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!
Pearclass="underline" 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.