Jakob’s Colors (13 page)

T
hem Authorities are finding it mighty hard to get a placement for the likes of me, they say. No one wanting a bounder, a boy that runs. So I watch the others coming an' going, some looking like they're heading to a family who might treat 'em with a little loving, while I stay stuck in this dark place being more polite an' low each day.

Mostly to get by, I remember that place I still calling home. Remember our horse, Blesham, how we hitched him up to the front o' our wagon and fed him good oats an' hay. How we traveled with our chickens an' our rabbits, and how I was loving them whether they were clucking an' skipping at my feet, or being chopped up an' steaming in a bowl for my dinner.

My work was filling up our horse's bucket and brushing the sweat from his hot hide, making the grain slick an' silky, and feeding them chickens, and playing with them rabbits. Learned how to whittle wooden nails at a young age, whittling them so sharp they can be hammered down easy. One stroke, two. Like that wood was a slice o' butter. And not ever do I think of hammering them nails into that boy Jesus's feet an' hands. Not ever.

I long for them gypsy nights, when we would light our way with that huge paraffin lantern that rocked in the wind leaving a trail o' scent we could smell half a mile away. Long for that sweet-sounding music, instruments tuned, violins, that cimbalom player knocking chords out in arpeggio with his cloth hammers as them castanets sounding out the beat.

Sometimes we roast sweet hedgehog, which we is catching in our traps. Cook it in a cube o' clay that dries solid. Split it apart, and watch how them prickles an' skin stick to it quick, so when we open it up there is a meat so white an' tasty smelling, our mouths are watering before they've even filled. Or we is roasting stuffed pheasant, or wild boar, chomping on a can of sardines that we mix up with a sweet lard.

I long for them days when we were making balls out o' our own jackets. How we stuff them full an' sew 'em up, playing soccer with trees or shrubs for our goals. Long for our caravan, with its two door wings, that we would let down to let the light and that clear breeze in. How we'd lie with our heads on them door wings in the daytime, feeling that big yellow sun raying down on our cheeks.

Sometimes I go to a school close to our
kampania
. Never a day being happy there, though. What with them children laughing at my clogs, tying their satchels in front of their chests as they playing at being airplanes, flying past me an' knocking me to the ground.

Some of them girls at those schools though, they'd take the edge off a good beating, with their pink lips an' long lashes. Never kissed one before. Know their pa'd be mighty mean if I getting near 'em, so that be enough to stop me doing it, but not enough to stop me dreaming.

Then there's my ma, who wraps me up tight in her apron and holds me 'til I squeal. Don't know when she gonna grab me, when not. So mostly I circle out of her reach, but sometimes I is wanting her arms around me, so I close in, and she catches me quick. Remember, too, the sight of her, when she has a headache, how she set up some vinegar on a cloth that she ties around her head. Or when she is wanting to keep that mighty sun off her face, how she ties a rhubarb leaf over her crown, and no matter how hard we laughing at her, or how many times we asking her to take it down quick, she sits proud an'
straight backed and gets on with the work she got about her. And if we laughing too long, she makes us a rhubarb hat of our own, forces us to wear it, and we half hating her for that, half loving her, despite the others mocking.

Free an' easy in our playing, we are, knowing our ma and pa be close by, and supper coming soon enough, and come that bright moon shining we gonna be wrapped up tight in our beds, hearing the people we love most in the world snoring down below.

But even then, I know my ma and pa don't sleep so softly as me. Got them troubles of the world on their shoulders. Ain't long in a gypsy boy's childhood before he knows the world's not walking by his side, that it's gonna give him a fight each day he got to stand up to.

