Jakob’s Colors (12 page)

T
hey say I not suffered enough, not thirsted enough, not hungered enough.

“Look, Yavy Boy,” they say, “you still have one jacket too many, and one pair of shoes too many.” Yet they know this is all I have. Lost all that is cherished to me. Lost all my life.
Sa so sas man-Hasardem
. All my heart.

“Nothing too good for you, Yavy Boy,” they say as they scrub me in them cold showers, trying to rub the skin off of me 'cos they say it come up too dark, like I am dirty. “You chava boy. Your pa, he is nothing but a dirty
tshor
, a thieving gypsy scoundrel. Your ma, she is a whore. You are worth nothing.”

“This true?” I ask myself. Ten years old, and worth nothing? I been taught that God up high gonna love all us little 'uns down low in the dirt. In my language, we using the same word for heart, same word for love, for God. Call them all
soori
. And that boy Jesus, he says that we come unto him, us suffering little 'uns, an' I reckon they lie when they say I am worth nothing.

With God that we found you—
Devlesa araklam tume
, I say to myself, over an' over, 'cos this what my ma been saying to me ever
since I can remember. And I hear her loud an' clear. Even when they have me down in the mud, eating dirt with their laughing. And even when they beat me hard, I hear her. Reckon I am worth something, 'cos why else'd they go to all this trouble?

Dream so often of a space that is black and cold, makes me more lonely than before I was born. Aching an' bewildered still by the loss of them gypsy days of mine. How they come to be vanished, when they was something I could reach out and touch? How in one moment did them days be up close 'gainst my
soori
, an' how in the next, did they disappear, like they been cut, sharp an' quick with an ax?

So once, from the garden of that Home, I pick and eat the poison of a berry. And after that I eat another an' another. Ready to die I am. But they find me, just as a light is pulling me out of the cold of this world and into the warmth of that blue heaven. Flushed right back into them cold halls, smelling of bleach so strong it would kill a rat. But not so strong it'd kill me.

They put me in the
strickapen
for that. Trapping me in the darkness of that room. Saying it's their way of enforcing them rules, 'cos they got to have order in this place of theirs or else us little 'uns gonna leave worse off than when we come in. A cold black room this
strickapen
. I am blinded in it. Same as when I wet them sheets in my sleep. Back they put me in that stone damp room with not a single window to show me a square o' sky, and they keep me there 'til the piss dry and crust on my clothes and I am stinking and so thirsty an' hungry I start seeing things in the darkness. Mostly angels,
martiya
, them spirits of the night, flying white and beautiful with wings all a-fluttering like a breeze on my skin. But sometimes them same angels is snapping back their heads and they are suddenly
mamioros
—devil ghosts that show me their teeth and their mouths a-gaping an' snapping at my heart. If I scream they keep me in that dark hole for longer, so I learn quick to keep the terrors to myself. To keep them angels sweet and them
mamioros
locked away in the corners of those dark quarters.

They beats us after we are let out of that hole. Not a beating of passion, but a cold, hard-hearted beating, with a stick that burns across the back o' my legs so that I can't be laying them down for days.

“
Ka xlia ma pe tute
,” they say to me, which is the only Romani words they know—“I am going to shit on you,” as they beat me hard an' fast. This my home now, they say, and they gonna teach me how to speak like they do. And also reading an' writing things in books and on paper that I ain't ever had no use for reading before.

We sleeping in bunks, and I can feel them wires beneath me, like the spine of some dead beast. And we are cold an' shivering at night under a flimsy blanket that is the only thing they gives us for a covering. I ache for the sweet scent of my ma and pa and my three sisters, who've slept snug an' softly beside of me every night I ever known.

The food they giving us is like some porridge slop that tastes of wood, or a soup in the evening that there ain't no guessing what lurks beneath that murky water: hunks of meat I never seen the likes of before. We say it is the dead 'uns they killed before us and we half believing it an' afraid of our own words.

Ain't no celebrations for us, neither. No celebration of our birthing days. No Easter eggs for us. Never no Saint Nic, coal faced and laughing down the chimney with a bundle of toys, no bells tinkling silver and merry bright. Like we've fallen off the face o' the earth, it is. Even magic can't be finding us. But I find my own magic. Go seeking out the
dook
that can save me.

