Mischling Read online

  Satisfied, she turned and walked on, her stride enlivened by the interrogation, and when we reached the end of the hall, she swung open the door to a room that would alter us forever. It is easy to think that there are many such rooms in one’s life. This room, you might say, that was the room where I fell in love. Or, This was the room where I learned that I was more than my sadness, my pride, my strength.

  But in Auschwitz, I found that the room that really changes you is the one that can make you feel nothing at all. It is the room that says, Come sit in me, and you will know no pain; your suffering isn’t real, and your struggles? They’re only slightly more real than you are, but not by much. Save yourself, the room advises, by feeling nothing, and if you must feel something, don’t doom yourself by showing it.

  Elma stripped us after we entered this room. Into her arms went the dresses Mama had sewn; Elma regarded the strawberry print with scorn. Even fruit could not avoid offending her.

  “So childish,” she observed while stabbing one of the strawberries with a red-lacquered finger. “Do you like being children?”

  “Yes,” we said. It would be the last word that we would ever speak in unison. I wish I had known that at the time, but I was too overwhelmed by the task of pleasing Elma, whose powdery face lit up with disbelief.

  “How funny. I can’t imagine why.”

  “I’ve never wanted to grow up,” I said. This was true. Growing up held too much risk of growing away from Pearl.

  Nurse Elma smiled her too-straight smile.

  “Then you are in the right place,” she said.

  Yes, I should have deduced the truth about what she was implying about our future. But something about Nurse Elma upended me, and I couldn’t think properly in her presence. Elma seated us on chairs, their steel backs so cold that we started to shiver. The room felt icy, then hot. A fog winged across my vision. I knew that fog well. It visited me whenever I saw cruelty. I tried to imagine Elma into a less cruel person as she set aside our things and arranged a tray of measuring instruments, but the woman’s image had a peculiar solidity that defied any improvements my imagination sought to impose on her. Nothing about her was vague or negotiable. Some might call this a strong personality. I wanted to call it that, just to be human and generous. But it was obvious that what she really possessed was emptiness so vast that it managed to approximate power.

  Maybe, I thought, if we flattered her, she would be nice.

  “Tell her she’s pretty,” I whispered to Pearl.

  “You tell her, if you think she’s so pretty.”

  It was as if Nurse Elma detected our psychic efforts to like her, because she then crossed to the other side of the room and busied herself with the polishing of a pair of silver scissors, their legs gleamy in the light falling from the blocky window above. Though small, this window let in too much light for girls who had just been stripped. We crossed our legs tight, covered the buds on our chests with our hands; we clutched at these signs of growth as if hoping to make them feel so unwelcome that they might voluntarily up and disappear.

  “They’re more frightened of you than you are of them,” I whispered to my sister, because there seemed nothing left to do but joke. Pearl giggled, so I giggled too. Naturally, our giggles soured Elma. She threw her scissors down on the surgeon’s table with a clatter.

  “Do you see any of the other children laughing?”

  We didn’t. In fact, we hadn’t seen the other children at all, because the strangeness of this place had so dimmed our perception. But with Elma’s direction, we saw that we were not alone.

  There were five other children in the room.

  Lino and Artur Ammerling were ten-year-olds from Galicia. Like us, they were new arrivals and had been subjected to some scorn by the Old Numbers. Hedvah—a girl who slept three bunks over from us and held the honor of being the most respected girl in the Zoo, due to her long tenure and ability to assert herself with Ox—had started a rumor that the Ammerlings weren’t twins at all, but were merely passing in order to receive the benefits afforded to those of our station. Twins’ Father had been known to pull such tricks, she’d said, changing the paperwork so that young boys could enjoy the salvation of twin status. Hedvah cited their different hair colors—Lino was a redhead, Artur a brunet—as evidence that they were impostors. But they had to be twins. I could tell by the way that they sat in their chairs. They showed the same shock, the same trembles, as the nurses counted and measured their every feature. Not a single gesture toward identicality was overlooked—their eyelashes were counted, their eyebrow hairs, the flecks in their eyes, the dimples at their knees and cheeks. They were added and subtracted and compared, two human equations who could only squirm in their seats.

