Mischling Read Online Free PDF Page B

passed one of the babies to Dr. Miri to admire. I saw Dr. Miri stiffen at the sight of the child, but Clotilde seemed blissfully unaware of this reaction, too invested in answering Stasha with a tone of educational bitterness.
    “Soup that isn’t soup!” she proclaimed with glee.
    “I’ve never heard of such a soup before. What’s in a soup like that?”
    “Today? Boiled roots. Tomorrow? Boiled roots. After that? Boiled roots and a bit of nothing. Does that sound good to you?”
    “There are things that sound better.” Stasha nodded at the babies. “Your twins are lucky not to have to eat soup like that.”
    “Pray for better, then,” Clotilde instructed. “And if your prayers aren’t answered, then eat your prayers. Prayer alone can keep a body full.” The babies saw the absurdity of this, and their whimpers assumed the turbulence of ear-piercing bawls.
    “We don’t pray,” Stasha told her, raising her voice to be heard above the wails.
    We’d stopped praying in the fall of 1939. November 12. Like many who stop praying, it was a familial event, spurred by disappearance. Although, to be most accurate, I should say that prayer experienced a surge for one week, then two, and it wasn’t until the first thaw that it died entirely. By the time the bluebells thrust their heads up in the soil, prayer had become a buried thing.
    I wasn’t about to explain this to Clotilde, whose eyebrows were already arching disdainfully at us. She regarded the heads of her babies and covered them with her scarf, as if hoping to protect them from our lack of faith.
    “You will reconsider your position when you get hungry enough,” she muttered, and then she and Twins’ Father had a quick conversation in Czech, the meaning of which was unknown to us, but my impression from the blunt ends of their words and their shattered delivery was that each was telling the other to know his or her place. As the fray mounted, a torn and fearful look entered Dr. Miri’s face—not unlike the expression a child has while witnessing her parents fight—and she stepped between the two quarrelers.
    “But maybe,” she suggested to us, her voice winsome despite the fact that she had to shout to be heard, “maybe, instead of praying, you will wish. You do wish, don’t you? You can have as many wishes as you want here.”
    Her manner was so even, so practiced, that I realized that much of Dr. Miri’s work in the Zoo had to involve easing similar conflicts to a halt. She was successful in this case. Clotilde spat on the floor, signaling her surrender in the argument, and Twins’ Father smiled a little at the fanciful nature of this proposed resolution before returning to our interview.
    “Where have you lived?” he asked us. “Any other siblings? Your parents—both Polish Jews, yes? Your birth—natural? Cesarean? Any complications?”
    We could hear the travel of his pen as he sorted out all the details we gave him, and then, right as we were nearly finished, a troop of guards flooded past; the dust rose, the dogs barked, and Twins’ Father threw his pen to the ground with a force that made us jump a little. The babies’ wails increased. The man put his head in his hands, and we thought he might be going to sleep forever, that he’d decided to stop living altogether, just like that. We’d heard that such phenomena had a habit of occurring in this place. But after we’d watched the top of his prematurely gray head for a minute, he looked back up at us, thoroughly alive.
    “Forgive me,” he said with a weak smile. “I ran out of ink. That’s all. I am always running out of ink. I am always—” For a second, it appeared as if he might sink again, but then he righted himself, just as suddenly as he had before, and smiled at us broadly while waving his hand. “Go, now, for roll call.”
    We began to turn away from him, obedient, but then he gestured for us to wait. He made a point of looking directly into our eyes. It was obvious