“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.
Pearclass="underline" Chapter Twelve My Other Birth
There were things I knew stilclass="underline" 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.