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.