Mischling

Pearl: Chapter Ten The Keeper of Time and Memory

I had a face still. I didn’t know my name, but I was aware of others. I knew the name of Auschwitz. I heard it shouted out in whatever world lay beyond the boxes that I lived in. There were three boxes, so far as I could tell. One was a building, the second a room, and the third — that was the cage of wire and lock that kept me. It was the white-coated man who put me there. After he finished inspecting me on his table, he dropped me to the cage bottom with a thud and took away my blanket so I could experience nakedness in such a way that the wires dug into my flesh. He came, he left. He shone lights into my darkness and made notes about my squint, my response. He did more than that, but I chose not to remember this then. I knew his name when this occurred. But I chose to forget that too.

From this time — there is not much I want to recall. What I want to dwell on is different, and it is mine.

This may not be true for the world, but it was true for me, in my cage: There was a brief moment, a slip of rare time, quite unlike any time before it. Because when Auschwitz fell, the lives it took were restored — for the merest of moments — just so our dead could see it founder.

Our dead in this moment — they were not your ordinary spirits. There was nothing of the specter in them, not a bit of ghost. They were simply people who had been tortured but were now allowed to see a justice. I could hear their murmurs, their joys. Theirs was an afterlife of mere moments, a permission to witness the ruin of what had ended them.

Among the shouts and cries of millions as Auschwitz collapsed, two voices made themselves known to me.

I heard an old man try to toast but he couldn’t find the words; he simply uttered the beginnings of them until his voice cracked. I heard a woman comfort him, I heard her assure him that the girls would not end, and that’s when I knew she was my mother. She and my zayde—they watched over me while the camp burned and the guards fled and the prisoners found that they did not know what to do with their freedom.

I heard Mama suggest a game to get me by in this time. I knew games; they were familiar to me, the concept came from whatever sprawl of a life I’d had outside this cage. I told this woman whom I knew to be my mother that I wasn’t sure what game would have me anymore — though I could move a little, I was sure I was a cripple, and though I could think, I was sure that my mind had been broken. But Mama insisted that I try.

My grandfather did too.

Play an ant, he suggested. Ants lift fifty times their own weight. You need that strength.

Play a chimp, Mama suggested. There is no dignity in it, I know, but the intelligence is fair compensation. You must be smart.

Just then, a pigeon landed on the windowsill opposite me, some ten feet away, and began to daven. A silver band flashed at its feet announcing its status as experiment, messenger, or property. I could relate to all three roles.

“I’ll play a pigeon,” I said.

The pigeon has an excellent memory, Zayde murmured in approval. The pigeon navigates and rescues and delivers. This is good, he said. All will be well.

A fine choice, Mama agreed. All will be well, she echoed.

But I could not even lift my arm in imitation of a wing. Simply crooking my finger lit a pain that soared through me. I asked them how I was supposed to treat survival like a game if the game would not have me, but their voices had gone. They’d witnessed the fall, and then they performed their own fall back into nothingness, into what I hoped might be peace.

This was how I knew that I was still alive, because I was not at peace at all.

But I continued with the game long after the voices were no more. Play a mouse, I told myself. Play a fox, a deer, an elephant. I recited the order of living things, and I ended them the way one ends a prayer. This was how my recitations went: species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and all will be well.

Stasha: Chapter Eleven Bear and Jackal

When I looked up from my blanket, the parts of the world were before and behind me, the plains of snow extending on either side like the wings of a dove. The death march had slunk on, the guards had continued to torture our fellow prisoners at a distance, and we were left with the sound of despair in our heads. The wasteland chose us, but we didn’t want to be chosen by it. There we were, moving so slowly across this eternal earth, readier for an end than ever; we clung to the winter beneath us, trying to remember that beneath it, there lay the heartbeats and mutters of a floral season. I knew I had to find a way to make Feliks stay alive, to see him through to that spring. I had not even a sense of direction without him.

I was stripped of location. Feliks could remind me all he wanted that we were in the forests of Stare Stawy, a village outside of Auschwitz. But where we were meant nothing to me. The Classification of Living Things, that meant something.

Because we were following the river, like animals do. Away from the death march, we’d been reborn; our instincts had reassembled themselves into a formation better suited to the wanderings of animals. Feliks was Bear — the protective forager, fearsome and charismatic, resistant to any human efforts toward taming. I was Jackal — the doleful creature, clever, stealthy, accustomed to ruin and abandonment. We were hungry, without direction. Little more than an hour stood between us and the death march we’d escaped. Or I should say that I believed it to be an hour. I really wasn’t sure that hours truly existed anymore.

I knew I was not an easy burden, but though his hands were mangled and blistered, Feliks chattered easily, as he dragged me forward, with talk of his beloved city.

I never asked the city’s name. How could I care? All I knew was that it had fallen. Its machines were abandoned, its books were burned, its synagogues turned to ammunition factories, its people stifled, disappeared. Still, Feliks said, he was sure the sun shone there still, and he insisted on spinning the place to me as we crept. He told stories of everyday kindness, stories that valued beauty. I knew he was trying to convince me that we should make a life there as brother and sister, with our brother-ghost and sister-ghost at our sides, and the stories were making me imagine myself into quite a different person, someone who could stop feeling as if her tongue were made of stone. This someone would not be an immediate someone but an eventual one, and I warmed, thinking of her.

“And someday,” he concluded, shaking a fist purpled by cold, “we will leave that city, as beautiful as it is, and we will hunt down all the Nazis; we will make them pay. And after every thrilling capture, we will always return to the city, because it will be a fitting home for heroes like us.”

“Your plans for this city aren’t convincing me,” I told him. We were deep in the woods now, with the stillness of the river in our ears.

“Who says it’s you I’m trying to convince?” he spat.

He dropped the corner of my blanket and wiped his hands in an exaggerated gesture of disgust. From the parcel Bruna had assembled for us, he drew two bottles of water and a potato and planted them in the ground beside me. I watched his form retreat, watched his bear coat waver and blur before blending into the trees. I put my finger on the speck that was him in the distance. Ever since the cattle car, I had been denied good-byes. This was the first real good-bye I could have had, and yet I refused it. I didn’t shout after him, I didn’t even whimper. All I could do was stare at the dullard of a sun, so high above me, but penitent still.

It stood like a guilty trickster with his hands in his pockets. A sun with such a conscience — you’d think it could be easily manipulated. I thought if I stared at it long enough it might correct my vision.

Because what Mengele had done to my eye — it grew grimmer by the day. A consequence of the tamper with my vision: Shadows lilted around the edges of everything I saw. My shoes. My cup, my hat. Our sacks. I didn’t understand the intention of this shadow. Why it insisted on cradling all I needed, I didn’t know. Would it ever leave me?

“No, Stasha — I can never leave you.” Because he’d returned and heard me speaking to myself, as usual. When he extended his arm to me, I saw his hand was outlined by that ever-present black. “I wasted time walking away from you,” he said. “And even more trudging back. Now it is your turn to carry me, but you are unable. What do you propose that we do in such a situation?”

I promised that I would make him laugh at some point.

“I’m sure you will,” he scolded, “but will it be for the right reasons?”

I stretched out my hand, and he hoisted me up. He shouldn’t have had the strength even for this simple motion — he was stooped and twisted, and his hands were raw; he faltered a little at my grasp, and when he smiled, the force of his expression made the frost leap from his eyebrows.

“For Pearl,” he said, and he gestured impatiently for me to walk.

I thought of my sister dancing. The tap-tap of Pearl’s feet, the clap-clap of my hands as I watched. All of it in pairs, in repetition.

This is how I walk, I told myself. One step, then another. This is how I walk with the sun, this is how I walk through the snow. This is how I walk in memory of Pearl, the girl whose every step could have been musical, and for all time, if only Mengele had fulfilled his promise and given her the deathlessness too. That last thought — it made me stop walking again. But not walking would not do. I studied my feet and began once more.

This is how I walk beside someone I love who lives still, I thought, someone who should abandon me, but together, we walked until we found shelter — deep in the woods, a wall of fallen logs, and with the paws of jackal and bear we dug a shallow ditch beside this wall; we lay down and covered ourselves with leafy branches and decided that we would take turns sleeping and keeping watch so that no one could creep up on us in this feeble shelter and throw a match into our nest.

Feliks huddled beside me in his bear fur with all the closeness of a brother. Even in his sleep, he made vows. But they were not the vows of vengeance I expected to hear. Instead, he vowed to himself that he would never be alone again, he would never be parted from me, he would not permit separation to alight between us. When he began to panic in these vows, gnashing his gummy jaws together in grief, I saw fit to wake him.

“Your turn,” he said, rubbing his eyes and peering into the darkness for intruders.

I tried to sleep. I begged my mind to give me a dream of Pearl. Not the best dream, the one in which the world never knew war at all, or even the second-best dream, the one in which Auschwitz remained swampland, but the third-best dream, the one in which Mengele gave Pearl and me this deathlessness at the same time, in unison; he plunged the needle down and we turned to each other and knew that while living forever was a terrible burden, this was something we could do together, in our usual style.

She would take the best, the brightest, the funniest.

I would take the guilt, the blame, the burden. And if she ever couldn’t walk, I would do all the walking for her. Because now that I could walk again, I did not want to stop. It seemed a triumph to me, and yet both my ankles were braceleted by an ache that I knew not to be frostbite. It was an odd sensation, and not entirely unpleasant, due to the fact that it let me know I could still feel, and someday, I knew too, my walk would increase its pace, someday soon, I might even jump.

Papa, the good doctor — he’d told me that people who lost limbs and fingers and toes, they continued to perceive sensations in them long after, in the form of pangs and tickles, and to such an extreme that it felt as if they’d never lost any flesh at all.

But he never warned me about this.

The next morning, we heard the Vistula River crack, heard it shuffle its sheets of ice like a deck of cards. The morning was blue on blue; trees thrust their limbs into the clouds. The sky rustled like Pearl’s blue hair ribbon when she turned her head. We shook off the blanket of snowfall and wondered at the fact that we still lived.

The river, fissured, was a great white expanse, and the cracks watched over us as we knelt toward the ice. Its surface was so milky that I felt welcomed by it — it seemed to me the freshest, most innocent surface on the earth. Despite the darkness crouching in the canopied trees, we found a rabbit struggling in a hollow.

“Cripple,” Feliks said, noting a wounded leg. I looked away while the bread knife sank, but I made myself watch him hang the rabbit from a branch and strip the tufts of its fur. He popped the eyes in his mouth, wrenched the bones bare.

“Eat!”

“Why can’t we build a fire? Just for a minute.”

“You know why. There are people who would be happy to catch us in these woods. You don’t even have to be a Nazi to enjoy capturing a Jew.”

He was becoming like a father, this Feliks. He was impatient with me; his tone often dipped into severe registers. I didn’t doubt that he would stuff my mouth with the raw rabbit if I continued to decline. It was better to be agreeable.

I watched him struggle to chew the bloody meat. His tooth loss made this difficult. So I chewed for him, then spat it out into my hand. Embarrassed gratitude — that was the look he gave me, but he accepted the chewed food from my hand and popped it into his mouth, swallowed as if it were medicine. He urged me to eat for my own sake, and this was harder to do — still, I was tired of arguing and gave it a try.

“We have to keep up your strength.” Feliks nodded. “We can’t achieve the vengeance we’ve sworn ourselves to if you are bones.”

I agreed. Vengeance, it was what I longed for most, but I’d begun to doubt how it might be handed down from experiments like us. I’d made attempts before. Mengele was slippery, beyond cornering. In him, I saw a little boy life had long indulged. Life didn’t always indulge, though, did it? Was there any chance that we, in such diminished states, might ever truly finish him? We did not even have a clue as to his location.

My companion stabbed a tree trunk with his bread knife. He issued pairs of gashes — one, two; one, two — in a meditative fashion. Then, inspired, he turned and looked at me curiously.

“There is something I must tell you,” he said, cautious. “This city I speak of — it is not my city at all, I have been lying, but for good reason, to persuade you. It is Warsaw, and I have been trying, from the very beginning, to take you there.”

I couldn’t imagine what cause he might have to usher me into such destruction. The isolation of Auschwitz had not saved me from the knowledge that the place he spoke of would soon enter history as the most devastated city of all time.

“There is no greater ruin than Warsaw,” I said.

He crouched in the snow and took to stabbing it with his bread knife. One, two. One, two. The motion was resolute, a way to steady his argument.

“But the man we want dead is alive there,” he said. “I overheard him; he was speaking too freely in the final days. While I sat waiting on my bench at the infirmary, he was on the telephone discussing his future plans. He was going to flee to Warsaw. He was going to rendezvous with someone there. I think he was telling this to Verschuer. They have documents about us, valuable pieces. Research. Information, I believe. Or maybe bones, all that war material, those slides you keep talking about.”

I couldn’t understand why he was telling me this now. Why had he not been direct before? I joined him in stabbing the snow. Have you ever stabbed the snow to make sense of things? It is not something I recommend.

“Let’s say that I do believe you,” I ventured. “What else did you hear?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, as airily as if we were seated in a parlor putting sugar in our tea. “Something about the Warsaw Zoo.”

“It would be like him to want to go there,” I offered. I thought of all the cells in a zoo, joining, dividing, engaging in all the tricks of variation that so enraptured Mengele.

“It would, wouldn’t it?” He sounded oddly pleased, as if he’d had a hand in the sense-making of it all.

I will be honest — nothing in this wild story should have sounded correct to me, but I didn’t want to doubt. It felt good to believe in something for once. It made me feel real. In believing, I was less experiment, more girl.

And so it was decided, there, on the banks of the Vistula, with its cathedraled branches of trees and snow: We would take Mengele’s life in Warsaw. We would repossess his slides, his bones, his numbers, his samples. We would take and take from him until there remained only a single mustache hair as proof of his villainy.

He had tried to make monsters of us. But in the end, he was his own disfigurement. Future innocents, we swore, had to be protected, and then there was the matter of repayment for his misdeeds. In the name of Pearl, he would be our kill. I thought of his eyes, I thought of the terror that would color them when he spied my approach; I thought of his surrender, his arms flailing in that blasphemous white coat. He would cry out; he would beg. We would permit him to beg because we would enjoy the spectacle, but when his beggary ceased to amuse us we would put him down, and because our humanity had not left us entirely, we would be swift about it. Mengele’s expression — the shock on his face at discovering our survival and pursuit of justice — that would be trophy enough for our violent souls.

And I knew that the animals in the Warsaw Zoo, witnessing the triumph of Bear and Jackal, would rejoice; I knew that they would lift up their voices in shrieks and cackles and guffaws so loud that even Pearl, in her death, would hear that vengeance was ours.

Pearl: Chapter Twelve My Other Birth

There were things I knew still: There were doors that shut, there were shouts, there were scratches along the floor; there had been someone else, caged opposite me, who muttered poetry through the day and night, his voice melodious and familiar. I could not remember exactly when his recitation halted, I knew only that it had ceased, and then I wondered if I had ever heard a voice at all. Perhaps what I’d imagined to be a voice, one possessed by a lover of poetry, had merely been a leak in the ceiling. A meek drip-drop with a musical quality. This alone I could be certain of: I had tried to converse with the leak, I had begged for its help, but it did not help, it only stopped.

Rats squeaked their way near me where I lay and I remembered: species, genus, family, order. In the dim, I saw whiskers, snouts, tiny feet. I knew that these were not the same parts I had, that I was human, but still, I sniffed in mimicry and became reliant on my nose. I could smell rust, waste, the dried blood encircling my ankles, the stitches at my abdomen, a stagnant pool of water. I told the rats about what I smelled but they weren’t impressed. I tried to smell more, I tried to smell all that I could, but the only other scent I could detect was death.

The scent of death is not frantic. When you have been around it enough, it is oddly respectful; it keeps its distance, it tries to negotiate with your nostrils and appreciates the fact that at some point, one becomes so accustomed to it that it is hardly noticeable at all.

Despite its politeness, I hated that smell. I wanted to train myself to smell other smells. This was an activity that was available to me, it was something I could do to pass the time. The rats, though, they refused to mentor me in this art. The pigeon at my window — he had departed long ago.

It seemed that I would have to instruct myself — if I could retain this sense of smell, I thought, the world might want me still, if I was ever freed from my cage. I began my recollections with the owners of the voices. Mama smelled like violets. Zayde smelled like old boots. My papa — I could not remember what he smelled like, but I didn’t much care, because I found a different avenue of memory to traverse. Or my pain found it for me. Because when I became aware that both of my feet were clubbed and swollen, that the bones had been snapped at the ankle and my feet sat at the end of my legs like a pair of too-large lavender boots, I had a thought that he would fix everything: he would come and heal me if I only called.

Papa, I remembered, he was a doctor. I remembered that.

And this discovery was so great that it overshadowed that other, very different discovery — the realization that even if I were able to leap from my cage, I would not be able to walk.

On what I’d later learn was January 27, 1945, footsteps surged through the door. There were words that were close to the first language I heard in my head, but they were not my words. My words were Polish. These words were neighbors in sound and meaning—They are speaking Russian, I thought. The Russian chatter increased, and the stomp of boots rose beside them. A pair of red spots bobbed toward me, and then the spots became stars and I saw that they were worn on the caps of soldiers.

Someone trained a light to this corner and that, and then traced it up to the ceiling.

The boots and stars moved through the dimness. The lights multiplied. There was a stumble, a fall of materials — wire clanged to the concrete floor, there was a metallic clamor of instruments and trays — and the soldiers pounded fists into boxes and debated, as if on safari, who had seen the most interesting and grotesque of sights. What they spoke of — all the many horrors — made me grateful for a moment that my darkness had kept such sights at bay. I thought about contributing my own story to their conversation — they seemed interested in all the goings-on, after all — but when I opened my mouth to speak I found that I could only croak.

“You hear something?” a gruff soldier asked.

“Rats,” said another.

Their flashlights found the wall opposite me, glanced over the wall after that, and then settled on my cage.

“What a shame,” a voice said. There was a catch in it, a start. And the others agreed that it was a real pity — the child looked so young; it was too bad, what had happened to that little body.

Hearing this, I cried out. I wanted to speak to this child who was the focus of their concern. I wanted to say to this child, I wish I’d known you were here! I hope you didn’t think me rude. I didn’t mean to exclude you from my conversation with the leak in the ceiling!

But of course, when I cried out these things, there was only a rattle and an exhalation.

My voice was as good as smoke.

Above me, the beam of the flashlight shuddered.

“Is it dead?” asked the bearer of the light.

“How could it not be?” another answered.

“I swore I heard something. Like it tried to speak.”

“There’s too much to hear in this place. My ears haven’t stopped ringing.”

And he suggested that they move on to the next block, that they should permit someone else to collect my body — and I was sure that they were gone without another thought for me, but then they heard my whimper. The gruff soldier found my padlock and he fiddled with it and then he took up an ax and though I thought I knew that he was there to rescue me, I curled into myself as the blade closed in, and one of the other soldiers, he kept hushing me all the while, he kept saying, “Na, na,” which is a way of saying, “Nothing, nothing”—Zayde used to say this all the time to comfort me to sleep — and I wanted to agree with him, I wanted to say that I was a nothing, or at least that the man had made of me a nothing, he’d turned me into so little that I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to escape that blackness because it seemed certain, as I shivered and bit my tongue and watched the little leak at the roof, that I was no match for living anymore.

But the gruff soldier was not to be reasoned with, he was determined to smash the lock and turn me loose, and so I let him reach down and take me up from my depths, and there I was, I was free.

Was birth like that?

I had to wonder.

There I was, gasping for air and squinting at the light. I was bare as a baby; my hands swung helplessly at my sides. Everything about me was infantile. But what kind of infant had these scars on her face? What baby is emptied of her innermost organs, a procedure indicated by the crude stitches across my abdomen? A newborn can’t walk because she is new. I couldn’t walk for a far different reason.

The gruff soldier clasped me to his front.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

“Don’t cry!” his companion ordered, looking at me.

I opened my mouth again to protest. I might have done terribly within this box, I might have withered and lost the use of my legs, and I knew that there was something even greater in me missing, something so large that it was the equal of a whole other person, or at least a small girl. But I’d never cried. And then a drop lit on my cheek, and I realized that the soldier wasn’t speaking to me but to the gruff man who held me, a man who trembled while my tongue crept from my mouth to find the evidence of his shock and joy.

“Look at it!” he said; he wept. “It is drinking my tears!”

Stasha: Chapter Thirteen The Straw Temple

When the woods fell behind us on our third day of wandering, we found ourselves near the village of Julianka, hunched and frost-threatened animals with two potatoes to our names. A vast azure opened up, and the clouds insisted on being formless and unread; they floated high above us and acted lofty, as if they feared nothing, not hunger or cold or the Angel of Death. I wanted to tell the clouds they weren’t so mighty because I didn’t fear him anymore either. Hadn’t they heard of Feliks’s plan? I shouted this for all the sky to hear.

A distant boom answered me. It was faint, but explosive, with a frayed edge.

Feliks’s eyes darted about in panic, and he clapped a hand over my mouth, and he folded me over like I was an empty box. He held me close to the icy ground and glanced about to see if my foolish cries had been overheard. Fortunately, not a soul approached.

“Madness” was all he would say. But empathy shimmered through this statement. He felt mad too, I was quite sure, because we were emptier now than ever before; hunger toured through us during our rare intervals of rest, and winter was threatening to take the toes peeking through our holey shoes. While it seemed likely that we were crazed from all our deprivations, the booms were quite real. The following day, we would learn that these sound bursts were not gunfire but the work of Jewish rebels blowing up the tracks some miles away. In the grasp of that early evening, though, we had no notion of its friendliness.

So when, out of the emptiness, we saw a golden column at the farthest periphery, we ran toward its gleam, encouraged by the change in the scenery.

Like a brass bell sprinkled with snow, this straw temple rose from the earth with a steady determination. As we neared, we saw that we were not the only ones that this golden column had drawn in. It appeared that bales had been removed from the lowermost of this stack to create a burrow — we could see the discarded piles of hay flung about, their golden threads strewn on the ice, and through a flimsy panel of straw at the rear, we could see a peepery of eyes. They were scattered throughout in the manner of constellation, and with equal glitter. The eyes were friendly, I thought, but I’d been wrong about the friendliness of eyes before.

Was this a trap? A trick?

Another boom cried out into the night.

Before we could debate, Feliks parted the wall of straw and scurried inside. He dragged me with him, deep into the itchy burrow, on hands and knees. On all fours, we were rib to rib and so close to each other that I was quite unsure where I ended and he began. You would think this would have been a welcome feeling, considering the compromises of my hearing and vision, but it made me feel only amorphous and undone.

Adding to this discomfort was the general overpopulation of the haystack, which trembled with the shifts of its fugitives. We were not the only ones on hands and knees. Though it was dark, I could make out the forms of five individuals, all seated against the perimeter, and all so small that I assumed them to be children, not a one of them any older than the age of seven. But the curses that confronted us were quite adult; they tumbled toward us in Czech. We do not speak that language, we said. Then a few voices switched to cursing us in Polish. That is the way to curse us, we said. And we apologized for crowding them so.

“You can’t stay here,” a male voice hissed. His Polish was quite good, I thought.

“Why can’t we stay?” we hissed back.

“No room! We did not escape to be crushed by strangers. You must leave!”

“But we are making it warmer in here for you,” I pointed out. The temperature was most hospitable with this crowd of bodies, and the ceiling of this burrow was low, so low that when I moved my head, the hay tickled my scalp in a pleasant way. I cared little whether our hosts welcomed us or not — I could not ignore the welcome of this golden palace.

“It is true that you are warming us,” the male voice conceded. “But we have warmth enough, and you are crowding my mother. This haystack is not as spacious as it appears. And it belongs to us. We carved out this burrow with our bare hands! Do you know how difficult a feat this is in winter? Only the most desperate men are capable of such miracles!”

I respected the speaker’s message, but I did not care to move. It was too lovely in the haystack — like curling up in a summer I’d once known. The perfume of the hay was so sweet, and the perfume of its inhabitants — it was not terrible. For all time, I could live there, and my reluctance to exit made this clear.

A large sigh arose. It sounded as if it came from the depths of a matriarch. The eloquent speaker addressed us again.

“You have to leave, children! I am sorry — we have no room!”

Exhaustion possessed me and I could only weep. And I did not care who my tears fell on in this little crowd.

“Stasha!” Feliks whispered. “Collect yourself!”

All of the haystack hushed after this command.

“Stasha?” said the male voice. “Pearl’s sister?”

At first, I confess, I did not know him, even as he expressed familiarity.

“Have you seen Pearl?” I blurted out, and my desperation nearly felled the haystack. “Or did you see what happened to her?”

“No, I haven’t seen her,” the male voice said.

A lie, that’s what it sounded like to me.

“Who are you?” Feliks demanded. He was truly a bear in the tradition of the Classification of Living Things. A defensive lining, part growl, had entered his voice. Bruna and Zayde both, they would have been proud of this performance. But the speaker was not put off at all by this inquiry.

“I’m the one you call Sardine,” he said.

His voice was even and brave. It had none of the oily flavor or shrunken nature of a canned fish. I couldn’t imagine a more inaccurate term for this gentlemanly Lilliput, and I hung my head in recognition of the taunts he had so stoically faced.

“We’re sorry,” Feliks said. “Truly. We can’t beg for your forgiveness enough!”

Because it was Mirko who presided over this straw temple alongside his family. Apologies were owed to the lot of them, because the children of the Zoo had referred to all the Lilliputs as sardines, at Bruna’s instruction. Now, it seemed, sardines would be the preservation of us.

Upon realizing that we’d been reunited with fellow survivors, we felt as if the whole world might be held within this haystack; it was all that mattered. In this pile of straw, I thought, there may not be happiness, but there is a hope that may impersonate happiness, if only for a small while. We had lived through death together — how could we not want the intimacy of this haystack?

