Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

  Yael wasn’t sure which would break first, her fork or her fingers clenching it. She was all too aware that she wore the same clothes she’d had on in the alley. Her P38 sat in her pocket, heavy with unfired bullets.

  They knew. This thought rounded and tore through her chest. They knew. They knew. They knew.

  “Not her, though.” The soldier-boy spoke first. “The girl who attacked us had dark hair. Brown eyes.”

  “It’s night,” the checkpoint operator grumbled. “Partisans swarm these alleys like rats. Nothing to do with us.”

  “Zündapp KS 601 motorcycles aren’t so common here.” The sergeant’s eyes stayed on Yael. “Where were you an hour ago, Victor Wolfe?”

  “I was crossing the Tiber.” She managed the flattest voice she could. “A few minutes from this checkpoint.”

  The sergeant stepped closer. “Do you have any proof of this?”

  Luka spit out his cigarette and rose from his chair. The breadth of him blocked out the sergeant’s stare. “You might be low on Zündapps, but we’re straight out of brown-eyed brunettes. If I were you, I wouldn’t go around bragging about how you got beat up by a girl. Not such a great bullet point on your curriculum vitae.”

  The sergeant’s face grew red. “Your opinion is noted, Victor Löwe.”

  “It usually is.” Luka crossed his arms. “Now, maybe you can let the girl who’s just ridden thirteen hundred kilometers finish her dinner?”

  The flush crept—redder, redder—into the sergeant’s clenched jaw as he eyed the half-spooled noodles in Yael’s bowl. After an agonizing moment he turned. His men followed, the soldier-boy looking over his shoulder one last time before he ducked back into the cool Roman night.

  They were gone.

  Yael’s fingers slid off the fork. She stared at Luka. He faced the door, arms still crossed. Shaggy afternoon blond—too long by Hitler Youth standards—fell around his face, hiding his expression. This boy… was… more.

  But what?

  When Luka finally turned around, his face was twisted. He should patent that smirk, Yael thought, make a mask out of it. “Better eat up and get your beauty sleep, Fräulein. This next leg is a bitch.”

  Yael watched him leave, flicking his unlit cigarette into the trash bin. Her heart scattered like buckshot in her throat.

  CHAPTER 11

  NOW

  MARCH 11, 1956

  ROME CHECKPOINT

  Yael was exhausted, but sleep did not come easily. Her body was all-over sore (no matter how she positioned herself on the mattress, she felt its springs—coil, screw, and stab—against her tender muscles), and her insides were still skittish from the dining hall. It didn’t help that every quarter hour the dorm door’s hinges squealed, letting in another road-worn racer. It also didn’t help that her bunk was directly across from Luka’s. He was asleep and not facing her, but his presence still set Yael on edge.

  She kept her eyes on the victor’s bare back. A silver chain cut around the base of his neck, glowing between hills of vertebrae. His Iron Cross hung from the bedpost. It looked strange apart from him. Or maybe he looked strange apart from it.…

  Did it matter?

  Yael flipped to the other side of the mattress. Everything was so heavy: her muscles, hope, the slash through Shiina Hiraku’s name. It piled into her chest as she stared at the cracks in the dormitory wall.

  Instead of sheep she counted wolves.

  1,2,3,4,5. 1,2,3,4,5. 1,2,3,4,5. 1,2,3,4,5. 1,2,3…

  THEN

  THE THIRD WOLF: MIRIAM SPRING 1945

  With the spring came the thaw. With the thaw came the stench. Flowers grew somewhere, but even vast carpets of blossoms couldn’t overcome the smell of death.

  Besides. Nothing grew here.

  In the life before—the life Yael struggled to catch, hold, remember—death had been a shocking thing. A time for tears, a time for rituals and remembering. But when Yael’s mother passed, there was no observing the seven days of shivah. There was no grave to pile high with visitation stones. There was no long, low male voice to recite the Kaddish prayer.

  There was only this: Yael’s mother there, then not.

  Miriam tried to honor Rachel’s memory by pulling some straw pieces from the mattress, twisting them together, and propping the braided piece against the wall. (“Just pretend it’s a candle, burning,” she said, looking at the straw with a set jaw. “We cannot forget the dead, Yael. You must never forget the dead.”)

