Jakob’s Colors (15 page)

Y
avy came that night and stood outside her window up at the Institution. The wind was a bluster, whistling through the crevices, and she was not sure whether it was this that stirred her, or that through a drug-induced sleep she somehow sensed him there. She turned her head and saw him behind the glass, simply standing, watching. He seemed again to be studying her with the timeless confidence of the invisible. As if he were unaware she could see him. Slowly her heavy eyelids closed again as a mist of sleep drew her under, unsure in the end whether she had really seen him at her window or simply dreamt it.

But he came the next night. And the next. Almost as a ritual. As if he were waiting for something. Finally, when she was strong enough to rise, she crept from her bed and pushed up the window, as she had that first night when he stood in the rain. She felt the chill breeze on her hands and heard him shiver.

“You are cold?” she asked him.

“No matter.”

“You come to see me?” He nodded. “And they do not know it?”

“They knowing little besides their own thinking. They should watch more. Think less.”

“But you risk much with it.”

He shrugged and she found herself again trying to hide the scars on her arms. He glanced at them.

“Been watching crazy people come and go from this place,” he said finally. “For years now. You're not one of them. Them scars 'long your arms, they'll be healing. An' one day they won't be there no more. Time changes. Nothing staying the same. You lost your balance, is all. You fell some with the loss of it.”

“You do know that I see my own mother?” Lor said, surprised by the harshness of her tone. “I see her in front of me as clear as day. But you should know my mother is dead. Do you still think I am not crazy?”

“You loved your mother?” he asked. Lor nodded. “Then you are not crazy.” He hesitated, seemed afraid of what he was going to say next. “Can take you from here, if you wish it,” he said finally. “Been here long 'nough to know they gonna knock the life out of you if you stay.”

She fell silent. What he was saying was insane. He was insane, surely, even to think it, let alone speak it.

“How? How can you?” she asked.

“I can. If you wish it.”

“I am afraid of you.”

He bowed his head. When he looked up, he was smiling. “Remember,” he said. “Nothing staying the same. Best you sleep now. Rest yourself. You don't know it yet, but you can be trusting me.”

“You are Yavy,” she said.

“Yes. I am he.”

And then he was gone, defiantly striding out from the shadows and out across the moonlit lawn, and she was left knowing that she alone did not have the strength either to stay or to go. That her life was broken either way, and that if he had the will for it she would go with him. The world was no longer recognizable to her. It did not matter where she was in it. She lived now too far inside herself to care.

W
hen Jakob wakes the following morning, there are whispered discussions going on next door. Markus is there, a conversation between all three of them. He cannot make out what they are saying to one another. He stretches the stiffness from his knees, strains to catch their words, which seem to be a collection of negatives: . . . no . . . not . . . none . . . never.

When Markus brings Jakob his meal later on that day it is filled to the brim and sloshing.

“We have been talking,” he tells him.

“I have been listening.”

“I am afraid they will soon discover you. You have heard: they are suspicious. I cannot even clean a window in my own house. It is not safe for you all to stay here any longer, Jakob. I am going to get some help for you to cross the border. I am going to send word and we will see what comes of that. But first you must eat. You will not get there as thin as you are, so you must get stronger, you hear me?”

A hole opens up in Jakob's stomach, a fist full of dread. What is there but this cupboard? What is there but this black scented space?
Despite this, he nods, wanting to please, hearing the conviction in Markus's words.

“Now eat. It has begun. I am to strengthen you up. Day by day.”

“How did you find us more food, Markus?”

“I have some things that I can sell.”

“Things that are precious to you?”

“What else would be worth selling for you? You will be strong, my boy. You will be strong enough to run fast.”

Jakob can remember the sheer delight of running fast. His small legs pumping up the brow of a hill, his sister beside him, racing to the very crest, where they hovered momentarily, took in the sky, before running back down over the other side. Through high grasses, both light enough for the balmy wind to pick them up, lift them in leaping bounds over mounds and ridges down the grassy slopes, running until they fell, their feet entangled as if nature had tripped them. Yes, to run fast would be good. He remembers that to do that was always good.

