothing to ease her pain. Alone, I pulled the life from her — my hands bare, bloodied — and I told myself, through the mother’s screams, and my own, stifled tears, You are sparing this soul, this baby, the greatest of tortures. And when it was over — oh, it was never over! — but I would speak to the mother, I’d say, ‘Your child is dead, but look, you are strong, you still live, and now there will be a chance, someday, when the world welcomes us back into its wonder, you will have another.’ Each time I said this, it was not just for them — it was for me too. The grief was not mine, and yet all I knew was grief! So many little futures — I ended them before he could torment and end them, to enable other futures. And still, myself I cannot forgive.”

Miri’s hands fluttered to her face — she did not permit us to see her expression. But we knew she did not want her own future at all.

Jakub looked as if he had witnessed the events she’d described. His face grayed, as if struck by illness, and he struggled to compose himself. He tried to tell her that he knew what it could mean to save a life. That cost, he said, was unending, because in choosing who could be saved, he had also chosen who could not be saved. In failing these lives, he’d selected the color of these deaths, their scents, their violences. Every day, he murmured, he had to save his own life, even as he’d failed the most vibrant, dearest one, the one he’d wanted to save most.

And then he must have found himself unable to say anything at all, because he pulled the curtain back and led me to my guardian’s side. She would not look at me, but she drew me close, she held me tight, and as she wept, I wondered if anyone else, the whole world over, could boast a stronger embrace.

Out in the hall, I overheard the nurses approach Jakub. The cost, he repeated. I know it well. I am sure that you know others too, working as you do, I’m sure you see us, desperate to shake these matters from our minds, you see us try to live until we try to die, and when we can’t succeed at either, we try to coax ourselves toward death by trying to remember them, the ones we couldn’t save, and when we remember them too well, it is terrible, and when we remember them too little, it is worse—

Here, a nurse burst into the room, her eager step announcing an intent to distract me from the conversation in the hall.

This nurse saw my need. She took off my shoes and laid me down in Miri’s bed, so white and clean-sheeted, and there I pressed my cheek to my guardian’s. That bed suited us so well. I could have stayed there forever, stroking Miri’s hair and listening to the nurse’s stories and telling some of my own. But the nurse said that I would have to leave someday. It was not good for me, she claimed, to be so surrounded by pain, and we needed to find a place free of it that I could go to.

“A place like that is real?” I asked.

I was asking not for myself, but for Miri.

It is a particular madness, yes, to long for a cage, and for the sounds of isolation — rat-scratch, leak-drip, my fingertips drumming on the bars — but there, at least, I had some expectation of suffering. I could speculate reasonably about how I might feel pain and how I might be torn, how I could die in a flash, or slowly, bit by bit, in increments so small that I was unable to tell the difference between my life ending and my death beginning. In that space, I’d kept my hope fast. But in places like the hospital, with their white sheets and scrubbed floors and modest stores of food, I was suspended in a perpetual wait. Everything that was good, clean, and plentiful reminded me, once again, how swiftly I could be diminished, and without a single warning. I could be underfoot and powerless in mere seconds, and the anticipation of this made the struggle to remain seem utterly pointless. What work there is, I thought, in being a real person after death!

I wondered how being a real person might feel after leaving the hospital. I assumed that one of us would be leaving soon, as a nurse had given us a suitcase. I also assumed that this person would be me. I would never be ready, I confessed to the nurse after receiving this gift. Ever patient, the nurse explained — Miri was ill, she could not take care of me. Polite, I protested — it was I who would take care of Miri now.

The nurse was not convinced. She merely folded two pairs of socks and placed them neatly within the suitcase. Then she left me with that dreaded object.

How odd it was, to own a real suitcase. We had become a people of sacks invented out of threadbare jumpers or emptied potato bags. These were easily slung over the back and were well proven in their utility. But a proper suitcase! When I took it up by the handle, I felt surrounded. By people and by wall. I felt as if I were boxed in, dust-covered; sweat pooled at my ankles and my ears rang with shouts and a panic burned too bright in my chest. I dropped the suitcase at my feet like a hot piece of coal.