“In that case—can I give it to Patient Number Blue?”
Confusion crossed his face and then soured into irritation. So I waved my words away and popped the sugar cube in my mouth. Pleasing him, I was discovering, was a great deal of work.
Uncle then plunged into an extended line of questioning that ventured into my most uncomfortable territories. He said he just wanted to know the fundamentals. Who we were because of who we came from. Or, more specifically, why didn’t we have a father? Pearl eased the information out somehow. While she talked, I hummed in my mind so I didn’t have to hear what she said. I hummed “Blue Danube” till its blueness began to cloak my thoughts, but even this blueness wasn’t enough to drown out the whole story.
Pearl told Uncle that one night, Papa didn’t return from the task he’d told Mama he had to attend to. She had tried to make him stay—it was past curfew, she’d argued, and why couldn’t another doctor take care of our neighbor’s ill child? Didn’t Stasha and Pearl matter? she had asked. Papa did not argue, but he forgot his umbrella in his hurry out the door. We stood there, Mama with the umbrella in hand, waiting for him to fetch it. But he didn’t come back that night. And then, Papa didn’t return for day after day, month after month. Mama went to the authorities, who provided little in the way of explanation initially but later said that a man matching Papa’s description had been found floating in the Ner River. Mama insisted that this couldn’t be him, that some other violation must’ve occurred, and she was not going to believe it without documentation.
Uncle wasn’t one to be put off by messy paperwork, though. Proof or not, he favored this explanation. Suicide was a Jewish epidemic, he claimed.
“Do you ever feel overwhelmed by sadness?” he asked us while shining a light in first Pearl’s mouth, then mine.
“We never do,” I said.
“What about you?” He gave Pearl another sugar cube, which she popped into her mouth to avoid conversation.
“Pearl is too good to feel sad,” I said.
“I see.”
“Pearl is so good—she can’t even feel pain. See?”
To demonstrate, I pinched my sister’s arm. But instead of her remaining silent, we both cried out at the same time. Uncle took note of this with great interest, but I don’t think he could have understood what was truly happening. Pearl didn’t cry because of my pinch; it was pure coincidence. At the very moment that my fingers twisted Pearl’s flesh, we’d sensed the sorrows of Mama, who missed us so much that she was finding life too hard to bear. She had no idea of the blessings that were about to be visited on her because of our value as experiments. Mama was so fragile—we could only hope that the paint and brushes would reach her before it was too late.
I was about to impress upon Uncle the urgency of all this, but he grabbed my shoulder before I had a chance. His touch was firm, instructive—I tried to hunch over to hide my nakedness, but he was intent on making me rise and steering me through the room.
“Pearl will stay there and wait for you,” he told me as we passed the other children and the nurses and made our way behind a screen that partitioned us from the room. There, he laid me down on a steel table and flashed on a light overhead. We were alone—it was just he and I and the white wings of his coat and the bright beam of the light—but I discerned another presence.
I sensed the gaze of the eyes looking down on me, even as I knew that not a single one had stirred from its pin. I knew those eyes saw what I saw. With them, I watched Uncle perform the magic of loading a needle with some luminous liquid. It was as amber as the amber stones Pearl and I had once collected from the Baltic Sea, and the color took me back to that time, shortly before Papa’s disappearance, when we’d taken a boat and rowed out onto the waves—and then I forced myself to stop remembering because Pearl was in charge of time and memory, and I was in danger of trespassing on a history I wasn’t sure belonged to me anymore. Yet I was glad it did not belong to me. Because as I lay there on the table, beneath the stream of light, I knew myself to be in a place where time and memory brought only pain, and I was so grateful to my sister, my dearest friend from the floating world, for sparing me this affliction.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Uncle said as he approached me with the needle.
I told him that was very funny, because in the past, only Pearl had had that ability.
He smiled his laboratory smile, but I could tell that already, he was tiring of my jokes. So I made my face intellectual and severe, and peered at the needle with interest, as if I were in the front row of a schoolroom with a teacher I very much wanted to impress.