My pa, he's a Roma gypsy boy. Been hearing taunts an' cruel words all his life. From folks who stand safe steps away as they recite their limericks and their slanging insults, so that if he swings at them, they can duck an' dive and run away with their cowardly hearts. His great-great-grandfather was a slave of the Danubian provinces. Bought and sold by princes, “advertised like furniture in a newspaper,” my ma told me. Fetching a good price for his knowledge of horses. Knew which ones to buy an' which ones best steering clear of. He fled Austria with the wind sweet in his nose after the Revolution. Fell in love with the first Roma girl he meets. My great-great-grandmother, a dark-haired beauty who could ride a horse as good as he, smoking her own clay pipe as she riding, filling it with dried oak leaves. Bought themselves a wagon home, setting off on that lonely road, looking at horses from town to town an' giving away their thinking for a handful of pennies. My family been traveling from that day on, moving from one place to the next, gathering up our skills, learning crafts that we see be most needed in the places where we stopping an' sticking for a time. Misfits, gypsy scum. Infidels. Only thing that is constant is that name calling that drives us off one piece of land to another.

My ma was a Yenish gypsy girl, light skinned, fair haired, like me, from that landlocked country they calling Switzerland. Been taunted for her “witch's blood” from when she first was walking. Seen hatred in the eyes of a child that is younger than she, a child that is smaller than
she. Been stared at a thousand times, as if she smelling of something rotten. But my ma, she smells sweet as blossom.

My pa met her in a country neither of them is from, in a market on the outskirts of some shantytown. Met in a maze of cluttered stalls that my ma got herself lost in, afraid until an old 'un walks past her to piss 'gainst a wall, shouting out for her to take her eyes off him.

My pa, watching from his stall, took her hand-to-mouth gesture as shock, so he steps forward, pulling her into a metal yard, where he gets a surprise when he uncovers her laughing face. They stand an' stare with the smash of hammers all 'round them and metal sparks flying up, and my pa said that when she flicked back her varnished hair, he knew. And they been walking this tricky world side by side ever since, past all them people who wanting to see them keep on walking by.

Same with them Authorities of mine. Finally they find me that placement, and I walk on from one set of folk to another. Some man in need of a little help in his house. Gonna be my new pa, teach me how to be a proper boy, teach me how to be deserving of society, and they tell me by the looks of him he more than capable of doing that with the likes o' me. So I best be behaving, they tells me, lest I wanting what will come if I don't.

I stay low an' small. Not rising to what they calling me. And not caring where they takes me by then, 'cos I is seeking out that magic that gonna make life worth living. A magic that's gonna keep my
soori
safe. I seen what my pa done with them white crosses. Know the magic of what coming from one thing to make another. Seen how it can keep a boy alive.

H
er days were filled with airlessness, amassed against the sealed windows like a stale gas. The morning sunlight shone through the clear glass and cast finger-like shadows across her bed from the breeze-blown wisteria leaves outside. She lay unmoving. Seeking to remember if she had always been so, or if this was, as they explained, part of her illness.
Her
illness. You are
ill
, Lor. Still so very
ill
. That small clean click of a word. What was insanity, she wanted to ask? What was sanity? If the two were separate she could not define within her one from the other, nor a time when she had been either or. Both seemed a mere accident of holding life together. A trick of the fragile mind hidden beneath a layer of lacquered varnish, the thickness of sugared glass.

“Do you miss your father?” Dr. Itzhak would ask. “Do you read his letters?”

“Yes,” she would reply.

“And your mother? Do you think of her? Do you remember her? Dream of her, still?”

“All of those things,” she would tell him.

“And you still see her? She still visits you?”

“No, she no longer does that.”

“And why do you think that is, Glorious?”

On these occasions she did not know what to say, what would appear sane, or insane, so she said nothing.

“I trust you to tell me if you see her again, Glorious, my dear. I trust that you will do that.” And she would nod, make her promises, and, when he left, lie there bereft.

When he arrived this particular morning he said, “So Glorious, you are progressing very nicely.” He held a file in his hands that he opened and studied with exaggerated interest. “I am pleased with you,” he said eventually. “I wonder if you feel ready to venture outside? A short walk around the grounds?” Perhaps he was as aware as she of the staleness inside the room. “You would like that, my dear?”

