Jakob’s Colors (11 page)

Imitative:
something that is not quite genuine
. Yes, she thought, that was the right word to describe those songs.

The doctor had stopped what he was doing, stood watching her, his head tilted. Past him, through the window she could see the mountains, their frosted tops arrows to the sky.

“We are finished here then, my dear,” he said finally. “You should sleep now.”

She did. When they let her. Sometimes she slept for days.

T
hen there is an afternoon, when the chill of winter is ceasing and the edges of spring are flickering through the cracks in Jakob's door. The air smells less of rain, more of grass. It is dryer, fresher. It drifts through the gaps in the house, as if carried in on the wings of passing moths. Markus comes to him.

“Jakob,” he whispers. “Jakob, I would like you to see the sky.”

“I don't know what you mean, Markus?”

“The sun is setting. It is beautiful. I long for you to see it.”

“I see it,” Jakob says. “I see it every day in that chink of window.”

“That is not the sky, Jakob,” says Cherub's voice from next door. “You are a boy. You should see the sky once in a while.”

Jakob hesitates. “I am afraid, Markus,” he says finally.

“There is no one here. The barn is empty. It is safe. We can watch from a hidden place. Cherub is right. You are a boy. Once in a while you must see the sky.”

So in the end Jakob lets Markus help him from the cupboard. He feels his limbs crack as he stands his full height, sways, dizzy as he looks downward to the floor that seems farther away than it ever has done.

“Come,” says Markus, taking his hand and leading him around to the back door. The old man goes first, clicks the lock and thumps at the door where the wood has expanded after rain.

Jakob hesitates. Stands there on the threshold as light bursts upon him. It is that which takes him back, that square of the outside when it is spied from the confined dark of indoors. Once again he is trapped within the cattle cars, watching the face of the man light up at the sight of that lone tree that had broken the flat of the land. Sees the almost-smile that had crossed his lips. Hears the shouts that followed.
Sich setzen
. Gypsy scum.
Sich hinsetzen
.

“I am afraid,” he whispers to Markus again.

“Come,” and Markus takes his hand and slowly he leads him from the threshold of inside to out. Jakob has not ventured outdoors for the past four months. He has not seen the raw light of nature or heard the sounds of it.

He closes his eyes to begin with, cannot open his lids against the glare, and therefore what he feels first is the wind, only slight, a breeze of freshness that brings scents of wood anemones and sun-warmed pine needles and the promise of rain.

“It is spring?” he asks.

“Almost, almost,” Markus replies.

Markus leads him around the side of the house, keeping to the shadows that are navy with dusk, toward the water tower. Jakob blinks, slowly lets the light into his eyes. It aches to walk. The heels of his feet feel tender.

“Look up,” says Markus, and finally Jakob opens his eyes, lifts his head, and for the first time in four months he sees the vault of the sky above him. He sways, reels beneath the space. He crouches down, gasping. It is the palest of blues, barely blue at all, and there is not a single blemish to blot the clearness of the air up there, but for the sickle of a new moon that smiles on its side, faint and silver. In the west the sky is reddening, rays of cinnabar, burned like spice, that seem to stretch and stain the distant horizon, deepening in color as the sun sinks farther below the crest of the skyline. Jakob spies a chevron of birds, skimming the air like torn rags. He cannot fathom the sight of them, the
impossibility of something so miraculous existing in blissful oblivion to the turmoil below. He trembles, awed, a boy with a kite, a shudder of something close to hope.

Around them dragonflies mate in the thin evening air, dancing hopefully heel to toe. He sees a trail of ants, busy and oblivious. A flower of deep indigo that is opening before its time. A white petal already lost, already withered; the carcass of a bee that has not survived the winter, its abandoned nest clinging to the eaves above it. He spies buds on the trees, the folded leaves of a copper beech, clenched like fists, streaks of blood red inside waiting to burst open. Everything is luminous before him. As if before his months of darkness he had seen the world through clouded glass.