He tested the point of the needle on his fingertip.
“You’re thinking that this is going to hurt. I promise—it won’t. Well, it might hurt a little. But so little! And that will be a small price to pay for the reward you’ll get.”
What reward? I wondered.
He whispered it in my ear and then begged my permission. That is how I remember it, at least. Or how I remembered it for some time, before I regained my full ability to reason. But of course, it is likely he never asked at all.
Even still, desperation can riddle a heart with consent. Mine was heavy with it. This consent must seem odd—but in a place where a person could end so abruptly without a chance to save her loved ones, how could I hesitate when he offered me the contents of a needle that would make me deathless?
Yes, I said. I would like to be deathless, if only for a little while.
And Uncle coaxed one of my veins into cooperation, and the needle, it wheedled in, and as it wheedled I felt my cells divide and conquer other cells, and I went suitably cold.
As my memory lingers there, on that steel table, piled with its many instruments and confusions, you might ask: Stasha, this deathlessness you believed you were dealt—did it dive into you like an arrow, or sink like a knife? Did it skip through you like a stone? Did it pour salt on your heart and shrink it like a snail?
I would like to speak to the physical sensations of deathlessness, but in fact, I can’t. After he plunged in that needle, I did not feel my body at all. I would continue not to feel for some time. The first moment I felt even a particle of this numbness lift? I was leaving the steps of an orphanage in Warsaw in 1945. I was failing and weary; there was a poison pill in my kneesock and a wail at my back, and just as I approached the gate, I saw the tears of a near-stranger mingle with the rain.
But we will return to that episode later. For now, let’s look at the needle. Such a simple pinnacle of Uncle’s aims, with its fine sting and steady thrust into my veins. I could have lost myself watching it perform its labors, but I watched Uncle instead. His face was stiller than any face I’d known before. I wondered what feelings might leap behind his forced, placid expression, and then I stopped myself from wondering because I knew that it would not do me any good to know such feelings.
Once emptied of its amber, the needle withdrew. Uncle put a tiny cloud of cotton on the point of entry, brimming with a blood drop of sun.
“Your face is too white. How do you feel?”
Guilty, I wanted to say. Like I’d deserted all that was good and worthy. Like I’d escaped death by turning my back on life. All the cells in my body cried out, and I knew they cried not for me, but for all those who had been lost, and those who were to become lost, and there I was, someone who should not exist in the doctor’s world, and yet—Uncle interrupted my thoughts; he was snapping his fingers beneath my nose.
“Stasha? I asked you a question—how do you feel?”
“I feel like I am a real person now,” I lied, my guilt tucked away behind my shivers. “Not just a twin. But my own person. Stasha. Only Stasha.”
“How interesting!” he mused, flattered by this development. I assumed that it made him feel powerful to undo the miracle of our doubled birth, to disrupt the bond nature itself had given us. I am sure, too, that he believed I might be easier to control in the absence of my twinhood. He thought me simpler and unf
ettered, a perfect experiment. As blasphemous as my words were, I saw that continuing this lie might be greatly beneficial.
“My own self,” I declared. “I never dreamed that this was what I wanted to be—but now I know it. An individual, that’s what I am. Not part of a pair, not just Pearl’s sister. Just a normal girl, all alone and by myself, with no one else that I am compelled to love and live beside.”
Showily, I renounced all that I held most dear and—do you know what this did to the innermost of me? My heart was visited by a trembling anger, and my lungs became aloof—they pretended they didn’t know me at all. I could only hope that all of me, myself entire, would soon recognize my objective, that this was a deception undertaken to achieve the survival of us both. It was for Pearl and me, this sham. My sister, for so long, had upheld and polished me; she made me decent, lovable, significant—now, it was my turn to uphold her.
Mengele was fooled well enough. He was so amused by my declaration that he ruffled my curls with his fingers.