  And there were Margit and Lenci Klein, from Hungary. Six years of age. Whenever Pearl and I were immeasurably sad we looked for them, because they reminded us of how we’d been as younger girls—hands entwined, full of secrets and the occasional elbow-jab of annoyance. They were always combing each other’s hair with their fingers till their strands shone and making whistles out of blades of grass. Their mother had left them with instructions to always wear purple hair ribbons to make it easier for her to spy them in a crowd, so they fastened them atop their heads every day, first thing, propping them up so that they stood like velvet ears on their heads. We watched as the nurses diagrammed their pale, goose-bumped forms with red ink, circling a piece here, a bit there, until their bodies were rivered with scarlet.

  The fifth subject stood alone, his thumb hooked in his mouth. He could have been thirteen or thirty-five or sixty, he was so whittled, so beyond age. His nurse was leafing through files with an air of boredom, as if there were nothing left to be done with him. Before her on a table were two folders, two sets of photographs, two sets of diagrams, two sets of x-rays. But there was only one boy.

  And he was an iota of boy, a frail-boned brevity with an overbite and teeth that splayed themselves over his lips like a crooked fence. Tufts of white-streaked hair nested on his scalp and obscured his eyes, which seemed unable to focus on anything but the ceiling above. His veins stood so close to the surface of this boy that in the hospital’s faulty lights, their clusters lent his skin a pronounced hue of illness. In his chill and suffering, he was near blue.

  I fixed my eyes on him, hoping he might sense me and stare back, the way twins often do, but the boy only coughed showily, making no effort to disguise his sickness. The nurse frowned at him disapprovingly and boxed up half of the file—this action appeared to disturb the boy. I watched him sway where he stood and falter at the knees, and though I was sure that he was about to collapse, he simply stared at the box with all the reverence one might have for a grave, and then he reached toward it and tried to run a finger over the lid but the nurse slapped his hand away, and he withdrew like a wounded thing and inserted his thumb in his mouth again. The nurse declared him finished and gestured to him to dress, but he refused to accept his clothes, even as she thrust the garments forcefully at his sunken chest. It was as if he’d decided that nothing was graspable anymore, that there was no point in trying to hold anything other than a thumb to one’s mouth. Agitated, the nurse threw the garments at his feet and stalked off. And still, he stood bluely naked, refusing to follow her orders. He turned only to cough in her direction, and that’s when our gazes finally met.

  I looked away as fast as I could, which was slow enough to receive his friendly nod and quick enough that I could avoid returning it. I couldn’t face what he had endured, the horrors of which were made too obvious by the empty chair at his side.

  “I understand what you are saying,” he said to the empty seat beside him. “But our father, if he were here, he would say that curses curse their utterers. And our mother, if she were here, she would say—” And then he fell to coughing again.

  It was the boy and his empty chair that moved me to decide: I would be more than an experiment in this world. I was not as smart as Uncle Doctor, but I could stud
y his movements without him knowing, and learn about medicine, and use him to my advantage. Pearl had her dancing to look forward to—I needed my own ambition. After all, when the war ended, someone was going to have to take care of people. Someone was going to have to find the lost and put all the halves together. I saw no reason why that someone could not be me.

  I planned to begin my practice with the boy. Not knowing his name, I decided to call him Patient Number Blue. I studied him, taking in what I could from a distance, but before I could think too much on his particulars, I was interrupted by a high, trilling note.

  Uncle Doctor. He entered whistling with a sprightly step, smelling of peppermint and starch, the long white wings of his coat trailing against each surface he passed and erasing them. I’d come to learn that he considered himself an expert at whistling, just as he considered himself an expert on hygiene and culture and art and writing. But while his whistle was errorless, there was no mistaking its robotic lean. Even as it leaped about the scale, it was monotone at the core, a hollowed thing that couldn’t know a feeling.