  After Yael’s mother died, the mонстр, monstre, monster whispers of Barrack 7 ceased. Yael found herself surrounded instead by silent, pitying glances. She kept to the corner of her old bunk. Clutching her dolls. Watching. Waiting.

  Changing.

  She found that if she thought hard enough, felt deep enough, she could control the change. Memories of her mother caught her first, showed her what was possible. Yael would look at the flea-specked mattress space (newly occupied by a woman with a shining, bald head, who still kicked in her sleep as if she had something to fight) and picture her mother there. As she was before, with the velvet fold of her rich hair. With constellations of freckles dotting her forearms.

  Her being flared with sadness, beat with a black, black rage. Yael took the burn and pressed it into the hollow of her bones.

  Made it hers.

  Her hair grew, rippled fresh past her shoulders. Long and thick enough to braid. And one by one the freckles came, splashing across the inside of her arm, threading through the gaps in her numbers.

  She was Yael, but not.

  Not my Yael. Mонстр. Monstre. Monster.

  “Rachel?”

  Yael’s breath snagged. She looked up and saw Miriam. There were only seven (maybe eight) years between them, but the older girl was trying her best to fill the gap Yael’s mother had left: reminding Yael to eat, clinging close for extra warmth at night, asking her about her doctor visits. Of all the residents in Barrack 7, Miriam alone did not seem bothered by Yael’s topaz eyes or the pale-fire strands of her hair.

  But as Miriam stood by their bunk, clutching two chunks of bread and taking in the face of Yael’s mother, fear settled into her features. It clung to her jawline, shaded her skullcap curls. Her face was a two-way ghost: seeing one and being one.

  “It’s—it’s me.” Yael whispered this because she wasn’t completely sure. The whispers had sunk too deep, too many times. “Yael.”

  Miriam’s hands trembled; precious bread crumbs scattered to the floor. Her skin stayed as pale as the dead’s when she finally swallowed her shock, crawled into their bunk.

  “What are you doing?” Miriam asked Yael, and huddled close. The whole of her was like a wing—hovering over the younger girl, sheltering her in shadow. Yael realized this was so the other women of Barrack 7—who were filing back down the aisles, weary and worn—wouldn’t be able to see how she’d changed.

  Miriam was protecting her. The way the larger matryoshka dolls snapped over the small. Keeping them hidden.

  “I—I don’t know,” Yael whispered. She kept looking at the freckles. The ones she always stared at when she was sad or scared. When her mother had held her close. It was so strange: seeing something that was gone, yet wasn’t.

  Her mother’s freckles. On her arm.

  Yael. But not.

  “Can you do it again? Look like someone else?”

  Could she? Yael shut her eyes. The first person she saw behind them was the Babushka, with her crow’s-feet and piano-key smile.

  Change things.

  Change.

  Yael felt the cold sadness of the snow. The smoke-haunt behind the old woman’s eyes. She took these things and wrapped them inside her.

  When she opened her eyes, Yael saw new lines in her skin—age and years she had not lived. Fingers worn by whittling knives. Muscles made wiry by jobs she had not worked. Her mother’s lush tumbles of hair were gone. Silver now. And short.

  Miriam’s first question was not How? or Why?. Instead she frowned and t
ugged at her stunted black curls with nervous fingers. “Does the doctor know?”

  Yael shook her head.

  “Can you change back to the way you looked this morning?” Miriam asked.

  Yael had seen that pastel Aryan face—the one that was hers, but not—only in pieces. In the polished gleam of the scalpel tray, in the shine of Dr. Geyer’s glasses, in the uncertain puddles of the latrine. She shut her eyes and scraped up all these fragments, pasted them together with the burn she always felt when she was strapped to the gurney. Not the one the needles gave her, but the deeper one. The one that writhed and spit whenever the doctor’s eyes met hers. The one that wished the smoke would eat him instead of the Babushka, Mama, everything else.

  “That’s good,” Miriam whispered when the change had finished. “Stay that way. Don’t show anyone. Especially not the doctor.”