“This girl is my friend,” Mirko told the other inhabitants. “I might not think much of her companion, but the girl — a gem. And she has lost so much.”

Something in his voice made me want to ask how exactly he knew how much I had lost. There was a mournfulness, a knowing that indicated he was familiar with the workings of my grief.

“You hardly know her,” another voice said. I recognized it as his mother’s. “It’s as if everyone from Auschwitz is a friend these days, no matter that they lived beside us for so long without a care for us. Is this how we will live — picking up every stray and pretending a friendship?”

The other inhabitants of the haystack appeared to agree with this statement. I could feel the straw tremble with the force of their nodding.

“She was Mengele’s pet,” Mirko said firmly. “She knows what it is to be us.”

Even though he spoke in defense of me, I couldn’t help but take issue with his words.

“I wasn’t Mengele’s pet,” I said. “Not Pearl. Not me.”

“I don’t know what you were.” Mirko sighed. “But he mixed his terrors with favors. How is that?”

“True,” I said. Still, I felt defensive. I might have chided Mirko about the radio Mengele had given him. I might have reminded his mother about the lace tablecloth she’d eaten off of and confronted the whole lot of them with the palace of a room they’d been given while the rest of us were pierced by the splinters of our boxy little beds and given those black-crossed lice as company. I didn’t say these things, though, and not just because Pearl wouldn’t have approved of such an outburst. I had a more important question.

“Did you ever see Pearl?” I asked. “You had to have seen her.”

Mirko acted as if he hadn’t heard the question and breezed into another line of conversation.

“My grandfather, you know that he could recite all the passages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses? It seemed such a feat to me, impossible. But in my captivity, I tried to do the same. Already I have the story of creation down pat. The beginning of the world, Stasha — what do you think of that?”

“I think you lie,” I whispered. “I think you are lying about not having seen Pearl, and I don’t appreciate it. You are trying to spare me her pain. But her pain after death — that is mine to take!”

I swore I could hear some of the haystack voices murmur in agreement. But Mirko remained firm, as if he knew my sister better than I did. I wondered what time they had spent together to allow him to form such a conviction.

“Pearl would want you to live anew,” he whispered mournfully. “She would approve of this — she would want you to need the beginning of the world again.”

I told him I was liking the ending just fine.

My friend replied with a recitation:

Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven,

Nature was all alike, a shapelessness,

Chaos, so-called, all rude and lumpy matter,

Nothing but bulk, inert, in whose confusion

Discordant atoms warred.

As he narrated our supposed new beginning, I pared a little hole in the side of my haystack and looked out with my good eye. The heavens I saw, they had never been captured, but they were haunted like I was. Did they know the details of my sister’s death? Those stars, they knew what suffering and renewal meant, they were forged from collapse and dust and fire. That wisdom should have been enough to justify their existence, I’d think.

But they insisted on being beautiful too.

“Do you see what I see?” Feliks whispered. Because he’d made his own porthole too.

“I see stars” was all I would say.

“I don’t see the cremo” was all he would say.

Pre-morning glistened through the peepholes of our haystack. Like a litter of kittens, we’d slept, curled back to back into the family that adopted us, confronted only by the temple’s golden lining. I rubbed my eyes and saw that it was true — there was hardly any room with the additions of us. The hollowed-out sections of haystack provided three square feet of space, but when I sat up straight, my head struck the ceiling of frozen straw.

Still, I told Feliks that I wanted to stay. I was earnest, but he laughed. I could’ve told him that I’d lived in situations just as trying. The floating world, opposite Pearl. Inside the folds of Zayde’s coat. The vinegary confines of my barrel. And did I even need to mention the Zoo? But I chose to keep this logic to myself — I knew he’d mock me, and now we had company besides.

Mirko’s sister Paulina was sitting opposite us with her two children, a boy and a girl, sleepy-faced charmers only as big as crumbs. Paulina was braiding the girl’s hair, and I watched her fingers weave back and forth. Seeing me study this, she gave me a smile, and I was about to apologize for staring, to explain the longing it aroused in me, for touch, for family, but I was saved from having to do so when Mirko and his mother entered through the little thatch, each with a tin cup of snow, which one person passed to the next, lapping up any moisture that one could. Then Mirko took a roll of meat from his pocket.

“From the Soviets,” Mirko explained to me and Feliks, opening his bread knife and sectioning the meat into pieces. “We charmed them after they entered. Sang to them a little. And they permitted us a ride in one of their tanks, took us all the way past Stare Stawy and into this field. It seemed as good a place as any to hide and plan. Mother, she was quite ill with exhaustion, but she has improved after a week’s rest. If the trains are willing, we are going to go to Prague. We will be going back to the theater. Do you two have interest in joining us?”

I couldn’t answer because my mouth was too full of food. I had tried to refuse it, but the matriarch would not allow this. She hopped over with a square of meat and insisted it between my lips, and then, as if I were a baby prone to spitting out foodstuffs, she held my mouth shut until I swallowed. When she’d decided I’d had enough, she cleaned my face with the corner of her shawl and tried to pinch the life back into my cheeks.

“Mother always wanted a giant pet,” noted Paulina. And they all began to laugh, as if they knew they had to laugh again someday and it might as well be that moment. The laughter, though, it fell short; it was too soon, and they turned their attentions instead to drinking the melted snow from their tin cups, and gave Feliks seconds and thirds of wurst.

When their bellies were full, Mirko and Feliks began to discuss the problem of return. Our friend had many plans. He spoke of the parts he wanted to play upon his reestablishment in Prague, of the theater they planned to make their temporary home. He was so hopeful, I never should have interrupted, but I had to say the words that had been with me since I woke. They flowed from me in a burst.

“You never saw Pearl, that’s what you tell me. I believe you. But I also believe that since you are Mirko, you are being an actor, you are twisting words, you are not being truthful.”

Mirko lowered his head so that I could take in only the sea of his curls.

“I believe you never saw Pearl, the real Pearl, because she was already dead; she was just a body, she was emptied of who she was.”

Mirko nodded, and then ducked his face into his scarf. I didn’t expect a confession. But then he decided to give me one.

“I thought I heard her once,” he murmured. “But it was just a hallucination.”

“Where?”

“In the laboratory. A laboratory you are unfamiliar with.” He motioned to Paulina to put her hands over her little girl’s ears. She did so promptly, but the look on her face said she wished she did not have to hear this tale herself. Mirko covered the ears of the little boy, whose eyes darted curiously about as soon as his hearing left him. Only then did my friend continue.

“I was in a cage,” Mirko said. “Is that what you want me to admit? That I was in a cage?”

I told him I did not want to hear such a thing. This softened him.

“I will say I was in a cage. But instead of the word cage, we will use the word haystack. This is more of my word-twisting, I know. Still, is this agreeable to you?”

I indicated that it was.

“So you see, I was in a haystack. I’d been in the haystack for three, maybe four days. The haystack itself was so small that I could not even turn around. I didn’t eat, but water was given to me. This was at the end. Before they had a chance to initiate a single death march. The haystack was making me go mad. There were five other haystacks in this dark room, a room with two sources of light — the crack beneath the door, and a tiny window set so high in the wall that it looked out only onto the sky. Pigeons gathered on the sill. And rats scampered across the floor. These animals were noisier than the inhabitants of the other haystacks. I assumed them to be dead or so dazed from the injections that they could barely speak. I knew that I was the latter, because sometimes, lights flashed around me, and a great hand would unlock the padlock and pet my head and rattle things a bit. You know who that hand belonged to. Every day, another injection. The injections made me ill with a fever, and he marveled at the fact that I still lived. Of course, I wished myself dead, if only to get away from him. As time passed, I saw his hand grow shakier as he gave the injections. He seemed not to be his precise self. He even took no notice of the incompetency of my padlock, which was weak and rusted. Or perhaps he did notice, but he underestimated my ability to break free. Whatever the case, I assumed he was no longer in possession of his full powers — the end seemed near, and his cruelty toward me rapidly increased, as if he was determined to expel every last torture that occurred to him while he was still able. One day, another small body was lowered into my haystack. I felt the face on the body. It was dead. A child, maybe four — equal to my size. I had no choice but to sit beside it. I swear, there was no other option. It seems that Mengele was aware of Jewish prohibitions about contact with the dead. He told me that he’d take the dead body out of the haystack if I recited for him. I recited all day long, and into the night, though I had little voice left in me, and I knew that there was no hope. During my recitation on one occasion, a voice interrupted me with a cry and a plea. Mengele silenced that voice with a kick to its haystack, and I never heard from it again.”

“Was it a child’s voice?”

“It was a small voice.”

“Was it a girl’s voice?”

“It was a sweet voice.”

I did not need to imagine it. I could hear it.

“My haystack was felled when the SS brutes came tramping through. This was during their sackings and evacuations and attempts at retrievals; the planes were above, and they were searching through the room, they were overturning it all, every last haystack, making us go, pell-mell. After their departure, I stood on top of the dead body in my haystack — apologizing all the while — and I fiddled with the padlock. This destructive romp of the SS had weakened it further — the rusty shank all but fell apart! I hissed out in the dark; I ran my hands across the bars of the other haystacks. Not a peep, not even from the one I thought held you. If one had lived there before — she no longer did.”

“But you thought the voice was hers?”

“I thought it was yours at the time.”

“Then it was Pearl.”

“It was cold, I was starving more than the usual starvation, and Mengele, he was poking me, and when it wasn’t pitch-black, he was flashing lights in my eyes. It is all difficult to recall.”

“Maybe if I say what the voice was saying,” I said, “it will confirm things for you. Do you think you can remember it, if I say what the voice was saying?”

“Perhaps.” But Mirko did not seem to want to approach memory at all. I had to encourage him. I put on my sweetest manners.

“I know you’ll remember,” I said. “You are better than us all, Mirko. The smartest, the strongest to survive.”

My closest companion did not take well to this praise. He looked at both of us with the wary eye of one who feels quite left out.

“If you flatter him,” Feliks said, “you might change his memory.”

Mirko bolted up, his head striking the hay ceiling and his fists trembling, as if ready for a fight.

“I will always remember this with accuracy. Until I choose to forget it entirely, which I plan to do after we arrive in Prague. As soon as I step over whatever threshold that remains — poof! You will be amazed, all of you, how much I won’t remember!”

He stood, suddenly forgetting about his responsibility to his nephew’s ears. Now his hands curled as if ready for a fight, and the matriarch scolded him softly; she tugged at his pant leg and eased him back to the earth.

“Which is all the reason now for you to tell me,” I argued. “Tell me what the voice said so that I can repeat it and you can confirm and then forget.”

“Might I tell you in writing?” Mirko asked.

“Of course.” It would be better that way, I thought, because then I might carry the words with me. From Bruna’s satchel, I withdrew one of my last bits of paper and the stub of a pencil. With these precious objects in hand, Mirko hesitated. He turned his back to me as he wrote, and the Rabinowitzes gave a show of hushing themselves, as if we were in the velvet cavern of a theater. When he finally handed the slip back to me, I read:

Tell my sister that I

Long ago, I might have thought that such words would be enough to end me. But in that moment, the five of them felt like friends.

Tell my sister that I

Looking at Mirko — it became painful in that moment. His was perhaps one of the last faces my sister had seen. For her, it could have been far worse, I thought. He was handsome and genteel in a way that you only imagine movie heroes being. His bearing within a cage must have given her hope. In him, there was a valiance I knew I would remember. It was too bad that he was no longer Mirko to me but Mirko, the Last and Final Sight.

I could not bear to look at him any longer, and I told Feliks that we had to leave. He responded by reaching into our sacks and thrusting one of the precious bottles of water at the matriarch. To this sacrifice, he added half of our potato, divided with his bread knife.

“You are leaving?” Paulina cried. “But it is not safe!” And she entreated her brother to stop us, to invite us to stay.

“We have to find a man,” I told her. “We have to find him now more than ever.”

And I ignored their pleas, their warnings. A jackal had no use for the likes of those. But I was human too. Here is proof of it: I put Mirko’s note in my pocket, next to Pearl’s piano key, and with every good-bye I said to the Rabinowitzes, I felt a tear knock on the door of my eye, a tear that acknowledged my sister’s death and Mirko’s proximity to her final hours. He pulled on the sleeve of my coat, indicating that I should lean down and lend him my ear. On tiptoe, he stood, so intent on the delivery of his parting message.

“Pearl is free now,” he whispered, and then his voice divided itself beneath the weight of his grief. “Try to think of her, Stasha, as free.”

And then, with his story told, we left our benevolent hero and his golden temple and traveled out into what the Rabinowitzes surely thought was our end.

Pearl: Chapter Fourteen The Russians Make a Movie

I would wander into my body and try to know it, to stake my claim within it. It was weak, this body; I was ashamed of it. It had none of the strengths I’d imagined it might have while still in the tomb of my box. I did not have the strength of an ant. I did not have the memory of a pigeon. All I owned was breath, really, and a single thought: that the numbers on my arm represented how many times I would have to prove myself useful in the world in order to remain in it. But even I knew that this was untrue; it was the logic of my cage and my keeper, and I had to overcome it.

It took bread to make me find my fingers and my hands. When the bread rolled down my throat, I found that I had a belly. I became reacquainted with my back again when the Russian laid me down on a bed within the infirmary. There, I looked out the window and occasionally faced the wall and sometimes the ceiling, and though there was no leak to converse with, I was the happiest girl one could know.

And though I took all of this in once I was out of the darkness of my cage, I didn’t truly know I had eyes until I met the camera later that day. That is to say, I knew I had eyes, but I didn’t know what they could do, as they were still adjusting to a world of light.

The cameraman in charge of the Russians’ movie was a solemn, thin-lipped man. While many other members of the Red Army gave themselves to some wide-roaming emotion, he remained stoic. I imagined that the camera saw too much for him, or perhaps it provided details that he would rather have avoided. Strangely, the first time I saw him smile was when that camera attracted my interest.

He was moving a white cloth over the lens so tenderly. He held the camera to the light, took a look, cleaned it some more, and I found myself stretching out a hand, as if stroking the air that held such a magical instrument was contact enough.

“She doesn’t reach for anything,” the woman said, with awe. The woman — she had been the first to hold me after my retrieval, and she refused to leave my side. I remembered her doll eyes and her touch, but nothing more — I was told, though, that she was a doctor, that she could be trusted, that I didn’t need to be afraid. I accepted this because I liked how she said my name, as if she’d known me for years.

The cameraman and the woman collaborated to give me a look through the lens. I passed from her arms into his, and I put my eye to the glass. I think I expected to see someone I loved in the eye of that camera. Someone I loved who still lived. But there was no one there.

Disappointment, that’s what that camera held. I don’t know why I’d expected the little black box to contain something better than a view of this place. All I could see were prisoners, tiny little prisoners whom the Russians had dressed in the gray-striped, voluminous uniforms of adults for the atmospheric purposes of their film. They were cold and sad and their faces said nothing of freedom.

Still, though I was unfamiliar with my personality, I had the impression that I had been an acquiescent sort, one interested in guarding the feelings of others, so I made a point of acting impressed as I looked in the camera, and when I was done, the woman picked me up, commenting on my lightness, and we joined the crowd of children to make the Russians’ movie. We milled about near the fences, shivered in the snow. All us actors, so young and unskilled, were in a state of confusion. Why do we have to wear these clothes? we kept asking. We never wore these clothes before! we cried. Why are we marching but not leaving? But the moviemakers didn’t care for our opinions — they wanted only to see us march in a tidy procession as proof of how free we had become.

We were lit with a snowy blur; all of us moved as if shaken from a long sleep. The camera loved two faces in particular, two small girls of ten, Romanians, who were pushed to the fore. Though these identical girls clung to each other as they walked before the lens, their postures were different. One was sober and demure, but the other tossed her head in the air and, ever so briefly, stuck out her tongue. Whether the gesture was deliberate, a cheeky reproach to the cameraman, or done out of thirst or reflex or simple girlish fun is uncertain. What is certain: Those twins would one day tell the world of the man who was not angel or doctor or uncle or friend or genius. They would speak of the man we experiments would banish from our thoughts except for when we had to warn others that people like him existed, that they walked among us without souls, seeking to harm others for sport and perfection and the satisfaction of some inborn cruelty. Someday, Eva and Miriam Mozes, they would not let the world forget what had been done to us.

But then, as the camera rolled, they clung to each other, so fearful of being parted, comforted only by their sisterhood. They were as bewildered as the rest of us. Confusion was the dominant expression of the photographed children. We were walking down a path, fences rising on either side of it, as if we were free — these gates were not the famed gates the world is so familiar with now, but another opening, unadorned by language — and then we retreated back as if we were not. By the time the movie was declared perfect, we weren’t sure in which direction our true future lay, but the Soviets assured us that we would be in every paper, in every movie house. People would see us; they would know that we lived.

And I noticed something during this constant march, back and forth and cut from and cut to: nearly every child was part of a pair. Each was like the other in looks and manner and voice, and they marched together, step by step, in unison; they moved as if one could not move without the other. It was then that I knew I was not whole.

What I knew was small, but it enlarged itself quickly. We were in a place where we’d been meant to die, but we’d lived. For what, I wasn’t sure — but I was hardly alone in this. No one could tell me, not really, and there were so many sources of information too, all of them chatterboxes. They’d been bossed and corralled so often that they went wild in the infirmary; they spent their time shouting and jumping from bed to bed.

I envied that jumping. It was something I wanted for myself, someday, to leap and jump and run and dance, yet whenever I peeked beneath the bandages on my feet, the possibility of any of these seemed doubtful.

The shouting, though — I had no interest in that. But these freed children loved to shout. To their credit, these were quite organized shouts; they followed a strict pattern and held much meaning.

“No more needles.”

“No more ‘Heil Hitler.’”

“No more measurements.”

And whenever one of these recitations ended, this little chorus would turn to me.

“No more,” I said. “No more.”

They took pity on me and supplied me with items with which to end the sentence. Roll call. Root soup. Injections. X-rays. Elmas. Mengeles.

The last made me shudder. I knew the name belonged to the man who’d lowered me into my cage. Hearing him mentioned made me not want to play this game at all. But I forced myself to participate.

“No more cages,” I said to all of the infirmary.

It was all I could offer, as I could remember only the cage. I was certain of one other fact, and it was very curious: my name. It was scratched into the wall. Dear Pearl, the letters said. I liked to trace the letters in the dark and wonder after who had loved me enough to put them there.

That afternoon, the woman who carried me during the Russians’ movie embarrassed me with her attentions. I wanted to ask her if we were family, because she acted as if she owed me every kindness she could give me. She bathed me and fed me and neglected her other charges in the infirmary to look after my needs. I wanted to point out to her that they suffered too, but I had the feeling that she was not easily influenced by others when it came to matters of suffering.

As she put me to bed in a private room in the rear of the infirmary, a man stepped inside and hesitated in the doorway, fully shadowed.

“Papa?” I cried.

“She knows who you are,” the woman said.

The man was stern — I saw the shadow of his form shift, as if he was considering departure. But then he took off his hat and held it to his chest.

“Tell her I’m not her father,” he said.

“Would it really hurt to say you were?” the woman whispered.

“More than you know,” the man whispered back. He spoke for us both, I could tell. He was as discomforted by the prospect of necessary human connections as I was, it seemed. Though disheartened by this reaction, I began to sympathize with him in time. Over the course of our exodus I’d realized that the paternal figure had been living in a cage too, that he’d been cornered and pinned by the same torturer, though the assaults on his senses were quite different than my isolation.

He left the doorway and came closer, just near enough so I could see his face. It was a face that had once instructed me on the importance of remembering the other children’s names. I felt a deep shame that I had long forgotten every last one, but fortunately, he didn’t ask after them in that moment. Other clarifications were more pressing to him.

“I’m not your father, Pearl,” he said. “Understand that. And this woman, she isn’t your mother. And the rest of your family, your twin—”

The woman leaped up and hushed him. A confused look crossed his face, and then he nodded and left, unhappy with her intervention but not inclined to defy it.

Surrender was everywhere in those days. I suppose that was his.

And as for my own? I’d hoped that I’d left my ability to surrender in that cage, but I couldn’t be sure.

When the woman put me to bed that night, she made their identities clear. The man was Twins’ Father, and she was Miri. I was never to call her Doctor. I understood.

Twins’ Father kept a list. All the children were on it, their names, their ages, their hometowns, even the barracks they’d lived in.

I peered at the list as Miri inspected it on the day that we departed, January 31, 1945.

I knew I was someone named Pearl. This was not new. The wall had told me so.

Apparently, I was thirteen years old. That made sense. If I looked at the other girls who were thirteen or near thirteen, we were of similar scrawniness, height. The fact agreed with me.

My hometown might as well have been a blank. Unknown, it read.

I watched Miri cross out Unknown and write Miri instead. She caught my glance, tapped her pencil.

“Is this agreeable to you?” she asked.

I told her that it was, and she received that as if I’d paid her the highest of compliments.

Twins’ Father regarded this bit of information curiously when she handed it back to him but said not a word. He was too busy to care much, I think, about anyone changing her hometown to a person. He was scampering from child to child, asking after the contents of their packs — bottles of water, bread, sardines, candy from the Soviets — inquiring about the state of their shoes, and distributing fur coats pillaged from Canada.

The children’s forms were made round and fat by these acquisitions. Their bodies were engulfed by supplies and fur, and their faces peered out from beneath their hoods. It was as if they were an army of tiny, directionless bear cubs, and Twins’ Father handled them accordingly.

“Big ones look after small ones and small ones look after the babies, you understand? Keep up. Don’t lag behind. If you lag behind — I can only wish you luck. Be soldiers now.”

I watched multiple noses uplift proudly after this little speech. I wanted to feel so inspired. If only I had my half to walk alongside me, to lean over and joke to me as I lay in my wheelbarrow.

We were thirty-five children, all told, but my Someone was not among them.

“I know I had a twin,” I said to Miri, “I just don’t remember her. I tell myself that she must have been just like me in most ways, and different in other ways. But I don’t know what I’m like either.”

We walked and wheeled and trudged past the gates without the eye of the camera to note the grandeur of the event. Without costume. Without photographers. I didn’t know it then, but this was what I wished the world could see: bundles of children footing their way across the icy path, the too-young paying no mind to the words at the main gate, the words that arched their way into Auschwitz’s sky, and the still-young-but-now-too-old blinking at their meaning. I saw a fourteen-year-old boy with a torn ear and shaggy hair search the ground for a rock to loft at the gate’s words. I saw him shuffle through the frost; he was telling Twins’ Father that he had to find one heavy enough to strike those words and provoke a metallic clamor. I thought I recognized him as he fumbled through the snow. There was something familiar in the way he set his mouth, the way he searched for this stone, as if he were accustomed to procuring objects for very specific purposes. I tried to reach his name in my thoughts, but I could not. If he found a good stone, and he struck those words — well, then, I believed it might occur to me, I might hear it in the echo of a stone striking metal. But our march was moving swiftly on; Miri was carting me away, the children were sweeping alongside Twins’ Father, and it began to look as if this boy would never find a stone mighty enough to achieve his purpose. The leader of our troop urged him on.

We were too late, Twins’ Father told him, for life already. Better not to waste another minute looking back.

Stasha: Chapter Fifteen Our Marching Steps Will Thunder

Everywhere in Kolo, a sign, a message. Bits of paper leafed across the train station’s walls. People wrote where they were going, where they’d been, who they were looking for. They wrote who they had been but were careful not to write who they had become.

I had never been to this town before, but I knew it by its former inhabitants: Kolo was a transfer point for Jews who were rounded up and deported to the Lodz ghetto. A couple of these captives became Papa’s friends; they had met with him secretly in our ghetto basement. Papa’s friends, they spoke mournfully of the town’s history, its former hospitality to Jewish craftsmen. Their Kolo was not the one I saw from the windows of our train. This town, once so bucolic with its windmills and rivers, had become yet another place for Himmler to praise for its eradications.

I could hardly bear to look at it. I focused instead on the signs and the names.

Once, I saw Feliks scrape his name into the seat before us when he thought I wasn’t looking. He performed this task with a hurried shame, embarrassed by the futility of the gesture and his compulsion to perform it. Because nobody was looking for us. Nobody even wrote our names anywhere. Nobody wrote, If you are reading this, my greatest prayers have been answered, because it will mean that you are not dead after all, you are just away from me, which is the same thing, but somewhat more remediable. I always wanted to write that to Pearl. But there was no room for such a lengthy message among those many names and scrawls. So many names — they darted across every available surface with violent urgency.

I would be lying if I said that I did not look for my name among them, written in Mengele’s script. Because I was certain that he was looking for me still. On any one of these message depots — at the stations, on the backs of train seats — I told myself, he would have to be looking for us. I was happy that he was gone, yes, happy that I had to hunt him down, because this would be a greater demonstration of my love for Pearl. But I couldn’t imagine why he was so willing to abandon me, his most special experiment. I was beginning to think I had never mattered at all.

I was a broken half afloat in a great nowhere, and the trains were determined to keep me this way. Let me say this about those days, when the war was still a war, but one soon to end, when refugees were roaming and tanks lay overturned on their backs like great tortoises and one was wise to avoid the marching streams of any soldiers, be they Soviet or German: These trains we never should have trusted again, they appeared to be our only way home. And so people packed themselves into the cars quite willingly and looked the other way when they failed to arrive at their stated destinations. I marveled at our collective belief in an eventual safety.

While the trains did not take us back to Auschwitz, they appeared determined to strand and confuse us. Their only real benefit was that they sheltered us from the snow, and we paid nothing for them. Feliks and I, we’d sit two in a seat, and when a conductor happened along to squint at us, we had only to shove up the arms of our furred sleeves and show him our numbers. Their blueness purchased whatever direction the train cared to carry us.