  I tried to mimic this hollow whistle, but I found myself unable to copy the doctor’s trill—when I put my lips together to blow, I could only sputter.

  Uncle saw this mishap and smiled. It was an amused expression that might have seemed harmless to an outsider, but the arc of it made me shudder. After all, we were in his laboratory for tests, some of which were surely designed to ferret out our inferiorities and determine how long we might be permitted to live. It didn’t seem impossible that one such test might be how well one could whistle. These Nazis had such stupidly vicious ideas of what constituted a person—I knew well enough to never underestimate their whims.

  “I can whistle,” I assured Uncle. “I swear. I whistled just a few hours ago.” But he didn’t acknowledge this—he just turned his back to consult with one of the attendants and paid me no mind.

  I watched Pearl blanch with fright, and I followed suit. I was sure that my failure had doomed us both. In our defense, I considered listing our many other talents to the doctor, but I decided that it would not do to boast about Pearl’s dancing and Pearl’s poetry recitations and Pearl’s piano skills. I chose another method to prove my worth instead.

  “‘Blue Danube,’” I announced to the room in an overly loud voice.

  That did the trick. Uncle turned, curious.

  “What did you say?”

  “What you were whistling when you came in. That waltz. It is ‘Blue Danube.’”

  Uncle’s face creased with pleasure. He picked up the tail end of one of my braids and pulled it, his manner not unlike a schoolboy’s.

  “You know music?”

  I squirmed on the bench, discomforted by the singularity of his gaze. It was as if I were his only patient.

  “Pearl is a dancer,” I told him.

  “And you”—this was accompanied by a finger-point—“a pianist?”

  “I want to be a doctor someday.”

  “Like me?” He smiled.

  “Like our papa,” I said. It was the first time I’d used the word since Papa disappeared—those four letters, those two syllables, that sound that started hard and then went so soft, like a footstep that begins on a stair and ends in the sand. I’d tried to assign that word new meanings to erase the old one, to make a father into a ditch, a time, a false door in a library that one could hide behind and never be detected. After saying the word, I sank into myself, but Uncle was too delighted to notice, and I believe that when I said our papa, he managed to hear you, and only you, Uncle, because he beamed at me with a familial pride.

  “A doctor! I’m impressed,” he declared to the staff. “This is a bright girl.” Nurse Elma looked doubtful at this proclamation, but she gave an expression of agreement before returning to the cleaning of the instruments.

  Uncle stalked to the sink to wash his hands. Catching sight of himself in the reflective surface of a steel cabinet, he mugged a little, and then, upon noticing an errant lock, he fell to combing his hair with an obsessive attention, as if aligning the strands might bring his whole world into pleasing symmetry. After perfection was achieved, he sheathed his comb, resumed his whistle, and bobbed his head in the direction of an orderly, who set a chair before us for him to sit in. He wiped the seat of his chair with his handkerchief, rubbing disdainfully at a small stain on the wood, and then positioned himself stiffly before us. His posture resembled that of a person who finds himself at a family reunion after years of estrangement, eager to learn about the lives of others but preoccupied with hiding his own identity. As if it were our responsibility to put him at ease, I offered him a smile. I’m sure that it was not a pretty smile, but he saw my attempts to win him over in it, and I believe he saw my weakness too.

  He clapped a hand over each of our knees, obscuring the cattle-car bruises that covered them.

  “I have been thinking of organizing a concert here. Would you girls like that?”

  We nodded together.

  “It’s done, then! I will have them play each of your favorite songs. Or maybe, to save them some trouble, I will have them play the same song twice!”

  He laughed at his own joke. I laughed too, to cover my fear, and Pearl caught on and gave a giggle. Already, we’d learned how to coordinate our hearts in this place for protection’s sake. But my heart must’ve been a beat behind, as usual, because the very next second, I was blurting something out in a move that was foolish, inevitable, and typical of me.