Markus cups his hand in his and pats the back of it. “It is good, yes. I am so glad that you came to see it.”

They sit down on the slate stone steps and Jakob lets himself lean against the old man. He has not felt the warmth of another for such a long time. He feels the heat of him through skin and bone.

“You are alone, Markus. Why?” he asks.

“Is that the way you see me?” Markus is surprised. “I suppose I can see why. That is not the way I see myself. I was not always alone. I was married for forty-six years. No children. That did not happen for us, but I was a husband. Part of a pair. I still see myself as that. My wife died only a few months before the war began. I nursed her through a year of sickness, and was with her when she went. I held her hand, watched her eyes close, heard her last breath.”

Jakob looks at the old man's face, at the creases around his eyes, the crumpled jawline, and imagines how easy it would have been for someone to have loved it so long.

“I am glad of that,” Markus says in the end.

They stay like that for an age, just a boy and a man again, nothing else in the world as the light from the sun disappears and the night wraps around them.

“Thank God it was I who found you,” Markus whispers. “Thank God.”

Jakob picks up the fallen copper leaf, a creamy stone that is threaded with veins of orange. Holds them tight in his hand.

Later, when all the light from the sun has gone and the stars blink in the blue-black above, Markus returns Jakob to his cupboard beneath the stairs.

“What was it like?” Loslow asks him. “Tell us exactly what it was like.”

Jakob pulls his knees up to his chest with a familiarity that feels like home, and thinks for a long while. “It was like when you are sitting in the dust, near where you are living,” he says finally. “And it is just before suppertime, an' while you are waiting for your ma to call, you draw chalk circles 'round them tiny insects on the road, counting how long it takes for them to escape. An' all that there is, is that tree and that road and your family nearby, which is all that you know of anything. That is what it was like, Loslow.”

“I think that is the most you've ever said to us, Jakob,” Loslow replies, his voice low.

Jakob opens his wooden box, places his leaf and his stone inside, closes the lid with a gentle click. There is no sound from Cherub's cupboard, and Jakob is not sure whether he is still awake.

“Cherub,” he whispers in the darkness. “Cherub, you awake?”

“Yes, I am awake. I was beneath your sky.”

“I want to know if you rode a bicycle when you were a young 'un?”

“Yes. I used to ride a bicycle with my brothers to school,” he tells him, and Jakob can hear the smile of the memory in his voice. “We did this every day of my childhood in the wind and the rain of winter, and the sunshine of spring.”

“When I see you, I see you on this bicycle,” Jakob says.

“I like that you see that.”

“I do see it,” Jakob finishes. “I see it.”

The next morning when Markus lets them out to use the bucket beneath the stairs Jakob sees that the window in the hallway has been cleaned, the dirt scrubbed from it, the sky faintly turquoise, clear and endless beyond.

A
gain they held Lor down, the buckled straps pinching her skin, the weight of them on her ribs, pushing the air from her lungs so that she could barely breathe. Daily they did this. A ritual that had her weeping with the knowledge of what was to come. When they rolled her down those endless corridors, the rattle of the metal trolley beneath her, the jar of the wheels over the stone flags, she could not help but scream, her sobs disappearing behind the thick wooden door that was bolted behind her. They administered the insulin. Again and again took her down into the depths of a coma. She choked, swallowed her own vomit. Called out her mother's name. Her back arched, spasmed, her skin taut, almost translucent over the white of her bones. Her limbs hammered against the hard wooden bed until great bruises spread over her arms and legs like a map of what had been endured.

“The fight makes it harder for us, Glorious, my dear. Harder for us, harder for you,” she could hear Dr. Itzhak's voice from the far side of the room. “I know it is difficult. I know you are afraid, but if you let us, we will make you well again.”

Afterward she was brought back to her white room. She lay down on the bed, inert, hardly able to move, the words stripped from her.
She lay there, smelled the fungal scent of winter damp that permeated through the cracks in the walls, trapped inside the cement, like the leaking passage of time.

