Affinity Konar - Mischling

“You are not our first,” Stasha lied. “We’ve seen shows, lots of shows. We used to go to the theater all the time. We saw a whole troupe of people like you once.”

I often had to wonder where she summoned these lies from. They came so easily to her, as if she had another nature devoted strictly to fabrication. I can’t say that I wasn’t unnerved by her deceit, but she appeared to know how to draw in people like Mirko, who suddenly lost his defensive stance. His balled-up hands relaxed at his sides, and once the disgust left his face, I saw how handsome it was. He had features that a girl reading a romance novel would have projected onto the imaginary hero, and I’m sure he was well aware of its powers, because he made a gentlemanly point of turning to Stasha, and allowed me to blush with some degree of privacy.

“I would hardly have mistaken you for sophisticates,” he said to her. “But I suppose that even young ones like you may have use for the theater. Do you have any talent between you?”

“My sister is a dancer,” Stasha said. She made her usual mistake of pointing to herself while saying this. I grasped her pointing finger and put it in my direction.

“Oh?” Mirko’s gaze then focused solely on me. “Where have you danced? May I suggest a collaboration? Performing keeps the doctor very happy. We give him private shows from time to time, entertain his friends. Like Verschuer. Have you heard of Verschuer? He is the doctor’s mentor. Even Mengele, yes, he has a mentor. If you are a good dancer, perhaps I could mentor you?”

He performed an impromptu jig and then concluded with a proud bow.

“I come from a long line of dancers, and my grandmother, she was a tall woman, like you. We’ve danced all over, for kings and queens. We tell jokes too. Would you care to hear one? You would? What kind of joke would you prefer?”

Before we had a chance to answer, the palest woman we’d ever seen, white hair blazing at her back like winter, descended upon this small person in a colorless and incandescent glory. She swooped down and pummeled him; she stomped on his tiny feet as he yowled. She asked him who he was to think himself better than tall people, human people like us, even if we were just a pair of weak zugangi . Stasha tried to intervene — she pointed out that he wasn’t bothering us in the least — but the insulting angel was too preoccupied with her torture to listen. She chased him off, stepping on his heels as he ran, and threw a couple of rocks at him for good measure.

“You ugly ghost! You better watch yourself in your sleep,” Mirko threatened before retreating behind the boys’ barracks.

“Try it, tadpole!” his tormentor shouted. “I’d like to see you make me hate my life. If they can’t do it, how will you? Every day, I wake ready to burst, because I am filled with poison and vigor and plans for revenge. Just try to complete my suffering! Try!”

After concluding this outburst, the angel beamed triumphant and then fell to dusting off her sullied clothes with an aggravated sweep of her hands. She wore once-white pajamas of frayed silk and was so lean and tall that she resembled a pillar of salt. The eyes in her pale face were bordered by bruises that lent her the look of a panda. This was curious enough until one noticed that the eyes themselves were pink as roses.

Her name was Bruna. Or at least, that was the name she was going by in those days. The guards had given it to her as a sort of mockery — it was a German name that meant “brunette.” She twisted the darkness of their intention for her own purposes, though, and wore the name with her own pale bravado.

“Phooey to dwarves,” Bruna said. “Give me one of the cripples any day, or even one of the giants. You would agree with me?”

I was about to argue with this perspective, but Stasha interrupted.

“How did you get the bruises?”

Bruna pointed to the whorls of violet with pride.

“Ox gave them to me. For mouthing off to her. But she mouthed off to me first. If this were my hometown, my gang would take vengeance on her. I’d only have to say the word. Here, I have no gang. I miss it a great deal. I wasn’t any kind of leader. But I was a good enough thief. A diligent one, you could say. Started with pockets but soon advanced to grander heists. Guess what my greatest theft was.”

“A house?”

“How do you steal a house? People can’t steal houses!”

“They stole ours,” my sister pointed out.

“Mine too,” Bruna conceded. “You are smart in that odd way, aren’t you? But it’s not a house. It’s bigger than a house, because a house can’t die. Guess! You’re never going to guess, are you? Well, I’ll tell you — a swan! I stole a swan from the zoological gardens in Odessa. Went to the pond and tucked it up right under my coat. I wore a very roomy coat in those days, just for stealing purposes. Of course, the coat wasn’t so big as to hide the swan entirely. It was a young one, so it was smaller than average, and it bit me a little, here and there, but after I took it home, it was quite enchanted with our life, and I’m sure it would have lived with me forever if it could.”

We asked what the good in swan-stealing was. It seemed a curious transgression, and hardly profitable.

“They were storming the city. They were shooting all our animals, any animal they could find. The soldiers liked to kick our dogs till they flew. Some of our animals — the horses — the men took for themselves. You do not want me to tell you what they did with our cats. Well, I wasn’t about to let the greatest beauty in Odessa die by their hands. So when they stormed into my lodgings — I twisted her neck.”

She illustrated this savage transaction with a wrenching of both her broad hands. It was easy enough to imagine her extinguishing that life. We might as well have heard the crackle of bones, seen the white length of a feathery neck go limp. It seemed doubtless that Bruna heard the crack and saw the limpness still; her pink eyes went misty with reflection, and she thrust her hands in her pockets hurriedly, anxious to dismiss the memory of this most useful violence. She wiped an eye on the shoulder of her pajamas, and forced a smile.

“But my gang — we were talking about my gang. We might not have been much but we took care of each other. Like I just took care of you.”

“We will return the favor,” Stasha promised.

“Of course you will,” our angel said. “You’ll do whatever I say.”

Our faces must have shown alarm at the thought of being Bruna’s handmaidens of crime, because she dropped her voice quite low, and she slung her arms across our backs and huddled us close.

“Oh, don’t you worry,” she cooed. “I won’t ask for anything too bad or complex. It’s not like I want you to murder someone. But I might ask you to organize some things for me from time to time. Just because you can get away with more here. Since you’re twins and all. You could steal a whole loaf of bread with no punishment! A whole vat of soup, even! I saw the Stern triplets pull that one off, and a block of margarine to boot! They always share with me, since I taught them how to organize. Here, to organize is to steal, you know. You organize to live and to trade and to amuse yourself. Without organizing, I would go mad with boredom.”

Stasha wondered aloud how one could be bored in this place, which seemed to require that one be perched always on the worst possibilities. Bruna scoffed.

“You won’t wonder after you’ve lived here forever and are poked with needles every day. You won’t wonder after they keep taking your picture and drawing your face while all around you, other people are losing their faces, their bodies too.” She sighed and slouched, as if suddenly pulled toward the dust, then straightened herself, pushing her shoulders back with some concentrated effort toward uprightness. “Now that I have educated you, you must entertain me in return. I need entertainment. A trick, maybe. All you twins have tricks.”