After leaving the straw temple, we had days of halts and reversals. We went east, and then west, our heads bobbing listlessly on our necks, our bodies jostled in our seats. And when morning slipped into dusk and we entered Kolo, we witnessed yet another ending: the tracks. A conductor urged us out. This was not a hotel, he explained. We huddled into each other, tried to act as if we didn’t understand his Polish, tried to bargain this stalled train car into a place to sleep. But though the conductors weren’t bothered by letting refugees ride the cars for free, our true comfort was another matter. We were plucked up by our ears, led to the car door, and forced out into the ice, where we wasted no time tumbling down an embankment. For once, even Feliks was slow to stand. The contents of Bruna’s precious sack spilled out over the snow, and we leaped about, retrieving the one and a half potatoes and the bottle of water, the remnants of our sustenance.

Defeated, we trudged into the woods and found a barn. It appeared innocent. A pig lived there, fatter than even a pig had any right to be, and a sad-eyed Blenheim cow who mooed in pain, her udders overwhelmed by milk. Feliks showed me how to milk her, and I was impressed by this skill. We were cheered by the spaciousness of our accommodations — the cow and pig occupied two of the four stalls, and we claimed the furthermost slot, with the blankness of a vacant stall beside us. So sheltered, we drew our furs fast around us and dreamed of a morning when we no longer had to be Bear and Jackal.

Sleep comes so easy when you know you will wake to milk.

But when we did wake, it was not to sustenance but panic, to the neigh of a horse and the sight of a pair of boots, their muddy heels visible through the crack between the wall and the floor. As the owner of the boots secured the horse, Feliks and I tried to make ourselves very still; we flattened ourselves against the floor and possumed, and we would have gotten away with this, I’m sure, if it were not for Feliks’s sneeze. This noise sent the wearer of the boots shuttling out of the horse’s stall and into ours. She was an older woman in clean clothes and a decent coat. Her round cheeks bobbed like suns on her face, and the eyes above them were cloudy blue and suggested near blindness. I did not like the look of them, but when she approached us I convinced myself that they were kind, because we were lost and starving, living on beggar’s time, and you can only live on beggar’s time for so long until everyone starts to look like your salvation. She regarded us thoughtfully, as if calculating a move, and then, having reached her decision, plunged toward us with an open embrace.

“Children!” the woman cried. “I have been looking for you! I thought I’d never see you again!” She took us into her arms. She was a large woman, but she’d been diminished still — one could tell from her grasp; loose wings of flesh were enfolded in her sleeves. “Never run off again!”

I wriggled from her arms, huddled myself tightly against the wall of the barn.

“We are not yours,” I said, calm. “I am Stasha Zamorski. Pearl’s twin.”

“Oh? Forgive me. And this is Pearl, you say?” She gave Feliks a punch on the arm.

“Hardly. He is a boy. But you’re right to recognize him as a twin.”

“I could’ve sworn you were my own lost children,” she lamented. “I thought you’d returned. But maybe you can help me find them? I will give you food and shelter in exchange.”

Feliks gave me a look, the kind of look that said this was my decision. For all the woman’s suspiciousness, he had been disarmed by the prospect of comforts. If we had not been tossed about by trains and weather, if we had full bellies and proper shoes, and if the world hadn’t been overwhelmed by white, I’m sure he would not have considered it at all. He pulled me aside for a consultation.

“If need be,” he said, “do you think we could overtake her?”

I vowed that I would never allow harm to come to either of us. He received this skeptically but turned to the woman to present his plan.

“We will stay for an evening,” he told her. “Just long enough — the girl is weak, you see. A meal too? We are hungry. And perhaps some bread when we go?”

“My home and bread are yours,” the woman soothed.

“It is a deal, then,” Feliks declared. “Madame, we will be eager to assist you in the search for your children.” He gave a little bow, one shockingly graceful in its bent. And we followed the woman as she picked her way through the snow flanking the barn and onto a little path, where there stood a cottage so humble and white, like a child’s overturned top, that I couldn’t imagine any harm might come to us within it. Still, I knew that trusting such a stranger was a gamble. The woman’s milky eyes did not warm to us, and as we walked in the company of her detached and blighted stare, I began to wonder if her true flaw was not a matter of her sight but her disposition.

My deathlessness was useful in situations like these. But Feliks? I had to make certain that no harm befell him.

The woman’s lodging was simple. She had a rag-covered bed, snowshoes by the door. A drab braided rug, the usual harvest wreath. A bucket posed to capture a leak. The low ceiling made giants of us both, and the woman walked at a curvature so as not to crack her head. What must it be like, living at such an angle? She was crooked, I thought, but she must have been a good mother still, because the cottage was without spot or stain. The bench was cherry and polished, the cupboards plain and clean. A shiny hatchet lorded over the table from its nail on the wall.

“Your children — how long have they been missing?” I asked.

The woman didn’t have a ready answer. I asked again. But she appeared to be a little deaf in addition to being nearly blind. I was not beyond sympathizing with her conditions and so I did not press the issue but simply watched as she busied herself with cutting a loaf of bread. It was then that the starkness of the house came to my full attention. I found it odd that there were no pictures of these lost children. Or any sign, really, that they — or anyone — had ever lived here. Not a book appeared on the shelves. There was no piano, no cat sleeping in a cat basket. Before my family’s time in the ghetto, we had lived in a realm of objects, and sometimes I’d lie awake at night wherever Feliks and I happened to be sheltering ourselves and practice the memories of those things. I’d recite the details of Mama’s dishware, the color of Zayde’s telescope. I felt so sorry for the lost children because wherever they were, they had little to cling to in the way of reminiscences — this was a place where the candle had naught to flicker over. And then I saw the wishbone on the mantel followed by a procession of tiny ceramic angels. The sight of these objects comforted me — if I were a missing child of such origins, I would surely carry these tokens in my heart.

I asked the woman for her children’s names, their faces. Instead of answering these simple questions, she poked me in the ribs, in the manner of one titillated by malnourishment, and insisted that I eat.

Feliks ate merrily, but I couldn’t consume a thing. Eating bread required a talent that I no longer possessed. Raw rabbit — of that I was more deserving, as a jackal. But the civilized loaf of my past? Every piece of me had something to say about the fact that I did not deserve this bread if my sister no longer lived. What I am saying is this — I had no choice but to vomit on the table.

“What is wrong with you?” the woman cried, her voice entertaining a temperament quite different than the one we’d been introduced to. She raised her arm in the air. I could not tell if she was reaching for the hatchet on the wall or if she was settling for giving me a more standard beating, but I dove beneath the table and pulled Feliks down with me. “Vermin,” she muttered, nabbing a broom from its corner. Thus equipped, she stalked across the floor and bent toward our hiding place. With the handle of her weapon, she issued blow after blow, striking us at our shoulders, our backs. We fled, overturning the table in our wake, and parted to different corners of the cottage. The woman closed in on Feliks’s corner. Her broom handle flew about it in a chaotic fury, inflicting pain wherever it could on his body, and in a most disorganized fashion. Feliks shook, overcome by the reasonable fear of the mortal. But he did not cry out, not even when the broom handle landed on his spine with an audible crack. This crack made it clear: Now was the time to fulfill my vow of protection. My hand took up my hidden bread knife, and I crept behind the woman — she was so occupied with her abuse that my step escaped her notice.

But a knock at the door, merry and crisp, interrupted my quest.

The woman paused in her viciousness and her white eyes shifted; she crossed the room to the door and put an eye to the peephole. The sight it contained cheered her, and we understood why when we saw her company: a young man and a young woman in gray uniforms, thunderbolts riding their chests. The man introduced himself and the woman as heads of operations at the extermination camp of Chelmno. He was Heinrich and she was Fritzi.

“May you be blessed!” declared the woman, a nervousness riding the edge of her voice.

The man explained that Chelmno had been overtaken by the Russians. The camp officers had made a valiant effort to do away with the prisoners; to the very end, they’d risked themselves, even while fleeing, trying to leave no Jew alive. Unfortunately, the Jews, they were scattered all over the countryside. But Heinrich and Fritzi and those who had been with the cause from the beginning were not going to let them scamper into hiding.

“I have two finds that will thrill you, then, I am sure,” the woman said, ushering both of them inside. She gave us a nasty glance as we clung together, pressed into a single corner, shaking in our coats. She fluttered about, pouring tea and proudly displaying us to her guests.

“These two, they will not leave here alive. My husband and I killed Jews together for years. It was a holy obligation. You see that hatchet on the wall there? A good weapon against their skulls. I used to merely collect children for him, and he did the work, but now — he is gone.”

The heads of Chelmno offered their condolences on her loss.

“Yes, he was a good man, so dedicated to the cause. Of course, finding Jews became more difficult over the years, due to the führer’s efficiency! Once, we discovered a hiding place full of them in the woods, and from time to time, they even gave themselves directly to our hands, begging for food at the door. Collecting them is a much harder process without him. Now, if I am lucky enough to stumble upon them, I have to make them trust me. So I fill their bellies and then kill them while they sleep. You must understand my intentions — how else could I put these two at ease but with food?”

“A good plan,” Heinrich said. “But such a terrible waste of bread!”

“I know,” the woman lamented. “But I have no other way to gain their trust. I can’t read, and we have no toys. I suppose I should have sung to them?” This last bit — it was tinged with sarcasm. I could tell that she was displeased by their reaction. She’d expected praise and thanks, an outsize appreciation of her cruelty. Strangely, this had not been offered.

Heinrich stalked over to our corner and squinted at us. I am not sure how much of me there was to see because I had so thoroughly curled myself into Feliks’s side. We were just bear fur on jackal fur, trembling. The old woman joined Heinrich in looking at us.

“Maybe you will do the honors?” she said. “Or you could hold them down for me?” Her hand, mapped with green veins, clawed at the collar of my coat. I wondered why I was not running. Feliks tried to bolt, but in his fright, he tripped over his own feet and collapsed. Fritzi chuckled at his clumsiness, but somehow, her laughter did not strike me as wholly cruel. And then, oddly, the attentions of the heads of Chelmno turned to our hostess.

“You sing, you say?” Heinrich asked breezily.

“Yes,” the woman said, her forehead crumpled at the detour of this question, and she rose up and smoothed her hands over her apron. “I was trained as a girl, in another life. What would you like to hear?”

“‘Zog Nit Keyn Mol’” was the ready answer.

“This is a Yiddish song?” the woman wondered.

“You do not know it?” Fritzi asked, and, drawing her pistol and pointing it at the woman, she added, “It has become very popular in the camps and the ghettos.”

Together, the two soldiers sang a song Feliks and I knew well, the partisan’s song, the song of the Jewish resistance:

Never say that you have reached the very end

When leaden skies a bitter future may portend;

For sure the hour for which we yearn will yet arrive

And our marching steps will thunder: we survive.

And when they came to that last line, the old woman opened her mouth and began to squeak. Maybe it was an effort to appease them by joining them; we had no idea. We didn’t hear a glimmer of her singing voice. The woman might have had a fine voice, one for the ages, one that would have pleased Hitler and Mengele both. Perhaps she was owed a far different life on the back of her musicality. I would never know. We never had a chance to hear her, because as soon as she opened her mouth a bullet buzzed into it, like a bee returning to a hive, and traveled through the back of her gray head. Upon its exit, the bullet performed a little jig into the wall and there it stayed, very still and quiet, as if it were aware that its work was done. The avengers coolly stepped over the old woman and loped around the scene they’d created, taking in the wishbone and the angels, their faces shiny with youth and excitement.

“You should finish eating,” Fritzi said. Feliks rose, bumping his head on the table once again in his flurry, and reclaimed his seat. He tucked into his bread with zeal. I followed suit.

“Are those your real names?” Feliks asked.

No answer. They continued to stalk around the room. Fritzi had the attitude of someone at the intermission of a performance she was quite enjoying. Heinrich was equally mild. He took the third seat beside us at the table.

“May I?” Heinrich asked. He walked two fingers toward my plate, as if his hand were a person.

I pushed my plate to him. He didn’t even notice that it was edged with my bile from my encounter with the bread. He was too busy admiring his partner. She took the cap from her head and it was then that I saw that her blond hair was coal-black at its roots. She cracked her knuckles as if preparing for a fight, and then she spat on the woman, on her clouded eyes, on her apron. Not a particle of her escaped this assault. Fritzi even took care to spit on the pool of blood on the floor. She spat and spat until her throat went dry, and then she eyed my milk, sniffed its whiteness suspiciously, and drank it down to the last drop. Her black eyes flashed above the rim of the cup like two ships traveling the horizon.

A great portion of difficulty with deathlessness is that you have an eternity to wonder who you have become. The death of a twin doubles this predicament. Though I would never cease being Pearl’s half, I realized in that moment that I would not mind at all becoming someone like this dark-eyed girl avenger. My look for her must have been too admiring, because she turned from me with a grimace, as if to ward off my reverence, and declared, “You owe your life to no one.”

I started to argue this point with her, because she didn’t know Pearl, she had no notion that my life was owed entirely to my sister, but I could tell that the girl avenger didn’t care to debate; she was too busy rummaging through drawers and cupboards and throwing objects in her sack. All the meat, all the cheese, all the bread. She took a box of cigarettes, handed one to the young man, and lit it for him while the corpse lay at their feet. Between them, there moved a feeling, something sweet and strangely innocent, and they didn’t even seem to remember the corpse that they stood over until the girl avenger began to fuss with a spatter of blood that had lit upon Heinrich’s breast pocket, bright as a boutonniere. Her fingertips lingered there, just for a moment, and then Heinrich returned to our table with a look of satisfaction and winked.

He ate some more, chewing quietly like a gentleman, and then he looked at Feliks and he looked at me. We did not need to show him our numbers. He knew who we were.

“And what will you do with your freedom now? You have plans for your young lives?”

He handed Feliks his cigarette and nodded for him to take a puff.

“My father the rabbi, he liked to say,” Feliks began, attempting a puff before collapsing in a coughing fit. “He liked to say that the dead die so that the living may live. I did not understand that until now. In the case of our torturers, I think it more than applies.”

Heinrich took this in appreciatively and raised his glass to the sentiment. Feliks had the look of one who had met his hero. I can’t say that I felt any different. I wanted to tell the avenger my secret — I wanted him to know that while I appreciated that he had saved me, I hadn’t required saving. It was only Feliks who was in danger. But all of the room was too absorbed with making plans.

“I assume you have had many torturers, though,” Heinrich said. “It is quite ambitious to want to take them all on.”

“We only want one,” Feliks said. “Josef Mengele.”

“You are too young to kill.” This was the girl’s opinion.

“I watched them open my brother,” Feliks protested.

“It would ruin you, to kill. Look at us. We are ruined,” the girl said.

I wanted to argue that they didn’t appear ruined by any measure. To the contrary, they had a glow I hadn’t seen since the war began. Feliks pressed on, determined to secure their blessing for our mission. “My brother was my twin,” he said. “When the knife went through him, it went through me too.”

“You are not strong enough.” Fritzi clucked.

“That knife goes through me every day,” Feliks said. “And still I live.”

Heinrich and Fritzi exchanged glances. Will you think it strange if I say that love strung itself between them at every interval?

“Very well,” Heinrich said. “Who can argue with the determination of the freed?”

So began our training. Heinrich spent the next hour schooling us on the proper use of a revolver. For my first shot, I took aim at the five ceramic figures on the woman’s mantel. Even angels, you see, did not escape my fury, as they’d been quite content to observe our sufferings without intervention. The first angel splintered in the air, obedient. It knew what it had done. Then Feliks took a turn. We picked those angels off, one by one; we doomed their fragile souls to nothingness. After we’d each killed two angels, we turned to each other, both expecting a fight over this last murder. But all this shooting, it had a strangely civilizing effect.

“It is yours,” we said in unison.

The avengers were frustrated by our manners. “On with it!” both cried.

And so Feliks took aim at the last remaining figure; he did so with great relish, and when the bullet struck this final angel, the avengers flung their sacks over their shoulders.

Of course, this made us wish that there were more ceramic angels, enough to keep killing forever, so that our new companions might remain with us, too intrigued by our executions to go. But they were determined to leave us. To soothe our distress, they addressed our need for better weaponry and treated us as peers in their mission. Fritzi said, quite airily, that we could keep the gun. Then Heinrich took the hatchet from the wall and handed it to me.

“It is a bit heavy,” he said.

“We will manage it,” Feliks said. He came up beside me and tested its edge with a fingertip, then he wasted not a minute in stealing it from my hands. “This hatchet didn’t know what it was doing before. I will make it know its place now, in the heart of Mengele. And if not the heart, the guts. And if not the guts, the back.”

I saw them mask their amusement. They were not successful in this. If they thought us a joke, though, they were fully committed to our comedy, because Fritzi bent toward me with a delicate smallness cupped in her hand. At first, I thought it was a pearl. But this misperception was due to my bad eye. Looking closer, I saw that it was a pill. A pill, Fritzi explained, that would kill one instantly after consumption. It was a pea-size ampule, walled with brown rubber, and its core was fatal: a concentrated solution of potassium cyanide. She deposited it into my hand, curled my fingers around it, and advised me to drop it into Mengele’s drink before a toast, first crushing it to release its powers of brain-death and heart-stop.

I was overwhelmed by this. For death to seat itself in a pill held by my own hand! For vengeance to slip down Mengele’s throat unawares! This pill had charms that I did not. It outranked my bread knives and, possibly, Feliks’s new gun and hatchet. In my estimation, its powers matched the amber magic of Mengele’s needle. I could only hope that handling it would not corrupt me as the needle had surely corrupted him.

I nudged the little poison pill along down one of the paths of my open palm, expecting it to unfurl like a beetle. It seemed like a living thing. On impulse, I put my ear to it — I had to decode its whisper. I will always be strong enough, it whispered. In me, there rests a century’s worth of justice.

It had Pearl’s voice, I thought. Or was it my voice? Did we still sound the same, now that she had taken on the duty of being dead, and I the role of the bereft?

I was about to ask the poison pill what it meant by this, but then I saw that everyone was watching me. Feliks blushed when I caught his eye, and he redirected his gaze, as if embarrassed by his association with me. The avengers chuckled freely at my haze.

But the corpse? Feliks asked what we were to do with it. That is for you to decide, they said hastily. They were eager to return to killing. From the doorway, we watched them enter a car, a sleek, boot-shiny thing with a Nazi flag waving pitifully from its stalk. Instead of a good-bye, they cried for revenge. “Zemsta!” they shouted, the word encased in blue puffs of cold that burst in midair, and then they sped away, and they no longer belonged to us but to the realm of Nazi impostors who sought justice at every opportunity.

We lingered in the doorway and then we remembered the body on the floor. We looked at the hearth and its severance of angels.

“What now?” Feliks wondered aloud, and he tossed a ceramic wing into the fire.

A shared thought moved between us. It flickered in him; it sparked in me. With the old woman’s broom handle, we fed the flames to the curtains. The whole house was hungry for the fire; the flames moved over it in tongues, and sparks like birds fluoresced in the night. We watched it consume the rug, the table, the wreath, the wishbone. But as soon as it began to nibble at the woman’s body, the flames crowning her temple, we fled without looking back. I was afraid of what I might turn into with such a sight in my mind. So I plodded on with Feliks and our new weapons; we stumbled through the snow, back to the barn that had initially promised comfort. The horse greeted us. He knew how we needed him. He saw the heaviness of our hatchet, our gun, our food — there was no way, his eye argued, that we could continue without him. After all the evil tours of his master, he owed us this, he insisted.

“He is old,” Feliks said sorrowfully, stroking Horse’s flank. “We would do better to eat him.”

“Who would take care of the slaughter?” I wondered. Maybe Fritzi was right. Maybe we weren’t suited to killing at all. I could not confront the fullness of the question, because what could I think of myself if I were unable to execute vengeance on my sister’s behalf?

On Horse’s back, we traveled on, tripping across all the fallen things of the forest, making our way toward a future we weren’t sure wanted us at all.

Pearl: Chapter Sixteen Our Migration

Day One

I would reacquaint myself with what a day was as we traveled east toward Krakow. During the course of this journey, I’d see the sun and moon alternate, taking turns in their duties.

The sun took the hunger, the mile after mile, the swollen and weary feet. The moon took the nightmare, the unreliable road, the train tracks with the sudden ending, all that was no more. I was not sure which had the worse part of this deal. All I knew was that both shone.

“Look ahead,” Twins’ Father instructed. “I’ll look everywhere else for you.”

So we looked ahead, only ahead. But all I could see was what lay above me. First, I was swaddled in a woolen coat, and then a sheepskin rug, and then another rug, and these protections enwombed me up to my eyes. Above these layers was a sheet of cold air, a snap of frost, and this wintry skyscape was interrupted by my breath-clouds. I watched the little breath-clouds bear themselves into being and float up to Miri. She was most of the sky above me as she pushed my wheelbarrow.

Who needs a sun or a moon when you have Miri?

With myself below her, a dull, injured planet, she was determined to assume the responsibilities of both.

In our exodus, we were determined to make our leader proud, to conduct ourselves like the soldiers he treated us as. Some troops sing as they march, but we did not. In the beginning, we didn’t speak, not even a whisper. All it took, we told ourselves, was attracting the interest of one bad man, or even a man who was not bad but fallen on desperate times. With these thoughts in mind we skittered down the demolished roads.

“How is she?” a boy was asking Miri. She nodded to me.

“Pearl, this is Peter. He is your friend. He has many friends. This is true, isn’t it, Peter?”

Peter affirmed that it was. At least the part that we were friends, he and I. He didn’t know about the other part. Most of his other friends were—

Miri would not let him finish that sentence. “Describe yourself, Peter,” she instructed. “Leave nothing out.”

Peter said his parents were dead. He was fourteen. At Auschwitz—

“Don’t speak of it,” Miri commanded. “Say who you are, what you do with yourself.”

Peter swallowed audibly. He said that once, he had stolen a piano—

“This is Peter,” Miri interrupted, her voice firm. “He is one of those people who is so smart that I’m not sure what he will do with himself. Always helping too,” Miri added. “I’m sure you have faults, Peter? But I can’t think of any right now.”

I caught Peter staring at me with pity. Staring — that might be one of his faults, I thought.

“She is better than she should be,” Miri told him. “Hardly remembers still.”

“She must remember,” he said in hushed disbelief.

“Put yourself in a cage,” Miri tried to whisper, but I heard it all. “And then put the cage in a dark room. Once in a while, have a hand come through the top of the cage. Sometimes, the hand will give you food. Mere crumbs. Other times, the hand might shine a light or ring a bell or douse you with water—”

Miri could not bring herself to fully color the details of this scenario. I watched her grip on the handles tighten. Peter asked what the purpose of such an experiment might be.

Miri gave one explanation: Mengele wanted to know what might happen when identical twins, the ones most bonded to each other, experienced separation.

It was true, in its simplicity. But I could’ve given Peter another explanation: I was put in that cage because I loved too much. I had a great bond with Someone, a connection much envied by this man. He was cold and empty and he could not form attachments, not with his family or wife or children. All that coursed through him was ambition, and this empty man, like so many empty men — he was determined to make history. One day, he decided that the best way to do so was by discovering how two girls who loved each other too much might react to being parted. He tore us accordingly. I went to my cage, and she — I did not know. All I knew was that before he installed me in my cage, he hobbled me at my ankles, like an animal you want to keep but don’t care to chase.

But just by my thinking of this story, the man’s face began to follow me. I could not say a word. To rid me of that face, I asked after Someone’s. If I could see hers, I thought, his would leave me.

“Were we identical?” I wondered aloud.

“The same,” Miri confessed.

“Where is she now?” I asked. I knew of the death marches. I’d heard about the tumult when the Soviets entered, the many lives that had been snuffed out. And there was the unspeakable — Mengele. My Someone was extraordinary — surely he had known this; perhaps he’d taken her? There were so many terrible things that could have happened that it seemed foolish to hope that a good one might arise, but still, I thought Miri might present me with one.

Miri did not speak to any of these possibilities. But in her eyes, there surfaced a sadness, a bright and mournful quiver that said I was the sole survivor of my family. And then, as if she were desperate to change the subject, she enlisted Peter to join her in the task of telling me about things that were in the world we were returning to.

Miri listed places. Parks, she’d say. Open spaces where you could have a picnic, which was a meal taken outside. Museums, which were places with pictures and statues. Synagogues, places where you could assemble and study and pray. Peter focused on objects. Telescopes that showed you stars. Clocks that showed you time. Boats, which were vessels much like my wheelbarrow, but vessels that moved over water. Instruments, he said, and then added, as if this was supposed to have some meaning to me, pianos.

This was the second mention of this object. It did not have meaning to me. But he could repeat it all he wanted — I loved hearing Peter and Miri overexplain the world to me.

I could have corrected their overexplanations if I wanted to. But I did not, for good reasons.

For one, explaining the world gave them pleasure. For two, it made me whole.

I noticed, though, that neither attempted to explain a train station to me when we slunk onto an emptied platform that evening, Twins’ Father having decided that his little troop could go on no more. The other children slept, cocooned in rags, side by side, but I remained in my wheelbarrow, like an overgrown baby in a filthy cradle. Miri lay on the ground beside me, her hand raised to clutch the lip of the wheelbarrow even as she slept. The snores of my fellow children rose and fell, and I tried to pick out Peter’s snores from the rest, but another sound took priority.

The nightmares of Twins’ Father drifted past my ear as he defended himself in his sleep — who would be so foolish, he said, to create twins where there were none! Hearing his protest, I wondered if it was safe to dream, if there was any way to avoid this white-coated man as I slept. To make myself feel better, I renamed him. I called him No One.

“Good-bye, No One,” I whispered. But the ache in my hobbled feet claimed that he would be with me always, even if I ever managed to take a step.

Day Two

Though morning came, it did not bring a train with it. Yet again, the sun had let us down. On foot and by wheelbarrow, we continued. And on this day, we began to sing a little, but haltingly, and with much argument as to which song we might sing.