  “Why?” Yael asked. She thought of the morning her mother did not get up with the rest, the morning Dr. Geyer saw Yael’s transformation. He’d smiled so wide she was afraid his face might split apart, and offered her a whole handful of candies—as if pieces of sugar and sweet could make up for everything.

  She couldn’t imagine what he’d do if he saw this.

  “This…” Miriam paused. “This is special. This can get you out of here.”

  “The host has a marvelous success rate. Over the course of a few months I’ve infected her with a number of manipulative compounds. It seems her melanin and pigment levels have responded accordingly.”

  Host. She’d been upgraded. No longer subject or inmate. She was a carrier, a shelter for disease.

  Dr. Geyer and two officers formed a half-moon around the gurney. The newcomers had not introduced themselves to Yael, but she’d gathered their names by listening. One was Josef Vogt, kommandant of the death camp. And the other was Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, a man from Berlin who smelled like shoeshine and aftershave. Their faces were as pressed as their shirts, starched of all emotion as they studied the girl on the edge of the table. Blue eyes and blond hair. Shoulder blades and haunt.

  “She does look very… Aryan.” Reichsführer Himmler—the man with the most bars sewn into his uniform—spoke first. “Disturbingly so. How exactly does it work?”

  Dr. Geyer had his arms outstretched, the way they’d been when Yael first saw him. His angel pose. Only this time he wasn’t welcoming, but presenting, her. “I’ve been injecting the host with a compound I created meant to suppress melanin levels. This, of course, affects her hair, eyes, and skin. A chemical whitewashing from the inside.”

  “And there are no side effects?” Reichsführer Himmler asked.

  “The onset is… dramatic. Life-threatening fevers, epidermal shedding. It is an infection, after all. But if the host is strong enough to survive the virus taking root, there seem to be no repercussions.”

  The Reichsführer’s eyebrows rose high. “None? None at all?”

  Don’t show anyone. Yael was glad for Miriam’s command. Glad that Dr. Geyer shook his head. Glad she had something none of these men could touch, steal, destroy.

  Kommandant Vogt cleared his throat and adjusted his spectacles. “Dare I ask, Dr. Geyer, what exactly is the point of this research? You can dress her up, take her out, but filthy blood is still in her veins. She isn’t pure.”

  Yael’s eyes drifted down to the tiles by Reichsführer Himmler’s freshly shined jackboots. The floors had been bleached for his visit—scoured white with bristles and prisoner sweat. Only the grout still held traces of darkness, blood long spilled.

  She wondered if their blood—“pure blood”—was the same color.

  “Agreed, Kommandant Vogt.” Dr. Geyer nodded. “But think of the implications! If a Jewish urchin can appear Aryan, then why not the rest of us? What would take generations with eugenics could be accomplished with just a few injections! Those of us with flawless pedigrees who want more desirable traits can have them. Why, even the Führer himself…”

  The two listeners went wide-eyed, and Dr. Geyer realized his mistake. He swallowed back the words with a shaking throat.

  Reichsführer Himmler saved the room from its sterile silence. “A fascinating application, Dr. Geyer, and one I’m quite interested in, to tell the truth. But we’ll need more proof that this host is not an anomaly. You need to test more hosts before you can consider infecting the general public. Perhaps, down the line, if your experiments continue to be fruitful, we can present them to Berlin.

  “I think Experiment Eighty-Five shows much promise,” he went on. “Keep up the good work.”

  Yael stared at the floor instead of the men. Not because she was afraid of them, but because she feared that the blackness and burn inside her might spill out. Trigger the change she could not let them see.

  Kommandant Vogt’s shoes shifted in a way that meant he was eager to leave. “Ah, gentlemen. I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. It’s Bernice’s birthday, and I promised my wife I would be home in time for the party.”

  “Your daughter!” Reichsführer Himmler’s voice was lighter now that he wasn’t talking about good work and death. “How old is she?”

  Yael looked up to see Kommandant Vogt’s features transformed. He pulled a wallet from his pocket and held up a portrait of Bernice, tilted so even Yael could see the plum-dip dimples of her smile. Her hair was light—in curls almost as tight as Miriam’s. A light mole dotted her left cheek.

  Yael memorized the photograph, tucking all its details deep inside her.

  “She’s turning seven today. My wife is making seven-layer chocolate cake. It’s Bernice’s favorite.”