“Little deathless Stasha.” He laughed. “You’ll outlive us all.”
As he placed the needle back on its tray, I realized that he’d complicated me; he’d imposed divisions on the matter I shared with Pearl, all that we’d both collaborated on in our floating little world. The needle made me a mischling, but the word took on a meaning different than the term the Nazis imposed upon us, all those cold and gruesome equations of blood and worship and heritage. No, I was a hybrid of a different sort, a powerful hybrid forged by my suffering. I was now composed of two parts.
One part was loss and despair. Such darkness should make life impossible, I know. But my other part? It was wild hope. And no one could extract or cut or drain it from me. No one could burn it from my flesh or puncture it with a needle.
This hopeful part, it twisted me, gave me a new form. The girl who’d licked an onion in the cattle car was dead, and the mischling I’d become was an oddity, a thwarted person, a creature—but a creature capable of tricking her enemies and rescuing her loved ones.
“You are the first, you know,” Uncle said, and he prattled on, telling me that I was the latest in inventions, a girlish carrier of a startling future. He took out a magnifying glass and inspected my eyes, but no matter how closely he looked, he suspected nothing of my plans. Already, I was adept at trickery.
“Because I did this—my sister will be next?” In a world of questions, this was the only one that mattered to me. “You will make her deathless too?”
Uncle took a moment to line up the instruments on his tray. I could tell that he was stalling for time; he was trying to decide the best way to handle a Jew like me, a potential double-dealer, a probable spy. He told me that if I proved myself a worthy patient, Pearl would receive the same treatment, just like any identical twin should.
I promised that I would prove myself. Anything for Pearl, I said, and he nodded in an absent way and noted that he was happy to hear that, because it would not do to create a race of children who would live forever if such children could never outgrow the inferior origins of their blood.
As he spoke, I sensed what the needle had done. Within me, there was a twitch, a fever. It was as if my cells recognized the sound of his voice—I could feel them branch and unfurl in their deathlessness, like blooms acknowledging an untrustworthy source of light—and I swore, on Pearl and her approaching deathlessness, that no child would have to listen to that doctor-beast much longer. She would join me as a mischling; we would be two hybrids together, two girls mutated beyond the laws of life and death, victory and sorrow. With our sophisticated gifts we would plot to overthrow him, we would wait and wait and then, in a vulnerable moment, catch him unawares, and we’d have the means to end him hiding behind our backs—perhaps we’d use the very bread knives they allowed us prisoners so that we could cut our morning meal, maybe we’d turn these dull blades away from our rations, toward flesh—and in the blessed minute of his death, Uncle wouldn’t even know who was who, which was which; we would not identify which twin was freeing the world of him. All the duties that we’d partitioned between us for the sake of our endurance would unspool and mingle. In this act, we would both take responsibility for the funny, the future, the bad, the good, the past, and the sad.
And we would know nothing more of pain.
Pearl
Chapter Four
War Materials, Urgent
In October 1944, our second month of life as prisoners, we were no longer zugangen; we’d seen children come and children go like minutes.
Although I was the keeper of time and memory, I couldn’t know exactly when something went amiss in my sister, but I think it happened during our first meeting with Mengele. After that day, she was a listless mumbler, her nose always stuck in an anatomy book or her little medical diary, a small blue-stamped volume dedicated to listings of parts and their features. She went on tours of all the systems and their organs, treating each to a diagram and description.
This blue volume was not unlike the ones we’d kept while bird-watching under Zayde’s tutelage. But instead of larks and sparrows, she approached the features and functions of lungs and kidneys.
Of all the parts she listed, she seemed most preoccupied with those that appeared in pairs.
As morbid as such entries were, that interest was comforting to me, because though she professed—like all the multiples we lived with—an extreme interest in retaining our sameness, I had begun to feel as if a bit of her had broken off; her detachment reminded me of a crag of ice that frees itself from a floe and sets off, adrift.