None of Twins’ Father’s songs were appropriate, as he was a military man. Miri’s songs were too serious and romantic and sorrowful. The only song we could agree on was “Raisins and Almonds,” because all welcomed the thought of food. The lullaby sank us into our memories as we trod forward, and I felt as if I were not in the wheelbarrow at all but in Mama’s lap. We sang:

Under Baby’s cradle in the night

Stands a goat so soft and snowy white

The goat will go to the market

To bring you wonderful treats

He’ll bring you raisins and almonds

Sleep, my little one, sleep.

On the third rendition of this song, we were swarmed by a dozen women, all of whom had been sitting against trees at the edge of a forest.

“Are you the last of Auschwitz?” a woman asked. “We are waiting for our children.” Her face fell. “Should we wait? Is there reason to wait any longer?”

“There are others still,” Twins’ Father said, his voice hesitant.

The woman nodded at this information, receiving it with a guarded excitement.

“Children among them?”

“There are bound to be some at the camp yet — the Red Army has control. With me, there is thirty-five.”

The woman was awed by this meager number; her face — I would never forget the wince of hope in it.

“Do you have a Hiram among yours? Little Russian boy.”

“I do!” Twins’ Father turned and addressed the crowd. “Hiram! To the front!”

A snippet of boy was pushed to the fore by the rest of the children. And then another small Hiram followed. The woman scanned both Hirams and then sank to her knees.

“Not mine,” she whispered. “Not mine.”

Everyone was too still for too long a time. It was as if all in our caravan were felled by the woman’s grief and silence, and we were able to stir only when she rose and shook the dust from her skirts. She turned to resume her post at the tree trunk.

“Children, they draw other children, you know,” Twins’ Father said to her. “They see their own kind passing by, and they feel safe. You should join us. Maybe they will see us and find you.”

“I leave a sign wherever I go,” the woman said. She pointed to the tree trunk she’d been leaning upon. I assumed that she’d carved her child’s name on it — I could not read it because the effects were indecipherable. Her knife must have been dull, her hand too shaky. “But it’s not enough. Who is to say that they will even try to read it?”

I wanted to reassure her that children in captivity tend to read all they can. I wanted to tell her that as I traveled in my wheelbarrow, I was desperate to see any words on the horizon, words that could blot out the words of the gate I’d left behind two days before. I wished that the carved names could compete with the gate’s power. I wished that they stood as upright and clear. Because the only fault with the woman’s carved message was that it was tired and faint; every letter announced resignation.

Twins’ Father was too good to critique the marks she left, as poor as they were, but he took his own knife and neatly reinscribed her message, and after he was finished with this task, he took up her pack and waved for her to join our procession.

“My friends,” she wondered. “What of them?” And he looked at the women who’d returned to their trees, all of them so varied in age and suffering, and indicated that they should join us too. All he asked, he said, was that they record their facts on his list, to facilitate his communication with any authorities who might question our passage.

The women sprang from the trees and it was then that we saw that each trunk they had leaned against bore a message, a name, a plea. They would have covered the whole forest with the words if they were able. The face of Twins’ Father — this had to be one of the few times I saw it become so overwhelmed with sadness while he was awake, outside the grip of one of his nightmares. But I watched him steady himself and pass about his list, and soon enough, the women fell to the rear of our march. They tried to mother us, and we did our best to resist their attentions politely.

We already had mothers, we wanted to say.

I thought of mine every second. I thought of her, and I begged her and Zayde to show me Someone’s face. But neither responded. Had death forced them to abandon me? Or were they now so worried for my future that they couldn’t bring themselves to rejoice in my survival? My fingers searched my face; they tried to know it so they could know Someone’s too, but all they found were wounds, and two eyes that had seen too much.

We walked beside swarms of refugees. Face after face, body after body, all of them alive and searching, and not a single one of them mine. Was who I searched for already dead? I asked the sun and the sun told me to ask the moon — it claimed that the moon had taken the responsibility of answering inquiries with ugly potential. The sun was quite squirmy on this issue, I thought. It turned its back on me. And then a darkness lowered itself onto my eyes. The darkness was Peter’s hand, attempting protection.

“Don’t look!” Peter instructed. He was pushing my wheelbarrow at the time. I shrugged off the shield of his touch. I wanted to see what he saw. It sounded like horror. And there it was—

The body lay up the road, in a ditch. It was not a whole body.

“I told you not to look,” Peter said.

“It is her,” I whispered.

“It will never be her,” Peter said. And to prove it, he defied Miri’s instructions and veered close to the ditch so that I could peer at this corpse.

I did not know if it was male or female. I had no notion of its age — it was faceless and scalpless, and someone had cut off its legs so as to repossess its boots. That’s what Peter told me when he saw that I refused to avert my gaze. He said that the Soviets had superior boots, and whenever the Wehrmacht found them, they took these boots for themselves in the most desecrating way possible.

“So, you see,” he assured me, “it can’t be your Someone. Your Someone would never have such boots.”

I tried to find comfort in this. I could not. Did this mean that Someone was out in this winter with thin shoes?

“Look ahead, only ahead!” Twins’ Father warned us.

“What does she look like?” I asked Peter as we left the body behind.

“She looked like you.”

“I don’t know what I look like.”

“I bet you look like your mother,” Peter said. “Do you remember what your mother looked like?”

I couldn’t remember, not really. I decided that this would be another question to save for the moon. Its approach was nearing. I would ask it at any moment, even though I suspected that its answer was the same for all of us: We looked like death, one person after another; we were whittled and drawn, our eyes had sunk into our skulls, and the features that had once defined us had fled. Whether we would live long enough to be returned to our true selves — this seemed the greater question, and it followed me until we found our next shelter.

That night, we came upon a stone structure in the woods. It was too small to be a house and too large to be a shack. Inside, there was a constellation of teeth on the floor, and four narrow beds of marble. These marble beds had lids too, but only one remained closed. The other three gaped with empty blackness.

“Tombs,” Twins’ Father said before thinking better of it.

This structure was meant to house the dead. But three tombs had been overturned. Whether their disruption was the work of a fellow refugee or a pillager seeking to rob corpses of finery, we couldn’t know. The yellow jawbone that had been tossed to the corner of the structure said nothing of this history. It sat, bereft of teeth, a silent, fossilized witness.

Though we were not its usual guests, this house of the dead did just as well to shelter the likes of us. Twins’ Father cleared the emptied tombs of leaves and debris. They could fit a pair of children each. Peter stretched out on the lid of the fourth tomb and yawned. From the cradle of my barrow at the open door I watched the moon rise, answerless. Outside, a light snow fell and shook, like tiny white fists in the sky.

Day Three

A train ambled us a mere three miles toward Krakow. I looked out the window and saw roads filled with refugees, farmers returning home, Red Army soldiers slinking to unknowns. The frosty fields were scarred with the tread of tanks, and then we found ourselves in some untouched place, a row of intact farmhouses, as blocky and white as sugar cubes. Just as these farmhouses appeared, the tracks ended. We were forced to pile out, and as soon as all were accounted for by Twins’ Father, we were confronted by a fierce pillar of a Soviet soldier, his face sweaty with enthusiasm.

“Pigs!” this soldier shouted. “Pigs!” He waved his arms about in a frightful manner. One of the arms held a long rifle. His face was gray and his eyes were like red-blue sores or loose buttons fallen from a coat. He kept repeating that word as our ragged troop advanced.

“Pigs!” he insisted. “Stop, pigs.”

Twins’ Father brought our procession to a halt. A rare fright overcame him — he looked as if he were about to fold in on himself and collapse. Have we come so far just to end like this? his face seemed to say. He began to approach the man with one hand outstretched, offering his list, which shook more in his grasp than any wind could shake it. But the soldier didn’t even pause to look at the many names; he just raised his rifle to his shoulder and took aim. Children ducked behind smaller children. Miri’s hands quivered atop the wheelbarrow handles. The eye of the soldier’s rifle was our sole focus. We stared it down until the shot rang out, a shot that veered to the left of the road.

A pair of massive hogs, spotty beasts round as barrels, their snouts white with foam, were hurtling toward us, full of grunts and confrontations. The soldier’s rifle struck them down, first at the forelegs, and then at the temples, and we watched their immense bodies sink to the snow with the moans and whimpers of tiny babies.

We were accustomed to blood-snow. The blood shouldn’t have shocked our troop. But the confrontation dislodged something within us, because many began to cry in that silent way that captivity had taught them. The children shuddered and quaked, and then Sophia, a tiny four-year-old known for her queenly stores of dignity, collapsed in an uncharacteristic heap and wailed for us all. The soldier gave her a confused look — shouldn’t a hungry girl be pleased by this bounty? He put down his gun, nodded at the kills in a self-congratulatory fashion, and shook Twins’ Father’s hand, and yes, we ate well that night, children and adults, without a thought to any law above the grumbles of our stomachs, but I could not forget the panic in those animals’ eyes, not even as I comforted my hunger with their flesh.

I did not want to have a memory at all, not then.

As dusk fell on that third night, a farmer called to us from the side of the road. We saw him first by his beard, which bannered whitely in a peaceful manner. He offered us the shelter of his barn, and as eager as Twins’ Father was for us to make our way to Krakow, which was rumored to be relatively intact, he could not pass up this offer, as his troops had begun to wilt. The Kleins moaned with every step, and the Borowskis complained of cold. Peter’s toes had thrust through his shoes.

Most pressingly, David Herschlag was bent with illness — the abundant meal of pig had overwhelmed the poor boy’s shrunken stomach. His skeletal body now bore a dangerous protrusion of abdomen, a belly so puffed that it looked to be filled with poison, and for the past ten miles, Twins’ Father had taken to carrying David himself. So while our leader was always cautious in his approach to the peasants, he accepted the farmer’s offer gladly.

We entered the sanctuary of a barn, occupied only by a speckled flock of chickens and their chicken smells and, here and there, a nest of eggs. It was warm and lively — a skinny rooster stalked to and fro and chased the busty hens. None of the chickens feared us because we still had the remains of the pigs to consume, and when our second hasty meal was finished — one that David could not take part in — Twins’ Father shuffled off to a corner of the barn and attempted a fitful sleep while Miri traveled from one child to another, wrapping bandages and soothing feet and tipping canteens into mouths.

After each round, she returned to David, who lay on the straw, colored with illness, his brow thick with sweat. She looked at me with alarm and asked Peter to help her make a bed for the boy. Peter built a sturdy nest, covered it with my woolen blanket, and deposited David within it like a precious egg. David’s face stirred with a smile — he stared up into the rafters at some sight we could not see, and Miri, she reprised “Raisins and Almonds.”

Sleep, my little one, sleep.

Like a bird, she leaned over this nest, and lullabied the boy into something resembling peace.

Day Four

In the morning, we woke to the sight of Twins’ Father kneeling. He bent down beside a form in the hay, and then he took up the form and shook it, as if he were trying to wake a person who refused to be roused. We could see, from the way Twins’ Father held the boy, that David was no longer David, but a body.

“Zvi,” Miri said. “You will frighten them.” But she herself was undone by the loss. And Twins’ Father would not lay him to rest. The boy appeared changed. I recognized him only by what killed him — the stomach that rose like a hill.

Miri put a hand to the man’s shoulder; she tried to soothe him, but he would not be comforted. He fell to plucking feathers out of the still boy’s hair, and he spoke as if he’d forgotten his troop entirely, as if the dead alone could hear him.

“I must have made at least a dozen sets of false twins,” he said. He glanced at Miri for confirmation.

“Nineteen,” she said quietly. “You made nineteen sets.”

“Nineteen,” Twins’ Father repeated. “But David — and Aron — they were the first.” Miri nodded as she removed her coat. She tried to cover the boy with it, but Twins’ Father wouldn’t loosen his hold on David.

“In the beginning, they had trouble with it — the lie. They were so young — only four and five years of age. And my Dutch is very poor — they spoke no other language — it was difficult to explain to them what I needed. But every morning, before roll call, I would remind them: You are twins! And I made them repeat, over and over again, the birthdate I fabricated for them, and the fact that Aron came first, and David second. The difference between them — I shrank a year into five minutes!”

He ran a finger over the bridge of the boy’s freckled nose, in the manner of Mengele during one of his counts.

And this is where I tried not to listen to Twins’ Father. I couldn’t bear to hear him speak of the longing he’d had to be found out. How often, Twins’ Father wept, had he wanted to corner Mengele in the laboratory and reveal, with a hiss, that the doctor’s research had been tampered with, that his studies were jokes, idiocy easily undone by the lies of juveniles! He acknowledged that Mengele would have shot him on the spot. But it would have been better, he claimed, to die like that than to be doomed to save children only to watch them end like this.

Miri’s face blanched and she tried to shoo us out. Her voice took on an odd pitch as she told us that we should go see if there were any chores we could do for the farmer. Not a peep arose from us. Even the chickens hushed. I tried to trace a path from the still-open eyes of the dead boy to the rafters above. What had he seen as he left us? I had never been dead, but I’d neared it enough to know that it was likely he had focused on that tiny fissure in the barn’s ceiling, a crack just wide enough to accommodate the remote brilliance of a star.

“No need to lie to them,” Twins’ Father said stonily with a sudden, forced composure. The soldier in him had returned. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and straightened the collar of David’s torn sweater. “Let them say good-bye.”

And so it was that we gathered around the little boy who had been felled by the food he’d long been denied. His face was not peaceful. Twins’ Father gathered David into his arms and carried him out to the pasture, past all the frostbitten knots of fallow things, and though the soil was wintered and hard, it opened up to receive him. We filed past the brief grave, each bearing a stone.

But the farmer’s wife interrupted our procession with her own ritual. She scattered poppy seeds on the grave. To feed the dead that come back disguised as birds, she said. I watched the poppy seeds turn in midair and settle in the ice. I didn’t know why those seeds felt so dear to me, but I was lessened by the sight of their dark scatter. Already, the smallness of their lives were cold and stunted, and no sooner had our backs turned to depart than I heard the flap of a bird’s wings slice the air, too eager to seize upon the abundance wrought by David’s death.

In the bed of the farmer’s truck, the troop propped themselves against the wooden slats. Red-eyed, Twins’ Father surveyed us and consulted his list, dragging his finger down the weathered paper.

We waved good-bye to the farmer’s wife, who stood with the bag of poppy seeds at her side, and to the six mothers, who had decided to linger at the farm, convinced that their children were mere steps behind even as the rest of their group had fractured, each of them wandering off on her own desperate quest. Yet still they searched the faces in the back of the truck, as if they had yet to accept that their loved ones were not among us.

Then the truck roared to life, a horn honked, and as we trundled off toward Krakow, I heard Miri say David’s name into the wind — she said it softly, as if he could hear her where he lay, so deaf and cold beneath the earth.

“Forgive me!” I heard her whisper.

Miri’s plea was puzzling — she was not responsible for David’s death. She had cared for him to the end. But as mysterious as it was, it struck something inside of me.

The whole world might be obsessed with revenge.

But for my part — I knew I wanted to forgive. My tormentor would never ask for my forgiveness — this was certain — but I knew it might be the only true power I had left, a means to spare myself his grasp, the one that I felt close on me every morning when I woke. And if I could do this, if I took on this duty of forgiveness — maybe my Someone would return to me. Or at least maybe I would stop seeing my Someone’s face on every refugee we passed, the dead and the living both.

Stasha: Chapter Seventeen The Ruins Watch Over Us

Horse uplifted us. Mile after mile, we burdened this bony hero. In witnessing his enduring gallop, so unlikely for such a hungry animal, one could only believe that he, too, longed for the holy murder of Josef Mengele. But Warsaw would not be easily reached.

After four days of travel, we encountered roads thick with tanks and found ourselves turned about, choiceless, and pressed into Poznan. This had been Zayde’s city; he had taught at the university. Poznan, he liked to declare, was a jewel of scholarly devotion, a maker of great minds, of believers of art. But violence seemed the only lesson we might learn here now. The Wehrmacht stalked through the city, its streets silent but for the warning rattle of their gunfire and the echoes of their songs, rowdy bits of verse that surfaced as they braced themselves for the Russian advance.

Fearing that these soldiers might tire of their music and seek to amuse themselves with the torture of Horse and two refugees, we undertook the utmost stealth in our passage. Feliks took custody of our sacks, and I led Horse by his bridle. Ducking down a street, its lampposts strewn about like uprooted weeds, we found our path interrupted not by a menace of gray uniforms but by a beggar whose palm fell open at the sight of us.

That anyone might see us as prosperous enough to approach for food or coins seemed a wonder. But we decided to strike a deal. Some bread for the date, Feliks offered.

“February,” said the beggar. He said it could be the third day, it could be the fourth. I wanted to ask for our heel of bread back. “All you need to really know is that the Russians are coming. Leave now. This is my advice. And look,” he continued, biting into the bread. “I am not even charging you extra for this wisdom!” Having imparted this information, he limped off into the evening, leaving us to wonder at the sight that loomed behind us.

There it was, the old museum: a collapse of walls, a shudder of brick, a stagger of columns. The remaining windows were pocked and rent, glassy veils. The grand doors had fallen in surrender, and through the jagged entrances in the facade, I glimpsed the museum’s devastated interior. It appeared as if there was nothing to see but ruin. But when I looked still further, into my own memory, I saw the museum restored, its halls traversed by Zayde and Pearl while I lagged behind. I could see my seven-year-old sister pause on tiptoe before a painting while Zayde taught her what perspective meant.

Memory, it drove me into the museum.

I lied to myself and to Feliks, I said that we could find supplies in that building — in truth, this mattered little to me; what mattered was that I thought Zayde would be by my side if I entered. I might hear his whistle. I might smell the mothballs of his coat.

So we sat upon Horse’s back, our heads held high, for entry into this wasteland. Horse picked his way delicately up the crumbled stairs, his white flanks flashing silver in the evening light. On the fragmented marble of the threshold, his front hooves slipped — he threatened to founder, his whinny draped the devastated foyer with echoes, and then, as Horse always did, he pressed on.

There should have been paintings for us to see. Pictures of things real and not real, of landscapes and people. But in that museum, we could find only a portrait of ruin. We watched a hurricane of black pigeons swoop through a hole in the eaves. The floor opened wide and threatened to swallow us. Where it didn’t open, it hosted black pools of water. Light winced across the crumbled walls; rats philosophized from their holes.

“Blessed are the rats, for they at least believe in blood,” Feliks intoned. “That’s what my father the rabbi would have said.”

As if angered by this blessing, the theories of the rats increased in volume.

“Turn back.” Feliks shuddered. “That’s what my brother would say. Turn back!”

But I couldn’t turn back, because even in the shambles, I had this treasure: I was surrounded by what Zayde had loved. Though devastated, the museum still spoke of Zayde’s compassionate logic, his will, his science, all that he loved. And what Zayde had loved, they could not smash or burn or plunder. What he had loved was my tradition.

And as we moved through the savage disarray, we kept a vigilant watch. Horse’s eyes flickered in the dark. We let our path be informed by traces of brass, coins that pillagers had left behind, snippets of wire. Bits of antiquity minnowed among the gravel that peppered the floors, and we soon found ourselves in a room where a chandelier swung. Horse startled us by shattering a teacup beneath his foot, and we saw then that we were in a grand tearoom, the very kind we’d heard our pale friend say she longed to visit as a true lady, before Taube snapped her neck.

This ruin reminded us like no other ruin had — we still lived while our friend did not. With respect to her loss, we climbed down from Horse to pay tribute.

“I would like to buy another day for the lovely Bruna,” Feliks whispered to the sky.

The wind offered nothing in reply.

“I don’t accept your answer,” he said, his voice dangerously veering from its whisper. “She was the bravest soul in all of Poland, and you let the world take her down.”

He leaped onto a pedestal bereft of its statuary, and on this surface he posed and flexed and shook his fist at the God he believed in. Looking at this monument he’d made to our anger, I saw that we were children still, but mercenary children, half-murdered troublers. I had to wonder what such a child looked like. I stalked about the velvets of this tearoom looking for some opportune reflection. But the darkness was unrelenting; the shards of glass said nothing about appearances at all. I remarked on the blackness of this evening to Feliks but received no answer. Seeing that he had left his pedestal, I looked about in a panic. Whenever Feliks left my sight, even for a moment, all feeling but loss fled me. Distraught, I searched in the dimness for a single hair of his bear-fur coat.

This is when I felt a tap at my back. The touch was musical; it clinked.

And when I turned, it was to the sight of a silver fist, brandished high by an armored individual. It lingered above my head; its enmeshed fingers stabbed the sky. In the confusion of this darkness, I was certain that this was a warrior who was aware of my dealings with Mengele. I could tell by this warrior’s bearing that he or she had a great love of justice and an awareness of my accidental crimes.

In my bewilderment, it didn’t occur to me to call for Feliks. It didn’t even occur to me to mount any defense on my behalf. I could’ve pointed to my greater scheme, my plans to thwart Mengele, my assumption that Pearl, too, would benefit from the needle.

Instead, I fell to my knees in the rubble, and I bent low. I made my neck vulnerable and ready for penalty. So bowed, I begged this warrior to punish me, to deliver me the greatest judgment of all, if he were able. I’d be happier dead, I declared, so long as I could be near my sister. I would bring death to myself, I swore, if I could!

“But I could never kill you!” the warrior proclaimed. He had a terribly pitchy voice for such a fearsome spectacle. It was the unmistakable squeak of Feliks. How could it be — was I so desperate to be delivered from my life that I mistook my gentle friend, clad in pilfered armor, for some divine hand of vengeance?

“Why would you make such a joke?” Feliks queried. “After all that we have endured! I understand your need for humor. But this?” He shook his silver head dolefully.

“I am not funny,” I agreed.

Fortunately, he was too enraptured with his latest acquisition to pursue this further. He turned so I could appreciate his appearance as one of the old Polish winged hussars, but the armor was creaky and ill-fitting. The torso piece swung and gaped over his bear-fur coat, and he had only to take a step before the silver piece fastened at his legs loosened and fell with a piteous clink. Still, my friend desired praise for his ferocity.

Naturally, I informed him that he looked a grand figure. If I were a Nazi, I said, I’d take one glance and flee. To this, he thrilled. I wished that I could have shared his delight, but I felt only anguish. Spying my mood, Feliks did his best to cheer me with another find from the depths of the rubble. In the air, he raised a tiny flask. I caught it up greedily and took a sip. The embered sensation in my throat made it known: this was not water.

“Vodka,” Feliks declared, repossessing the flask. “Good for bartering, but we could use some now.” He attempted a tipple and I snatched it away. But just as my hand closed on the flask, I heard Zayde.

To Pearl! Zayde toasted. Keeper of time and memory!

I had to honor this toast. So I let Feliks take a swig on my behalf, but he was not familiar with swigs. He knew only indulgence, and drink promptly overtook the emptiness of his stomach. He staggered about like a tin fool, then collapsed in a silver heap. For a moment, it appeared as if I would have to drag him up. But then he peeled the armor off in disgust and swung himself up onto the back of Horse, who looked askance at his tipsy burden.

“You aren’t fit to ride,” I protested, but he would have none of it.

And what could we do but ride? The soldiers patrolling the streets outside cared nothing for the condition of a thirteen-year-old boy.

“Fine,” I conceded, “let us go now.”

With the ruins behind, distant villages floated before us. On horseback, we picked our way across the puddles of black pocking the snow, Horse sinking midstep into the mud. The same sky that had witnessed our imprisonment winked innocently above us. Such a naive sky seemed at risk of forgetting its involvement with our dead. Would it use the alibi of a cloud to deny all that it had seen? I hoped it would not. But doubt was beginning to overtake me. We were hungry, tired, lost — only bereavement bent us forward as we traveled on. We were forced by the Russian tanks advancing into Poznan to go in any direction available to us; we were turned and turned about in our passage toward the Warsaw Zoo, and as we rode, we begged our respective authorities — God for Feliks, fate for me — for the strength to end the man who’d lured such a wild hatred into our hearts.

Pearl: Chapter Eighteen Partings

We arrived in Krakow and wandered through the city; we went from house to house. Here and there you’d see a sudden flutter of curtains — you could see fingers appear at the edge of the lace, and it was as if every adult had turned into a child in a game of hide-and-seek. Many did not want to look at us at all. Like the girl I saw — she was sitting before a wall papered with flowers and she was reading a book. I wanted to read a book someday. I wanted to read one that would tell me who I had been before my cage.

And on that someday, I wanted Miri beside me as I read. But since she’d spent the ride to Krakow begging for forgiveness beneath her breath, I began to wonder if her sadness might thwart the future I’d envisioned for us.

“It is not as bad as it could be” was Twins’ Father’s assessment of Krakow. He looked to Miri as if expecting agreement. None came. Her lips remained set with a silent dismay as we walked along the strings of houses and experienced a series of closed doors. Through the streets, we saw women chased by Russian soldiers, saw them taken into alleys, pressed into walls. We did not see them emerge. We saw beggars approach us for food and curse us when we said we had none. Most notably, we saw a man watching us from a bench outside a clock shop. He sat with a little book to write in and the day’s newspaper, drinking coffee and listening to a woman whose distraught gestures made her appear as if she was petitioning for help. She was not the only one. There was a line of widows and refugees and townspeople, six or so, all waiting to speak to this figure. But when he saw the tattered assembly of us, he leaped up from his chair and dashed to Twins’ Father’s side to ask after our origins.

He was young, this man, but his face was old, windburned, and battered, as if he’d lived his whole life outdoors, hunting and hiding. In him, there was the presence of a soldier, but a soldier far different than Twins’ Father. In his gaze, there was protective instinct — it was as if we had become his family simply by entering his city. Later, we would learn that he was deeply involved with the Bricha, the underground movement that helped Jews flee to other, safer lands. But at that moment, we knew only that this man named Jakub was determined for us to take shelter in the abandoned house adjacent to his own, a structure with boarded windows whose gray dreariness reminded one of a rotten tooth.

