Affinity Konar - Mischling

“I don’t see a single Nazi among you,” he said to the gathering cumuli.

I said there was no time for this game. I promised that as soon as we found Mengele, we could rest and read the clouds. We didn’t even have to kill him right away, I reasoned. We could secure him in the tiger pen and take care of him later, to maximize our viciousness.

“I’m tired,” he claimed, and he did not move.

In all our travels, this was the first statement of weariness I’d heard. I’d seen Feliks struggle to walk, to lift his head, to open his eyes, to swallow a morsel of food — but never had he voiced his fatigue. This concerned me. I put a hand to his forehead, but he wrenched it away.

“We should sleep and look for him in the morning,” I said brightly. “It would be stupid for us to confront him when we are not at our best. Like your father the rabbi would say—”

“My father was never a rabbi,” he said dully. “I lied.”

He confessed this to me, but he said it to the clouds above.

“I forgive you,” I said. “I lie too. I lie all the time since Pearl left. Actually, that’s a lie — I lied before she was gone. I always have.”

This revelation did not bring him the comfort I thought it might. I watched a tear slip from his eye and plummet down the side of his face. He didn’t bother to wipe it away.

“I am the biggest liar of all,” he said. “My father was a drunk, a criminal, an indigent. We lived with him in graveyards, back alleys, anywhere we could find. He didn’t even survive the invasion. My mother — dead long ago. I don’t know how. My brother — after our father died, we went to live with a woman, a kind woman, she took us in—”

I told Feliks that he could stop. This was not a contest about who was the biggest liar. This was a contest about who could be the best killer of Josef Mengele, Angel of—

He sat bolt upright, mouth twisted with confrontation.

“Let me finish! We lived here in Warsaw. Behind this zoo, in fact. See that house there, so close? It was ours, once.”

I looked at the remains of the house, its insides exposed like the nest of a wasp. The sight of its skeleton laid everything bare. I thought of his odd familiarity with the city, the way the people nodded at him as he passed, how he knew the name of every street. I told Feliks that I forgave him, none of these falsehoods mattered. The one thing I didn’t understand was why he had acted as if this was a new place, as if he’d never been here before—

He did not look at me as he explained.

“I thought you’d love the zoo. I thought that once you saw the animals, you’d want to live again, and maybe you’d want to live with me. I thought — if you had that chance, that hope, it might even be possible for you to put this deathlessness aside. That ridiculous story he gave everyone! He told all of us that fib, you know. A bigger liar than myself!”

I don’t know what my face looked like but I’m sure it showed my foolishness. For so long, I’d hoped that others would forgive me my survival. Just a moment before, I’d believed that the years of children and mothers were in me, the minutes of violinists and farmers and professors, every refugee who never managed to return from the seething country that war had put them in. And now it had come down to this: not science or God or art or reason. Just a boy — a traitor, friend, brother — who wanted to show me a tiger.

“You know that it isn’t true? How could you believe it? Mengele told all of us, you know, every last — you were not the only one he put evil into.”

Hearing this, I put my spear down too. I dropped my sack of stones, which thudded on the ground with finality. The stones took my side in this matter. The stones cried out, they agreed with me that, yes, I’d been a fool, but Mengele thought I was special, Mengele singled me out, he said I was a rare girl, the only worthy one.

My friend’s mouth twisted with pity.

“If I had ever thought you believed that, Stasha—”

Seeing my distress, Feliks hurried to my side, and he went on to say that all I needed was a good night’s dreaming and then a new family, maybe an adopted family, and then a new country, complete with a future. The soothing nature of his voice only riled me. I covered my ears to protect them against the force of his good wishes, and I removed my hands only to reach down into my sack and pull out a stone. It careened past his ear, toward the carnage of his home.

His face? The sadness in it told me we had been family.

I reached again, threw stone after stone. I threw them not to strike but because I needed to no longer carry such burdens. I threw them into the remaining window shards of his house. The stones pleased me with their shatters. The last, in particular, sounded distinguished, almost musical in its destruction. I did not realize the reason for this until my target cried out in dismay.

“Your key!” Feliks shouted.

I looked into my sack. It was true, I had reached into its depths with a careless, raging hand and thrown Pearl’s piano key by mistake. Already Feliks was turning to run into the house to retrieve it, and I was at his back.

If Feliks felt the recognition of his old home as he entered, he did not say, but I watched him scan its insides warily from the doorway, I watched him step purposefully on a framed photograph that lay just beyond the threshold. I looked at the photograph, and a younger Feliks looked back at me. His twin looked back at me too. I could not tell how long before the boys were herded into Mengele’s Zoo this photograph had been taken. But though their young lives had never been prone to ease, it appeared that once, they had been immaculate; they grinned the same grins, these twins, their hair was parted in the same direction, and their eyes were wide and hopeful.

It was difficult for me to put that past down, but we had to move forward.

We found ourselves in a parlor with armchairs and sofas in disarray, all of it covered in a fine shower of concrete and crockery. The looters had searched the floorboards and pulled the china from the cupboards. The whole of this house was overturned and smashed, but its ruins were not pathetic in the way ruins can be — this place had struggled against those who came to overthrow it.

We climbed to the second floor, bolted up a staircase muddy with footprints, and found rooms aflutter with mosquito nets. They’d been suspended over every summer bed but the looters had ripped them and dragged them to the ground. This tulle, with its drapes and flounces, floated over the floors and furnishings, a ghostly blizzard. We sifted through this tulle foam for that white key; we bumped into this corner and that, and then Feliks stopped with a start.

“Did you hear that?”

I had not.

“A woman — crying,” he said. “Listen.”

And then it soared toward us like an invitation and we hesitated at a stair before bolting upward into the darkness.

“It’s coming from the parlor,” Feliks said. “And it sounds as if someone is hurt.”

The weeping increased. I felt so distant from my body while listening to it. I could swear that cry was familiar. It sounded like a cry I’d heard all my life, one that I had once dreaded hearing but now welcomed.

“It’s Pearl,” I said to Feliks.

And then, as if in confirmation, there was a crash, a startle, the sound of something falling across a set of piano keys. I pushed past Feliks and, without the aid of candlelight, picked my way over the shattered glass, the furniture outstretching its arms.

In the parlor, I saw the piano. It was intact. Feliks rushed toward it, blocking my view.

“Who is in my house?” he demanded.

We received only more cries. I noticed, then, that these cries had a womanly note; they drifted out of an experience I was quite unfamiliar with. As we neared the piano, I saw their source: a figure swaddled in blankets. I watched Feliks approach this figure, and then slow.