  “I heard that you keep the families of twins safe,” I said in a rush, my head bowed. As soon as I made this mistake, Pearl kicked the leg of my chair to prompt my usual apology.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Uncle soothed, and he swept the back of his hand softly across my cheek. I wondered how many times he’d said that to people like us before, because the phrase appeared to feel odd on his tongue. The corner of his mouth twitched a little, and he chewed on the edge of his mustache. It was a strange tic for a man of his composure, a bit bovine and low, but later, I came to recognize that it usually surfaced when he was taking care in choosing his words. After some thought, the mustache was released from his mouth’s grip, and he addressed us gravely.

  “I do take care of the families. Is there anything you’d like me to do for yours?”

  We told him that our zayde might look like an old man, but he was very young in his outlook, with a mind always prowling about in search of new things to poke at and study. In the cattle car, he’d made us promise two things: That someday we would learn to swim, and that, when we survived, we’d get a massive bottle of the finest wine and toast him. During this toast, we were to call for the obliteration of the murderers and wish on them a million mansions filled with thousands of rooms, and in every room, a hundred beds, and beneath every bed, a poisonous snake to bite their infernal ankles, and at every bedside, a doctor with an antidote, so that they might be cured and live to be bitten again and endure the same suffering over and over till the snakes got bored of the Nazi flavor, which would be never, because everyone knows that you can’t bore a snake with the taste of evil.

  At the conclusion of this outburst, Pearl glared and shifted in her seat uncomfortably, but Uncle appeared unbothered. In fact, he acted as if he hadn’t heard it at all. He simply resumed chewing on his mustache and continued the inquiry.

  “Does your grandfather like to swim?”

  Oh yes, we said. Zayde swims and flips and dives like a fish.

  “That is settled, then. We do have a swimming pool here, you know. I will arrange for an escort for him and inform his block supervisor.”

  I pointed out that Zayde would require swimming trunks.

  “Of course! How could I forget? I’m sure it’s unlikely that he brought a pair with him. We can’t have that elderly bum-bum frightening off the other bathers, can we?”

  I didn’t find the thought of my naked zayde funny, but he did, so I joined him again in laughing, much to Pearl’s alarm. I could only hope that s
he saw the strategy in my laughter, because when it finally subsided I made another request.

  “There is someone else,” I said. “Our mother.”

  “Yes?”

  “She is our mother” was all I could say at first, because thinking of her emptied me.

  “And?”

  “She draws and paints. Animals and plants, mostly. She makes a history of the living things and the things that don’t live anymore. It keeps her happy.”

  This was a polite way of putting it. I’m not sure that it kept her happy so much as it lessened her tears. I thought of the poppy on the wall of the cattle car, how the flimsiness of the petals supported her. But it didn’t seem to be the time to hash out such particulars with Uncle. Already, a glaze of boredom was threatening to wash over his face, and I knew I wouldn’t have much more time to barter with him.

  “Brushes, then,” he decided. “And an easel. Obviously, some paint.”

  We thanked him, we said that Mama and Zayde would be so grateful. It was more than enough, we said. Or, not more than enough, but—

  “I know what you are trying to say.” His voice was solemn. “It is good that you think of others, but your family should be entitled to advantages for bringing you into the world. Because you are special, you twins.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell Pearl that for years,” I said.

  “Maybe she finally believes you.” His face was serious. “Do you believe now, Pearl?”

  “I believe,” she said. But I knew that this was not the whole of her sentiment.

  Charmed, Uncle issued us both head pats, and then he rifled through a glass jar in a cabinet and handed me a sugar cube. Such a rare little igloo of sweetness—I couldn’t waste it on myself. So I gave it to Pearl. He furrowed his brow, then handed me another sugar cube. I gave that one to her too.

  “This is for you,” he said, dropping a third cube into my palm and folding my fingers over it. “It serves a medicinal purpose.”