“I would like that very much,” she said, and shortly afterward he called for the nurse, a young girl only a few years older than Lor, who helped her dress, swapping her nightclothes for day clothes that were starched and ironed and coarse against her skin.

Then, after months of only that room, only those walls, that bed, she was led from inside to out, one small step bridging each. Surprisingly once there, it was not the grass, nor the breeze, nor the sunlight that she was first aware of, but the scent of her own skin. She could smell the sleep on it, days and nights of it, trapped between the sheets. As if time had decayed on her.

They were watching. She felt them. From behind the closed windows and doors. She blinked against the light, the arc of the sky above her, the lake that spread like a pool of spilled silver out toward the mountains, their white peaks hidden in other worlds above the clouds. She reeled beneath the space. Steadied herself. A jolt of air, dry-hot and scented with thyme.

Around her, other inmates were scattered about the immaculate lawn. She recognized some of them from the ward: the woman who was circling the wrought-iron bench, still tugging at her hair, wrenching clumps from her scabby blistered scalp. Another knelt beneath the apple tree, picking up rotten windfalls which she sniffed and discarded. They passed a man with hair the color of straw who rocked
on his haunches and snarled like a dog, drooling pools of saliva into his hands. He spat at them as they passed. The nurse raised her arm in the air and immediately two men in white coats came running from the upper terrace. They dragged the man onto his feet, carted him away, his gait hunched and unsymmetrical. Long after she lost sight of them, Lor could hear his screams.

The young nurse led her down a path that cut diagonally across the lawn. She was a shy girl, less forthcoming than Lor, less likely than she, even, to light up a room. Her skin was pitted with adolescent scars, a sheen of grease across her nose. She smelled of that grease, as if she spread great quantities of lard across her bread each morning, so that at night it seeped from her pores.

They were walking toward the lake, following the path past shrubs that hid the Institution, strolling beneath overhanging trees of willow and ash that shaded them from the late morning sun. The nurse led her to the water's edge where the air smelled of shadows. To the right of them was the boathouse, which looked locked and unused. To the left was a small workshop that sat at the very edge of the walled garden beneath thick vines of wisteria that were yet to flower. Its foundations looked strong and there were flurries of intricacies in the stonework, suggesting that originally the plans for it had been for something grander: a gazebo perhaps, a summerhouse. But now it was dilapidated, discarded it seemed, with sunlight that slanted through the windows and lit up shafts of pale-gold dust. The nurse led her onward alongside the lake, following the path past the workshop, and as they did so Lor looked through a gap between stone and wood where the door was ajar and caught a glimpse of what was inside.

She stopped. Covering every surface, cluttering every crevice, were dried petals, dried leaves, pieces of fabric, stones of ochre and malachite, lake-smoothed pebbles, tinted glass, and broken china shards. Colors, everywhere. They hung across the stone walls, lined the shelves; a chink in the wall even, where a brick was missing; an open drawer; the space under the narrow metal bed with springs that sagged. And there was variety to their shade, an ordered layout that circled the entire space. Aquas, fuchsias, indigos and teals, magentas, maroons, burnt siennas,
and bright vermilion reds. Lor could name them all; a row of paint cans in her mind's eye: cyans, limes, golds, olives, silvers, perus, tans. No color the same. All of them graduating from one to another with the slightest distinction.

“Come along,” the nurse said softly. “Come along now.” And she led her back up the path toward the Institution, back to the bleached-white walls, away from those colors.

I
t is at the end of the second month, the dusk is falling, and none of them can sleep for the cramps of containment.

“I used to collect. I used to collect stamps,” Loslow is telling them. “I had over two thousand by the beginning of the war. They filled four leather-bound books, each of them labeled in the order of the date I acquired them. Seems futile now, but you know it gives me comfort to imagine them, sitting where I left them on the shelf in my library. I was always searching for that rare one that might make me a fortune. You know the most famous stamp in the world, the Red Magenta, came about simply through mischance. Simply because an anticipated shipment of stamps in Guiana did not arrive. The local postmaster there ordered the printing of an emergency replacement batch. There is only one of them left in the whole world. A small ship sailing on a sea of bright magenta. It sold for three hundred thousand francs. Do you collect, Jakob?” he asks.

