“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 fataclass="underline" 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.
Pearclass="underline" 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.”