The next time Markus brings food, there are chunks of chopped cheese melting in the soup and slices of egg, the yolk gleaming like jewels in the murky liquid.

“Where?” Jakob asks in amazement.

“My neighbor. He has a golden goose! I will have another one for you tomorrow.”

“I did not know you had a neighbor. I thought there are only fields surrounding your home.”

“Everyone has a neighbor. No matter the distance between them.”

The flavor fills Jakob's mouth. Never before has cheese tasted so rich, so salty. He can feel his whole head burning with the flavor of it.

“Loslow, you are happy?” he almost shouts. “You are happy for your cheese?”

“Jakob, it is like heaven has descended upon our little world. I cannot wipe the smile from my face. My cheeks are aching with it,” Loslow tells him.

Jakob chews slowly, savors his mouthfuls, hears his own teeth chomping through the soft textures.

“And you, Jakob, you are happy?” Cherub asks him.

“More than. More than,” he replies between mouthfuls. “My feet, they are growing, Cherub.”

“Yes, Jakob. Eat up. Soon you will be as cramped as we are in our cupboards.”

Afterward he slumps against his warm wooden walls and dreams of golden geese, streams of them in an empty sky.

“You have to have a vision, Jakob,” Markus tells him during this time. “You have to find something to grasp onto, to feel it inside the very depths of yourself. A longing as strong as loss. We are magnificent in this way. We can rise above the very worst. Believe it, Jakob. Seek it out.”

Seek it out, Jakob repeats to himself.

“See the colors.
Na spourz ne kolory
,” his father whispers in his right ear. Then his mother in his left, “So you are on Gillum and I on Valour,” she tells him. “With Malutki and Eliza behind. We have stepped up our pace now, left the Forest of the Light-Footed behind us, left the madness of the wind there. We are seeking out, heading for fields so vast they cover the whole land. To the farthest horizon will be the color blue, bright as the sun in our eyes.”

From then onward, occasionally there is something special floating in the broth of Jakob's soup, but even if that is not so there is always more of everything: a larger bowl, more potato to gnaw and suck, more liquid to burn the lining of his chest. They eat in silence. The scrape of their wooden spoons against the china of their bowls. And afterward Loslow will ask, “You can feel your stomach swell, Jakob? Is it rotund and bursting?”

“Yes, Loslow,” Jakob will reply. “I am fat with it.”

“Almost fat with it.”

“Yes, almost. Almost.” And he will hear Loslow chuckle and imagine the smile on his face.

He thinks again of his mother at these times. How she could not cook. How every meal was as tasteless as the last, and how between the five of them there seemed an unspoken pact that this was not something to be acknowledged openly. For his mother tried so hard, worked so relentlessly to create something that resembled the food
she saw being cooked on the
kampania
, the rabbit and the beef stew. No one had the heart to tell her that no matter the content of herbs and spices heaped into a dish, no matter the effort, the kneading, the rolling, the chopping, the braising or the frying, each and every meal was as bland as the last.

Only once had he found her weeping because she could not cook. She had dropped a pot, a stew of some sort, which had splattered across their wagon floor, slipping down the gaps in the wooden planks.

“It is of no matter,” she had said, picking the food up from the ground: a hunk of chicken, cubes of potato, diced pieces of carrot. “No matter.” But the tears that streamed from her eyes said otherwise. He knelt to help her.

“No matter, Mamo,” he had repeated. “No matter at all.” She had smiled weakly and they had cleaned up together in silence and afterward she had wrapped him in her apron and held her to him long enough for him to feel the warm of her through the cloth.