  Chocolate. A whole cake of it. The thought made Yael’s stomach stretch, hollow with hunger that was always there. She stared at Bernice’s photo and wondered what it was like, the unfenced life. With fathers and parties and seven-layer cakes.

  Kommandant Vogt’s wallet snapped shut. He’d caught her looking; Yael knew this from the squirm of his lips. The eyes that shunted so quickly from hers.

  Perhaps they were harder to stare at, now that they were blue.

  When she told Miriam about the photograph, the older girl actually smiled and Yael could see the pinch on the edge of her eyes. Crow’s-feet that would not have a chance to grow.

  She put her hands on Yael’s shoulders. “You’re certain it’s Kommandant Vogt’s daughter?”

  “Yes. Her name’s Bernice. She was turning seven. They made her chocolate cake.”

  “And you remember what she looks like?”

  Yael nodded. It was hard to practice changing without a proper mirror, but she had. During lonely barrack days—when the others were off sifting through the clothes of the dead for things too valuable to turn to smoke—she stood over the scummy puddles of the latrine, catching pieces of herself echoed with the daylight. She was getting better at controlling the burn. Yael held other people’s faces in her mind, sewed them to her bones with sadness and rage. She could never say how she did it. The skinshifts were like walking or chewing or crying—part reflex, half conscious. All pain.

  Bernice was her favorite face to imitate because whenever she peered in the puddle and saw the baby-doll curls, she could pretend they really were hers. The chocolate cake, too.

  The only thing she hadn’t mastered was the girl’s dimples. She had to practice grinning. Coax them out.

  “Seven years old. She should be your size. Maybe taller. Fatter, too, if she’s eating all that cake,” Miriam muttered. “I’ll ask some of the other women. See if they can help.”

  It was only the next evening, when Miriam returned from the sorting hall, that Yael realized what she was talking about.

  “This should do.” Miriam reached under the thin gray film of her workdress, pulled out another dress folded carefully into quarters.

  Yael stroked it with barely there fingertips, afraid that if she pressed too hard, the dress would vanish. The fabric was soft, faded. Ruffles laced the edge.

  “We got you shoes and a sweater, too.�
�� As if on cue, these items appeared on the mattress, offered by a number of hands that emerged from the gaunt rush of workers.

  “You should be able to pass. Pretend you’ve been called to the doctor’s. Once you reach the medical barracks, you change when no one is watching. Pretend you’re looking for your father, Kommandant Vogt.”

  A guard’s bark tore through the barrack doors. Miriam tucked the clothes quickly into the same mattress cavity the matryoshka dolls huddled in.

  “But, Miriam… what about you?”

  The other girl didn’t respond with words. She reached out and squeezed Yael’s hand. That was when Yael understood. Miriam was not coming with her.

  Yael’s chest was frozen—tight with fear, frosted with anger—her words felt stuck inside. She had to tear them out: “I—I can’t.”

  There were wolves beyond the fence. She did not know if she could face them. Not without Miriam, or Mama, or the Babushka…

  “Rachel was right; this place is death. People don’t walk out of those gates.” Miriam’s eyes drifted through the door, to the ever-smoky sky. Her hand was still tight around Yael’s. “But you can. You are special, Yael. You can live.”

  Live? In a world of fangs and lonely?

  Or die. In a cage of smoke and needles.

  Yael knew Miriam was right. But excuses still tumbled to the edge of her tongue. “But my arm, it has my numbers. I can’t change them.”

  “Hide the marking under your sweater. They won’t know the difference,” she said.

  “I don’t want to leave you, Miriam.” Yael felt her lips trembling. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You’re going to have to be brave.” Miriam leaned back into the mattress and pulled out the Babushka’s handiwork. She started to take the matryoshkas apart with small, loving twists. The same way the Babushka had. One by one the dolls fell away. Until only the smallest was left. “You won’t be alone. I’ll be thinking of you. And Rachel and the Babushka and all the others… they’re watching.”

  “You really think so?” Yael was used to watchings: guard towers, medical inspections, the puckered-mouth nurse. It wasn’t such a leap to think that the dead’s eyes flickered above the smoke, alongside the stars.