Affinity Konar - Mischling

A violet night was falling and we heard a clock ticking in the air, addressing us, telling us that we were running out of time. Two steps farther, I realized that this sound was only the pound of my heart, though the message remained the same. The ticks quickened when we rounded a corner and saw a Red Army soldier paring an apple with a nail file and leaning against a wall alongside a broom. I wondered if that broom was so young that it had only the experience of sweeping ash and rubble. The soldier was so airy and nonchalant that I assumed everything had ended.

“You have captured him already?” I asked.

The soldier peered at me over his nail file.

“Hitler?” he wondered.

“Not him,” I said. “The other him. The Angel of Death — have you found him?”

“I don’t understand the question,” he said. “Your Russian — very poor.”

I knew that he understood well enough. But I pantomimed so that he could claim no excuse for not answering; I pretended as if we were playing the Classification of Living Things.

With my hands, I tried to depict a person born to German industrialists and affectionately known as Beppo. This was easy enough to convey. I stood on tiptoe and made myself look vast; I twirled a mustache, plucked a hair from it, and popped it into my mouth to approximate Mengele’s nasty habit. Also easy to get across was the fact of his doctorhood. I swung the white wings of an invisible coat about; I plunged a needle, removed an organ, sewed children together, and caged a Lilliput. More difficult, however, was the degree of his evils. This I was unable to communicate in all its lowdown fullness, its beastly disrespect for all living creatures and their variety.

Yes, I failed at this as badly as I had failed in my cattle-car portrayal of an amoeba.

So I wasn’t surprised when the soldier shook his head in confusion. I begged his forgiveness about the complicated message. I tried again. I left nothing out. The experiments, the shared pain, the Zoo, the days, the nights, the smell. All the dead tossed to the mud banks of the latrines. I did my best, but I realized that those who had not seen what we’d seen would never truly understand.

The soldier didn’t understand. So I took another approach. Realizing that Mengele was a man that could become fully known only through his victims, I began to list them all in the dust. I wrote all the names that I knew. I wrote Pearl’s. I wrote mine too, and then I crossed it out. The soldier bent to inspect the names, shrugged, gave Feliks his half-eaten apple, and then stalked off into the rubble chasing the vision of a pretty girl who’d begun to hang her wash on the ruins of a butcher shop.

“You didn’t even try to help,” I said.

“Not true,” Feliks said through a mouthful of apple. “I stood by your side the whole time.”

I told him I was beginning to think that he didn’t want any outside assistance.

“You are right,” he confessed. “I want it to be you and me, no one else. We are the only ones entitled to kill him.”

For once, I could not argue. And we walked on in our quest, picking our way through these ruins. Men were crawling out from holes, puffs of dust and soot haloing their heads. Faces were covered with soot and ash and dust, but beneath these layers, determination peeked. They were singing to the city, these people, trucking their wheelbarrows to and fro. Children perched on fallen stoops with buckets. Cats surveyed the efforts with suspicion and made sudden moves to escape stew pots. Mugwort hung on the remaining houses, warding off traditional evils.

Feliks had a strange familiarity with this place, or as much familiarity as one can have with a city that has fallen. He’d had an auntie here once, he claimed, and so he knew the streets, and he took me through what remained of them. We found tattered clothing to replace our burlap bags, ragged socks and mismatched shoes for our feet. We inquired about the zoo to any who would pause to answer us. The inquiry always put people into fits of headshaking. We used to love the shriek of the cormorants, they’d say. We used to admire the canter of the zebras. And our downcast eyes told us that we would know this zoo by its destruction.

We came upon signs. The signs told of lives that should have been, lives that had burst or been diminished, lives that had wandered into the forest. Here, an aviary stripped of its feathers. There, the elephant house with its emptied swimming pools. Over there, in the middle of the green, tigers should have familied themselves into magnificence. Peacocks should have glinted, geese should have gaggled, apes mocked monkeys. The lynx should have given chase.

But where the grandeur of the animal kingdom should have made itself known, there was only scatter — an upturned moat, tufts of fur clinging to bars wrenched wide. The pheasant house fluttered with pages torn from a book; tourist maps clung to the mud. The polar bear’s pool hid beneath a blanket of scum and moss. The only pride in the lions’ house was now a litter of shells. In the monkey habitat, rope swings hung freely, ungripped by primate hands, suggestive only of the noose.

I traced my finger around the print of a hoof, laid myself beside it in the mud. Did anyone ever truly manage escape? The hoofprint did not seem to think so.

I’d come for Mengele, yes. But I’d hoped for life too. I hadn’t known this, though, till I saw nothing of it.

To the left of the hoofprint, I spied a small mound of earth, a fresh heap of soil capping the ground. I turned over the soil and plunged my hand in. What did I expect to find at the bottom of this tunnel? My hand dreamed of discovering another hand; it wanted to find my sister sitting in a patient vigil beneath Warsaw’s mud. But my fingers struck tin instead, and I smuggled out a glass jar populated with names.

I spilled its contents over the ground like seed, little slips of yellowed paper. There was Alexander and Nora. There was Moishe and Samuel and Beryl. Agathe, Jan, Rina, Seidel, Bartholomew, Elisha, Chaya, Israel. Not a Pearl among them. Feliks looked at the names and mourned. I was glad he did, because I didn’t have any mourning to spare. We couldn’t have known then that the names belonged to the children smuggled by the Jewish underground, children who had been assigned new identities and homes and faces, children who sank their selves into objects — a bolt of fabric, a pile of medicine, a slew of bottles — children who lived in their mother’s skirts, beneath floorboards, under beds, behind false walls, so that they might someday rejoin life. But instinctually, he knew enough to sweep up these names with his hand and bury the jar again, admonishing me all the while for disrupting their hibernation.

We crept through the habitats; we asked ourselves where a Mengele might lurk.

I wondered if he’d learned the art of camouflage, taken a suggestion from some animal at the zoo, an innocent that believed, as I had, that goodness could be found within him. Chameleons could be optimistic like that. But Mengele — he’d think too highly of himself to blend with stone, dust, earth. Still, with every step, I expected him to leap up beneath our feet, to bolt from an underground hiding place. I couldn’t be too cautious. I kept one hand fishing about in my sack of stones and readied the other with foul gestures.

“Check the trees,” I whispered.

But Feliks was not interested in my instruction. He threw his makeshift spear into a copse of birches and shrugged. He considered his sack of stones, and then laid the stones down, one by one, as gently as if he were handling birds’ eggs. Then he sank to the ground and let the wind play over his face as he stared into the evening sky above, with all its dusky drifts of clouds, and with an odd air of resignation he played the game we’d played so long ago, on the soccer field.