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.