I remember that first time I was running, leaving behind them stony-faced eyes and the burning pain of that stick 'cross my back. Climbed over that brick wall they built high to keep us trapped inside. But no wall's too high to climb when you are longing for that road, like your heart's gonna split right through if you don't find it.

“
Te den, xa, te maren, de-nash
. When you are given,” I been taught, “eat. When you are beaten, run away.”

So I running on cold roads, trampling grass into that blacktop, rainwater seeping through my shoes, too small for my growing toes. Happy to be back on that long road, where I belong. Crawling through wet furrows, twenty miles from that place I meant to be calling home. On I run. Wading knee-high through the rushes of a stream, knowing it flows fast to a blue sea, where maybe a boat can sail me far from this land that is no good for my kind. I go seeking out that
baxt
. That is
luck, an' I praying out loud a bit of it follows fast on my heels. Dreaming of a village without dogs. Dreaming of a time when a man can walk without a stick.

I know the
satarmas
, them bright stars, are good to follow. And I know my own star, that my ma give to me when I was seven days old. Spying it always just below that morning star, glinting like it knows I in need of a little light. And I knowing how the forest an' I stay side by side in our looking after each other. Know the bindweed and the kelp and the dog-dirty leaves that can keep a boy alive. Listen to that music that falls between them lemon an' apple trees. Not afraid of the forest dark. Not afraid of the outside dark. Only the dark inside scaring me. Us gypsies, we not knowing the meaning of being alone. We not ever alone. We have the
jekhipe
, a oneness, a unity to us, so we just don't talk to a man before he washes his face in the morning, so he gets to be private before the starting of the day. We learn how to be on our own in the company of others. Don't be seeing someone who's not ready to be seen.

How'd they find me? I was lying sweet in the hay when a farmer he stumbles upon a sleeping boy in his barn. He don't go asking where I come from. Just calls them Authorities, an' before I cotton on to his hiding face beneath his smiling face, big arms are hauling me from that warm, soft hay, back to them stinking dark corridors full of all the things they believing in, an' none of the things I believing in.

“To whom God will reveal his true grace, him will he send into the wide world . . . ,” we say over and over 'til we are whispering it in our sleep. When the president of that local community come, he holds a speech about that Christ and that God, and about loving our neighbor, how we need be more thankful for this last chance. Tells us we being the ones that forged them nails that held that boy Jesus to the cross. Says us gypsies got a lot to make up for, and he be wide smiling as he says all of this, like it being a privilege for us to hear him talking this way. I look at his eyes when he speaks and they are hard an' stone cold, like he could be hurting you without touching you.

No more running after that. They watch me night an' day, and in the end they knock the running out o' me and I am good as good can be
so they beating me less. But still they calling me “good for nothing.” Still they calling me “chava boy” and “gypsy scoundrel.” “You are a black nuisance. You are a crow,” they shout. “Ga, ga. Your mother flies.” An' I stay hush-hush, with my eyes looking at them stone flag floors, and my voice low an' polite. Seeing my ma on her knees, that last time I ever saw her, weeping like she'd not ever stop.

But when they puts me in that
strickapen
, I remember something. Remember it over an' over. My pa. Kneeling beside rows an' rows of nameless white crosses from that stinking killing war he fought in. How he tended to them graves stretching into the faraway, with his soil-stained fingers, letting wildflowers grow between the rows. And I left wondering how a field full of dead men, who were killed with bayonets an' bullets of bloody fighting, ending up to be such a place of peace? That's what I think of in that
strickapen
. And that damp stone room fills up with a loving the likes of which I've not felt before. Like it could lift my ma up off her knees, and like it could stop them heavy falling tears from her eyes.

W
hile their parents and younger siblings were being rounded up in the square during Marli Louard's speech of unity and hope, the children in the schoolhouse heard the thunder of trucks arriving at the
kampania
and caught through the small chipped windows the sight of soldiers clambering down into the camp. Swiftly they crept from the schoolroom to the eastern ditch at the back of the wooden building, a large group of them, between the ages of seven and thirteen. They climbed down the bosky banks of the river into the muddy dried-up bed, fistfuls of cloth in their mouths to stifle their screams. They pressed their faces into the bog as they listened to the rampaging in the camp, the splintering of wood, the frantic neighing from their horses, wide and glassy eyed as they bucked to loosen their binds, the shots and sudden silence as one horse fell, then another. They listened to all of this, to the shooting of their horses, their dogs, the shouts, the rhythmic trampling of boots across the grassland on which only days before they had played ball, had rolled and tumbled in the sun and the rain.

