“We’ve seen so many girls,” the nun or the official or the monk or the guard would say.
“She has a number,” I’d bleat, and I’d show them my own.
“This doesn’t help us,” they’d say, staring into the blue. Often, they seemed to lose themselves looking at it.
“She has other identifying marks,” I’d say. “If she still has hair, she wears a blue pin in it. If she still has legs, they are knobby at the knee. You can’t miss her — if you’ve seen her.”
And they would smile and say that we should go to this place or that place. She was sure to turn up, they said. If she was alive, they said.
“Of course she is alive,” we’d say, pointing to the photograph. “Look at this face!”
All we could do after the conclusion of these visits was look at the newspaper. There Pearl was, nesting in Dr. Miri’s arms, with fences rising on either side of them, as if they were trapped in a garden with hedges of wire. If you looked at the picture long enough, you could sense the grip of the doctor’s hands, or feel the prick of the frost. Whenever we returned to Feliks’s house, the newspaper lived in Papa’s dresser drawer, alongside our guns. He kept it there because I looked at it too much, he said. There were rules, he said, and they were imposed for my own health. He was not wrong in this. If I looked at the picture in the morning, I couldn’t bring myself to eat. If I looked at it in the evening, I could not sleep. And so my visits with the pictured Pearl were confined to the afternoon. If I looked at her with both eyes blurred, it was easy to imagine that she looked at me too.
Tears must have been invented for that reason, I thought.
On the first day of March, I confessed my stupidity about Mengele and my deathlessness to Papa. It was the weather’s fault — it coaxed me with its beauty. Crocuses began to thrust up their heads in the animal houses. Birds returned. Buildings began to hold themselves high. Baby became round and hardy at the breast of a wet nurse. Humbled by this splendor, I could only hang my head and tell my secrets — I was sure that Papa would be ashamed. But he assured me that I did what I did in order to survive. And then he called Feliks over for a story.
“It is only because of a curse, or many curses, that I survived,” Papa said. “When they first took me from Lodz, I marched with the other captives, on the roadsides, through fields. Often, we would come upon fellow Jews in disguise. I told myself that they would save us if they could. It didn’t matter to me that they did nothing to support this belief. I took care not to look at them. I feared that if I did, they would crumble and be forced to join us. On a day I was sure I would starve to death, we were led through the field of a priest. Peasants were gathering potatoes, piling them in a wagon. On top of the potato pile sat an old Jewish man. Unlike others in disguise, he had never bothered to clip his earlocks. Seeing us, he suddenly crossed himself, as if horrified by the proximity to our kind — the gesture was unnatural; it was a wonder to me that he had managed to pass for so long without capture. But his next action made me realize I’d been wrong to question his resourcefulness, because he put a hand beneath his bottom, searched about the wagon bed, pulled out a potato, and flung it at me with a curse! Then again. One after another. For every curse, he threw a potato. His curses followed us until we reached the end of the field and came to the road, but we knew what they meant — these were the kind of curses that would keep us alive.”
I wanted to ask Papa how he could be sure of this, but I didn’t want to admit my uncertainty. So I pinched Feliks. He asked for me. Papa was unnerved by this connection that thrummed between us but he answered all the same.
“I saw it in his face,” he said. “The curses were merely blessings in disguise. He meant for me to take up those potatoes and live.”
He pulled on the end of his nose, as he always had in a thoughtful moment, and then he sank his head into his hands so I was forced to study the new seam that wound itself over his face and scalp.
“I know that Mengele’s curse — there was no good intention in it, not at all. But I just want to say that you were not wrong to take that fool’s curse — with all his lies and manipulations — and twist it so that you could survive by it. Understand?”
I did. And I lied and told my father that I would take comfort in his cursed-vegetable story. I know that he did. Because when Papa died many years later, eyes shrouded in illness, stretched out on his bed, Feliks and I saw him raise his hands in the air as if trying to catch an object. His fingers lifted with a strange urgency, unnatural to any deathbed, and we watched his sightless eyes dart back and forth, following the holy path of a potato in flight.
Papa did his best to restore us, but we knew soon enough that he was broken too. He went to Lodz alone, as he was worried about what he might find there. When he returned, he shook his head for days. We sought out the company of other refugees in Warsaw, every last one so hungry for reunion.
“Have you seen Pearl?” Papa would ask, pushing me forward.
None had.
Papa admired the resurrection of Warsaw and said that he would stay to rebuild Feliks’s house with him. But though Papa was a man of skill, his hands weren’t suited to the task of mending rooms and righting walls. They were accustomed to the diagnosis, the wound tinkering, the application of cures. And while Feliks was swell with a hatchet, a knife, a gun, and could spin a lie to live in just as well as I could, mending a house was not among his gifts. Still, both were determined to rebuild, to follow the city’s example.
I watched the two shamble about the house with merry shouts, wielding mallets and breaking down the remnants of walls. I perched with Baby while they fumbled with paving stones and fiddled with doorknobs and I often fell to wondering if they were pursuing this rebuilding as a flimsy distraction from the unknown whereabouts of Pearl. They would take up their hammers and their nails and soon enough they’d find themselves too startled by the sounds to continue. Rebuilding can sound a lot like war, a lot like capture — all that bang and falling brick, all that smattering of stone.
As for me, I kept myself occupied by teaching Baby lessons from Twins’ Father, lessons from Zayde, lessons from my anatomy book. The least I could do, I decided, was to give him certain advantages, a distinct smartness, so that if he ever became an experiment too, he would fare better than some. We had to get the words out fast enough, before the words were snatched away. We had to establish the words, make them whole. I spent my days memorizing all that I could find so that in the event that we were recaptured, I’d have words to amuse us with, words to let us abide. Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven, I’d say, in tribute to Mirko, nature was all alike, a shapelessness! And to Baby, in hopes of installing his first word, I’d whisper: Pearl, Pearl, Pearl. It was as if I believed that only the most innocent whisper could bring her back. That if he cried her name, she would be there, dancing. A crown of heather on her head. And good shoes on her feet.
I couldn’t deny that in Warsaw, things bloomed. Baby cried enough to water a linden, and I did my part too, though I was careful to express my tears only in the vicinity of a wasp’s nest, so that I might blame some assault if anyone happened to see my pain. People saw my pain often, though. Mostly, these people were ones who came to the zoo. The Jewish underground had operated through its buildings, in its many holes and caves. Now, refugees came looking for sons and daughters who had curled up within the burrows meant for badgers until it was safe to transport them to another location. Many of these seekers were mothers, and as they passed through, they paused simply to hold the child, and when they looked into his brown eyes they could not help but offer me advice. They told me to swaddle him tightly, and they showed me how to bathe him so that he looked less like a wild thing.