“I know its owners will not return,” he insisted. Twins’ Father hesitated at the door, noting the blank space where the mezuzah should have been, the paint there so bright and unfaded, but Jakub said, Don’t be foolish, and he flung the door wide so that we had no choice but to enter.

So we had an abandoned house to sleep in and it had all four walls and a roof that leaked. Everywhere we looked, we saw the flight of the former inhabitants. The bookshelves were upended, and a woman’s nightgown sat in a pale blue puddle in the sink. A trio of bricks had been pulled from the wall, revealing a secret compartment. A sheet of paper sat at the kitchen table alongside a pen, but only a salutation adorned it.

After we had gratefully surveyed the interior, dinner was announced, and Twins’ Father doled out beets from a lone, mammoth jar in the pantry. We passed the beets around, each taking a bite, our hands pinked, our mouths encircled by their pickled blush. Miri alone refused. Outside, snowfall resumed, but for once, this seemed a celebratory frost. As we ate and passed around a single cup of water, the children made note of more absences.

“No Ox,” they toasted. “No rats, no blocks, no gates, no needles!”

It was my turn. After the silence of my cage, I would never truly be comfortable with speech, but in that moment, the words found me. I don’t know how they found me, but they were my zayde’s, and when they occurred to me, they fell as bright and easy as snowfall.

To the return of Someone! I toasted.

Miri raised her glass to me, but the smile that accompanied this gesture was wan and unconvincing. I wondered if she feared abandonment. Was she worried that when I found Someone, I would have no need of her?

I slept in fits and starts, always waking to the question of Miri’s sadness. And whenever I woke, I saw that she hadn’t retired at all; she sat in her chair, hands folded, utterly still. Seeing this, I realized that it was not Miri who had to fear abandonment, but myself.

Morning altered our borrowed house and drew my attention to a cage in the corner of the room. Its little wire door was open, hanging listlessly from a single hinge. The emptiness of that cage, the thought of the bird’s flight, even if it escaped only to founder — it put a dream of motion in me. I wanted a pair of crutches. To move on my own, uncarried, toward the future I believed possible.

I told Miri about this fantasy as she thrust on her coat and readied to step out into the city. She warned me of the scarcity of crutches but said that she would inquire at the hospital. Already, she was embedded in new duties in Krakow, as was Twins’ Father. He held a hushed meeting with Jakub at the kitchen table, one I strained to overhear while the other children ran up and down the stairs and romped in the rooms above.

Sometimes, it is fortunate to be a cripple. By not playing with the others, I learned our fate. Feigning interest in the birdcage, I spied as Twins’ Father explained his sorrows.

Twins’ Father was concerned about a woman. He said that she had witnessed the unimaginable, she had saved all she could, and now — she could not emerge from this unaltered, fully alive. He knew this because it was true for himself too.

Jakub paused before answering, thoughtful, as if he knew this matter too well. The burden saved you, he finally said, until you had a moment to examine it, to feel, for once, its full weight.

I think Twins’ Father agreed. But his voice was too small for me to hear.

Jakub assured Twins’ Father that the only thing greater than his devotion was the needs of the children. And then he gave a recommendation, one that put the identities of all in this conversation into sudden relief: The twins, he said hesitantly, should be put into the custody of the Red Cross. Only then could they flourish and the adults recover.

She will never leave them, Twins’ Father replied, his voice hollowed by dread. I knew he spoke for himself too. Jakub urged him to reconsider. Thirty-four children, he said, all of them on the edge of one suffering or another. Jakub vowed to look in on us in Krakow and to send word to our guardians. They won’t be forgotten, he swore.

But Miri, I thought. She is the forgotten one. Without us, she would not continue. Had no one seen the change in her since we’d lessened from thirty-five to thirty-four?

If this separation were to come to pass, I thought, I would remember Miri. First, I would save myself with a pair of crutches. Then I would save her from her sadness.

I did not tell the others what I’d heard. The children had enough concerns. Already, they had an obligation to experience freedom. This was not as simple as one might think. Fresh from our journey, we still had leagues of hesitations, stores of panic. Even a pleasant laugh floating down from a window was enough to make us startle. But we were determined to make something of our first days in Krakow, so we spent the afternoon riding the trolley, flashing our numbers at the conductor for free rides. The townspeople were charmed by us — never before had they seen so many children who matched. Peter and Sophia and me, we were the lone strays.

Peter carted my wheelbarrow on and off the trolley, onto street corners and into shops, so we could inquire after crutches together. He swore he’d find a pair, and as we searched, I tried to tell him that it was Miri who truly needed help, because we would soon be leaving her. But I could not find the words to say this. Soon enough, I realized I didn’t need to.

Because when we arrived at our adopted home, it was to the sight of a dim-eyed Miri seated in a chair, an empty cup cradled between her hands. Twins’ Father stood at the hearth and instructed us to gather round; he counted us, consulted his ever-present list, and when he said that it was time to discuss the future, all manners of plans tumbled out. The children spoke of reunions with their families, their schoolmates, their houses.

“You may return,” Twins’ Father warned, “but your house may no longer be your house. Your country may not be your country. Your belongings — they may belong to someone else.”

As he spoke, he looked at Miri, as if expecting her to refute what he said. But she merely stared into her cup, as if she might find some other solution to our plight at its bottom.

“The Red Cross is better equipped to take care of you,” Twins’ Father said, and he began to speak of the arrangements, but the younger ones drowned him out with protest — they clambered over Miri in her chair, surrounding her with pleas, each tripping over the other in distress. She dipped her face into the sleeve of her coat as if to shut them out.

The older ones began to protest too but thought better of it and exchanged their outcries for a single question: When? they wondered.

The answer: four days.

Twins’ Father consulted with each of us in turn. He informed Sophia that he would not leave her without a new coat; he assured the Blaus that they would not be separated. All of his reassurances appeared routine — but then, ever so softly, I heard him tell Peter that their plans for Krnov had been solidified. Peter caught sight of my confusion.

“A friend of my aunt’s,” he explained dully. “She says that she will be my mother now. She lives in Krnov. Twins’ Father is going to take me there, on his way to Brno.”

I was not the only one to be surprised by this news.

“How did you manage it?” the others asked. “Was it a trick? How did you fool this woman into wanting you?”

I could have told them: It was too easy to like Peter. He gave and fought and searched — who would not want his company? That was what I wanted to say to the other children, who now appeared to regard him as a mystery and — judging by their expressions, which ranged from light scowls to outright disdain — one to be resented. When I asked him why they were so angry, Peter told me that I should be angry too. A family was a rare thing these days, he said.

I knew Peter had given me much. Now that I knew we would be parted, I wanted to give him something too. But words were all I had. So I told him that I had ten memories. Of those, there were six that I really wanted to have. So, really, I had six memories. The first was Dr. Miri’s face. The second was Peter pushing my wheelbarrow. The third was the gates, but only the gates in my hindsight as we left. The fourth was Peter throwing a stone at those gates. The fifth was Peter scouring the streets of Krakow for a crutch. The sixth wasn’t really memory at all, it was more of a longing for a memory, and it was my Someone.

“You are in three of those,” I pointed out.

He responded to this by increasing our search for a crutch. In our remaining days, we traveled up and down the streets in search of a pair, knocking on doors, asking passersby, inquiring at the hospital. We also checked with Jakub.

“Do you have any crutches?” I asked him on the first day of our search.

“Not crutches, but onions,” he said, handing Peter a pair of yellow globes. One could see that refusing us anything pained him greatly.

That night, at our abandoned house, I put the onions in a soup pot and watched their yellow faces bob and revolve with unending optimism. I took their sunniness as a sign — by dawn, I thought, Jakub would have crutches for me.

And then, the following morning—

“Here for food, are you?” he ventured jovially.

No, we said. We thanked him for the soup. And did he have any crutches?

“I don’t,” he said, regretful. “But will you take this?” He folded a blanket into my wheelbarrow. I took its warmth as a sign — by dawn, I thought, I will have crutches.

But on the third day, Jakub hung his head at the sight of our approach. He couldn’t bear to say no to me, so I did not ask. Grateful for our lack of inquiry, Jakub placed a pocketknife in my hands.

“That is all that I have to give,” he said sorrowfully. We thanked him and then wheeled away. I studied the pocketknife. Peter saw my disappointment.

“Good for a trade,” he assured me.

Back at the stoop of our abandoned house, I etched images over the frosty windowpane at the entry with my fingertip. I etched the image of one crutch, and then another, and as soon as I’d completed the second, a storm arose, erasing all I’d imagined.

I decided not to take anything as a sign anymore.

It was my responsibility — not fate’s — to ensure that I was strong enough to look after Miri, even if I remained within my wheelbarrow for all my days.

When I wasn’t with Peter, I was with Miri, who spent her mornings making rounds of the streets of Krakow. I was her attending nurse, or so she told me. Really, she just couldn’t bear to leave me alone. Together, we went to the Red Cross and moved among the many cots. She knew that I was perpetually on the lookout for crutches, but she was determined to make me useful too, so I sat and wound bandages under her supervision. This work was good for me. But my guardian benefited even more, because Miri forgot her pain while surrounded by the pain of others. In tending to them, she was renewed. It was women that we looked after, for the most part, because not every soldier entrusted with the welfare of Krakow had been worthy of this task. Women and young women and girls that war had made women of too soon. I looked at them and wondered: Would they have appreciated the protection of my cage?

And every afternoon, when another doctor relieved Miri from her post, she took me to the station. There, we looked for a name. The name of Miri’s sister. Or for Miri’s name — in case Ibi was looking for her. The station wall was thick with names, but Ibi’s was not there; she was not looking for Miri. Name upon name, letter after letter, plea after plea, and not a single one addressed to us. Until one afternoon, the day before the grand parting, Miri seized upon a flutter of paper and said that we owed the writer a visit. Her hand shook as she held this note, and her eyes were so overwhelmed with tears that it seemed a miracle to me that she could read it at all. All I could spy was the flash of an address. I wanted to inquire after the note’s full contents, but Miri’s demeanor told me enough: this was not a happy discovery but an obligation, and she steered me toward the address with dread.

In answer to our knock, a scarfed head poked out of the doorway. The woman’s mouth was jam red and she had curls to match — a colorful person, to be sure, and behind her form, we could spy glimpses of a room that was once very fine, a parlor with gilt paper and furniture whose shimmer had been dulled by age and neglect.

The woman squinted at us curiously, and just as she was about to address us, a drunken man tripped down the steps with promises to return for fun the next day. That was how we knew this was not an ordinary house. Miri turned away, but the woman slipped down the steps and clasped the doctor’s shoulders. With warmth, she studied my guardian.

“Very pretty,” the woman said approvingly. “And I see you have a daughter to feed.” She regarded me with pity. “But I’m afraid I have too many girls already—”

“I’m so sorry,” Miri said to the woman. “We are in quite the wrong place.”

She glanced down at the paper, and the woman took note of it too. Her eyes went wide with recognition. “If these names mean anything to you”—and she took the slip of paper gravely from Miri’s hands—“then you are precious. We must speak.” Introducing herself as Gabriella, she gestured for us to enter. “Do not worry,” she said, spying Miri’s dubious expression. “Nothing untoward for your daughter to see. Just a matron and her girls and a cup of tea.”

So we followed the woman up the stairs, through the parlor, and into the kitchen, where a dour teenager, her limbs spotty with bruises, glared at Miri as if she believed her to be an old enemy. With a mocking bow, she pulled out a chair for my guardian.

“Away with you, Eugenia!” our hostess ordered, bewildered by this display, and the girl fled to join a trio lounging on the stairs, but not before casting a final look of disgust at Miri.

In the sweetly perfumed kitchen, Gabriella’s softness increased; she lifted me from the wheelbarrow and onto a chair as if she performed this task every day of her life. Then she placed the note on the kitchen table and smoothed it lovingly with her hand, as if doing so achieved some proximity not just to the names, but to their owners.

“I left the note for my nieces,” she said. “I do not expect their mother to be alive. She was lame, like your girl. I know that the cripples did not last.”

Miri asked the woman if she had been at Auschwitz.

“I was in hiding here,” Gabriella said. “This place — it was not my choice. I used to be a dressmaker. But who needs pretty dresses in war? What I know of Auschwitz I learned from my girls. Two of them came here from…the Puff, I think they called it.”

Miri glanced at the girls on the stairs, the frills of their pastel underthings lending them the look of half-dressed parakeets. I knew she searched for Ibi. She did not find her.

“I have heard that twins were precious at Auschwitz. From Eugenia.” She indicated the bruised teenager, whose sulkiness had yet to abate. “She insisted there could be hope if one was a twin. I assumed my nieces to be dead even as I left that note. But now you come here with their names in your hand — and you would not bring bad news?”

I thought Miri’s silence strange. It seemed simple enough to reveal herself as the guardian of Auschwitz’s twins, a caretaker who was losing pieces of herself to the stress of keeping them whole. But she said nothing. I took this as a chance to act on her behalf. And so, with an adult tone borrowed from my caretaker, I asked Gabriella her nieces’ names.

“Esfir and Nina,” the woman said, her voice wistful. Again, she caressed the note.

Esfir and Nina — these names brought back the memory of my first night in the Zoo. I thought of them dragging a dead girl from our bunk and stealing her clothes.

“Resourceful girls,” Miri said carefully. “I was their doctor.”

Gabriella was beautiful in this renewal of her hope. Her eyes shone; her cheeks pinked.

“Where are they now? Can I see them?” Her gaze darted about the house, taking in all that would have to change to make this place into environs befitting the two refugees.

Before Miri could say a word, Eugenia began to speak.

“A doctor in Auschwitz was not a doctor at all,” she declared angrily. “Ask her who she answered to. Ask her what she did.”

Bewildered by this outburst, Gabriella looked at Miri, whose eyes were needlessly lit with shame. Gabriella reached out her hand and tried to take the doctor’s in it, as if the touch might prompt better news. Miri responded to this gesture with a start. Her tears were soundless, and they slid from eye to lips without the accompaniment of any expression at all. But in number, these tears — I have never seen them matched. One followed the other; they multiplied themselves; they became innumerable. I wondered how I might defend Miri.

And then the words presented themselves to me. At the time, they seemed to arise from a sweet nowhere, some place within me that I didn’t know I had. I told Gabriella that I’d known her nieces too. They were good girls, kind girls, and their last act had been a brave one of which any auntie could be proud. I said that no sooner had the girls found themselves in the Zoo than they began to plot as to how to thwart the death-doctor. These plans consumed them down to the second. Always, they were sly, sidling up to him like little foxes and applying thick layers of flattery to his willing ego. They pretended to like what he liked, to think what he thought, and when they had him alone in a vulnerable moment, isolated within the confines of a car, they grasped the hilts of their bread knives, which were secreted in their pockets, and even though this plan proved unsuccessful, they had been more alive than anyone in that moment, and their plots to kill the doctor — however naive, however foolish — were the stuff of legend. Every day, I said, I thought of them. I thought of them with such an intensity that they often merged into a single person and I thought of this person as if she were my own heart.

Gabriella kissed the top of my head and held me tight; her embrace was such that I knew, in our closeness, that she imagined me into the girls she had lost. Her touch carried heartbreak, but her voice held only resolve.

“You have made life livable,” she whispered. I thought her grip might never ease, but she suddenly released me, and she walked across the room and then back, as if proving to herself that she could continue, and then an idea must have seized her because she darted to a closet by the entry. Out of it tumbled all manner of things: scarves, umbrellas, hats, even the tuft of a toupee. She sifted through this pile, reached to the back of the closet, and, triumphant, she presented to me what no one else in Krakow could.

“Left by a soldier,” she said. “A shrimp of a boy, and so ill — he is not coming back. Better for you to have these than some drunken lout!”

Though old, these crutches made me new. They made a version of me that could walk. Or at least, one that could do more than stumble. I could sidle a crutch forward and swing my feet before me, and even within a few steps, I saw the potential of what I might do. That I might remain broken, but I could be swift and broken, adaptable and broken, able and broken.

With these crutches at my sides, I could take better care of Miri.

As we left that place, Miri asked me where I’d summoned such a story, about plots and vengeance and dreaming this most impossible dream of Mengele’s death, and I told her that it was something imprinted within me, and while I couldn’t locate its origin, I knew it to be real, or half-real, or at least the warmth that ran through me — so intense that it cast a shadow I could pretend into family — felt realer than anything.

“Remember that,” she advised me. And so, it was official: this became my first true memory of my sister, the twin that I’d once had.

On our final morning I woke to the sun peering through the cracks in the boarded windows, tossing its ribbons over the rows of sleeping children on the floor, all of us cocooned in blankets and rags. Sophia lay on my left, snoring mightily, her arms flung over my chest. My crutches were on my right, and seeing them, I remembered: I could go anywhere by myself, and take Miri with me.

But on that day, they would try to turn me over to the Red Cross.

As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw the preparations for our parting. Miri and Twins’ Father, they were huddled on the kitchen floor, a pile of our many shoes between them. Miri was stuffing the holes with paper, and Twins’ Father was binding them with twine. Shoe after shoe they mended in silence, and with hands that shook, both unsteadied by the nearing good-bye. I saw Miri glance at the packs stationed by the door, one for Peter, another for Twins’ Father. She studied them as if she was trying to gather courage to speak, and then she addressed Twins’ Father, her face downturned, her eyes still low.

“You never questioned my actions, Zvi. Why was this? The others — I would hear stories about myself, what I had done. And the stories, they follow me, even now.”

She sealed the shoe’s injury shut, tied the twine in a final knot.

“You were only ever good,” he said simply. He faced her as he spoke, seemingly hoping that she might welcome this truth, and when she did not, he bent to arrange the mended shoes in rows, as if this could put matters to rights. But when he turned his back, Miri took the opportunity to slip past him, to the door. Spying my wakefulness, she gestured for me to join her, but Twins’ Father was not willing to forgo the formality of a farewell. Looking up from the rows of shoes, he gave her the only one the ex-doctor might accept.

“Your children will miss you,” he said.

Miri’s eyes said that she believed him.

And as I hobbled out on my crutches, I saw Peter’s head rise from where he slept, at the crackle of the fireplace, saw the hair ruffled on the back of his scalp. He looked at me in the haze of a partial dream. I had tried to prepare for this good-bye. “When we see each other again,” I said, but I couldn’t complete the sentence the way I wanted to. I couldn’t say: It will be better, I will be walking, you will be well, all will be found, we won’t be imprisoned or without a country, we won’t be hunted or starving, we won’t be witnesses to pain.

I couldn’t finish that sentence, not then.

Twenty years later, I would have a chance to finish, but there was no need for it. We would be grown adults, waiting in a courtyard in Frankfurt. Peter would show me pictures of his wife, the one who understood why he bolted in the night following the ring of the telephone, why he kept boxes stacked beneath the bed filled with speculations as to the whereabouts of a criminal more slippery than most, a man whose initial escape from Auschwitz led to a transfer to Gross-Rosen, and then a flight into Rosenheim, where he found work as a farmhand, separating the good potatoes from the bad potatoes, putting them into neat little piles for the farmer’s inspection, before settling into the ease of his final hideout in Brazil, where he wrote his memoirs and listened to music and swam in the sea.

But this is not about that man, as much as he would have liked it to be.

This is about Peter. As Miri had predicted, he was good at many things, so many that he found himself a bit lost after the war. He ran away from his guardian’s custody and traveled; he roamed from country to country as if he would never shed the role of a messenger, a delivery boy, but his travels stopped when a woman loved him and married him, despite her family’s warnings that he was damaged beyond repair, that she should not be surprised when their children were stillborn or, worse, born with mutations issued by the doctor’s hands. But they had children. Two boys. They were healthy and beautiful; you could see their father in their faces. I could have studied that photograph all day, but we were in that courtyard with a greater purpose.

Her trial was over. We would be permitted to see Elma in her confines; we would be allowed to confront her with the facts of what she had done. Germany had given her a life sentence plus thirteen years. One of the more severe sentences handed down in the course of the country’s prosecution of the criminals of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it determined that Elma’s death would occur on the cold floor of her cell.

Peter went in first. What he said, I don’t know. When he returned, he simply nodded me forward, without a word. Somehow, he had never stopped knowing what I needed.

Elma’s cage was more spacious than the one I had lived in. And no one drove a needle into her spine, no one hobbled her at the ankles, no one broke into her body and sifted through its insides, seizing her ability to have children while still a child herself, before sealing her shut with a ragged stitch. Her hair was close-cropped, but she had not been shaved. Her fine clothes were gone, but she was not naked. She had been captured, but no one had taken her childhood, as she’d taken mine, and even from behind her bars, she tried to take more from me; she gave a little laugh at the sight of my cane, eager for me to know her defiance. But I knew that she would spend her days hearing nothing but the sound of her own thoughts. She had no Zayde or Mama to soothe her — she had not even the davening of a pigeon at her window. This seemed a rightful misery. I felt no pity for Elma, and yet — the sight of her troubled me. I could have given her a game or two, to help her preserve herself within her cage, but I doubted she would see the value of such things. Instead, I gave her something that was of value to me: my forgiveness. She spat in disgust. I forgave her that too.

Forgiving her did not restore my family; it did not remove my pain or blunt my nightmares. It was not a new beginning. It was not, in the slightest, an end. My forgiveness was a constant repetition, an acknowledgment of the fact that I still lived; it was proof that their experiments, their numbers, their samples, was all for naught — I remained, a tribute to their underestimations of what a girl can endure. In my forgiveness, their failure to obliterate me was made clear.

And after I was finished telling Elma that I forgave her, I reminded her of those who didn’t have the opportunity to do so. I said their names.

Peter, he was the only one of the names on Twins’ Father’s list that I ever saw again.

All those innocents — I didn’t wonder about their futures that day as I left the abandoned house. I couldn’t know their destinations, their triumphs, their troubles. The ones who integrated themselves into new cities and forgot themselves in new professions, either forming empires grand enough to blot out a past, or failing to thrive because they couldn’t get the sound of their own blood out of their heads. The ones who married other survivors, and the ones who wouldn’t marry because they had nothing to offer a marriage bed but night terrors. The ones who took comfort and freedom in the soil of the kibbutz, and the ones who found themselves lying on a different set of tables, granting permission to other doctors to burn the branded memories from their brains, to take away, once and for all, the misery that he had imprinted upon us.

They were children, once.

When the truck bearing a true red cross came, I hid.

I heard the attendants collect the children. Some shrieked, kicked, clung to the doorposts. All thirty-two were forced to surrender their bread knives, and the blades clanged as they joined a pile on the floor. I wished I could have hidden them with me, but I could not risk discovery. I was in the yard, behind a snowdrift, with my wheelbarrow over me. I peered around the hedge to see the children shuffle into the truck. I saw Sophia jaunt merrily, a doll given to her by the attendant beneath her arm. I saw Erik and Eli Fallinger regard the attendants skeptically, their feet rooted to the ground. The Aaldenberg triplets hid behind Miri, and she coaxed them into the attendants’ arms, her blank expression shifting with grief. And then — I watched her count the children, call their names, register my absence. I heard her cry out for me. The attendants tried to soothe her, but Miri protested that Krakow wasn’t safe, the assaults were happening every day, no one could tell her that the girl would be fine, especially after what the girl had been through, and the girl, she continued, she was crippled besides, the easiest of prey for anyone who might hunt her.

I would listen to my guardian call for me till her voice deserted her.

It was cruel to make Miri wait, especially with such dangers in her mind, but I knew I could stir only once there was no risk of the Red Cross’s return. Only without the interference of their presence could I convince her that we had to stay together. After a good hour of caution, I picked up my crutches and hobbled into the abandoned house. It was dark. I lit a candle. But I did not have a free arm to carry it. So I stood in the middle of the room and looked about at what I could see in this scant light. I wanted to tell Miri that we could start again now. But Miri was not herself; she was not even the version who sought forgiveness. This Miri was folded in the corner near the birdcage. She was awake, but absent. I thought that the game that brought me back could bring her back too, that it could make her recover from this want of death.

I dwelled on fish. I thought about species first, then genus, and then I reached the third classification, the one I truly wanted.

Family was my first thought.

But even family ends was my second. It was not a thought I wanted. I assured myself that Miri would continue to live simply because I needed her to — but when she would not shift her gaze from the thirty-two injurious reminders of all she’d lost, I recognized that she would end her world if I did not act — this possibility, it made me forget my crutches, and I stumbled forth for help. Desperation alone carried me, two steps, then three, and then I fell and cried out to the city, I cried for all of Krakow to hear.

Stasha: Chapter Nineteen The Sacred Curtain

Here and there, lost, upended things: a bird’s nest on a puddle of ice, shattered spectacles on a locket dangling from a fencepost. I opened that locket. One half held a lock of hair, the other rust. I knew how that half felt. I felt that way whenever I looked at the tree trunks and saw those many names, all of them loved and searched for, and mine not among them.

The beggars here were certain it was February 11, 1945. They wanted no payment.

We were in Wieliczka, just outside of Krakow, according to the signs I no longer trusted. Like many a place, we never should have been there at all. Leaving Poznan, we found the roads obscured by tanks, interrupting our path to Warsaw. Whether they were Russian or German, not one of us could tell; the darkness carried too much risk. We told ourselves that the roads would clear in only a moment, any moment, but we rode on Horse’s back as we waited, and soon enough, our waiting turned into wandering.

Horse was annoyed; he did not care for the circuitous nature of our travels. Feliks accused me of stalling. While I was usually eager to accept blame, I could not fault myself for this. In all three of us, I knew, there had arisen a hesitation. Our fragile army couldn’t possibly be up to such a task. Defeating Mengele! Even my new pistol had taken to mocking me, and its bullets chorused in terrible agreement.

My aim will never be true enough, the pistol said. My aim will never be sweet or accurate or good.