“I am not sure,” says Jakob, squeezing the stone in his hand, feeling for his box, as the line of light under his cupboard door darkens.

“Perhaps you should begin. I think it is good for the soul. Part of our makeup. Like nuts to a squirrel.”

He is interrupted by the sound of Markus's shoes shuffling faster than usual across the stone slabs. “They are coming,” his voice hushes outside the cupboard doors. “Be silent. They are coming over to the house.”

Loslow stops talking immediately. Voices sound from the kitchen, abrupt, clipped. There is the noise of furniture scraping across the floor. When the door to the kitchen opens and boots sound on the stone flags, Cherub pushes a finger through the hole in the partition between them. Jakob feels for it in the darkness and peers through the crack beneath his door. Light spills out into the hallway. A shadow streaks across it.

The fear slips through him, immediate, sudden, like stepping over from white to black. He clenches his stone in his hand to stop from shaking, afraid that even the movement of air inside his cupboard might give him away.

“Your pictures are not straight,” a voice is saying with an accent that brings dread, and Jakob listens for something recognizable in the guttural tone—the sound of honey. “Why are your pictures not straight?”

“I had not noticed,” Markus's voice replies.

“How? How do you not notice a thing like this? You are too busy perhaps? You clean one window. You can clean no more?” There is no reply. “I asked if you were too busy?”

“Perhaps.”

“These pictures are precious to you?”

“Not in value, but in sentiment, yes.”

“So I ask again, what is it that keeps you so busy that you cannot straighten your precious pictures? Cannot clean more of your windows? With what, old man, are you so busy?”

There is no honey. No honey in that voice. The officer is moving around the floor. Jakob can hear the shifting of a picture straightened on the wall.

“It is difficult to find food. It is time consuming,” Markus replies.

“Yes, that is true. But you find it?”

“Not enough.”

“You have enough to feed a guest?”

“A guest?”

“Yes, a boy, a young boy?”

“There is no boy.”

“That is funny. Someone said that they saw you in the yard with a boy.”

“No, there is no boy.”

“A mistake then.”

“Yes, a mistake.” There is a long silence. “Perhaps I can find you something to eat,” Markus offers eventually.

“I would appreciate it. They talk of you as a brave man in the village. You fought in the Great War?”

“Yes, I did.”

“So are you still as brave an old man as I have heard?” the voice is asking.

“What have you heard?” Markus's voice replies.

“Enough. You are proud to be of use to your country?”

“Yes, I am proud.”

“I have heard this. Proud enough to stand up for what you believe in?”

“Yes.”

There is the smack of a sound that comes suddenly and then a thud upon the floor. “So be proud, old man. Stand up for what you believe in.” Silence. “Stand up. Stand up, old man.”

“Please,” is all they hear Markus utter. Again they hear the smack of something. “Please. Please.”

Jakob squeezes his eyes shut. He waits for his cupboard door to swing open. Waits for the sound of gunshots and the hot pain that will follow.
Sich setzen
. Gypsy scum.
Sich hinsetzen
! Sit down! And behind the view of a Y-shaped tree that broke the flat of the horizon.

“Please,” Markus says again, a whispered plea, hoarse, stuttered. “Please . . .”

A shadow moves across Jakob's doorway. He can just make out the black boots and the soldier's khaki coat. He is tall and broad. His bulk bulges inside his jacket. The padding is bursting at the seams. Jakob hears the rattle of the cattle trucks in his ears. He feels his brother's heel in his ribs, bare toes in the crease behind his knees.
He smells the grease of his sister's hair next to his own, feels her hot breath on his cheeks. He sees the tree on the mound. Sees the children crowded beneath it, dirt smeared and grazed. Sees the hard-set face of the officer as he lights and coaxes the flames of his fire, a man who only moments before had held his head in his hands as he wept.

