Mischling Read online

  I knew how important words were to a life. If I gave the body some of mine, I thought, it would be restored.

  Was I stupid to think this? Or feebleminded? Would the thought have occurred to me in a place free of flame-licked winds and white-winged doctors?

  These are fair questions. I think of them often, but I have never tried to answer them. The answers don’t belong to me.

  All I know: I stared at the body, and the only words I could summon weren’t my own. They were from a song I’d heard played on a smuggled record player in our ghetto basement. Whenever I’d heard the song, it had improved me. So I gave these words a try.

  “‘Would you like to swing on a star?’” I sang to the body.

  Not a sound, not a stir. Was it the fault of my squeaky voice? I tried again.

  “‘Carry moonbeams home in a jar?’” I sang.

  It was pathetic of me to try, I know, but I had always believed in the world’s ability to right itself, just like that, with a single kindness. And when kindness is not around, you invent new orders and systems to believe in, and there, in that moment—whether it was stupidity or feeblemindedness—I believed in a body’s ability to animate itself with the breath of a word. But it was obvious that these lyrics were not the right words at all. None of them could unlock the life of the body or were powerful enough to repair it. I searched for another word, a good word, to give—there had to be a word, I was sure of it—but the guard wouldn’t let me finish. He pulled me away and forced us to press on, anxious to have us showered and processed and numbered so that our time in Mengele’s zoo could begin.

  Auschwitz was built to imprison us. Birkenau was built to kill us. Mere kilometers bridged their attached evils. What this zoo was designed for, I did not know—I could only swear that Pearl and I, we would never be caged.

  The barracks of the Zoo were once stables for horses, but now they were heaped with the likes of us: twins, triplets, quints. Hundreds upon hundreds of us, all packed into beds that weren’t beds but matchboxes, little slots to slip bodies into; we were piled from floor to ceiling, forced into these minute structures three or four bodies at a time so that a girl hardly knew where her body ended and another’s began.

  Everywhere we looked there was a duplicate, an identical. All girls. Sad girls, toddler girls, girls from faraway places, girls who could have been our neighborhood’s girls. Some of these girls were quiet; they posed like birds on their straw mattresses and studied us. As we walked past them on their perches, I saw the chosen, the ones selected to suffer in certain ways while their other halves remained untouched. In nearly every pair, one twin had a spine gone awry, a bad leg, a patched eye, a wound, a scar, a crutch.

  When Pearl and I sat on our own bunk, the mobile ones descended on us. They scrambled over the rickety corrals with their straw mattresses and appraised our similarities. Demands of our identities were made.

  We were from Lodz, we told them. First, a house. Then, a basement in the ghetto. We had a grandpapa, a mother. Once, there had been a father. And Zayde had an old spaniel that could play dead when you pointed a finger at him, but he was easily brought back to life. Did we mention that our father was a doctor who helped others so much that he disappeared one night, that he left us to tend to a sick child and never returned? Yes, we missed him so much we could not even divide the weight of our grief between us. There were other things we dreaded too: germs, unhappy endings, Mama weeping. And there were things we loved: pianos, Judy Garland, Mama weeping less. But who were we really, in the end? There wasn’t much to say beyond the fact that one of us was a good dancer, and the other one tried to be good but wasn’t really good at anything except being curious. That one was me.

  Satisfied by this information, the others offered their own in a clamor of sentence-finishing.

  “We get more food here,” began Rachel, a girl so pale that you could nearly see through her.

  “But it’s not kosher and it eats your insides,” her equally transparent half pointed out.

  “We keep our hair,” noted Sharon, pulling on her braid for show.

  “Until the lice come,” added her shorn sister.

  “We get to keep our clothes too,” contributed one of the Russians.

  “But they put crosses on our backs,” finished her double. She turned so I could see the cross that blared in red paint on her dress, but I needed no illustration. A red cross stood between my shoulder blades too.

