Mischling by Affinity Konar

their cigarettes tumbled from their mouths. This laughter, combined with the effort of my dancing, left me sick and breathless, and I started to gasp. One of these onlooking wardens leaped to my side in concern—everyone knew that Mengele punished guards who let harm come to any of his twins—and gave me a gentle slap on the back.
    “You should hope that the doctor doesn’t hear about this,” he warned his fellow guards.
    “Just a joke.” Taube shrugged. “Jews love jokes, especially jokes about themselves. You have yet to observe this?”
    He placed a proprietary hand on my shoulder and shook me till my teeth clashed with my tongue.
    “You love to laugh, don’t you? Laugh a little for me now.”
    I wanted to appease him, but before I could manage the slightest titter, Bruna started to cackle beside me. She roared and guffawed and snorted with a mocking force.
    “Not you!” For once, the whole of Taube’s face was animated with disgust. “Communists have no right to laughter!”
    He was too easy to bait, that Taube. Clever Bruna increased her cackle and turned and ran, and Taube trailed her, like a dog suddenly distracted by the prospect of a new, more challenging prey. By the wisp of her laughter, she led him away.
    It was the sweetest thing she’d ever do in Auschwitz, but it made me never want to laugh again.
    Once the yard was emptied of wardens, Stasha sat down beside me. She put my shoes on for me; she wiped my eyes with her sleeve. None of it, she saw, did much good. Deciding that one of our old games was the only thing that could cheer me, she positioned herself so that we sat back to back, spine to spine, hips to hips. It was the game of our youngest years. This game was played by drawing whatever entered our heads, at the same exact moment, and then checking to make sure that we’d drawn the same image.
    We took up sticks and etched these images in the dirt. First, we drew birds. We checked. They were the same. Then, moons and stars hovered over the birds. They were perfectly alike. We drew ships. We drew cities. Big cities, little cities, untouched cities, cities without ghettos. We drew roads leading out of these cities. All our roads led in the same direction.
    Then, without warning, I had no idea where to go or what to draw. My mind went blank, but I could hear my sister scribbling on with her stick, free of any interruption. I had no choice but to peek over her shoulder. Unfortunately, the shift of my spine from hers gave my intentions away.
    “Why do you have to cheat?” she demanded.
    “Who says I’m cheating?”
    “I felt you move. You peeked.”
    I didn’t try to defend myself against this charge.
    “It’s because you’re different here, isn’t it? They’ve changed us already.”
    She was not wrong, but I wasn’t willing to accept this.
    “It’s not true,” I told her. “We’re the same still. Let’s try again.”
    We would have tried again, we would have tried forever, but before we had a chance to try at all, a white truck with a red cross on its flank arrived. Nurse Elma emerged from the truck’s door, her step so delicate and fussy that she could have been descending the ramp of a cruise ship. We had heard of this Elma from the other children in the Zoo, but this was to be our first encounter.
    After spying Elma, Stasha drew a bullet in the dust. I drew bullets too, drew them faster and faster. For every step that brought Elma nearer to us, the bullets multiplied.
    I tried not to look up at her, to focus only on the shadow she cast over our drawings, but Elma didn’t give me a choice. Squatting beside us, she thrust her powdered visage into mine and pulled on the tip of my nose as if I were some rubbery thing without feeling. Elma had a fierce-angled face that Stasha would later claim was of an evolutionary design that allowed her to track her prey in the dark, but at that moment, when the nurse was near enough to sink her teeth into me, I noticed only the calculated