But through the crack in the cupboard door there is no eagle, no white silk or aluminum wire. Jakob cannot see his face, but he knows the officer in the hallway will not smell of cologne, or carry the scent of licorice on his breath.

His sister lifts her foot from the ground, asks if the grass feels pain.

His father's voice.
Nothing wasted. Nothing futile
. The memory of his blue-stained fingers as he used to sweep back his hair.

Jakob remembers the cow, its fur damp and matted. Its wide-eyed look, long lashed and pleading. It had shifted its head, jerked it slightly upward. Only once, before it lay still, its expression one of mild surprise as the breath was stifled from it.

“
Zyli wsrod roz
,” Jakob whispers. “They lived amongst the roses.
Nie znali burz
. And they did not know of any storms.”

He can hear the long, drawn-out breaths that betray the soldier's stony calm. He can smell the oil and the gasoline on his hands, the cut grass on his shoes. He listens. Hears the shift of moving fabric. A boot scuffs. Then silence. Then the grunt of effort as Markus stands, the grind of his knees as he rises.

“Come, I can find you something to eat,” he says. He hears the shuffled steps on the stone flags, hears the heavy tread of the soldier following. The door to the kitchen closes again and the voices continue muted from behind the wood.

“You have earned yourself a bullet,” the officer had told him, his face streaked with muddy tears as he had looked up from his fire, and Jakob had witnessed the straightening of his spine. Knew that he was no longer caught in that no-man's-land between thought and action.

Inside their cupboards, Loslow and Cherub do not utter a word. Jakob lies curled on his side, hugs his knees to his chest, inhales their scent.

“So you are on Gillum, and I on Valour,” he whispers to himself. “With Malutki behind me and Eliza behind you. We are far beyond that
Ushalin World now. Far beyond them deserts of smoke and ash that eddy 'cross them Great Plains, splintering against those who stand in their path. You carry that indigo in your right saddle, a glass vas full of the night, and in your left that malachite green, what we cut from the azurite we found in them copper caves, cut and welded and ionized with fine wine. We ride fast 'cross them golden sands, till we find that crevasse, no wider than the length of you, no deeper than the height of me. An' we sleep safe in the hiding down low of there, sleep deep through that long night.”

They do not get any food that evening. They have to wait until the next day. When Markus comes to them that afternoon he brings only bread.

Loslow sobs when he sees him. “My friend. My dear friend.”

“Why, Markus?” Jakob hears Cherub asking, his voice tight in his throat. “Why do you hide us?”

“Because.”

“Because—why?”

“Perhaps there would be no point to my life without you.”

“That is it? Really?”

“Perhaps my life is not as precious as it once was,” the old man whispers. “For your company, it is worth the risk.”

“You are an angel,” Loslow weeps.

“Only in the hell of this life. We live in a time of angels and devils, but not a single one of us is either.”

“You are right,” Loslow says. “War, it is mankind's illusion. Our longing for the pendulum that swings from peace to the extreme. A lust for something other than the beat of the ordinary.” He is a rush of words suddenly, talking so quickly they spill out like his tears.

When Markus opens Jakob's cupboard door, Jakob sees the deep laceration across his right temple that is still bruised and inflamed, the gash on his lip, the blue wound beneath the knuckles of his hand.

“Hello, my boy,” Markus says, forcing a smile.

“Why, Markus?” Jakob asks. “Why?”

“When you can hurt a man without consequence, perhaps the temptation is uncontainable.” And then, “You know you cannot stay
here much longer. You must get to Switzerland,” he tells him. “When it is time, that is what you must try to do. You must run south and not stop until you reach the lakes. Remember that, Jakob. Be invisible and swift. You can be that?”

“Yes,” says Jakob. “I can be swift,” he repeats, but the thought terrifies him. Warm in his triangle cupboard, wrapped in his sheepskin coat, with faceless friends, a day passing and then another, he has come to imagine that this is the way it will always be. Day after day, in a world of sound, until . . . until . . . he doesn't know what.