Outwardly, she put on a fair show. All the cheeriness was there, the polite inquiries, the routine obedience. But away from the observations of Mengele and Elma, Stasha folded inward. She slumped through interactions, glanced away when addressed. Her attention went to her anatomy book alone, with all her furious scribbles in the margins. And whenever she paused in her studies, she sat with a thumb positioned solidly in her navel, as if it were the potential source of a leak and she was doing her best to hold herself together, to stave off collapse. I’d stick my thumb in my pupik too, just to copy her, but it did nothing for me. The sensations she sought were suddenly beyond my grasp—she was either lost or changed; I knew little, I knew nothing, so much of me had already been stripped away that it often felt that all I had was an ability to watch my twin become a stranger.
Mengele must have fastened some illusion to her ready imagination. That was the conclusion I reached. Ever since that visit, her voice was too bright and her eyes were always mid-blink and her mood was never what I thought it should be.
“How do you feel?” I asked her once after we emerged from hours of tests at the laboratory. “Do you feel like I feel?”
“I allow myself to feel only at sunset” was the answer.
“How do you feel at sunset, then?”
“I feel guilty because I get to live forever.”
“What do you mean by that?” I laughed. This was hardly the sort of thing that one took seriously from Stasha. I’d heard so many stories from her over the years—another one didn’t faze me.
She’d avoided looking at me since that first visit—that much I could be sure of—but never before that moment had the avoidance been so pronounced. I watched her lashes—all 156 of them, according to Dr. Miri’s tally—brush against her cheeks, and saw the blue veins in her eyelids map out her distress.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I promised I wouldn’t say anything.”
I tried not to dwell on it, but late at night, as we lay in our bunk, blanketed by the body heat of a third child—a speck of a girl who would disappear in the morning, shuttled off to yet another prodding—I wondered what had put such an odd idea into her head.
My sister’s head had always been a mystery to me, even during those brief flashes of connection where I found myself wading through her every fancy and sensation, but this was something new. Traditionally, it hadn’t frightened me to conduct such forays—h
er mind was a sweet, mild place to visit, an island full of gentle animals, varying shades of blue, trees suitable for climbing, the books she wanted to read, the plants she wanted to know.
But when I looked into my sister’s thoughts those days, I found them much altered. Where that peaceable island had once been there was new, unmapped territory, a realm where the chromosome held court and cells divided in reverie and the prospect of mutation was comfort, rescue, and the means to vengeance.
It was a place that believed she could be Mengele’s undoing. She told herself that if she was clever enough—if she turned herself into the slyest of flatterers, a false protégée, a girl too girlish to draw suspicion—she could repossess what he’d taken from us, and set the Zoo free.
I found this belief, this strange territory in her head, to be nothing less than terrifying.
She called him an experiment, but I knew the boy named Patient Number Blue was more. I knew she thought of him as a brother, a triplet, yet another family member she could not lose. I warned her not to get attached. She accused me of insensitivity. She wasn’t wrong to do so, but I couldn’t help but be insensitive to Patient because I was so tired of being sensitive to the both of us. My body was overrun by pain; it didn’t need Patient’s pain too.
But I was helpless to stop her investigations. I could only sit and watch my sister conduct these inquiries outside of the boys’ barracks, with her subject seated on a stump, the cremo behind him, looming in the distance. These examinations were redundant affairs, always touching on the same matters, the same explanations.
I remember the first one too clearly. I was sitting cross-legged next to Stasha and knitting a blanket as a cover for my real interest. The other girls in the Zoo, they’d schooled me in this craft, which they found so useful for passing the time between roll call and the laboratory or those inevitable hours in which you were separated from your twin. For needles, we used bits of wire torn from the fence and sharpened on rocks. For yarn, we used a pile of thread gathered from our unraveling sweaters. We had a small supply of this material, and each took a turn knitting a blanket large enough to suit a tiny doll. Once a blanket was finished, it was never used. It was simply dismantled, and the strands given to the next girl.
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