Affinity Konar - Mischling

“You’re not a twin?” Stasha seemed surprised by this, but the stupidity of this question was confirmed by Bruna’s guffaw.

“Are you blind? If so, I’d be quiet about that if I were you. Or you’ll get the gas.”

“What is the gas?” Stasha wondered.

Our explainer of things became suddenly reticent and sorrowful.

“Never mind that,” Bruna finally said. “Just do not let anyone think you’re even weaker or stupider than you are, not even for a moment. Understand?”

She stood very straight and dignified, and she swept a hand from her face to her hips to indicate the extent of her pallor.

“Never seen an albino before?” she asked. “Because that is what I am. A genetic mutation.”

“So you’re like him.” Stasha gestured in the direction of Mirko’s retreat, and we saw him peek his head around the corner of the boys’ barracks, where he’d apparently been eavesdropping on the conversation. He stuck out his tongue and then disappeared once more.

“Mutant! Pisser! Worm!” she shouted at him before informing us, “No, not like him at all! Better than him! But not as good as you twins. You — if one of you dies by accident, Mengele, he wails and stomps his feet. You are still objects to him, mere things. But precious objects. You are the grand pianos of this place, the mink coats, the caviar. You are valuable! The rest of us — just kazoos, canvas, tinned beans.”

As she ended this little lecture — which she clearly loved delivering, delighting in such a neat summation of our troubles — a black fly careened near her nose, drawing a new stream of insults from her mouth.

“Tramp!” she screeched at the insect. “Parasite! Wretch! You think you can make me hate my life too!” She leaped after the fly, chased him this way and that till she lost her balance and collapsed in a white heap, the dust billowing about her where she fell. I leaned down to her, offered her my hand, but she shook me off as if possessed and turned her dirt-streaked face with those blackened eyes up to the sky, which was not the blue of a normal sky but a flame-touched blanket of gray.

“Tell me,” she said, her eyes trailing the fly’s escape over the fence and into the fields, “what does it feel like — to be of value?”

I said that I didn’t know. A lie, obviously. I knew the feeling of value well, I’d known it until Mama and Zayde were taken away, and it still remained — though in an altered form — with Stasha, who valued me more than herself. But I wasn’t about to boast of this to Bruna, whose frenzy had enlarged in such a manner that the whole of her quaked. The index finger of her right hand shook the most. She pointed it at a building in the distance, a building that I’d later come to know as one of Mengele’s laboratories.

“Please,” she entreated, “tell me when you understand? I would like to know.”

September 7, 1944

The bread made everyone forget. That was one of the first things Bruna taught me. It was full of bromide, and all it took was a day’s worth of crust lining your stomach to make your mind mist over. Since I was the half in charge of time and memory, I always gave the bulk of my portions to Stasha. One of us, I decided, should be encouraged to forget as much as possible, and I found other ways to sustain myself, with Bruna’s help.

Bruna called me Smidgen One and Stasha was Smidgen Two. It was her way of owning us, but I didn’t mind it much because it seemed better to be owned by Bruna than anyone else. She taught me all sorts of useful things. She taught me how to make a soup from the grass in the soccer field, how to stew it discreetly in a pot, and how to obtain a pot in the first place. She showed me how to ingratiate myself with the cook and how to carry supplies to the kitchen so that I might organize some things for us. A potato here, an onion there, a few lumps of coal, a book of matches, a spoon. She sewed a little burlap sack for me to keep tucked into the waistband of my skirt so that I could be a stealthier thief. Soon enough, I held the whole of our world in that little sack.

I wondered what Mama and Zayde might think of our association with Bruna. On the outside, I would’ve feared her, but in a place swarming with treachery, she was family, and we did our best to repay her with our affection. She loved our games — they were more sophisticated than the standard grave-digging game that many of the other children favored — and she was always ready for riddles, or Kill Hitler, or the Classification of Living Things, which she was quite terrible at, as she had such odd opinions about what made a living thing superior or functional or worthy of life.

Bruna was only seventeen, but she’d been in Auschwitz for three years and had slunk from labor camp to labor camp for months before that, and so she knew, she assured us, what she was talking about. She said that where we lived was far superior to other sites that were unpaved, their only concrete poured into towers, their only decoration the crook of guns into the sky.

“More civilized here,” she liked to say. “But that is not a good thing.”

She kept herself occupied, this Bruna, and not only with us. She was always leaping up to help one person or to torture another; she was a busybody who presided over everyone. Much of the day, she stood on the top of a barrel outside the girls’ barracks, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. Nothing escaped her attention. If a nurse wanted something organized for the infirmary, Bruna found it. If a twin was bullying another, Bruna bullied back, with pleasure. If Twins’ Father required a book, Bruna procured it. If someone wasn’t a great lover of communism, Bruna helped him or her find that love.

Still, even these activities were often not enough to satisfy her restless nature.

“I’m bored,” she declared on our third day within the Zoo. “You should entertain me. I’ve shown you girls my talents.” She turned her pink eyes on me. “Smidgen Two keeps boasting about your tap dancing.”

“Stasha is exaggerating,” I said.

“Show me,” Bruna commanded, dismounting from her barrel with a showy jump. “I am a great appreciator of art. My life is proof of that. I stole a paintbrush once. I stole tickets to the ballet. I stole a dozen china figurines from a fine department store. They caught me for that one, but I stole those figurines all the same. I did time, paid penance. I suffered for art, you see, and so you can’t refuse me.”

She regarded me expectantly and then removed a few stones from the dirt before us to prepare a stage. I was shocked when she failed to toss them in the direction of any passerby, as she was known never to waste a potential weapon, but it seemed that she was occupied with a different form of anticipation.

“Come now, Pearl. Show me how you dance. Let me forget a little.”

“I’m not going to dance here,” I insisted. “I have no reason to.”

“As practice for when we get out,” Stasha said, and she bent to clear another stone away. “For the future. I’m in charge of the future, remember?”

“I won’t.”

Bruna folded her arms and watched us argue. This seemed entertainment enough for her, but Stasha insisted that I had to practice, I had to make preparations for the life we’d have when the war was over because my dancing might be the only way to provide for our family once the cities were destroyed and all the dead were counted up, once the fathers never came back and the houses never rebuilt themselves.

When I failed to accept this argument, she upped the stakes. That’s what Judy Garland would do, she claimed. Judy would practice through her suffering no matter how much her feet bled or her stomach grumbled, no matter how much her head swam and the lice flocked to her.