If Feliks felt the recognition of his old home as he entered, he did not say, but I watched him scan its insides warily from the doorway, I watched him step purposefully on a framed photograph that lay just beyond the threshold. I looked at the photograph, and a younger Feliks looked back at me. His twin looked back at me too. I could not tell how long before the boys were herded into Mengele’s Zoo this photograph had been taken. But though their young lives had never been prone to ease, it appeared that once, they had been immaculate; they grinned the same grins, these twins, their hair was parted in the same direction, and their eyes were wide and hopeful.
It was difficult for me to put that past down, but we had to move forward.
We found ourselves in a parlor with armchairs and sofas in disarray, all of it covered in a fine shower of concrete and crockery. The looters had searched the floorboards and pulled the china from the cupboards. The whole of this house was overturned and smashed, but its ruins were not pathetic in the way ruins can be — this place had struggled against those who came to overthrow it.
We climbed to the second floor, bolted up a staircase muddy with footprints, and found rooms aflutter with mosquito nets. They’d been suspended over every summer bed but the looters had ripped them and dragged them to the ground. This tulle, with its drapes and flounces, floated over the floors and furnishings, a ghostly blizzard. We sifted through this tulle foam for that white key; we bumped into this corner and that, and then Feliks stopped with a start.
“Did you hear that?”
I had not.
“A woman — crying,” he said. “Listen.”
And then it soared toward us like an invitation and we hesitated at a stair before bolting upward into the darkness.
“It’s coming from the parlor,” Feliks said. “And it sounds as if someone is hurt.”
The weeping increased. I felt so distant from my body while listening to it. I could swear that cry was familiar. It sounded like a cry I’d heard all my life, one that I had once dreaded hearing but now welcomed.
“It’s Pearl,” I said to Feliks.
And then, as if in confirmation, there was a crash, a startle, the sound of something falling across a set of piano keys. I pushed past Feliks and, without the aid of candlelight, picked my way over the shattered glass, the furniture outstretching its arms.
In the parlor, I saw the piano. It was intact. Feliks rushed toward it, blocking my view.
“Who is in my house?” he demanded.
We received only more cries. I noticed, then, that these cries had a womanly note; they drifted out of an experience I was quite unfamiliar with. As we neared the piano, I saw their source: a figure swaddled in blankets. I watched Feliks approach this figure, and then slow.
“You have to see this, Stasha,” he whispered.
It was a Roma woman. She was slumped against the side of the piano, but she lifted her face to us. Looking at her, I forgot Pearl’s key. I wasn’t even trying to look for it. The woman wilted before us — she was not unlike a petal struggling to remain on the stem.
“She’s dying, isn’t she?” Feliks asked. “That’s why her breathing is so strange?”
I wasn’t sure if the breaths were dying breaths. They sounded like a different sort of distress, though one just as life-changing as death. I was certain that I had never made such sounds. I was certain Pearl never had either. These moans carried a wisp of future in them — they were aggrieved, but hopeful too, as if the woman had some happy prospect in her mind even as she wept. But I said nothing of this to Feliks. Because I was too busy looking at this pitiable woman with hatred. Instead of my sister, she was this — a woman who had been hunted down, left to wander. A bereaved creature, much like myself, without too many gasps left. I wondered what had been promised her in life — a home, a husband, a child — and how it differed from what had been promised to me, but I couldn’t get very far with that thought because I couldn’t remember what life had ever owed me in the first place.
Feliks peeled back one of the blankets in search of a wound, and the woman exhaled with startling force. She flurried her hands at us — begging for pause — and then she reached behind herself and produced the arc of an immense knife. It may as well have been a miracle, that blade; we forgot ourselves looking at it and were impressed by her unforeseeable power. Surely, anyone who possessed such a weapon should be the true vanquisher of Josef Mengele. Though prostrate and beaded at the forehead with illness, she shamed us both with her smiting potential.
We told her how impressed we were. If only, we told her, if only we’d had such a knife at our disposal in the wilds of the Zoo.
She was confused — drops of sweat were tossed from her brow as it furrowed.
“Not this zoo,” Feliks said. “Another zoo, the one that made—”
The woman exhaled sharply. At first, I thought it was frustration. But when that exhalation multiplied into a series, I saw that it was pain, and in the midst of these spasms, she gestured for Feliks to lean in toward her. And into his grimy palm she placed the long blade with a ceremonial flourish.
“I thank you,” he finally managed to say. “And I swear that I will kill a Nazi someday, in your name.”
The woman cocked her head at him, gave another ragged exhale, and, by some miracle, capped it with a girlish laugh. It seemed that there were two words that she recognized. They were Nazi and kill, and though neither appeared to be relevant to her wishes, she seemed to appreciate their usage. She clapped as if we’d just performed for her, and then she crooked her finger at us apologetically, and pointed to her abdomen.
“We have nothing—” I started, but it didn’t matter what I said because she was pulling up the hem of her ragged jumper to reveal a belly that was not the starved belly that we were accustomed to seeing but one of an unfamiliar fullness. A prick of movement encircled her navel. A ripple of life, that’s what it was.
I moved to sit beside her, to hold her hand. I did this not out of familiarity but out of a desire not to faint. And then she drew my hand in a neat line beneath her abdomen. Her manner was instructive, her movements precise. There was no mistaking her petition. Feliks grasped me by the arm; he tried to force me back.
“You will kill her,” he whispered.
I told the woman that I couldn’t use the knife as she asked. She smiled at me and repeated the motion. She wanted to be my teacher, my reason to continue; she wanted to show me birth.
I told her I couldn’t. But already, I was wondering if I could — she was dying, this woman, she was leaving the world with a life inside her, a life that could go on to know nothing of the suffering we had endured. A life with a real childhood. Didn’t I owe something to a life like that?
“You won’t forgive yourself,” Feliks warned me.
I thought back to Mengele’s charts. Once, I’d seen him open up a woman while I lay in the examination room. It was an unusual procedure, he’d claimed, a favor for a friend. I’m not sure what kind of favor sees a newly born child plunged into a bucket behind its mother’s back, but he insisted on speaking of this as a charitable act, even though the cesarean soon turned into a vivisection before my very eyes. Before I had a chance to look away I had learned from this experience — I’d chosen to forget the bereaved mother’s face, but I remembered the scars of such deliveries, their position, their length, their arc; I knew that such incisions could end children just as easily as they could deliver them.