Affinity Konar - Mischling

I wanted to ask Papa how he could be sure of this, but I didn’t want to admit my uncertainty. So I pinched Feliks. He asked for me. Papa was unnerved by this connection that thrummed between us but he answered all the same.

“I saw it in his face,” he said. “The curses were merely blessings in disguise. He meant for me to take up those potatoes and live.”

He pulled on the end of his nose, as he always had in a thoughtful moment, and then he sank his head into his hands so I was forced to study the new seam that wound itself over his face and scalp.

“I know that Mengele’s curse — there was no good intention in it, not at all. But I just want to say that you were not wrong to take that fool’s curse — with all his lies and manipulations — and twist it so that you could survive by it. Understand?”

I did. And I lied and told my father that I would take comfort in his cursed-vegetable story. I know that he did. Because when Papa died many years later, eyes shrouded in illness, stretched out on his bed, Feliks and I saw him raise his hands in the air as if trying to catch an object. His fingers lifted with a strange urgency, unnatural to any deathbed, and we watched his sightless eyes dart back and forth, following the holy path of a potato in flight.

Papa did his best to restore us, but we knew soon enough that he was broken too. He went to Lodz alone, as he was worried about what he might find there. When he returned, he shook his head for days. We sought out the company of other refugees in Warsaw, every last one so hungry for reunion.

“Have you seen Pearl?” Papa would ask, pushing me forward.

None had.

Papa admired the resurrection of Warsaw and said that he would stay to rebuild Feliks’s house with him. But though Papa was a man of skill, his hands weren’t suited to the task of mending rooms and righting walls. They were accustomed to the diagnosis, the wound tinkering, the application of cures. And while Feliks was swell with a hatchet, a knife, a gun, and could spin a lie to live in just as well as I could, mending a house was not among his gifts. Still, both were determined to rebuild, to follow the city’s example.

I watched the two shamble about the house with merry shouts, wielding mallets and breaking down the remnants of walls. I perched with Baby while they fumbled with paving stones and fiddled with doorknobs and I often fell to wondering if they were pursuing this rebuilding as a flimsy distraction from the unknown whereabouts of Pearl. They would take up their hammers and their nails and soon enough they’d find themselves too startled by the sounds to continue. Rebuilding can sound a lot like war, a lot like capture — all that bang and falling brick, all that smattering of stone.

As for me, I kept myself occupied by teaching Baby lessons from Twins’ Father, lessons from Zayde, lessons from my anatomy book. The least I could do, I decided, was to give him certain advantages, a distinct smartness, so that if he ever became an experiment too, he would fare better than some. We had to get the words out fast enough, before the words were snatched away. We had to establish the words, make them whole. I spent my days memorizing all that I could find so that in the event that we were recaptured, I’d have words to amuse us with, words to let us abide. Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven, I’d say, in tribute to Mirko, nature was all alike, a shapelessness! And to Baby, in hopes of installing his first word, I’d whisper: Pearl, Pearl, Pearl. It was as if I believed that only the most innocent whisper could bring her back. That if he cried her name, she would be there, dancing. A crown of heather on her head. And good shoes on her feet.

I couldn’t deny that in Warsaw, things bloomed. Baby cried enough to water a linden, and I did my part too, though I was careful to express my tears only in the vicinity of a wasp’s nest, so that I might blame some assault if anyone happened to see my pain. People saw my pain often, though. Mostly, these people were ones who came to the zoo. The Jewish underground had operated through its buildings, in its many holes and caves. Now, refugees came looking for sons and daughters who had curled up within the burrows meant for badgers until it was safe to transport them to another location. Many of these seekers were mothers, and as they passed through, they paused simply to hold the child, and when they looked into his brown eyes they could not help but offer me advice. They told me to swaddle him tightly, and they showed me how to bathe him so that he looked less like a wild thing.

Whenever I bathed Baby in his bucket, the boy’s life became too real to me. He was so vulnerable, a dark little duckling with a wee stem of a neck. While I made him clean, I wondered what I might tell him someday about his mother, how she’d made me kill her, how she’d guided my hand with the knife. I tried to invent prettier, more scenic deaths for her. Something with a snowfall. Something without a blade. But in Warsaw, my imagination had left me. I did not know where it went, but I hoped it didn’t occupy anyone else the way it had occupied me. I wanted the death of my imagination more than anything. It had no place in this world after war. Once, I told myself, I was happy to live for another, to continue for her sake. But without her, I was just a madman’s experiment, a failed avenger, a girl who didn’t end when she should have.

Papa saw my sadness. He said that we had hope still. He said we had a country so cracked that it was easy for Pearl to slip inside and hide in the most unseen corners. He’d say this on our daily visit to the orphanage when we went to see if she had been shuttled into its care. But no one who looked like me was waiting at the window; no one who sounded like me was singing at the gate.

“If we don’t find her,” I began on the way home one time. But I didn’t have a chance to finish this sentence. An odd correction was made to my thoughts when a stray dog appeared at my side and then promptly dropped at Papa’s feet. This dog was a mud-covered scrap, ugly and mongrel. The state of his paws made it clear he had traveled a long distance in search of someone. On us, he could smell the same struggle.

Papa thought that the dog would cheer me. He was not wrong in this. I loved this mongrel’s protective spirit, the way he barked like a pistol and snarled at anyone who raised his voice to me. This dog, I noted to Feliks, he would have been a match for Mengele. Feliks did not disagree.

“But I’m glad that he will know only this zoo,” he said. “And not the other.”

Together, we watched the dog dig tunnels through the animals’ cages. This was something that pleased him to no end, and I could only hope that he would never dig up the poison pill Papa buried in the yard while he went about this business. I knew that if I saw that pill at the right moment — I could not resist the finality promised by its whiteness.

Feliks saw this temptation in me. He, too, assured me that Pearl would return. Maybe, he said, she was just waiting until the animals came back to the zoo. He said that the zookeeper’s wife had plans to visit the grounds, and already, there was talk of the zoo’s revival. Soon, the animals would march, two by two, into their rightful houses. I stalked about their cages in wait, and tried not to dwell on the cages I’d known.

But on the day I want to speak about, it was not an animal that arrived in Warsaw, but a coffin. I wasn’t there to see it lowered onto the street. I didn’t hear the cry of the mistress of the orphanage as she opened it.

I was in the fields with Baby and my dog. I was training him to be a stronger dog. He liked to beg, and I could not break him of it. Begging would not do in these vulnerable days. So I gave him a new trick to use instead — I taught him to dance. Whenever that dog danced, I heard Zayde laugh. I had thought I would never hear Zayde laugh again, but there he was, all chuckle and knee-slap. None of it ghostly or remembered, but clear as spring. That was fair motivation to keep up with the practice. Watching this shabby canine waltz — it made me dream again.