And in that moment, having no one to share my duties with, I took them all on. I took the hope and the risk, the reckless determination, the stubborn belief that yet again, I would survive.
Inside my latest box, I put on the tap shoes and waited for the moment that my kick at the ceiling of my confines might turn into a leap.
Stasha: Chapter Twenty-One Not the End
What kind of welcome did I expect from the ruins of Warsaw? In the place where Mengele’s life was to end and lend a new beginning to ours, there was only the echo of peasants spitting in the streets, emptying their lungs of dust. And look at us — our weapons were gone, our furs had been stripped. Near naked, defenseless, we wore burlap sacks begged from a roadside farmer; we wrapped our exposed legs and arms in woolen rags discarded on the side of the road, we stumbled forth in too-large shoes, and my friend winced with every step, his hand constantly returning to worry at the wound on his shoulder, which had surrendered its bullet into my hand. With two fingers I’d pried it from his flesh as he shrieked, cursing the fact that my own affliction could not enjoy the same bloody and swift extraction. That, I told myself, was the last doctoring I would ever do. Destruction was all I cared for now, and Feliks shared this with me — together, we improvised fresh and clumsy methods of persecution. We collected a new sackful of stones to lob at our torturer’s skull, we clutched sticks beneath our arms, makeshift spears, the ends of them whittled to points fine enough to pierce his chest, and we trusted that the meek power of these humble instruments would be transformed by our fury when, at last, we came upon Mengele, cornering him in the cages of his hideout at the Warsaw Zoo.
Warsaw did not recognize our destructive aims, as it was too possessed by its own restoration to know us. But although it did not note our entry, I trusted the city to host our mission. It had been destroyed like we had been destroyed. It was gutted and drawn; vacancies had been cleared until the city was little more than a cellar, a tomb, a waiting room with a telephone that said only good-bye, but everywhere, I saw people crushing themselves to revive it, I saw them expelling every breath they had into the foundations of the felled synagogues. They had the power specific to natives — they compelled the leaves to remain on the trees, coaxed the flowers to bloom and the skulls to stay in the ground, buried where no dog might unearth them — but we had the gifts of outside avengers. While they entrusted the city with life, we were there to ensure a death. Only when Mengele was finished would the leaves remain, the flowers bloom, and the skulls go back to sleep.
A violet night was falling and we heard a clock ticking in the air, addressing us, telling us that we were running out of time. Two steps farther, I realized that this sound was only the pound of my heart, though the message remained the same. The ticks quickened when we rounded a corner and saw a Red Army soldier paring an apple with a nail file and leaning against a wall alongside a broom. I wondered if that broom was so young that it had only the experience of sweeping ash and rubble. The soldier was so airy and nonchalant that I assumed everything had ended.
“You have captured him already?” I asked.
The soldier peered at me over his nail file.
“Hitler?” he wondered.
“Not him,” I said. “The other him. The Angel of Death — have you found him?”
“I don’t understand the question,” he said. “Your Russian — very poor.”
I knew that he understood well enough. But I pantomimed so that he could claim no excuse for not answering; I pretended as if we were playing the Classification of Living Things.
With my hands, I tried to depict a person born to German industrialists and affectionately known as Beppo. This was easy enough to convey. I stood on tiptoe and made myself look vast; I twirled a mustache, plucked a hair from it, and popped it into my mouth to approximate Mengele’s nasty habit. Also easy to get across was the fact of his doctorhood. I swung the white wings of an invisible coat about; I plunged a needle, removed an organ, sewed children together, and caged a Lilliput. More difficult, however, was the degree of his evils. This I was unable to communicate in all its lowdown fullness, its beastly disrespect for all living creatures and their variety.
Yes, I failed at this as badly as I had failed in my cattle-car portrayal of an amoeba.
So I wasn’t surprised when the soldier shook his head in confusion. I begged his forgiveness about the complicated message. I tried again. I left nothing out. The experiments, the shared pain, the Zoo, the days, the nights, the smell. All the dead tossed to the mud banks of the latrines. I did my best, but I realized that those who had not seen what we’d seen would never truly understand.
The soldier didn’t understand. So I took another approach. Realizing that Mengele was a man that could become fully known only through his victims, I began to list them all in the dust. I wrote all the names that I knew. I wrote Pearl’s. I wrote mine too, and then I crossed it out. The soldier bent to inspect the names, shrugged, gave Feliks his half-eaten apple, and then stalked off into the rubble chasing the vision of a pretty girl who’d begun to hang her wash on the ruins of a butcher shop.
“You didn’t even try to help,” I said.
“Not true,” Feliks said through a mouthful of apple. “I stood by your side the whole time.”
I told him I was beginning to think that he didn’t want any outside assistance.
“You are right,” he confessed. “I want it to be you and me, no one else. We are the only ones entitled to kill him.”
For once, I could not argue. And we walked on in our quest, picking our way through these ruins. Men were crawling out from holes, puffs of dust and soot haloing their heads. Faces were covered with soot and ash and dust, but beneath these layers, determination peeked. They were singing to the city, these people, trucking their wheelbarrows to and fro. Children perched on fallen stoops with buckets. Cats surveyed the efforts with suspicion and made sudden moves to escape stew pots. Mugwort hung on the remaining houses, warding off traditional evils.
Feliks had a strange familiarity with this place, or as much familiarity as one can have with a city that has fallen. He’d had an auntie here once, he claimed, and so he knew the streets, and he took me through what remained of them. We found tattered clothing to replace our burlap bags, ragged socks and mismatched shoes for our feet. We inquired about the zoo to any who would pause to answer us. The inquiry always put people into fits of headshaking. We used to love the shriek of the cormorants, they’d say. We used to admire the canter of the zebras. And our downcast eyes told us that we would know this zoo by its destruction.
We came upon signs. The signs told of lives that should have been, lives that had burst or been diminished, lives that had wandered into the forest. Here, an aviary stripped of its feathers. There, the elephant house with its emptied swimming pools. Over there, in the middle of the green, tigers should have familied themselves into magnificence. Peacocks should have glinted, geese should have gaggled, apes mocked monkeys. The lynx should have given chase.
But where the grandeur of the animal kingdom should have made itself known, there was only scatter — an upturned moat, tufts of fur clinging to bars wrenched wide. The pheasant house fluttered with pages torn from a book; tourist maps clung to the mud. The polar bear’s pool hid beneath a blanket of scum and moss. The only pride in the lions’ house was now a litter of shells. In the monkey habitat, rope swings hung freely, ungripped by primate hands, suggestive only of the noose.