Affinity Konar - Mischling

You see, the pill the avengers left me with, the poison intended for Mengele that I’d carried in my mouth out of the depths of the salt mine — it was secured in my sock. It took every step with me, whispering all the while into my ankle, which just so happened to carry nerves and veins that sided with my heart. This poison wasn’t the bully I’d expected it to be but a strange comfort, a modern invention that knew my pain. It was wiser than I was; its chemicals had passed over the earth for centuries, and it was a well-traveled substance, practiced in human dismissal. From time to time, it tried to escape my ragged sock, but I only pushed it back and kept walking. The distance between myself and the orphanage was growing ever shorter, and I wanted to appreciate the walk because, though the city was gray and rubbled, it was the last city I’d see, and so I saw all I could — the old woman blowing dust from her photographs, the children collecting husks of bullets in a heap, the shop window full of stopped clocks and my reflection.

I pretended that the clocks had stopped for Pearl and me. I had failed at protecting her in life, but there was a chance, I believed, of finding her in death. She would want it that way, I told myself, and not just because she wanted to see me. Pearl would want me to die because she knew me, she knew how intolerable it was to my spirit that Mengele would escape unavenged, wholly beyond my desperate reach, my every wish for justice. Even if I was never reunited with her — I could not live with that failure.

And if there was a life for us beyond this death, we could embark on a new set of tasks and divisions.

Pearl could take the hope that the world would never forget what it had done to us.

I could take the belief that it would never happen again.

No one would know us as mischlinge. In that life, there would be no need for such a word.

And then I came to my destination. A red mitten was impaled on the iron gate, like a pierced heart. The paving stones before the remaining walls of the orphanage were upturned, the earthworms were surfacing in the exposed soil, the rosebushes were showing their roots, and the thorns were pointing the way to the iron knocker on the red door, a bold but tarnished lion. I wiped the dew from the doormat and laid Baby down upon it. I was no savage — I was careful to keep it wrapped in the blanket that had belonged to its mother. Baby appeared content — there were coos, a pleased thrashing of fist. I placed its thumb in its mouth. It was the least that I could do, I thought, though it began to wail a moment later. I started to leave, and I would’ve done so quickly, I would’ve passed through the gate and headed down the street to take my poison pill in a quiet corner, but I did not look where I was going and I collided with a man. He was coatless; his clothes were ragged, and his shoes were in pieces. He had no face — at least, none that I could see, because he held a Soviet newspaper before his head. The print shrieked across the front page. I begged his pardon. He begged mine. Or he almost did. For some reason, he stopped short in his apology. Then he clutched my numbered arm, and the paper fell at my feet.

There, on that front page, was a face I knew better than any other. It floated in a sea of other faces, behind the barbs of a captivity I knew too well.

From above, a drop descended to the page, threatening to blot the face out. Thinking it rain, I snatched the paper from the ground, and that’s when I heard the crying.

You might wonder how I could recognize a man by his crying when I’d never, in all the years we’d spent together, heard him cry. Laughter had been his chosen sound, and shouts of frustration largely featured too in those last days before his disappearance, when he was trying to negotiate with the other men of the ghetto, all of them so interested in doing good, and all of them bearing conflicting ideas as to how to achieve it. But there, at the steps of the orphanage, it was his cry that solved our long separation.

“You are alive” was all I could say.

My father held me close. He sobbed. His sobs should have made him still stranger to me, but instead, they reintroduced a man who knew what it meant to search and press on, to ignore all doubts that wanted so badly to diminish him. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this — Papa was never good at doubting, not for as long as Pearl and I had known him. And now, in our father’s eyes, there was all the good I’d ever known, and there was good to come; there were days to see and stories to hear and weapons to abandon. From his threshold, nestled in his basket, Baby went quiet, so quiet, as he observed our reunion. They say the newly born see nothing. They are wrong. I can testify to this fact because in my own way, within Papa’s clasp, I was newly born too.

When I saw Papa, the world rolled on for me. In seeing his face, so changed, I felt found by luck, by miracles. All became awe, and rain fell to join our tears. How strange, I thought, that rain remains rain after what we’ve endured! Some things were unchanged; this was proof. Another unchanged thing: my father lived, and as he pressed me to his chest, I could still hear his heart! It did not know quite what to say.

Papa was similarly speechless. He stroked my face with a bandaged hand, a hand that still knew, through its tribulations, Pearl’s face as well as my own. When he tweaked the tip of my nose, I could not help but join him in his tears.

And through these tears, I tried to tell him that Zayde was dead, but all I could say was Please, Papa, bend so I can see your face, a leaf is caught in your beard.

I tried to tell him that Mama was dead, but I just said, Mama, Mama.

I tried to tell him that Pearl, our Pearl, my Pearl — he made me stop speaking, and he drew me even closer. I could feel his lips move against my scalp as he spoke.

“I am so happy to find you,” he said. “The article said that the children are scattered all over. Displacement camps, mostly. Some orphanages. Gross-Rosen. Mauthausen. I have been traveling for weeks, one stopped train after another — I thought I might locate someone with information in Lodz, but I found myself in Warsaw. How could it be that I would discover you here?”

Papa laughed and I thought I heard Baby laugh too, in his newborn way. I couldn’t laugh with them. I was too busy looking at the photograph in the newspaper that my father now clutched with one hand.

“That is not me,” I said.

I said it not only to my father but to my sister’s face, which peered out from the photograph, a look of capture in her eyes even as she floated above the place that tormented her, cradled in the arms of one of our few protectors.

“I thought it was you,” Papa said. “The expression — it is yours.” My father could not stop shaking, and yet he did not know how to move; we stood there, before the door of the orphanage, experiencing a joy so many would not.

“I didn’t hear you, Papa,” I whispered. “I am half deaf now.”

It was a lie, somewhat. I just wanted to hear him say those words again. But there was no need to draw this phrase out of him. He was too eager to repeat his joy, to hold me close.

“I thought it was you,” Papa said, and he increased the clasp of his arms around me so that I could hear his heart acknowledge our loss even as his voice refused to. “Look at the expression,” he whispered. And this is where he crushed me, where he drew me so tight that I could not breathe. He held me so close I felt my ribs crowd toward each other, but curiously, there was no pain at all, and I wasn’t the least bit worried about the potential suffocation of his embrace. My father was a good doctor, and he could do my breathing for me in a pinch, maybe not as good as Pearl could breathe for me, but I was beginning to think that, when I saw her—