Outside for the first time in a long time it was raining. Slight at first. It tore at the air. Then heavier, slanting from the night sky and smashing against the barred glass window. It came in surges, like waves that dashed against the pane, ebbing then flowing. She longed to see it, waited for the shutdown of night, for the shifting of locks and the silence of the corridors that followed. Then slowly she lifted herself from the bed. Her legs trembled after weeks of immobility. Her head spun. She held it first in her hands, waited for her sight to steady, for the spherical toad on the desk to be still. The stone flags were cold beneath her feet. A draft blew against the back of her legs from the gap beneath the thick oak door. She longed for the movement of rain.

Slowly she crossed from the bed to the window. She pressed her face up to the cold pane and saw the leaden streaks that fell across the lake, pelleting onto the surface so that the water seemed to dance. She pushed against the lintel, shifted it upward and open until it jammed beneath the fixed bolts above. A small space, no wider than her bandaged arms. She laid her head upon the sill, moved her face up against the glass and smelled the rain and the chilled air from the mountains that were filled with the memory of snow. She pushed her arm outward, opened her palm, felt the splattering of drops, not so cold. Not so very cold. She lay that way, staring up at the clouds and the dark of the sky, until a thread of light bled through them and a crack opened up, exposing the hidden moon. Light streaked onto the lawn, turned the slate-gray rain silver. She could see the silhouette of the trees suddenly, skeletons before spring buds opened, the leafless shrubs, the outline of a rosebush, thorny and waiting to flower.

And it was then that she saw the boy. He stood in the middle of the lawn, like some strange apparition. The rain streamed over him, down his hair, his face. His clothes were soaked, hung heavy and waterlogged from his slender frame. He stood with his hands held palm upward, his head tipped back, his face to the heavens. He stood with his mouth open, drinking the rain.

Lor saw him from behind the glass, her head upon the sill, the view of him tilted, and felt something close to sickness. As if she were falling from a great height. She could not move, watched in stillness, he in movement. The rain lashed down from the skies, lit up his eyes against the dark of his skin. They shone clear, crystalline, as if they had been made with only light in mind. She watched, trapped between the fear and the desire for him to look across and see her. His hands clenched and unclenched. He pushed his feet farther apart, seemed to steady himself against the force of the rain pounding toward him. Then suddenly he took his arms up and over his head, covered his face with them, hid his eyes as if he were sheltering them from the sight above. And in that she saw, too, that, though he was like her, of a similar age and not yet adult, there was a look to him, an otherworldliness almost that separated him from the place in which he stood, so that he seemed not wholly to be there. She recognized this. That he, like her, kept a part of himself hidden.

She shifted on her heels, lifted her head, and it was this slight movement that made the boy drop his own head and look directly at her. She stepped back. He forward. The rain poured. Streaked down his face. He spat it from his mouth. Struggled to breathe in the wet air around him. He walked farther forward still.

When he reached her window, he stopped. She could hear his breath: short, sharp, faintly rasping. She was afraid of him: the rawness that seemed to emanate from his limbs; the lightness of them when they moved, as if he might set off at any moment. His shambolic appearance, the clothes that were too big, hanging loosely from his frame, frayed, worn, his hair unkempt. But mostly it was the way he looked at her, as if he were completely unafraid. No conscious recognition that he was looking. Only that he was seeing. Taking in her every detail.

Then he reached out, put his hand through the iron bars and pressed his palm against the glass. He kept his eyes on hers, bold almost. Defiant.

Out in the corridor a door banged shut. She leapt back. Turned to listen for footfalls. Afraid of them. Afraid of him. And in the end it was
this that gave her a reason to move away from the window, to return to her bed, where she burrowed under the cold sheets and lay there in the confusion of what had just taken place.

She lay like that for an age, flitted between restless sleep and wakefulness, but thinking all the while only of those eyes of his, lit up.

It was later, much later, that she eventually crept from under the covers, back to the window, where the rain was still falling heavily. But the boy had gone. Only then did she press her hand against the glass, to the place where his had been.