  The children hushed abruptly, and the uninvited silence hung over us all—it was as if a new cloud had installed itself within the rafters of the Zoo. The many doubles looked at each other searchingly—there had to be something, their faces said, something more than food and hair and clothes. Then a voice piped up from the bunk below us. We craned to see the speaker, but she and her twin were curled up together, flush with the brick wall. We never came to know her face, but her words stayed with us always.

  “They keep our families safe for us,” said this unseen stranger.

  At this, all the girls nodded their approval, and Pearl and I were overwhelmed by a new rush of conversation as everyone congratulated one another on belonging to families who would remain intact, unlike so many.

  I didn’t want to ask the obvious. So I pinched Pearl to make her ask for us.

  “Why are we more important than the others?” Her voice shrank as it approached the end of the question.

  A flurry of answers rose, all having something to do with purpose and greatness, with purity and beauty and being of use. We didn’t hear a single one that made sense.

  And before I could even try to understand this concept, the blokowa assigned to look after us entered. Behind her prodigious back, we called this person Ox; she had the appearance of a wardrobe with a toupee and tended toward foot-stamping and nostril-flaring when caught in one of her passionate rants, which our supposed disobedience frequently inspired. When Pearl and I were first introduced to her, however, she was just a figure popping her head in at the door, half shrouded in night and offended by our questions.

  “Why are we called the Zoo?” I asked. “Who decided this?”

  Ox shrugged. “It is not obvious to you?”

  I said that it was not. The zoos we’d read about with Zayde were sites of preservation that presented the vastness of life. This place, it cared only for the sinister act of collection.

  “It is a name that pleases Dr. Mengele” was all Ox would say. “You won’t find many answers here. But sleep! That’s something you can have. Now let me have mine!”

  If only we could have slept. But the darkness was darker than any I’d known, and the smell clung within my nostrils. A moan drifted from the bunk below, and outside there was the barking of dogs, and my stomach wouldn’t stop growling back at them. I tried to amuse myself by playing one of our word games, but the shouts of the guards outside kept overpowering my alphabet. I tried to make Pearl play a game with me, but Pearl was busy tracing her fingertips over the silver web that embroidered our brick corner, the better to ignore my whispered questions.

  “Would you rather be a watch that only knows the good times,” I asked her, “or a watch that sings?”

  “I don’t believe in music anymore.”

  “Me neither. But would you rather be a watch—”

  “Why do I have to be a watch at all? Is this my only choice?”

  I wanted to argue that sometimes, as living things, as human-type people who were presumably still alive, we had to treat ourselves as objects in order to get by; we had to hide ourselves away and seek repair only when repair was safe to seek. But I chose to press on with another query instead.

  “Would you rather be the key to a place that will save us or the weapon that will destroy our enemies?”

  “I’d rather be a real girl,” Pearl said dully. “Like I used to be.”

  I wanted to argue that playing games would help her feel like a real girl again, but even I wasn’t sure of this fact. The numbers the Nazis had given us had
made life unrecognizable, and in the dark, the numbers were all I could see, and what was worse was that there was no way to pretend them into anything less enduring or severe or blue. Mine were smudged and bleared—I’d kicked and spat; they’d had to hold me down—but they were numbers still. Pearl was numbered too, and I hated her numbers even more than mine, because they pointed out that we were separate people, and when you are separate people, you might be parted.

  I told Pearl that I’d tattoo us back to sameness as soon as possible, but she only sighed the sigh traditional to moments of sisterly frustration.

  “Enough with the stories. You can’t tattoo.”

  I told her that I knew how to well enough. A sailor taught me, back in Gdańsk. I’d inked an anchor onto his left biceps.

  True, it was a lie. Or a half-lie, since I had seen such an anchor-inking take place. When we’d summered at the sea, I spent my time peering into the gray recess of a tattoo parlor, its walls bordered with outlines of swallows and ships, while Pearl found a boy to hold her hand near the barnacled prow of a boat. So it was that as my sister entered into the secrecies of flesh on flesh, the pang of a palm curled within one’s own, I schooled myself in the intimacies of needles, the plunge of a point so fine that only a dream could light upon its tip.