But you have your bullets, I pointed out. You are not alone. And you have me besides. We are family, all of us. See how much Feliks and I have accomplished already, as brother and sister?

What does it matter? the bullets murmured to one another. Stasha’s rotten eye has made her aim rot too — she is bound to miss. I wanted to tell the bullets that they couldn’t think this way, they couldn’t question me, they had to dream themselves into the heart or the head of our enemy.

Hearing this, the bullets snorted. Pistol remarked on the presence of smoke in a manner of turning the conversation.

The smoke over the city smelled as smoke should — a tang of pine, a touch of balsam. The threads of it didn’t write out a welcome, but they weren’t the red furies of Auschwitz either. Still, there was evidence that our kind had been endangered there in the days that the Wehrmacht ruled. We stumbled over this evidence while rooting for a place to sleep.

Why had no one defended it? Or had its defenders been overcome? This wooden synagogue — I could only imagine the flames it had seen. I am not sure that we would have known our shelter to be a synagogue at all if it were not for the singed parochet—the curtain of the ark; blue velvet, its lions smote by soot, its Torah crown still agleam — that lay in the snow some feet away, as if it had managed to flee the pillage under its own power. When Feliks saw the parochet, he said not a thing, he didn’t even say what his father the rabbi would have said, but he stooped and kissed it and he draped it over a singed post in the midst of the collapse to protect it from the earth. But the parochet fell once more, leaving us with no choice but to carry its sacred length with us.

Fallen rafters black as pitch thatched themselves across a floor that shimmered with broken glass. A corner of this structure remained intact, and it was into its shelter that we retreated, hitching Horse to a charred birch at the perimeter. Horse looked as if he could restore the synagogue to its former glory with his beauty alone. Though the protrusions of his ribs upheld their prominence, so, too, did the black spark of his eye, which he fixed on us with a vigilant stare, and whenever the slightest sound arose on the wind, his ears shifted with worry. In the sweet protection of Horse’s observance, we were comforted.

We huddled together beneath the blue velvet and guarded ourselves. If one were to look in our distant direction, all he might see was a thatchery of torched wood, a luminescing horse shifting from foot to foot, and the briefest field of azure that was our parochet. It felt as if no harm could ever come to us. I was about to ask Feliks what his father would think of us using the parochet as a blanket, if he would praise our endurance or curse us for blasphemy, but already, he was fast asleep.

And so it was decided that Horse and me would keep watch. Feliks snored while we counted stars to stay awake. There were too few that night to outpace my thoughts, so I expanded on the usual by giving them names, and then futures. I gave them futures in all sorts of places that I’d never seen, and when these futures were complete, I took them away, because why should a star have a future when Pearl did not?

Eventually, the watchfulness of Horse’s eye convinced me that it was safe to sleep.

A simple belief, the kind I needed.

I would like to say that although we woke to find Horse gone, nothing else was amiss, but more than his absence struck us in the morning. Where our pale hero should have stood, nodding his head while sleepily rousing, a red ribbon began. This trail of blood wove itself around the ruins and escaped across the field like a loose serpent, and we followed its path, all the stops and starts of it, for half a mile, until it flurried to finale before the arch of a stony-mouthed tunnel. Into the ensuing darkness, we peered.

“It continues,” Feliks said. I was not sure if he was referring to pain or to the red path. He caught me by the arm and made an attempt to hold me back, but his grip was not earnest. He wanted answers as much as I did. We didn’t care that it was to take place in the depths of a salt mine, that we were to follow a red path neither narrow nor straight into a briny underground, a place beneath the earth that seemed most hospitable to evil.

We were both blinded, I think, by this bloody ribbon that stretched before us, or, rather, we were blinded by what it might mean to our many losses. I took it as a message even as it was leading me toward horror. I knew I would not find my sister alive, I knew violence had seized Horse, but I thought perhaps I was being led toward understanding and restoration. How could I not think that while surrounded by such beauty?

Because the entry of this salt mine — imagine stepping into the tilted entry of a lily; consider slipping into coils of white, luminous beyond compare. Following the mine’s wooden staircase, we turned into one gleaming corridor after another; we dead-ended ourselves in tiny cells strewn with tinsel; we stumbled into frosted dens of sodium that hosted flutteries of bats. Through these subterranean halls, we walked in witness to awe at the core of our world.

But even awe bottoms out. At the end of the wooden staircase, we saw that the lily that we traveled in held some nectar that had attracted an army of ants. The soldiers were all so alike in their uniforms and their misery. One would think, after all their crimes, that some godly, glowering hand might descend from the ceiling and lay them out, one by one, like gray dominoes. But no hand descended. Even if it had, it was far too late for Horse.

Because I was never an expert in bones, but I knew, seeing the scatter and the threads of red ribbon that led to a boiling pot propped on a primitive lattice of bricks, that we would not be riding into Warsaw on horseback, that Horse, this dear animal that had lent us his service had met with the same ineloquent brutality we knew so well.

The depths of the salt mine repeated my horror to the center of the earth.

Some people, they have heard so many gasps, screams, cries that they are deaf to them, no matter how much a salt mine enlarges their volume or reach. This seemed to be the case with these Wehrmacht soldiers. The six of them were too busy squatting here and there, picking at their plates, drinking. They had no fear or interest in bears and jackals. Only one turned to acknowledge us, the one manning the stew pot. He had a shuffled, disorganized bearing and metallic eyes that stood in his face like medals rewarded for terrible deeds.

“He wasn’t yours to take,” I whispered. I was certain that Horse had alerted his captors to this fact. After all, it is known that all animals speak while in the throes of de-creation. Horse must have shrieked that he belonged to us, that the three of us were on a sacred mission for the restoration of our souls, the taking of another’s, and the avenging of Pearl.

I stumbled forward in rage. Feliks tried to pull me back.

The soldier tending the pot was dazed on horse meat and drunk on whiskey. He staggered forward and drew his pistol and then took another step. He tilted his head to regard us. He couldn’t understand why we didn’t run; he appeared to find our behavior novel, and he treated us like we were curiosities sent to interrupt his boredom and doom. I knew why I didn’t run. I had nothing to fear. But Feliks — why was he so rooted to the floor? He stood as if he had no choice but to stand by me. Both of us, we’d dropped our sacks, and we should have been lifting them in our arms and running, we should have been bolting up those stairs. The soldier stepped forward to inspect their contents.

We had a hatchet, three knives, two pistols, one poison pill meant for Mengele. We had a crust of bread, a bit of sausage, a bouquet of rags to bind our wounds. We had Pearl’s piano key in a bag full of stones. I couldn’t imagine they would be interested in any of this. He looked at the weapons in amusement. I worried not for myself but for Feliks. Run! I mouthed. He did not.

“You two are well armed,” the man observed. “Have you come to kill me?”

“Another,” I declared. “A real Nazi. You are all turning on each other now, yes? We can give you information about his whereabouts. You can make a deal with the Russians, with the Americans. Can’t you? And maybe, in exchange, you will let us go and give us back our weapons? This person — he would be a fine capture for you. He’s better than Himmler. Bigger than Goebbels. Greater than Hitler himself—”

“Josef Mengele,” Feliks interrupted, breathless. “She is talking about Josef Mengele.”

Not a single reverberation attached itself to his voice. Even echoes, it seemed, were not on our side that day, though they lent themselves freely to the soldier, who was inspecting our weapons, turning them over with metallic clinks that repeated themselves through the salty halls.

“We can tell you where he is — just let us go,” I pleaded. “Anyone who captures him — they will be heroes. He is a prize — after what he has done, the whole world will want him.”

But the soldier was unimpressed with this little speech. He was more interested in pointing one of our pistols at us. We watched the eye of the pistol waver in its focus. He shifted it back and forth. First Feliks. Then me. As if the pistol alone could decide. And then it chose Feliks — he leveled the muzzle at my friend.

My friend, with all his many vulnerabilities and braveries, the one who was now the root of my many dreams, the one who could tame a winter and lessen hundreds of miles and make sorrow eat from the palm of his hand. My brother. My twin. I knew I’d need Feliks all my life. I wanted to watch him grow and be a boy for all time, even as he shifted into an adult. I wanted to see the hair drift from his head as my own turned gray, I wanted to get him a new set of teeth so he could chew someday, and if he still couldn’t chew, then I guess I’d continue to chew for him. When I looked at Feliks, my vision was only good.

I stepped in front of Feliks in hopes of absorbing this bullet. A bullet couldn’t hurt me. But Feliks didn’t know this. He pushed me aside. The soldier nodded the barrel of our pistol at us.

“The two of you — strip.”

So it was that we shed the skins of Bear and Jackal, the outer layers that had protected us from night and winter and any misgivings about the nature of our true strengths. The bravado on loan from these predators — now it was gone. What an ache it was to watch the plush warmth of our borrowed skins fall into enemy hands! My dress followed, and then my two sweaters. I stood, feebly covering myself once again, and my body, it remembered everything for me, it took on Pearl’s duty of the past, and it pointed out the march of needle pricks down my arms. I looked up at the ceiling of the salt mine because I could not look at myself or at Feliks. I knew that he was likely overcome by gooseflesh, that perhaps he’d wet himself in fear, and I heard him sniffle. When Feliks slipped off his pants, the soldier laughed at his tail and teased its tip with the butt of his rifle.

I wondered if this soldier knew Taube, if he had heard of the guard’s merciful act and was determined to correct the situation. Because he did not show any sign of sparing us. Taube, he had done so in a moment of insanity and confusion; he had taken his boot from my back. But this soldier was not confused as to what to do with us.

“Who said you could keep your shoes?” he barked at me. “Socks too,” he added.

My poison pill was in my left sock. I thought of what the avengers would have done, and so as I bent to unroll the woolen sock, I extracted that ampule and slipped it into my mouth. I carried it neatly in the pocket between jaw and cheek.

And as we stood so bare, in the distance, I could see pieces of Horse’s pelt, scattered like a torn blanket. How had I let Horse carry me for so long without noticing that he was piano-white, like the piano in Pearl’s film? My good eye reported this fact, and curiously, for the first time since Mengele’s drop entered my vision, my bad eye agreed. Its traditional veil of blackness had lifted. Both eyes were able to see the same white. There was no variation in it, no shades of gray, not a single suggestion of ambiguity. All was too clear.

This is what I saw: The soldier was touching all that I had left of my sister. Pearl’s key. He’d taken it up from the sack, regarded it without interest, and then allowed it to slip from his fingers.

I could not let that piano key fall; I could not let it meet this dust. Pearl was dead, and that was my fault. But this — if I could not catch a key, I thought, I deserved all I’d been dealt. So I made a naked dash to catch it and threw myself at the soldier’s feet, and it was such a glory having it in my hands, I wept with happiness even as he gave me a kick in the ribs. And then another. And another. I felt the little poison pill stammer between my teeth, the ampule’s walls threatening to cave at the point of my canine. In my hand, there was my sister’s life, and in my mouth, there was Mengele’s death.

Even in that moment, I knew which one meant more.

I heard a shot ring out, and I presumed myself wounded. But it was not me; it would never be me who was truly at risk. I watched Feliks stumble back, watched him forget to hide his nakedness through the pain. I saw him clutch his shoulder, clapping tight a brimming wound.

I looked at Feliks and I looked at the soldier, and I’ll confess to this madness — for a minute I thought I saw not the deserter but the doctor, the Angel of Death, standing there, the evils of his experiments so great that he could no longer live on the surface of the earth.

I wish I could blame this on the depths of the salt mine, whose dimensions were known to make people see ghosts and specters and illusions of all kinds. But the fault was with me. I wish, too, that I alone were visited by such a delusion, but so many, year after year, decade after decade, would find themselves followed by this same face. They wouldn’t be children anymore and they wouldn’t be prisoners either, but always, there would be the sense of his gaze, the prospect of his inspection. How many ways might he disguise himself? we’d wonder. And the world would look at us as if we were mad.

There in the salt mine, I was so sure that I saw him.

And the illusion shattered only when I took in the circularity of Feliks’s injury. Mengele would not hurt us like that; he had more profitable and efficient ways to damage us. His brutality was too studious and elegant to leave Feliks bleeding from the shoulder, such a coarse and ineffective wound that contributed nothing to the advancement of his science.

The soldier took aim once more, but already we were fleeing; we tripped up the stairs, our speed quickened by the fact that the soldier who was following us appeared to be nearly blind with spite as he stumbled upon the stairs. I saw his boot slip and his face strike the wooden slats, and I paused too long to study his stupor and his tumble, his body thudding like a toy as it fell. It was as if I believed that in watching the descent of our enemy, all could be reversed — the trains would change direction on their tracks, the numbers would erase themselves, the point of the needle would never know my vein.

Even with a flesh wound, my friend was faster than I; he knew enough to lean his stunned body into mine as we fled up the stairs, he knew that I needed more to urge me on from the death of Horse. Yet again, they had killed a loved one, they had robbed us, left us defenseless. I felt no victory in evading that grasp. I could hardly see the point in continuing. If that poison pill would have ended me, I would have swallowed it with joy.

“Look,” Feliks said with a gasp, and he lifted a tremulous finger to the sky. A dozen people were falling from it. We didn’t know if they were friend or foe, but they had the clouds of a waning winter at their backs. My friend had the gleam of a bullet burrow at his shoulder, and yet this is what he saw. I watched his pained face marvel at their flight — the drifting freedom of it — and long for the same.

But what we had, it was only on this troubled and accursed soil. I had the poison pill in the pocket between my teeth and jaw, still intact and full of promise. The rest that we’d collected in our quest — gone.

Farewell, Horse. Our beloved. You were more innocent than Pearl on the day we were born. You were better than the best parts of us. You were who I wished the world could be.

Farewell, hatchet and pistol and three precious knives. You were fiercer and deadlier and sharper than I could ever be.

So long, fur coats. Farewell, Bear. Farewell, Jackal. You made us fearsome and possible, you vaunted us into the Classification of Living Things in a performance that I could not execute alone. In you, we became predatory in the way a survivor sometimes needs to be.

So stripped, I pressed forward in the snow, my friend draped across my side, and I dragged him toward the mercy of a row of cottages in the distance; we stumbled forth, hoping for relief, for someone to dress our nakedness and heal our wounds, while men parachuted above, so light and free. I shook my fist at them in envy. I gave them a reckless cry, not caring who might hear me and repossess my body once more. It had been taken from Pearl and me so many times already, I could not care anymore.

“Stasha,” Feliks begged, “I see that you will die soon if you continue this way.”

It was prophecy, warning, love.

Oh, that I could be a girl who needed to heed it!

Pearl: Chapter Twenty The Flights

From our window at the hospital, I saw them, adrift in the sky like the spores of a dandelion. Parachutists — I counted twelve in number, afloat through our evening, on the edge of Krakow.

“Do you know who they are?” I asked Miri. I turned from the window and maneuvered my crutches so I could face her. I asked her who the parachutists were coming for, why they used that method. Miri said it was hard enough to tell, even up close, if someone had good intentions, but she’d been told that many in the Jewish underground used this method of travel in the transport of goods and secrets and weapons.

I did not get to watch the parachutists land — they floated down to a location beyond my eye’s reach — but three days later, I would see a reconfiguration of the white silks that had bloomed above them, their soft lengths having fallen into the hands of a seamstress. Now, a bride glided down the streets; she drifted across the cobblestones toward the chuppah in this ruched wartime splendor, the parachute silks draped into a filmy bodice, the train wisping behind her like mist. The two mothers joined her; they led her beneath the lace. If you put your head out the window, you could hear the celebration. The bride circling the groom. The seven blessings. A shatter of glass sang out.

“There are weddings still?” I said in awe.

Miri rose from her bed and came to the open window to watch with me, to cock her ear and listen. She put her arm around me.

“There are weddings still,” she said, a catch in her voice. “And I don’t know why I am so surprised.”

One ceremony, and then another.

In the abandoned house, when I had thought Miri was leaving the world, I’d felt as if I were in a different kind of cage. My hands didn’t work and my vision blurred. All became distant and impossible. I didn’t even consider my crutches as I stumbled out to the street in search of help. My voice moved far better than I could, and my cries drew the neighbors from their homes. Jakub, the giver of onions, our Krakow host, was among them. His was the only face I knew and trusted. I pointed to the open door and watched as he dashed inside.

I knew he would carry her out. But I didn’t want to see her state. I didn’t look. Not even as Jakub put Miri in an ambulance and placed me beside her. I did not open my eyes until we came to the hospital. I saw her look away from the nurses and the patients both — though they’d seen many with her affliction, she remained ashamed of it, and her shame did not lift as she was tended to and her vitals were taken and she was given a bed. She refused to lie in that bed; she just perched on the edge and studied the curtain that divided the room, and there she remained until a nurse showed Jakub inside.

His entrance was unusually formal; he gave a little bow at the door — it was as if he thought an extreme politesse might conceal his worry, though from my perspective, it only announced an attachment to the doctor. He looked about the room as if he’d never seen the inside of a hospital before, and then he asked me to give them some privacy. I did, in a way. I ducked behind the curtain that divided the room, and there, behind its cover, I still heard everything.

Jakub drew a chair next to the hospital bed and sat beside Miri’s hunched form. He did not sigh or speak; he didn’t even whisper. In his silence, there was a loss, a too-bright and borderless thing, a loss that understood: the survivor’s hour is different from any other; its every minute answers to a history that won’t be changed or restored or made bearable. Recognizing Jakub’s loss, Miri spoke of her own.

“My husband,” she murmured. “He didn’t survive three days in the ghetto. Shot in the street.”

I peered around the curtain’s edge. The room was dim, but Miri’s face was half bathed in lamplight.

“My sisters, both lost to me. Orli, dead, months after our arrival. Ibi, dispatched to the Puff. But before they were lost — he made me take their wombs myself.”

She looked to Jakub, as if awaiting a response. None came. Jakub bowed his head.

“Of course, mine was not spared either. But I could not mourn it. I was too busy mourning my children. My Noemi, my Daniel. How many times have I wished that they were closer in years so that I might have told Mengele they were twins? In my dreams, I close that gap of time between them, I make them passable as twins. But when I wake, I know this was impossible, and I console myself with this: at least my children will never know what their mother did in Auschwitz.” And here her voice began to slip away from her, as if it had become untethered from her thoughts.

Jakub tried to tell her that in a place where good wasn’t permitted to exist, she had nonetheless enabled it. In a place that asked her to be brutal, she brought only kindness, a comfort to the dying, a defiant hope that crept—

But she would not hear it. The mothers, she said — she’d tried to keep the mothers alive, that was the logic of her acts.

So many more would have died without you, Jakub insisted, but my guardian drew only bitterness from this, a bitterness that plunged her into the unspeakable.

“A pregnant Jewess,” she said. “Little offended him more. I told the mothers, ‘If you and your baby are discovered, you will not be shot; no, you will not go to the gas. Such ends are considered too gentle for you. If your pregnancy is known to Mengele, you will become research and entertainment both, he will take you to his table, and, with his instruments, he will dissect, bit by bit, he will push you toward death. And as he kills you, he will force you to watch your baby become his experiment. For Mengele, such savagery is a treasured opportunity — as soon as he learns of a pregnancy, he places bets with the guards about the gender of the child, and they plot its death accordingly. If it is a girl, they’ll say, we will throw her to the dogs. But if it is a boy, we will crush his skull beneath the wheels of a car. These are only some of the brutalities I can speak of. They are too innumerable and varied, so grotesque — I do not have the words. What I know for certain: the only true delivery he knows is that of misery. For every mother and child, he invents a new murder — in Auschwitz, one need not even be born to experience torture.’”

She closed her eyes as if to shroud the memory. But it would not be shrouded. Opening her eyes, she looked squarely at Jakub with the air of one who can only confess.

“So many times, to save a mother’s life — I had to act swiftly, on the floors of filthy barracks, with dull, rusty instruments, and nothing to ease her pain. Alone, I pulled the life from her — my hands bare, bloodied — and I told myself, through the mother’s screams, and my own, stifled tears, You are sparing this soul, this baby, the greatest of tortures. And when it was over — oh, it was never over! — but I would speak to the mother, I’d say, ‘Your child is dead, but look, you are strong, you still live, and now there will be a chance, someday, when the world welcomes us back into its wonder, you will have another.’ Each time I said this, it was not just for them — it was for me too. The grief was not mine, and yet all I knew was grief! So many little futures — I ended them before he could torment and end them, to enable other futures. And still, myself I cannot forgive.”

Miri’s hands fluttered to her face — she did not permit us to see her expression. But we knew she did not want her own future at all.

Jakub looked as if he had witnessed the events she’d described. His face grayed, as if struck by illness, and he struggled to compose himself. He tried to tell her that he knew what it could mean to save a life. That cost, he said, was unending, because in choosing who could be saved, he had also chosen who could not be saved. In failing these lives, he’d selected the color of these deaths, their scents, their violences. Every day, he murmured, he had to save his own life, even as he’d failed the most vibrant, dearest one, the one he’d wanted to save most.

And then he must have found himself unable to say anything at all, because he pulled the curtain back and led me to my guardian’s side. She would not look at me, but she drew me close, she held me tight, and as she wept, I wondered if anyone else, the whole world over, could boast a stronger embrace.

Out in the hall, I overheard the nurses approach Jakub. The cost, he repeated. I know it well. I am sure that you know others too, working as you do, I’m sure you see us, desperate to shake these matters from our minds, you see us try to live until we try to die, and when we can’t succeed at either, we try to coax ourselves toward death by trying to remember them, the ones we couldn’t save, and when we remember them too well, it is terrible, and when we remember them too little, it is worse—

Here, a nurse burst into the room, her eager step announcing an intent to distract me from the conversation in the hall.

This nurse saw my need. She took off my shoes and laid me down in Miri’s bed, so white and clean-sheeted, and there I pressed my cheek to my guardian’s. That bed suited us so well. I could have stayed there forever, stroking Miri’s hair and listening to the nurse’s stories and telling some of my own. But the nurse said that I would have to leave someday. It was not good for me, she claimed, to be so surrounded by pain, and we needed to find a place free of it that I could go to.

“A place like that is real?” I asked.

I was asking not for myself, but for Miri.

It is a particular madness, yes, to long for a cage, and for the sounds of isolation — rat-scratch, leak-drip, my fingertips drumming on the bars — but there, at least, I had some expectation of suffering. I could speculate reasonably about how I might feel pain and how I might be torn, how I could die in a flash, or slowly, bit by bit, in increments so small that I was unable to tell the difference between my life ending and my death beginning. In that space, I’d kept my hope fast. But in places like the hospital, with their white sheets and scrubbed floors and modest stores of food, I was suspended in a perpetual wait. Everything that was good, clean, and plentiful reminded me, once again, how swiftly I could be diminished, and without a single warning. I could be underfoot and powerless in mere seconds, and the anticipation of this made the struggle to remain seem utterly pointless. What work there is, I thought, in being a real person after death!

I wondered how being a real person might feel after leaving the hospital. I assumed that one of us would be leaving soon, as a nurse had given us a suitcase. I also assumed that this person would be me. I would never be ready, I confessed to the nurse after receiving this gift. Ever patient, the nurse explained — Miri was ill, she could not take care of me. Polite, I protested — it was I who would take care of Miri now.

The nurse was not convinced. She merely folded two pairs of socks and placed them neatly within the suitcase. Then she left me with that dreaded object.

How odd it was, to own a real suitcase. We had become a people of sacks invented out of threadbare jumpers or emptied potato bags. These were easily slung over the back and were well proven in their utility. But a proper suitcase! When I took it up by the handle, I felt surrounded. By people and by wall. I felt as if I were boxed in, dust-covered; sweat pooled at my ankles and my ears rang with shouts and a panic burned too bright in my chest. I dropped the suitcase at my feet like a hot piece of coal.

Miri saw what I had seen, and drew me close.

“Believe that you are safe,” she whispered, and she spent the evening scratching out the monogram—JM, it said, in silvery script — with a pin, and there was no mistaking that her efforts had such a roughness to them that she nearly put a hole in the leather.

Better a hole, she claimed, than a memory. I did not argue with this — Miri had more to forget than anyone, and it would do her good to impose large swaths of absence on her mind. But I hoped that as she pursued forgetfulness, a little memory of me might remain. Just a tiny bit, just enough so that if we were ever truly parted, she might seek me out again, someday.

I looked out my window while Jakub and Miri had one of their discussions. There were no parachutists in the sky, but the heavens were assuming a different blue, and the frost seemed soon to end. I consulted a piece of paper that one of the nurses had given me. On it, there was a series of boxes, little cages that represented days. We were halfway through the month of February. Did my Someone know this? I wondered.

Miri and Jakub spoke in hushed tones; they tried to conceal their plans. Jakub claimed that the time for worry was not ending, but it was changing a bit — the problems were different now, but so were the solutions, and he himself could escort the children toward one that was rare and brilliant. The authorities at the Red Cross confirmed the desirability of this scenario — already, they had selected eleven of Miri’s children to participate in this plan. And, of course, there was Pearl — surely she would join this exodus toward safety? The good doctor was in favor of this venture, wasn’t she?

Miri was not stirred by Jakub’s excitement. She muttered something beneath her breath, something wholly unintelligible to me aside from the mention of my name. She said it longingly, or so I believed. Perhaps I imagined this. But when I turned at the window, I caught the trail of her gaze — it was fastened on me; her eyes, they appeared fixed on my injured legs.

Palestine, Jakub continued, insistent. First, a trip to Italy, which could be dangerous — some concealment was necessary — and then a ship that did not have room for everyone but would surely accommodate the twins. Hearing this, Miri faded still further — the voice I’d not believed capable of becoming any smaller lilted softly in query.

“This flight — it is our only hope?” she asked. “Still?”

I knew the tone she used. It was the tone I heard on all the streets when people turned and asked each other if it was safe to resume living.