He dreams of his wagon, the rattle of its wheels over rough roads, the rhythmic creaking of its axle, the occasional crack of a whip, and the wind, the wind in the leaves and the hum of flies that hung around Borromini's head; his breath soft when he walked, streaming from him when he rose to a trot. They would move from forest to field, across field to forest. Through oat and corn and walls of swaying wheat. Breathing in wood smoke as he watched his skin darken beneath the sun.

Next door everything is silent.

“Cherub?” Jakob whispers eventually in the darkness.

“Yes?”

“You ever kill a man?”

“No, I have not ever killed a man.” Again they fall silent. “I imagine it would be a hard thing to do,” Cherub says at last.

But Jakob does not reply. Outside there is the sound of a distant train, the rattle of it across the tracks. Once again he is transported from his cupboard to the rails. Lies on the cold cattle-truck floor again, listening to the sound of the wheels on the track. The rattle and the grind, the cradle-rock back and forth. Tuchun tuchun tuchun. Metal on metal. A hot spark. A screech of wheels twisting on a bend. Tuchun tuchun tuchun. There is no water, no food. His tongue lies like a slab of dry rock in his mouth. He drifts in a torpid haze, weak with starvation.

Asleep, he hides in dreams of color. The brightest of colors: Prussian blue, emerald green, a burning scarlet. When he wakes, everything is the color brown. Familiarity comes in the form of dust and soil on
the soles of worn shoes, as the cattle trucks move on across the land. There is little light, just a sliver through a slit above his head. He feels his brother's heel in his ribs, bare toes in the crease behind his knees. He smells the grease of his sister's hair next to his own, feels her hot breath on his cheeks. The sweat crusts on their bodies. The stench of stale urine seeps into their skin. The rattle of the train rings in his ears. Nothing to do but sleep and fear. When it rains the air smells of mushrooms. When it doesn't, it smells of blood.

Tuchun tuchun tuchun, metal on metal, the cradle-rock back and forth. Tuchun, tuchun, tuchun. The rhythm of his thudding heart as he sits in the miasma of sweat and blood.

They do not stop, for two days they do not stop. Then he feels the gravity of being pushed forward, the slowing of the wheels, the sudden silence of stillness. They stop at a platform in a valley of nowhere, the doors sliding open, slamming more metal into metal as light pours into his blinded eyes. He is given only water and it is as brown as the color of his skin. Still he sips from the filthy cup his mother hands him, gulps his meager ration, and imagines the dirt that films it is from the soil of the most fertile field.

Only afterward does he notice the man opposite who is staring out at a plain of green grass, at a lone tree, shaped like a Y, that breaks the flat of the horizon. Jakob catches the rapture on his face that passes across it as if his very life depends on seeing such a tree, and not on the water that is being handed to him. Jakob watches the man's pale eyes filling with tears. The corners of his mouth quiver, and Jakob sees the almost-smile of nostalgia that moves across his lips.

“You,” a guard is calling from the open door on the other side of the carriage. “Sit down. Hey, gypsy scum, look at me when I'm talking to you.
Habt ihr verstanden
? I said sit down,” the guard goes on. “SIT DOWN,” he yells. “
SICH HINSETZEN
. SIT DOWN.” But the man doesn't sit down. He is too absorbed in the view of the tree in front of him.

The bullet hits him in the back of the head. Jakob watches him jolt forward, his temple smashing against the wall of the cattle truck before he slumps onto the floor. The blood flows from the wound,
dripping down his neck as he lies, eyes open, still staring at the view of the Y-shaped tree he has died for. That and an almost-smile that was lost in nostalgia. The woman next to him sits trembling with his splattered blood on her cheeks. She makes no sound. A pool of scarlet seeps across the floor. The woman sits upright, her mouth a straight line, clenched but quivering tenuously with fury. Tears slip down her cheeks, one after the other, but they seem separate from her, an involuntary physical response that defies the strength of her jaw.