I
n the end Yavy took her from the Institution by boat, a small wooden skiff of faded green and red. There was the echo of his hammer ricocheting down by the lake in the early and late hours of each day, the patching up of wood and iron, watertight so that the lake would not seep in through the rotting planks and drown them before they reached the far side. There was his nightly sawing of the bars that crossed her window, steady, slow. The fear of what they would do if they found him there in the night, spitting sparks out onto the lawn. When he left, Lor's head ached with watching him. On the final night there was the muffled smash of glass, before she climbed up and out of that place, touching him as he helped her down from the stone coping, the heat of him on her arms, his hands gripping her elbows, her waist.

“That what happening when you become unseen,” Yavy told her. “When you become invisible they're not so careful with their watching. Not seeing what happening beneath their very eyes.”

Strangely there was a space for a farewell inside her. She would have liked an ending to her time with Dr. Itzhak. But yesterday on his rounds he had inquired only politely of her health, seemed somewhat
harassed and hurried. She had studied the points of his face, the corners of his mouth, always set in grim contemplation of the tasks at hand, tasks he wholeheartedly believed in, with a practiced suppression of his heart. When the parting had come, it had been fleeting and insignificant. His mind had been on other things as he had stood on the threshold of her room, nodding distractedly before closing the door as a mere afterthought behind him.

She stood now gazing back at her room. It looked strangely gray and vacant against the night dark. She took from it only a letter, one of her father's that described a walk across the greenest grasses.

It was all that she possessed of her old life. Like a husk, the rest of herself she discarded. Yavy gave her clothes, his clothes, which smelled of him; wood smoke and something other: grass, soil, both rain drenched and sun dried, lake water, both deep and shallow. She drew them on, too large, rolling up the cuffs and trouser hems, the scent of the outdoors upon her. Then, all too quickly, there was the rushing over the dew-drenched lawn, weak limbed, cold, afraid of looming shadows, and then the clambering down to the boathouse, the wading through icy water, the shock and the half thrill of it. She did not know where the light had gone. There seemed to be none. The sky was black. The water blacker. He helped her into the boat, which was hidden in the grasses amongst the nests of small shy warblers and reed buntings. They flew up through the darkness, twittering angrily. Then there was the breeze on her skin. She breathed it in, tasting silt and brine. The air felt full of mist, mouthfuls of it that sank into her chest, soaked into her bones. She shivered. Pulled his clothes, already dank, around her. Watched the shadow of the Institution disappear behind them as Yavy rowed out across the lake, a vast sea of tideless darkness, guided by nothing, it seemed, but his own
senses. He said little. Asked at intervals if she was all right, if she was not too cold. She lied and said she was not.

Slowly the silhouettes of the mountains on the far side of the lake loomed closer, the sheer cliffs, fissured and cracked, disappearing into the dark waters. For a while he rowed alongside them, the only sound his oars cutting through the surface, and the echo against the rocks. She felt the depths beneath them, the undiscovered darkness. There were no stones in her pocket. No want of them.

Eventually they reached the river. He fought the currents as far as he could, but it was the beginning of spring and the waters were flooded, full with rain from the mountains that had been blocked by storm and snow. The current was higher, faster, thrashing in torrents over boulders and gullies. He got them to the shore, heaved the boat up onto the shingle and helped her from it.

“We best heading for the largest town,” he told her.

They walked as far as she could. Sometimes it felt as if she slept as she walked, lulled to the rhythm of her own steps, weak still with months of medication and immobility. In the end he caught her as she stumbled, pulled her down into the long river grasses to sleep upon the cold earth.

“You are weary,” he told her. “Best you sleep now.” She lay beside him, felt the warmth of him, vaguely aware of a dawn sky bleeding out above their heads and the cry of a lone buzzard circling above.

They had not until now been together in either the confines of a room or beneath the height of a sky. Alone, she had known him from within the stark staleness of that white room, and he from a garden at winter's end, when the trees were still bare and leafless, the light low and bright enough to burn their eyes to tinder. Now they lay together amongst reeds—too tired to dream, but in the intimacy of sleep they drew the mutual loneliness from each other.