Mischling Read Free Page B

something to do with purpose and greatness, with purity and beauty and being of use. We didn’t hear a single one that made sense.
    And before I could even try to understand this concept, the blokowa assigned to look after us entered. Behind her prodigious back, we called this person Ox; she had the appearance of a wardrobe with a toupee and tended toward foot-stamping and nostril-flaring when caught in one of her passionate rants, which our supposed disobedience frequently inspired. When Pearl and I were first introduced to her, however, she was just a figure popping her head in at the door, half shrouded in night and offended by our questions.
    “Why are we called the Zoo?” I asked. “Who decided this?”
    Ox shrugged. “It is not obvious to you?”
    I said that it was not. The zoos we’d read about with Zayde were sites of preservation that presented the vastness of life. This place, it cared only for the sinister act of collection.
    “It is a name that pleases Dr. Mengele” was all Ox would say. “You won’t find many answers here. But sleep! That’s something you can have. Now let me have mine!”
    If only we could have slept. But the darkness was darker than any I’d known, and the smell clung within my nostrils. A moan drifted from the bunk below, and outside there was the barking of dogs, and my stomach wouldn’t stop growling back at them. I tried to amuse myself by playing one of our word games, but the shouts of the guards outside kept overpowering my alphabet. I tried to make Pearl play a game with me, but Pearl was busy tracing her fingertips over the silver web that embroidered our brick corner, the better to ignore my whispered questions.
    “Would you rather be a watch that only knows the good times,” I asked her, “or a watch that sings?”
    “I don’t believe in music anymore.”
    “Me neither. But would you rather be a watch—”
    “Why do I have to be a watch at all? Is this my only choice?”
    I wanted to argue that sometimes, as living things, as human-type people who were presumably still alive, we had to treat ourselves as objects in order to get by; we had to hide ourselves away and seek repair only when repair was safe to seek. But I chose to press on with another query instead.
    “Would you rather be the key to a place that will save us or the weapon that will destroy our enemies?”
    “I’d rather be a real girl,” Pearl said dully. “Like I used to be.”
    I wanted to argue that playing games would help her feel like a real girl again, but even I wasn’t sure of this fact. The numbers the Nazis had given us had made life unrecognizable, and in the dark, the numbers were all I could see, and what was worse was that there was no way to pretend them into anything less enduring or severe or blue. Mine were smudged and bleared—I’d kicked and spat; they’d had to hold me down—but they were numbers still. Pearl was numbered too, and I hated her numbers even more than mine, because they pointed out that we were separate people, and when you are separate people, you might be parted.
    I told Pearl that I’d tattoo us back to sameness as soon as possible, but she only sighed the sigh traditional to moments of sisterly frustration.
    “Enough with the stories. You can’t tattoo.”
    I told her that I knew how to well enough. A sailor taught me, back in Gdańsk. I’d inked an anchor onto his left biceps.
    True, it was a lie. Or a half-lie, since I had seen such an anchor-inking take place. When we’d summered at the sea, I spent my time peering into the gray recess of a tattoo parlor, its walls bordered with outlines of swallows and ships, while Pearl found a boy to hold her hand near the barnacled prow of a boat. So it was that as my sister entered into the secrecies of flesh on flesh, the pang of a palm curled within one’s own, I schooled myself in the intimacies of needles, the plunge of a point so fine that only a dream could light upon its tip.
    “I’ll make us