“Would you like to take the risk?” Jakub whispered. “Is there ever a moment when you are not looking behind your back? Yes, it is over — we are free. Until they decide that we are no longer free — the war is not over, everything remains undetermined—”

This was an argument of proponents of the Bricha, organizers of the flight. We did not know it then, but peace was still over three months away. But who was to say it would come May 8, not July or the next year? While we lived in February’s thaw, creeping toward spring, many believed that flight to another, more hospitable land was a necessary risk.

“She will be safer there than she is here,” Jakub assured her. “I will see to it.”

If there was a moment in which everything was decided, I suppose it was that moment.

Because my guardian did not increase her protest, and I did not raise one at all, and so it was assumed, by all three of us, that this was what would become of me. I would be shipped to Italy, where I would board a boat that held its own sea, a sea of numbered people like myself, young and old, survivor and refugee, and every last one a searcher seeking to purchase a new beginning.

Jakub had promised. It was to be a box quite different than the box I’d known — I was to bob within it next to Sophia, the two of us surrounded by the company of supplies: rolls of bandages, vials of medicine, tins of meats, bags of tea. But when the day came for my departure, a wooden box arrived at the hospital. It was a bit glamorous, so far as boxes go. It had a cherry-lacquered top rendered in the goyish style so as not to attract additional suspicion, and it was sized for a large adult. I could have rolled myself up like a blanket and lived in one corner. At the sight of my hiding vessel, Miri wept. Tears big as marbles rolled down her face. She tried to hide them with her hair, as was her custom.

“It’s a coffin,” she said.

“A trunk,” Jakub corrected.

“I know coffins,” Miri said.

I would only have to hide myself in order to cross the borders, he assured her. There were holes in the bottom so that I would be able to breathe. And there were other children that would be hidden alongside me, the ones that I knew so well from our journey to Krakow. We were to be quiet, but we would know we were not alone, and this, the man claimed, was a comfort.

Into the truck bed piled eleven of my thirty-two companions. While only a week had passed since I last saw them, they looked different from the children I’d known. Their faces were rounder; their eyes no longer carted hollows beneath them. Sophia had a new hair ribbon. The Blaus had gotten haircuts. One of the Rosens wore a pair of spectacles. They were ragged still, but you could tell that some hand had cared for them. I saw Miri’s face as she took in the details of their transformations and I knew that she wished she had been that hand, but she only smiled at each of them and asked if they were excited about this latest journey, and she helped seat me in a corner of the truck bed, where I could lean myself against the coffin box for comfort.

Miri had a gift for me, which she presented with her ever-trembling hands. When I saw this gift, the fact struck me with all its finality. She was not coming with me — not then, and perhaps never.

Like us, the tap shoes were a mismatched pair. One was bigger, younger than the other.

All I knew was that one shoe was blush, the other white. I am not sure how she missed these differences. Maybe she hated the exaltation of symmetry after following Mengele’s orders. I couldn’t know. Both were kissed by the necessary metal at heel and toe. She shined them for me and caressed the laces with pride. She placed the shoes in my hands. She said she’d see me again.

“In Italy?” I asked.

“If I am well by Italy.”

“And what if you aren’t well then?”

“I will be well someday,” she promised.

We would have a dinner, she said, and I could wear my new shoes. I wanted to point out that they were dancing shoes, and I could not walk, let alone dance, but she looked so pleased at the prospect of this reunion that I said not a thing. I put the shoes in the box and did not look at her as she continued to swear that this was not the end for us.

Her form, as the truck trundled off — first, distance diminished her, then the fog swept away her face. I tried to memorize Miri as the expanse between us grew, her eyes, nose, mouth, chin. Wordlessly, I said good-bye to each, until there was nothing left of her to be seen, and I told myself to be happy for this, this chance to say good-bye, to say that I loved her. My affections had found a home in her; she was not my mother, my father, my sister, my Someone, but she was who I wanted to be, she was born kind, but hardship kindled it, and her vulnerabilities did not live apart from her bravery. Miri knew what suffering was and still, she wanted to know restoration too.

I don’t know if she ever truly believed that our reunion would come to be. What is more, I don’t know if she thought she might live even an hour past my departure. But I believe she knew that she had to become well so that I could see her again, alive and restored. She could not do this with me at her side, as much as she would have loved to have me near. This was not abandonment, I told myself, years later. This was love, her dream for my future.

I’m not sure she thought much of her own future. She couldn’t have dreamed of her triumph, I am sure. That she would be allowed a haven in America, that she would be permitted to resume her practice in the halls of a hospital, that she would enter thousands of rooms with her soft step, eyes fixed on the expectant patient.

Dear God, she’d pray as she washed her hands and pulled on her gloves and turned to the waiting mother. You owe me this — the chance to deliver a true and vital life, a child that will never have to be known as a survivor. And thousands would take their first breaths in her hands.

No, she couldn’t have even dreamed of that, not then. We don’t always know ourselves, who we can become, what we may do, after evil has done what it likes with us.

A decade later, we would find each other in a waiting room at a Manhattan hospital where I was to see a specialist. I recognized her as soon as I saw her back, those dark curls tangling at her shoulders, and her usual stance — a slight tiptoe, as if ready to tend to a new disaster at any moment. And though she’d been well prepared for our meeting, she could not help but call me Stasha when she saw me, and I spent the next minute or so begging her not to apologize for this error, which remained in my mind as a sweetness that I couldn’t experience enough.

Stasha, she’d whispered, as if in memoriam.

And like the mother-sister she’d become, she remained with me as I was led to an examination room, as I was undressed and poked. She bossed the nurses a little, and she directed the doctor to be as gentle as he could, and when this inquiry of my insides were over, after I’d spent an hour reliving my girlish selves, all two of them, one the chosen sufferer, the other an intact half, I laid myself down on a couch in a private waiting room, and when the results were declared to be in, and the doctor took a seat to address me, I put my hand in Miri’s.

Miri sat by my side as I was told the details of what he’d done to me, all the undetectable troubles that had begun to plague my health. Together, we learned that parts of me had never fully developed — my kidneys remained the size of a small, starving child’s, a child caught on the cusp of adulthood, her growth interrupted by the fact that there’d once lived a man who had no soul, and he’d collected children and those he found odd, acted as if he loved them, marveled at them, and destroyed them. The insides that he’d tampered with — they did not meet the demands of my grown life.

Miri wept for me then. She took on the tears that couldn’t pass from my own eyes. She did so as if there were some unspoken pact between us. She looked at me, so still, and wondered aloud after my feelings, and when I didn’t answer, she said my name, and Stasha’s too. She didn’t care who saw her cry, she wanted all to know what he had done to me — she was so different then from the woman who’d forced herself to be stoic during our journey out of Auschwitz.

At our parting, I thought those tap shoes were all she had left me with. But when I was forced to enter the coffin while crossing a border, I found, in the toe of one of the tap shoes, a note. Opening it, I expected to see her say good-bye. I thought she might say that she was sorry, that she might detail how her burdens kept her from joining me in my flight.

But this long-ago letter, the one that wept in her blurred script?

It was not about her life, her loss, her sorrows. It was about mine.

And when we children were waylaid, when the roads clogged with tanks made us travel to the wrong city, and then the wrong village, I’ll say this — it was not my will that kept me alive, it was not the canteen of water, the provisions of bread, the company of Sophia beside me or the other twins that rattled in their boxes in the bed of our truck. It was not even our system of communication as we knocked on the linings of what held us whenever we crossed a border or had to hide — one knock to say I’m here, two to say I’m here, but there is little in the way of air, three to say I’m here, but I’m not sure I want to be.

It was only what Miri told me about the Someone who had loved me. All the details she wrote about this person — all her games, her fondness for a knife, the way she’d made me dance — those details kept the breath in me for three days of travel, till our truck was detained by a pair of Wehrmacht deserters so desperate for transit that they were not above forcing Jakub from the driver’s seat. Seeing their approach, Jakub had warned us to take cover in our boxes. Whether he knew this was the end of his life, I don’t know. All I knew was the sound of the pistol, and then the sound of a body hitting the ground beside the truck. I heard, too, the whimpers of Sophia as she lay beside me, and as we sped away, I told her that we had only to bide our time till the soldiers paused in their travels, and as soon as the vehicle stopped, we would slip out, the lot of us, head for the nearest village, and find another rescue. She pointed out that I was on crutches. I pointed out that we were twins, the both of us, even though we’d had our share of loss. I assured her that freedom was something we might achieve together, that my Someone had always said so.

And in that moment, having no one to share my duties with, I took them all on. I took the hope and the risk, the reckless determination, the stubborn belief that yet again, I would survive.

Inside my latest box, I put on the tap shoes and waited for the moment that my kick at the ceiling of my confines might turn into a leap.

Stasha: Chapter Twenty-One Not the End

What kind of welcome did I expect from the ruins of Warsaw? In the place where Mengele’s life was to end and lend a new beginning to ours, there was only the echo of peasants spitting in the streets, emptying their lungs of dust. And look at us — our weapons were gone, our furs had been stripped. Near naked, defenseless, we wore burlap sacks begged from a roadside farmer; we wrapped our exposed legs and arms in woolen rags discarded on the side of the road, we stumbled forth in too-large shoes, and my friend winced with every step, his hand constantly returning to worry at the wound on his shoulder, which had surrendered its bullet into my hand. With two fingers I’d pried it from his flesh as he shrieked, cursing the fact that my own affliction could not enjoy the same bloody and swift extraction. That, I told myself, was the last doctoring I would ever do. Destruction was all I cared for now, and Feliks shared this with me — together, we improvised fresh and clumsy methods of persecution. We collected a new sackful of stones to lob at our torturer’s skull, we clutched sticks beneath our arms, makeshift spears, the ends of them whittled to points fine enough to pierce his chest, and we trusted that the meek power of these humble instruments would be transformed by our fury when, at last, we came upon Mengele, cornering him in the cages of his hideout at the Warsaw Zoo.

Warsaw did not recognize our destructive aims, as it was too possessed by its own restoration to know us. But although it did not note our entry, I trusted the city to host our mission. It had been destroyed like we had been destroyed. It was gutted and drawn; vacancies had been cleared until the city was little more than a cellar, a tomb, a waiting room with a telephone that said only good-bye, but everywhere, I saw people crushing themselves to revive it, I saw them expelling every breath they had into the foundations of the felled synagogues. They had the power specific to natives — they compelled the leaves to remain on the trees, coaxed the flowers to bloom and the skulls to stay in the ground, buried where no dog might unearth them — but we had the gifts of outside avengers. While they entrusted the city with life, we were there to ensure a death. Only when Mengele was finished would the leaves remain, the flowers bloom, and the skulls go back to sleep.

A violet night was falling and we heard a clock ticking in the air, addressing us, telling us that we were running out of time. Two steps farther, I realized that this sound was only the pound of my heart, though the message remained the same. The ticks quickened when we rounded a corner and saw a Red Army soldier paring an apple with a nail file and leaning against a wall alongside a broom. I wondered if that broom was so young that it had only the experience of sweeping ash and rubble. The soldier was so airy and nonchalant that I assumed everything had ended.

“You have captured him already?” I asked.

The soldier peered at me over his nail file.

“Hitler?” he wondered.

“Not him,” I said. “The other him. The Angel of Death — have you found him?”

“I don’t understand the question,” he said. “Your Russian — very poor.”

I knew that he understood well enough. But I pantomimed so that he could claim no excuse for not answering; I pretended as if we were playing the Classification of Living Things.

With my hands, I tried to depict a person born to German industrialists and affectionately known as Beppo. This was easy enough to convey. I stood on tiptoe and made myself look vast; I twirled a mustache, plucked a hair from it, and popped it into my mouth to approximate Mengele’s nasty habit. Also easy to get across was the fact of his doctorhood. I swung the white wings of an invisible coat about; I plunged a needle, removed an organ, sewed children together, and caged a Lilliput. More difficult, however, was the degree of his evils. This I was unable to communicate in all its lowdown fullness, its beastly disrespect for all living creatures and their variety.

Yes, I failed at this as badly as I had failed in my cattle-car portrayal of an amoeba.

So I wasn’t surprised when the soldier shook his head in confusion. I begged his forgiveness about the complicated message. I tried again. I left nothing out. The experiments, the shared pain, the Zoo, the days, the nights, the smell. All the dead tossed to the mud banks of the latrines. I did my best, but I realized that those who had not seen what we’d seen would never truly understand.

The soldier didn’t understand. So I took another approach. Realizing that Mengele was a man that could become fully known only through his victims, I began to list them all in the dust. I wrote all the names that I knew. I wrote Pearl’s. I wrote mine too, and then I crossed it out. The soldier bent to inspect the names, shrugged, gave Feliks his half-eaten apple, and then stalked off into the rubble chasing the vision of a pretty girl who’d begun to hang her wash on the ruins of a butcher shop.

“You didn’t even try to help,” I said.

“Not true,” Feliks said through a mouthful of apple. “I stood by your side the whole time.”

I told him I was beginning to think that he didn’t want any outside assistance.

“You are right,” he confessed. “I want it to be you and me, no one else. We are the only ones entitled to kill him.”

For once, I could not argue. And we walked on in our quest, picking our way through these ruins. Men were crawling out from holes, puffs of dust and soot haloing their heads. Faces were covered with soot and ash and dust, but beneath these layers, determination peeked. They were singing to the city, these people, trucking their wheelbarrows to and fro. Children perched on fallen stoops with buckets. Cats surveyed the efforts with suspicion and made sudden moves to escape stew pots. Mugwort hung on the remaining houses, warding off traditional evils.

Feliks had a strange familiarity with this place, or as much familiarity as one can have with a city that has fallen. He’d had an auntie here once, he claimed, and so he knew the streets, and he took me through what remained of them. We found tattered clothing to replace our burlap bags, ragged socks and mismatched shoes for our feet. We inquired about the zoo to any who would pause to answer us. The inquiry always put people into fits of headshaking. We used to love the shriek of the cormorants, they’d say. We used to admire the canter of the zebras. And our downcast eyes told us that we would know this zoo by its destruction.

We came upon signs. The signs told of lives that should have been, lives that had burst or been diminished, lives that had wandered into the forest. Here, an aviary stripped of its feathers. There, the elephant house with its emptied swimming pools. Over there, in the middle of the green, tigers should have familied themselves into magnificence. Peacocks should have glinted, geese should have gaggled, apes mocked monkeys. The lynx should have given chase.

But where the grandeur of the animal kingdom should have made itself known, there was only scatter — an upturned moat, tufts of fur clinging to bars wrenched wide. The pheasant house fluttered with pages torn from a book; tourist maps clung to the mud. The polar bear’s pool hid beneath a blanket of scum and moss. The only pride in the lions’ house was now a litter of shells. In the monkey habitat, rope swings hung freely, ungripped by primate hands, suggestive only of the noose.

I traced my finger around the print of a hoof, laid myself beside it in the mud. Did anyone ever truly manage escape? The hoofprint did not seem to think so.

I’d come for Mengele, yes. But I’d hoped for life too. I hadn’t known this, though, till I saw nothing of it.

To the left of the hoofprint, I spied a small mound of earth, a fresh heap of soil capping the ground. I turned over the soil and plunged my hand in. What did I expect to find at the bottom of this tunnel? My hand dreamed of discovering another hand; it wanted to find my sister sitting in a patient vigil beneath Warsaw’s mud. But my fingers struck tin instead, and I smuggled out a glass jar populated with names.

I spilled its contents over the ground like seed, little slips of yellowed paper. There was Alexander and Nora. There was Moishe and Samuel and Beryl. Agathe, Jan, Rina, Seidel, Bartholomew, Elisha, Chaya, Israel. Not a Pearl among them. Feliks looked at the names and mourned. I was glad he did, because I didn’t have any mourning to spare. We couldn’t have known then that the names belonged to the children smuggled by the Jewish underground, children who had been assigned new identities and homes and faces, children who sank their selves into objects — a bolt of fabric, a pile of medicine, a slew of bottles — children who lived in their mother’s skirts, beneath floorboards, under beds, behind false walls, so that they might someday rejoin life. But instinctually, he knew enough to sweep up these names with his hand and bury the jar again, admonishing me all the while for disrupting their hibernation.

We crept through the habitats; we asked ourselves where a Mengele might lurk.

I wondered if he’d learned the art of camouflage, taken a suggestion from some animal at the zoo, an innocent that believed, as I had, that goodness could be found within him. Chameleons could be optimistic like that. But Mengele — he’d think too highly of himself to blend with stone, dust, earth. Still, with every step, I expected him to leap up beneath our feet, to bolt from an underground hiding place. I couldn’t be too cautious. I kept one hand fishing about in my sack of stones and readied the other with foul gestures.

“Check the trees,” I whispered.

But Feliks was not interested in my instruction. He threw his makeshift spear into a copse of birches and shrugged. He considered his sack of stones, and then laid the stones down, one by one, as gently as if he were handling birds’ eggs. Then he sank to the ground and let the wind play over his face as he stared into the evening sky above, with all its dusky drifts of clouds, and with an odd air of resignation he played the game we’d played so long ago, on the soccer field.

“I don’t see a single Nazi among you,” he said to the gathering cumuli.

I said there was no time for this game. I promised that as soon as we found Mengele, we could rest and read the clouds. We didn’t even have to kill him right away, I reasoned. We could secure him in the tiger pen and take care of him later, to maximize our viciousness.

“I’m tired,” he claimed, and he did not move.

In all our travels, this was the first statement of weariness I’d heard. I’d seen Feliks struggle to walk, to lift his head, to open his eyes, to swallow a morsel of food — but never had he voiced his fatigue. This concerned me. I put a hand to his forehead, but he wrenched it away.

“We should sleep and look for him in the morning,” I said brightly. “It would be stupid for us to confront him when we are not at our best. Like your father the rabbi would say—”

“My father was never a rabbi,” he said dully. “I lied.”

He confessed this to me, but he said it to the clouds above.

“I forgive you,” I said. “I lie too. I lie all the time since Pearl left. Actually, that’s a lie — I lied before she was gone. I always have.”

This revelation did not bring him the comfort I thought it might. I watched a tear slip from his eye and plummet down the side of his face. He didn’t bother to wipe it away.

“I am the biggest liar of all,” he said. “My father was a drunk, a criminal, an indigent. We lived with him in graveyards, back alleys, anywhere we could find. He didn’t even survive the invasion. My mother — dead long ago. I don’t know how. My brother — after our father died, we went to live with a woman, a kind woman, she took us in—”

I told Feliks that he could stop. This was not a contest about who was the biggest liar. This was a contest about who could be the best killer of Josef Mengele, Angel of—

He sat bolt upright, mouth twisted with confrontation.

“Let me finish! We lived here in Warsaw. Behind this zoo, in fact. See that house there, so close? It was ours, once.”

I looked at the remains of the house, its insides exposed like the nest of a wasp. The sight of its skeleton laid everything bare. I thought of his odd familiarity with the city, the way the people nodded at him as he passed, how he knew the name of every street. I told Feliks that I forgave him, none of these falsehoods mattered. The one thing I didn’t understand was why he had acted as if this was a new place, as if he’d never been here before—

He did not look at me as he explained.

“I thought you’d love the zoo. I thought that once you saw the animals, you’d want to live again, and maybe you’d want to live with me. I thought — if you had that chance, that hope, it might even be possible for you to put this deathlessness aside. That ridiculous story he gave everyone! He told all of us that fib, you know. A bigger liar than myself!”

I don’t know what my face looked like but I’m sure it showed my foolishness. For so long, I’d hoped that others would forgive me my survival. Just a moment before, I’d believed that the years of children and mothers were in me, the minutes of violinists and farmers and professors, every refugee who never managed to return from the seething country that war had put them in. And now it had come down to this: not science or God or art or reason. Just a boy — a traitor, friend, brother — who wanted to show me a tiger.

“You know that it isn’t true? How could you believe it? Mengele told all of us, you know, every last — you were not the only one he put evil into.”

Hearing this, I put my spear down too. I dropped my sack of stones, which thudded on the ground with finality. The stones took my side in this matter. The stones cried out, they agreed with me that, yes, I’d been a fool, but Mengele thought I was special, Mengele singled me out, he said I was a rare girl, the only worthy one.

My friend’s mouth twisted with pity.

“If I had ever thought you believed that, Stasha—”

Seeing my distress, Feliks hurried to my side, and he went on to say that all I needed was a good night’s dreaming and then a new family, maybe an adopted family, and then a new country, complete with a future. The soothing nature of his voice only riled me. I covered my ears to protect them against the force of his good wishes, and I removed my hands only to reach down into my sack and pull out a stone. It careened past his ear, toward the carnage of his home.

His face? The sadness in it told me we had been family.

I reached again, threw stone after stone. I threw them not to strike but because I needed to no longer carry such burdens. I threw them into the remaining window shards of his house. The stones pleased me with their shatters. The last, in particular, sounded distinguished, almost musical in its destruction. I did not realize the reason for this until my target cried out in dismay.

“Your key!” Feliks shouted.

I looked into my sack. It was true, I had reached into its depths with a careless, raging hand and thrown Pearl’s piano key by mistake. Already Feliks was turning to run into the house to retrieve it, and I was at his back.

If Feliks felt the recognition of his old home as he entered, he did not say, but I watched him scan its insides warily from the doorway, I watched him step purposefully on a framed photograph that lay just beyond the threshold. I looked at the photograph, and a younger Feliks looked back at me. His twin looked back at me too. I could not tell how long before the boys were herded into Mengele’s Zoo this photograph had been taken. But though their young lives had never been prone to ease, it appeared that once, they had been immaculate; they grinned the same grins, these twins, their hair was parted in the same direction, and their eyes were wide and hopeful.

It was difficult for me to put that past down, but we had to move forward.

We found ourselves in a parlor with armchairs and sofas in disarray, all of it covered in a fine shower of concrete and crockery. The looters had searched the floorboards and pulled the china from the cupboards. The whole of this house was overturned and smashed, but its ruins were not pathetic in the way ruins can be — this place had struggled against those who came to overthrow it.

We climbed to the second floor, bolted up a staircase muddy with footprints, and found rooms aflutter with mosquito nets. They’d been suspended over every summer bed but the looters had ripped them and dragged them to the ground. This tulle, with its drapes and flounces, floated over the floors and furnishings, a ghostly blizzard. We sifted through this tulle foam for that white key; we bumped into this corner and that, and then Feliks stopped with a start.

“Did you hear that?”

I had not.

“A woman — crying,” he said. “Listen.”

And then it soared toward us like an invitation and we hesitated at a stair before bolting upward into the darkness.

“It’s coming from the parlor,” Feliks said. “And it sounds as if someone is hurt.”

The weeping increased. I felt so distant from my body while listening to it. I could swear that cry was familiar. It sounded like a cry I’d heard all my life, one that I had once dreaded hearing but now welcomed.

“It’s Pearl,” I said to Feliks.

And then, as if in confirmation, there was a crash, a startle, the sound of something falling across a set of piano keys. I pushed past Feliks and, without the aid of candlelight, picked my way over the shattered glass, the furniture outstretching its arms.

In the parlor, I saw the piano. It was intact. Feliks rushed toward it, blocking my view.

“Who is in my house?” he demanded.

We received only more cries. I noticed, then, that these cries had a womanly note; they drifted out of an experience I was quite unfamiliar with. As we neared the piano, I saw their source: a figure swaddled in blankets. I watched Feliks approach this figure, and then slow.

“You have to see this, Stasha,” he whispered.

It was a Roma woman. She was slumped against the side of the piano, but she lifted her face to us. Looking at her, I forgot Pearl’s key. I wasn’t even trying to look for it. The woman wilted before us — she was not unlike a petal struggling to remain on the stem.

“She’s dying, isn’t she?” Feliks asked. “That’s why her breathing is so strange?”

I wasn’t sure if the breaths were dying breaths. They sounded like a different sort of distress, though one just as life-changing as death. I was certain that I had never made such sounds. I was certain Pearl never had either. These moans carried a wisp of future in them — they were aggrieved, but hopeful too, as if the woman had some happy prospect in her mind even as she wept. But I said nothing of this to Feliks. Because I was too busy looking at this pitiable woman with hatred. Instead of my sister, she was this — a woman who had been hunted down, left to wander. A bereaved creature, much like myself, without too many gasps left. I wondered what had been promised her in life — a home, a husband, a child — and how it differed from what had been promised to me, but I couldn’t get very far with that thought because I couldn’t remember what life had ever owed me in the first place.

Feliks peeled back one of the blankets in search of a wound, and the woman exhaled with startling force. She flurried her hands at us — begging for pause — and then she reached behind herself and produced the arc of an immense knife. It may as well have been a miracle, that blade; we forgot ourselves looking at it and were impressed by her unforeseeable power. Surely, anyone who possessed such a weapon should be the true vanquisher of Josef Mengele. Though prostrate and beaded at the forehead with illness, she shamed us both with her smiting potential.

We told her how impressed we were. If only, we told her, if only we’d had such a knife at our disposal in the wilds of the Zoo.

She was confused — drops of sweat were tossed from her brow as it furrowed.

“Not this zoo,” Feliks said. “Another zoo, the one that made—”

The woman exhaled sharply. At first, I thought it was frustration. But when that exhalation multiplied into a series, I saw that it was pain, and in the midst of these spasms, she gestured for Feliks to lean in toward her. And into his grimy palm she placed the long blade with a ceremonial flourish.

“I thank you,” he finally managed to say. “And I swear that I will kill a Nazi someday, in your name.”

The woman cocked her head at him, gave another ragged exhale, and, by some miracle, capped it with a girlish laugh. It seemed that there were two words that she recognized. They were Nazi and kill, and though neither appeared to be relevant to her wishes, she seemed to appreciate their usage. She clapped as if we’d just performed for her, and then she crooked her finger at us apologetically, and pointed to her abdomen.

“We have nothing—” I started, but it didn’t matter what I said because she was pulling up the hem of her ragged jumper to reveal a belly that was not the starved belly that we were accustomed to seeing but one of an unfamiliar fullness. A prick of movement encircled her navel. A ripple of life, that’s what it was.