And later, when all was silent, when only bits of debris were left to be picked up by the wind, to be buffeted across the empty field,
they watched through the mist the figure of a lone man wander from one end of the camp and back again. They watched him upright a fallen chair, push aside broken glass, stoop to rest his hand upon the brow of a dying horse. There was about him an ethereal light, they thought, the mist, streaked with faint shafts of sunlight, and because of that they believed him to be not of this world, to be of another, sent perhaps to guide them. They watched him and did not approach, and when eventually he disappeared as he had arrived, back through the mist, they stayed in that ditch, hid there for three nights and three days, weeping away the hours as they slowly realized that their parents were not coming back for them. There they waited for the lone figure to return and guide them.

They found the first of his signs when the wind picked up and blew the fronds of an overhanging branch away from the gatepost, exposing the white cloth that had been knotted to the highest bar, its edges pointing down across the field. They waited until darkness, moved in the night, headed down across a field fringed with blackberry hedges, which they picked as they walked, filling their stomachs until they ached with fruit sugars and acids. They followed the signs on from there, left scattered at every twist and turn in the road, at every bridge, at every fallow pass: the white knot on a hanging branch, an arrow at the crest of a hill pointing south, a cross etched on the wall of a bridge.

They traveled first in a group, a large group of seventy, but gradually they dispersed as some fell back, small legs and feet giving way. They walked by night, slept by day, hung their shirts across branches and lay beneath the shade of them. They drank water from the stream they followed, picked berries, both sour and ripe, ate them regardless. They chewed hawthorn leaves, gummed their fingers with sweet sap, captured bugs in the palms of their hands: beetles, worms, hanging larvae grubs. Sometimes they trapped rabbits and roasted them over fires that crackled as the fat spat from them. Each night they walked for miles. Traveled across high passes and frozen streams. Flocks of starlings, bustards, and blue jays sweeping swiftly in invisible skies. Up above the snow line. Rugs of ice, so heavy that branches bowed down, touching ground knee high with the whitest
snow. They broke off icicles that hung like opaque pendants, sucked them until their fingers grew numb and their heads pounded with cold. They breathed out white smoke and lost the sound of their own steps beneath cushions of packed snow.

Then back down below the ice line, where they slept in long grasses and thick forest glades, hid under leaves and wrapped their small bodies around one another, a tangled mass of folded arms and folded legs that softened the night's sharp edges. They told one another stories they did not know they remembered. Recited poems and old songs.
Latesh de glak the dgon
. We remembered and we sang. They sang and remembered, wept and held tightly to one other.

They let the signs guide them. They believed in
baxt
. They believed in
dook
. They believed that this angel of the night was leading them. They believed in a oneness, the
jekhipe
that would keep them together, and that if they followed their own
soori
they would be safe. They were old enough to look after themselves, young enough to hope against hope. Their eyes were still bright with it.

T
here was a bird in Lor's room when she woke one morning at the Institution. A small house sparrow of pale brown and gray. It had come down the unused chimney, a layer of soot sprinkled across the slate. It stood on the windowsill and seemed content simply to stare out at the world beyond the glass, to watch it rather than to experience it. She woke to its silence, and yet something in the way it stood must have stirred her: the slight quiver to its green-tinted wing, the sporadic ruffle of its dark-capped head. For a while she simply lay there watching the rhythmic rise and fall of its tiny chest, the click of its black eye, which, in contrast to the rest of its body, moved constantly, nervously, twitching with the sounds of outside: the wind that came and went in long, drawn-out intervals; the chirp of another bird, a whistle that came in four sporadic bursts like an alarm. She wondered if perhaps it was calling, searching for its mate trapped beyond the glass.

It was this that made her rise eventually, with the will to reunite them. She pushed herself up from the bed, springs creaking. At that, the bird on the windowsill broke from its watchful stance, became a sudden flurry of wings: desperation where there had been peace, panic where there had been solicitude, hitting against the hard surfaces of
the room with a force that seemed impossible for its tiny form to survive. Lor rushed to the window, tried to force the locks that trapped the air and herself inside that room, but there was no shifting them.