  “I’ll make us the same again someday,” I insisted. “I just need a needle and some ink. There must be a way to get that, given that we are special here.”

  Pearl scowled and made a big show of turning her back to me—the bunk cried out with a creak—and her elbow flew up and jabbed me in the ribs. It was an accident—Pearl would never hurt me on purpose, if only because it would hurt her too. That was one of the biggest stings of this sisterhood—pain never belonged to just one of us. We had no choice but to share our sufferings, and I knew that in this place we’d have to find a way to divide the pain before it began to multiply.

  As I realized this, a girl on the other side of the room found a light, a precious book of matches, and she decided that this scarcity would be best put to use making shadow puppets for the audience of multiples. And so it was that we drifted off to sleep with a series of shadow figures crossing the wall, walking two by two, each flanking the other, as if in a procession toward some unseen ark that might secure their safety.

  So much world in the shadows there! The figures feathered and crept and crawled toward the ark. Not a single life was too small. The leech asserted itself, the centipede sauntered, the cricket sang by. Representatives of the swamp, the mountain, the desert—all of them ducked and squiggled and forayed in shadow. I classified them, two by two, and the neatness of my ability to do so gave me comfort. But as their journey lengthened, and the flames began to dim, the shadows were visited by distortions. Humps rose on their backs, and their limbs scattered and their spines dissolved. They became changed and monstrous. They couldn’t recognize themselves.

  Still, for as long as the light lived, the shadows endured. That was something, wasn’t it?

  Pearl

  Chapter Two

  Zugangen, or Newcomers

  Stasha didn’t know it, but always, from the very beginning, we were more than we. I was older by only ten minutes, but it was enough to teach me how different we were.

  It was only in Mengele’s Zoo that we became too different.

  For example: On that first night, the marching shadows comforted Stasha, but I could find no peace in them. Because those matches illuminated another sight, one accompanied by a death rattle. Did Stasha mention the dying girl?

  We weren’t alone in our bunk that night. There was a third child with us on the straw mattress, a feverish, black-tongued mite who curled up beside me and pressed her cheek to my cheek as she died. This wasn’t a gesture of affection—our proximity rose only from the fact that there wasn’t an inch of room to be spared in our matchbox beds—but in the days ahead I found myself often hoping that this twinless, nameless girl took some comfort in being close to me. I had to believe that it was not a lack of room alone that put her cheek to mine.

  When the rattle stopped, the Stepanov twins, Esfir and Nina, the eleven-year-olds in the bed slot below us, leaped up to our mattress and stripped the girl of her clothes. They performed this task with an unnerving deftness, as if they’d been undressing corpses all their lives. Esfir joyously flung a sweater around her shoulders; Nina shimmied into a woolen skirt. The disapproval on my face must’ve been obvious, because Esfir offered me the girl’s stockings, thrusting the unraveled, grayed toe beneath my nose, in a gesture of appeasement. When I waved this gift away, she—a veteran, or Old Number—employed the insult used for us New Numbers, or newcomers.

  “Zugang!” she hissed at me.

  If I hadn’t been so lost over the death beside me, I might have defended myself, but I cared little at that moment. The Stepanovs exchanged wily glances with each other, and then Serafima winked at me, as if to acknowledge the great favor she was about to perform on my behalf. Without a word of negotiation between them, the two took hold of the girl’s body by its head and its feet and slid its meager weight from our bed.

  “She can stay.” I reached out and put a hand on the still-warm chest.

  “She is dead,” they argued. “See the trickle from her mouth? Dead!”

  “So? She still needs a place to sleep, doesn’t she?”

  “It’s against our law, zugang.”

  “What law?”