I moved to sit beside her, to hold her hand. I did this not out of familiarity but out of a desire not to faint. And then she drew my hand in a neat line beneath her abdomen. Her manner was instructive, her movements precise. There was no mistaking her petition. Feliks grasped me by the arm; he tried to force me back.

“You will kill her,” he whispered.

I told the woman that I couldn’t use the knife as she asked. She smiled at me and repeated the motion. She wanted to be my teacher, my reason to continue; she wanted to show me birth.

I told her I couldn’t. But already, I was wondering if I could — she was dying, this woman, she was leaving the world with a life inside her, a life that could go on to know nothing of the suffering we had endured. A life with a real childhood. Didn’t I owe something to a life like that?

“You won’t forgive yourself,” Feliks warned me.

I thought back to Mengele’s charts. Once, I’d seen him open up a woman while I lay in the examination room. It was an unusual procedure, he’d claimed, a favor for a friend. I’m not sure what kind of favor sees a newly born child plunged into a bucket behind its mother’s back, but he insisted on speaking of this as a charitable act, even though the cesarean soon turned into a vivisection before my very eyes. Before I had a chance to look away I had learned from this experience — I’d chosen to forget the bereaved mother’s face, but I remembered the scars of such deliveries, their position, their length, their arc; I knew that such incisions could end children just as easily as they could deliver them.

And then I sank my knife in the way the woman wanted, the way my memory told me to, the way that Mengele never would have — I did it with care and the remnants of my love, and as she stopped crying, a new cry began.

For all my vengeful ambition, this was the first time I had had blood on my hands. We watched the woman’s eyes dim, her posture slacken.

I think she saw the squirmer before she left. Its face was so humorous, shrimp pink and ancient. Why else would she have died smiling?

I passed my knife to Feliks and told him how to cut the cord. Let him, I thought, be responsible for this final severance.

“What do we do with it?” he asked.

I wiped the membrane of the floating world from the baby’s skin.

This baby was so different than the camp babies. Its problem was not that someone was trying to kill it, but that no one in this house knew how to make it live.

In the morning, Baby wailed in my arms as I walked. I was on my way to the orphanage, crossing this street and that in my quest to put Baby where it belonged. Baby needed to be in hands that could properly care for it and see it grow into a child who could someday be more than an orphan. I knew this plan would be met with disagreement from my companion, so I’d crept out before Feliks could wake. His love of the impossible would make him want to keep the sweet unfortunate. And I did not want to be convinced. Because, you see, a new plan for my future had formulated within me as I’d spent the evening rocking Baby and watching Feliks dig a grave for the Roma mother.

He’d buried her near the glass jar of names.

The newborn cared nothing about this grave, but I knew Baby could feel the thoughts in me as I’d stood over the mound and placed the plume of a peacock feather where a headstone should have been. When the wind blew that feather away, Baby wailed. It wailed not only in grief, but as a negotiating tactic. It wanted to be known to me as a real human, and it saw that I respected grief more than anything. This was a shrewd plan, one much advanced for an infant, but as a hardened girl, I required more.

I looked down at its face now, wiped the sleep from its dark eyes with my shirtsleeve, and hoped that this attention to hygiene could serve as a substitute for love, but the infant mistook it for a gesture of true affection and blushed. Already, it wanted me as family. I felt sorry for it for choosing to love me even as I moved toward its abandonment, holding it at arm’s length while footing through the rubble.

During this walk, I noted what I was leaving behind. Once, I was Mengele’s experiment. And now, it seemed that I would be an experiment for the war-torn countries, the disassembled, the displaced — how do you restore everything to its rightful home? everyone was asking. Of course, I wasn’t alone in being an experiment in this way. There were so many like me, and I wondered how many among them would make the choice that I was going to make.

You see, the pill the avengers left me with, the poison intended for Mengele that I’d carried in my mouth out of the depths of the salt mine — it was secured in my sock. It took every step with me, whispering all the while into my ankle, which just so happened to carry nerves and veins that sided with my heart. This poison wasn’t the bully I’d expected it to be but a strange comfort, a modern invention that knew my pain. It was wiser than I was; its chemicals had passed over the earth for centuries, and it was a well-traveled substance, practiced in human dismissal. From time to time, it tried to escape my ragged sock, but I only pushed it back and kept walking. The distance between myself and the orphanage was growing ever shorter, and I wanted to appreciate the walk because, though the city was gray and rubbled, it was the last city I’d see, and so I saw all I could — the old woman blowing dust from her photographs, the children collecting husks of bullets in a heap, the shop window full of stopped clocks and my reflection.

I pretended that the clocks had stopped for Pearl and me. I had failed at protecting her in life, but there was a chance, I believed, of finding her in death. She would want it that way, I told myself, and not just because she wanted to see me. Pearl would want me to die because she knew me, she knew how intolerable it was to my spirit that Mengele would escape unavenged, wholly beyond my desperate reach, my every wish for justice. Even if I was never reunited with her — I could not live with that failure.

And if there was a life for us beyond this death, we could embark on a new set of tasks and divisions.

Pearl could take the hope that the world would never forget what it had done to us.

I could take the belief that it would never happen again.

No one would know us as mischlinge. In that life, there would be no need for such a word.

And then I came to my destination. A red mitten was impaled on the iron gate, like a pierced heart. The paving stones before the remaining walls of the orphanage were upturned, the earthworms were surfacing in the exposed soil, the rosebushes were showing their roots, and the thorns were pointing the way to the iron knocker on the red door, a bold but tarnished lion. I wiped the dew from the doormat and laid Baby down upon it. I was no savage — I was careful to keep it wrapped in the blanket that had belonged to its mother. Baby appeared content — there were coos, a pleased thrashing of fist. I placed its thumb in its mouth. It was the least that I could do, I thought, though it began to wail a moment later. I started to leave, and I would’ve done so quickly, I would’ve passed through the gate and headed down the street to take my poison pill in a quiet corner, but I did not look where I was going and I collided with a man. He was coatless; his clothes were ragged, and his shoes were in pieces. He had no face — at least, none that I could see, because he held a Soviet newspaper before his head. The print shrieked across the front page. I begged his pardon. He begged mine. Or he almost did. For some reason, he stopped short in his apology. Then he clutched my numbered arm, and the paper fell at my feet.

There, on that front page, was a face I knew better than any other. It floated in a sea of other faces, behind the barbs of a captivity I knew too well.

From above, a drop descended to the page, threatening to blot the face out. Thinking it rain, I snatched the paper from the ground, and that’s when I heard the crying.

You might wonder how I could recognize a man by his crying when I’d never, in all the years we’d spent together, heard him cry. Laughter had been his chosen sound, and shouts of frustration largely featured too in those last days before his disappearance, when he was trying to negotiate with the other men of the ghetto, all of them so interested in doing good, and all of them bearing conflicting ideas as to how to achieve it. But there, at the steps of the orphanage, it was his cry that solved our long separation.

“You are alive” was all I could say.

My father held me close. He sobbed. His sobs should have made him still stranger to me, but instead, they reintroduced a man who knew what it meant to search and press on, to ignore all doubts that wanted so badly to diminish him. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this — Papa was never good at doubting, not for as long as Pearl and I had known him. And now, in our father’s eyes, there was all the good I’d ever known, and there was good to come; there were days to see and stories to hear and weapons to abandon. From his threshold, nestled in his basket, Baby went quiet, so quiet, as he observed our reunion. They say the newly born see nothing. They are wrong. I can testify to this fact because in my own way, within Papa’s clasp, I was newly born too.

When I saw Papa, the world rolled on for me. In seeing his face, so changed, I felt found by luck, by miracles. All became awe, and rain fell to join our tears. How strange, I thought, that rain remains rain after what we’ve endured! Some things were unchanged; this was proof. Another unchanged thing: my father lived, and as he pressed me to his chest, I could still hear his heart! It did not know quite what to say.

Papa was similarly speechless. He stroked my face with a bandaged hand, a hand that still knew, through its tribulations, Pearl’s face as well as my own. When he tweaked the tip of my nose, I could not help but join him in his tears.

And through these tears, I tried to tell him that Zayde was dead, but all I could say was Please, Papa, bend so I can see your face, a leaf is caught in your beard.

I tried to tell him that Mama was dead, but I just said, Mama, Mama.

I tried to tell him that Pearl, our Pearl, my Pearl — he made me stop speaking, and he drew me even closer. I could feel his lips move against my scalp as he spoke.

“I am so happy to find you,” he said. “The article said that the children are scattered all over. Displacement camps, mostly. Some orphanages. Gross-Rosen. Mauthausen. I have been traveling for weeks, one stopped train after another — I thought I might locate someone with information in Lodz, but I found myself in Warsaw. How could it be that I would discover you here?”

Papa laughed and I thought I heard Baby laugh too, in his newborn way. I couldn’t laugh with them. I was too busy looking at the photograph in the newspaper that my father now clutched with one hand.

“That is not me,” I said.

I said it not only to my father but to my sister’s face, which peered out from the photograph, a look of capture in her eyes even as she floated above the place that tormented her, cradled in the arms of one of our few protectors.

“I thought it was you,” Papa said. “The expression — it is yours.” My father could not stop shaking, and yet he did not know how to move; we stood there, before the door of the orphanage, experiencing a joy so many would not.

“I didn’t hear you, Papa,” I whispered. “I am half deaf now.”

It was a lie, somewhat. I just wanted to hear him say those words again. But there was no need to draw this phrase out of him. He was too eager to repeat his joy, to hold me close.

“I thought it was you,” Papa said, and he increased the clasp of his arms around me so that I could hear his heart acknowledge our loss even as his voice refused to. “Look at the expression,” he whispered. And this is where he crushed me, where he drew me so tight that I could not breathe. He held me so close I felt my ribs crowd toward each other, but curiously, there was no pain at all, and I wasn’t the least bit worried about the potential suffocation of his embrace. My father was a good doctor, and he could do my breathing for me in a pinch, maybe not as good as Pearl could breathe for me, but I was beginning to think that, when I saw her—

I couldn’t believe that I could even think such a thing.

Tell my sister that I, she had said.

Pearl was alive. Or at least, she had escaped the cage that Mirko told me of. She had been carried through the gates we had entered together. What happened after that, I couldn’t know, but I was certain that her legs were moving faster than anyone’s in her efforts to reach me.

I should have shouted, I should have danced, but this discovery was too sacred to be commemorated by anything we could humanly do. I picked up Baby, and Papa and I walked back to the zoo; we kicked up pebbles and watched them stonily confront the rain. We handed Baby back and forth, and we spoke to each other as friends invested in futures speak. Papa told me of Dachau, the camp the secret police had taken him to so long ago. There was more to the story, bits that Mama had never disclosed. Because the sick child he’d left us to tend to that night existed, yes, but so did the Jewish resistance, and Papa had been a part of that shadowy movement. With Mama’s blessing he’d risked himself, smuggling weapons from the border of the city into the ghetto, and on that night, he’d risked himself too well; he was captured and beaten and then — he did not want to say, but I could imagine him being tossed onto the back of a truck or onto a train, traveling farther and farther away from us, till he arrived at a place that claimed, like so many others, that work might set him free.

I told him what the Gestapo said, that he’d plunged his body willfully into the Ner.

“I would never do such a thing!” he said. And then he hung his head and admitted that before the Russian newspaper gave him the company of that beautiful image, he’d thought of doing that very thing every day, soon as he woke, but with a rope, not a river. It was the inclusion of that last detail — rope, not river — that set my mind to realize that this returner was not the Papa of old but a new, broken man, one who no longer insisted on revealing the horrors of the world in discrete increments to his daughter, as they had already made themselves as plain as the new scar that careened across his forehead.

Papa asked me about what had happened to me, to us, to Pearl. I could not speak of such things. I simply told him that I wasn’t fit to take care of this baby, as much as he thought we owed him a home. I had impaired vision, a bad ear. I was useless in matters of assisting another’s survival.

Papa took out our beloved newspaper and unfurled it pointedly so I could not escape the face of my sister. She was ours, even in that picture.

“We will find her alive,” he swore. “She would not leave this earth without you.”

Already, the old nature of our relationship was returning to us, though with alterations. Our walk, that was new. For the first time I could remember, I strode directly by his side. I knew he would have lofted me onto his shoulders if I’d let him; he would have held me high enough for all the city to see so that they could know that Janusz Zamorski was not only still a man, but also a father not entirely bereft of family, a man with two daughters, twin girls that he loved for all their differences.

But he did not try the old shoulder stroll of our younger years, because if I were to be carried in such a capricious manner, who would look after the safety of Baby?

Papa was immediately taken by the infant, you see. He appraised him as a good doctor does, admiring the broadness of his newborn chest, the steady intake of his lungs. You would hardly know, he said in wonder as he tickled Baby, that this was the face of a wartime child.

I could see that Baby would never be left in a basket at an orphanage, not as long as Papa had some say. I did not want him. Or at least, I did not want him until I had Pearl by my side, because only then would I know that my life truly could continue. Baby must have seen my thoughts, he must have known in that way that infants do, because he escalated his handsomeness in a snap; he parted his lips and made his need for food known so discreetly. I had to admit the child was a charmer, but his comely manners could not overwhelm my doubts, and I assessed the matter as we picked our way through the streets.

“He is hungry,” Papa said, pointing to Baby’s mouth, open with want. “We must find him something to eat.”

Papa and me, we’d always spoken in bargains and bets. If I were to do this, I said, to take care of this baby, you must do one thing for me. What is this? he asked. He expected something playful. He expected me to make a joke. But I had none to make.

Please take this pill from me, I begged, please bury it where I can’t find it.

We kept a list; we crossed off names. The names were of orphanages, displacement camps, nunneries, and monasteries, all the places one had to look in those days. A farmer gave us rides around the towns bordering Warsaw. We went to Zabki, Zielonka, and Marki.

“Have you seen a girl,” Papa would say, pushing me forward, “who looks like this?”

“We’ve seen so many girls,” the nun or the official or the monk or the guard would say.

“She has a number,” I’d bleat, and I’d show them my own.

“This doesn’t help us,” they’d say, staring into the blue. Often, they seemed to lose themselves looking at it.

“She has other identifying marks,” I’d say. “If she still has hair, she wears a blue pin in it. If she still has legs, they are knobby at the knee. You can’t miss her — if you’ve seen her.”

And they would smile and say that we should go to this place or that place. She was sure to turn up, they said. If she was alive, they said.

“Of course she is alive,” we’d say, pointing to the photograph. “Look at this face!”

All we could do after the conclusion of these visits was look at the newspaper. There Pearl was, nesting in Dr. Miri’s arms, with fences rising on either side of them, as if they were trapped in a garden with hedges of wire. If you looked at the picture long enough, you could sense the grip of the doctor’s hands, or feel the prick of the frost. Whenever we returned to Feliks’s house, the newspaper lived in Papa’s dresser drawer, alongside our guns. He kept it there because I looked at it too much, he said. There were rules, he said, and they were imposed for my own health. He was not wrong in this. If I looked at the picture in the morning, I couldn’t bring myself to eat. If I looked at it in the evening, I could not sleep. And so my visits with the pictured Pearl were confined to the afternoon. If I looked at her with both eyes blurred, it was easy to imagine that she looked at me too.

Tears must have been invented for that reason, I thought.

On the first day of March, I confessed my stupidity about Mengele and my deathlessness to Papa. It was the weather’s fault — it coaxed me with its beauty. Crocuses began to thrust up their heads in the animal houses. Birds returned. Buildings began to hold themselves high. Baby became round and hardy at the breast of a wet nurse. Humbled by this splendor, I could only hang my head and tell my secrets — I was sure that Papa would be ashamed. But he assured me that I did what I did in order to survive. And then he called Feliks over for a story.

“It is only because of a curse, or many curses, that I survived,” Papa said. “When they first took me from Lodz, I marched with the other captives, on the roadsides, through fields. Often, we would come upon fellow Jews in disguise. I told myself that they would save us if they could. It didn’t matter to me that they did nothing to support this belief. I took care not to look at them. I feared that if I did, they would crumble and be forced to join us. On a day I was sure I would starve to death, we were led through the field of a priest. Peasants were gathering potatoes, piling them in a wagon. On top of the potato pile sat an old Jewish man. Unlike others in disguise, he had never bothered to clip his earlocks. Seeing us, he suddenly crossed himself, as if horrified by the proximity to our kind — the gesture was unnatural; it was a wonder to me that he had managed to pass for so long without capture. But his next action made me realize I’d been wrong to question his resourcefulness, because he put a hand beneath his bottom, searched about the wagon bed, pulled out a potato, and flung it at me with a curse! Then again. One after another. For every curse, he threw a potato. His curses followed us until we reached the end of the field and came to the road, but we knew what they meant — these were the kind of curses that would keep us alive.”

I wanted to ask Papa how he could be sure of this, but I didn’t want to admit my uncertainty. So I pinched Feliks. He asked for me. Papa was unnerved by this connection that thrummed between us but he answered all the same.

“I saw it in his face,” he said. “The curses were merely blessings in disguise. He meant for me to take up those potatoes and live.”

He pulled on the end of his nose, as he always had in a thoughtful moment, and then he sank his head into his hands so I was forced to study the new seam that wound itself over his face and scalp.

“I know that Mengele’s curse — there was no good intention in it, not at all. But I just want to say that you were not wrong to take that fool’s curse — with all his lies and manipulations — and twist it so that you could survive by it. Understand?”

I did. And I lied and told my father that I would take comfort in his cursed-vegetable story. I know that he did. Because when Papa died many years later, eyes shrouded in illness, stretched out on his bed, Feliks and I saw him raise his hands in the air as if trying to catch an object. His fingers lifted with a strange urgency, unnatural to any deathbed, and we watched his sightless eyes dart back and forth, following the holy path of a potato in flight.

Papa did his best to restore us, but we knew soon enough that he was broken too. He went to Lodz alone, as he was worried about what he might find there. When he returned, he shook his head for days. We sought out the company of other refugees in Warsaw, every last one so hungry for reunion.

“Have you seen Pearl?” Papa would ask, pushing me forward.

None had.

Papa admired the resurrection of Warsaw and said that he would stay to rebuild Feliks’s house with him. But though Papa was a man of skill, his hands weren’t suited to the task of mending rooms and righting walls. They were accustomed to the diagnosis, the wound tinkering, the application of cures. And while Feliks was swell with a hatchet, a knife, a gun, and could spin a lie to live in just as well as I could, mending a house was not among his gifts. Still, both were determined to rebuild, to follow the city’s example.

I watched the two shamble about the house with merry shouts, wielding mallets and breaking down the remnants of walls. I perched with Baby while they fumbled with paving stones and fiddled with doorknobs and I often fell to wondering if they were pursuing this rebuilding as a flimsy distraction from the unknown whereabouts of Pearl. They would take up their hammers and their nails and soon enough they’d find themselves too startled by the sounds to continue. Rebuilding can sound a lot like war, a lot like capture — all that bang and falling brick, all that smattering of stone.

As for me, I kept myself occupied by teaching Baby lessons from Twins’ Father, lessons from Zayde, lessons from my anatomy book. The least I could do, I decided, was to give him certain advantages, a distinct smartness, so that if he ever became an experiment too, he would fare better than some. We had to get the words out fast enough, before the words were snatched away. We had to establish the words, make them whole. I spent my days memorizing all that I could find so that in the event that we were recaptured, I’d have words to amuse us with, words to let us abide. Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven, I’d say, in tribute to Mirko, nature was all alike, a shapelessness! And to Baby, in hopes of installing his first word, I’d whisper: Pearl, Pearl, Pearl. It was as if I believed that only the most innocent whisper could bring her back. That if he cried her name, she would be there, dancing. A crown of heather on her head. And good shoes on her feet.

I couldn’t deny that in Warsaw, things bloomed. Baby cried enough to water a linden, and I did my part too, though I was careful to express my tears only in the vicinity of a wasp’s nest, so that I might blame some assault if anyone happened to see my pain. People saw my pain often, though. Mostly, these people were ones who came to the zoo. The Jewish underground had operated through its buildings, in its many holes and caves. Now, refugees came looking for sons and daughters who had curled up within the burrows meant for badgers until it was safe to transport them to another location. Many of these seekers were mothers, and as they passed through, they paused simply to hold the child, and when they looked into his brown eyes they could not help but offer me advice. They told me to swaddle him tightly, and they showed me how to bathe him so that he looked less like a wild thing.

Whenever I bathed Baby in his bucket, the boy’s life became too real to me. He was so vulnerable, a dark little duckling with a wee stem of a neck. While I made him clean, I wondered what I might tell him someday about his mother, how she’d made me kill her, how she’d guided my hand with the knife. I tried to invent prettier, more scenic deaths for her. Something with a snowfall. Something without a blade. But in Warsaw, my imagination had left me. I did not know where it went, but I hoped it didn’t occupy anyone else the way it had occupied me. I wanted the death of my imagination more than anything. It had no place in this world after war. Once, I told myself, I was happy to live for another, to continue for her sake. But without her, I was just a madman’s experiment, a failed avenger, a girl who didn’t end when she should have.

Papa saw my sadness. He said that we had hope still. He said we had a country so cracked that it was easy for Pearl to slip inside and hide in the most unseen corners. He’d say this on our daily visit to the orphanage when we went to see if she had been shuttled into its care. But no one who looked like me was waiting at the window; no one who sounded like me was singing at the gate.

“If we don’t find her,” I began on the way home one time. But I didn’t have a chance to finish this sentence. An odd correction was made to my thoughts when a stray dog appeared at my side and then promptly dropped at Papa’s feet. This dog was a mud-covered scrap, ugly and mongrel. The state of his paws made it clear he had traveled a long distance in search of someone. On us, he could smell the same struggle.

Papa thought that the dog would cheer me. He was not wrong in this. I loved this mongrel’s protective spirit, the way he barked like a pistol and snarled at anyone who raised his voice to me. This dog, I noted to Feliks, he would have been a match for Mengele. Feliks did not disagree.

“But I’m glad that he will know only this zoo,” he said. “And not the other.”

Together, we watched the dog dig tunnels through the animals’ cages. This was something that pleased him to no end, and I could only hope that he would never dig up the poison pill Papa buried in the yard while he went about this business. I knew that if I saw that pill at the right moment — I could not resist the finality promised by its whiteness.

Feliks saw this temptation in me. He, too, assured me that Pearl would return. Maybe, he said, she was just waiting until the animals came back to the zoo. He said that the zookeeper’s wife had plans to visit the grounds, and already, there was talk of the zoo’s revival. Soon, the animals would march, two by two, into their rightful houses. I stalked about their cages in wait, and tried not to dwell on the cages I’d known.

But on the day I want to speak about, it was not an animal that arrived in Warsaw, but a coffin. I wasn’t there to see it lowered onto the street. I didn’t hear the cry of the mistress of the orphanage as she opened it.

I was in the fields with Baby and my dog. I was training him to be a stronger dog. He liked to beg, and I could not break him of it. Begging would not do in these vulnerable days. So I gave him a new trick to use instead — I taught him to dance. Whenever that dog danced, I heard Zayde laugh. I had thought I would never hear Zayde laugh again, but there he was, all chuckle and knee-slap. None of it ghostly or remembered, but clear as spring. That was fair motivation to keep up with the practice. Watching this shabby canine waltz — it made me dream again.

On this day, we were practicing in the field with Baby lolling in the grass, an uninterested audience. We had music too, of a sort. In the distance, you could hear the sound of paving stones being laid, one next to another — the stones sang out, their clinks carrying over the city and up into the drifts of the crab apple trees. Here and there, a starling asserted itself, warbling, its cry so forceful that its hasty body trembled. It was to this music of stone and bird and Zayde’s laughter that the dog undertook his choreography.

I told my dog that he had to practice. Someday, I said, someone might discover his talents and put him in a movie. That could be our future — didn’t he agree? My dog did not agree. He disliked practicing just as much as Pearl had; he had no interest in proving himself worthy of the art. But he danced for me all the same, and I applauded him after the full revolution of a turn.

When I stopped clapping, though — I still heard applause. Someone was clapping behind our backs. I blushed. Because dog-dancing is nothing to be proud of; it is a sport for the solitary, a sad sort of whirl.

But when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw myself. Or I saw a girl, a strong girl, a girl who was no longer lonely. The girl was happier than I’d imagined I could ever be again. She was clapping and smiling and the dog gamboled toward her and shimmied at her feet, abandoning any idea of a show. Still, the girl kept clapping. She clapped even as there were two crutches propped beneath her arms.

Have you ever seen the best part of yourself stationed at a measurable distance? A distance you’d never thought possible after so much parting? If so, I’m sure you’re aware of the joys of this condition. My heart thrilled with reunion, and my tongue ran dumb with happiness. My spleen informed my lungs that they’d lost the big bet—I told you so! my spleen said — and my thoughts, my rosy thoughts, they kept thinking toward a future I’d believed long lost.

She put her crutches down and we sat back to back, spine to spine, in the manner of our old game.

I’ll admit — I peeked at what she drew.

I peeked not to cheat, but oh — just because she was my sister. I had to see her. I am sure you understand.

Pearl: Chapter Twenty-Two Never the End

And we drew poppies. We drew them as tight buds that might never see a bloom, we drew them for Mama and Zayde, and then we added a river for Papa. We drew a train, a piano, a horse. We drew the children Stasha would have, and the children I never could. We drew boats that carried us far away from Poland, and planes that brought us back. We did not draw a needle, no; we did not draw a crutch, much less the man who had undone us. But we drew skies that would protect us our whole lives through, and trees that would shelter two girls who might never be whole, and only when we finished drawing did my sister even try to speak.

“Let’s try again,” Stasha said.

I didn’t need to finish her sentence. I knew what she meant — we had to learn to love the world once more.