Mischling Read online

  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.”

  “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 stu
pider 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.

  “I’m not like Judy Garland,” I protested.

  But my sister remained unconvinced. So I danced in the dust, and Stasha provided some music by whistling. Her whistle was terribly feeble, all starts and stops, but I’ll admit that it took me back, and for a moment, I actually did enjoy dancing, enjoyed it more than I’d ever have thought possible in such a place, and I might have happily danced for hours if my audience hadn’t gained another member, an unwanted spectator who seated himself with a leisurely air on a nearby stump.

  It was Taube, a young warden famous for his ability to creep up behind a woman and twist her neck, extracting her heartbeat from her body before she even had a chance to scream. He had yellow eyes and hair, and ruddy apple cheeks that bobbed as he spoke while the rest of his face remained still as stone. At the sight of him, I stopped, but Taube gestured for me to continue, and he crossed his legs neatly at the ankles, as if settling in at a movie theater for a much-anticipated perform
ance. He pulled a bar of chocolate from his pocket and set to work attacking it with oddly dainty nibbles. Even from some distance, I could make out the semicircles of his bites, and it was easy to imagine the sweetness he enjoyed.

  “Keep practicing,” he ordered, his teeth coated in darkness.

  So I continued. I tried to imagine an audience other than Taube.

  “Faster,” he instructed.

  Heel and toe, I struck the dust. I thought that if I danced fast enough, hard enough, he might let the dance end. And then, to my relief—

  “Stop!” he commanded.

  I did. But Taube’s apple cheeks bobbed irritably. It seemed that I’d misunderstood his directive.

  “Not you! You keep dancing. Her!” He pointed to Stasha. “Enough with the whistling!”

  Stasha shut her mouth with a snap, and her hands crept up to cover her ears. I could see that the sound of my feet striking the ground disturbed her. She could feel what I felt, all the pain, all the fatigue. Her voice whittled by fear, she begged Taube to permit me to rest.

  “But Pearl’s very talented. Don’t you agree?”

  “Very much so,” Stasha quavered. She wouldn’t look up from her feet, and I knew that they were throbbing like my own.

  I might have been able to continue if I hadn’t seen Stasha’s anguish, but it tripped me up and I fell. Bruna offered me her hand, but Taube shoved her away, electing to pick me up by the waistband of my skirt. He then dragged me in the dust over to his stump, took a few steps back—so as to create a fine distance from which to study me where he’d placed me, like a toy on a shelf—and began to clap. It felt as if all our hearts were suspended in the air between his hands.

  “Do you girls know Zarah Leander? Star of The Life and Loves of Tschaikovsky? The finest actress of all of German cinema?” he asked when the mocking claps finally subsided.

  We did not know, but this didn’t feel safe to admit. Instead, we gushed about her beauty and talent, and Taube grinned all the while, basking in the compliments as if it were him we praised, and not a distant movie star.