In the end she sat back down on the edge of the bed, stilled herself, willed her thumping heart to steady. The bird was flying into the glass, over and over, a rhythmic smash that must eventually shatter its tiny bones. She sat on her hands, turned her head from the sight of it and listened only to the thud and flutter of wounded wings. Over and over and over. Thump. Thump. Thump. Until it became a white sound, rhythmic and undecipherable.

Eventually, though, the battered flight slowed, and finally, far too finally, the bird lay spent on the sill, against the glossy white that reflected back its image as if it were floating on the surface of water. Lor did not move. The bird lay unmoving. Only its left wing flickered sporadically.

They sat like that together, the bird and she, motionless, lulled eventually by their own silence, as outside the dawn light became morning light. Gray to blue.

The stillness in that room did not break until Dr. Itzhak arrived on his morning rounds, opening the door with his quiet manner, the movement of which sent the bird hurling itself one last time into the glass, as if the green world beyond was taunting flight. Afterward, it fell back and lay motionless on the sill.

Dr. Itzhak took a key from his pocket to unlock the window. A sudden rush of air came into the room. Scents of thistledown and cedar, moth mullein and goat's rue, uncut grass and cut grass. But the bird did not stir.

“It is dead now,” he said, and he lingered, his hand resting on the side of the sill, as if marking the moment of its life passing. “Not of your doing, Glorious,” he muttered quietly. “Not of your doing.”

Afterward he took her pulse, fussed and inspected her wounds, which were healed now, sealed like secrets. She did not take her eyes off the bird. Convinced herself that she could see it still breathing.

It was the boy who had stood in the rain who was shortly sent to collect it. He knocked so quietly that Lor did not hear him the first time,
and it was only when he knocked again that she called out, and then lay there waiting in anticipation of something fearful. He entered with that look, still unafraid, still defiant. She pulled the covers up and around her. Her face flushed dark. He walked toward the windowsill, but before he got there he stopped, reached into his pocket, pulled something from it and placed it on the side table by her bed. It was a berry, perfect, sanguine red.

“Growing all over this garden,” he said. “You see them, you pick them, eat them. No one be troubling you.” He spoke with an odd mix of languages, some French, some German, and then strange words she could not decipher. He seemed to flit sporadically from one to the other as if he did not differentiate between any of them. He nodded toward the berry, and so she picked it up, hesitant, unsure if this was allowed. Slowly she brought the berry up to her lips, then bit into the crunch of white pulp that spurted sweetness into her mouth. He did not take his clear eyes from her. Then suddenly he smiled, a reticent smile; halfway hopeful, halfway unsure. She wavered on the brink of smiling back. She had not smiled for months. Suddenly so much lay in the simplicity of a smile.

She looked at his clothes. He wore an old woolen suit that was too large for him, cut coarsely at the hem to fit, the sleeves rolled up over his wrists. The pants were held up with rope that he'd threaded through the belt loops. The suit was worn and soiled, not like the starched gowns of the patients who wandered the wards.

He leaned over the bird, one hand reaching out, hovering just above its chest. He lowered two fingers onto the line of its breastbone, massaged it in slow circular movements. Then he bent down and gently blew against its face.

“Still warm, this bird,” he said.

At length there was a tiny movement, a slight shift of the bird's right wing. Then another. “Heart's beating,” he told her. “Coming to now.”

“It is not dead?” she asked him.

“Not dead. Just stunned awhile is all.”

Gently, he lifted the bird into his hands, held its head against his fingers, cupped it to his chest. Lor saw its eyes blink open, bead black
and startled. It lay warm and alive in his hands. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to feel the life of it, but she was embarrassed for him to see her arms. Self-consciously she looked down at them, the pink lurid scars that ran from her wrists to her elbows. It was too late to hide them.

“Someone been hurting you?” he asked, softly.

She lifted her head, thought she caught that distant look in his eyes.

His name was called then, from somewhere outside in the corridor, abrupt and reprimanding. And then he was gone, taking the waking bird with him, and Lor was left with the sweetness of the berry that still lingered in her mouth, and his name: Yavy.