  They were too busy carting the body down the ladder to the floor to answer, their movements illuminated by the same scant light that produced the shadowy animals. I wished for utter darkness then. Because I saw the girl’s eyes fly open as her body thumped past the rungs and to the floor. All of the children turned in their beds so as not to witness the exodus, but I saw the girl’s hair fan over the threshold as her bearers dragged her out, and I tried, as she disappeared from view, to remember her eyes.

  I thought they were brown eyes, as brown as my own, but our acquaintance had been so brief, I couldn’t be sure.

  All I could be sure of was the sprightliness of the twins. When they reappeared at the door, they were clapping the grime from their hands. Nina twirled in the skirt, and Esfir plucked lint from the stolen sweater. They were enlivened by these new possessions. Nina ambled over with a bundle in her hand and tossed it in Stasha’s direction.

  “Take the stockings,” she spat at my sister. “Don’t act so superior.”

  Stasha regarded the stockings where they lay, so limp and forlorn, in her lap. I advised her to give them back, but Stasha had never been good at taking anyone’s advice, even mine. She thrust them onto her hands like mittens, much to Nina’s pleasure.

  “You’re resourceful,” Nina said approvingly before retiring with her sister to the bunk below, where the two of them rustled about in their straw like the scavengers they were, doubtless planning their next acquisition of goods.

  Everyone survived by planning. I could see that. I realized that Stasha and I would have to divide the responsibilities of living between us. Such divisions had always come naturally to us, and so there, in the early-morning dark, we divvied up the necessities:

  Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. I would take the sad, the past, the good.

  There were overlaps between these categories, but we’d negotiated such overlaps before. It seemed fair to me, but when we were done with the partitioning of these duties, Stasha had misgivings.

  “You got the worse deal,” she said. “I’ll trade you. I’ll take the past, and you take the future. The future is more hopeful.”

  “I am happy with the way things are,” I said.

  “Take the future. I already have the funny—you should have the future. It will make things more even between us.”

  I thought of all the years we’d spent trying to match every gesture. When we were small, we’d practiced walking the same amount of steps every day, speaking the same number of words, smiling the same smiles. I started to retreat into these memories,
but just as I’d begun to calm, Ox resurrected our dread. Cool and efficient, a drab figure in an oatmeal-colored cloak, she picked her way through the barracks with the dead child, now clothed in mud, held aloft in her arms. Wordlessly, she carried the girl over to our bunk and laid her back beside me, placing the cold hands over the concave chest and crossing the legs at their ankles. Tongue thrust between her teeth in concentration, she performed this endeavor with the manner of one arranging flowers for the room of a beloved houseguest.

  “Who did this?” Ox demanded after she’d completed her work and the girl stared sightlessly up at the rafters.

  No one would answer, but Ox didn’t much care for answers, preferring any opportunity for intimidation. “I recommend that you children find a better way to amuse yourselves than by dumping bodies by the latrines. You all know that Dr. Mengele requires that every child in the Zoo must be counted in the morning. If this body goes missing again—”

  She allowed the possibilities to dangle in the air, all the better to frighten us, and then, her mission completed, she turned and left with a dramatic flap of oatmeal-colored cloak, pausing only to confiscate the matches from the girl making the shadow puppets. All was dark once more, though not dark enough to obscure the death that lay beside us.

  “She looks hungry even now,” Stasha observed. She skipped a stockinged finger across the girl’s still cheek. “Do you think she has feelings anymore?”

  “No one has feelings when they are dead,” I told her. But I wasn’t quite convinced of this myself. If there was ever a place where the dead might still feel their tortures, it had to be the Zoo.

  Stasha took the stockings from her hands and tried to pull them over the girl’s feet. First the left foot, then the right. One stocking crowned at midcalf, while the other slipped easily over the knee. Frustrated by this difference, Stasha tugged at the woolens to make them align, and I had to point out to her that the pair were mismatched, that there was no way to force them into sameness. Nothing was fixable; we could only make do.