Jakob’s Colors (16 page)

T
hey had a suitcase with them now, old and battered, with the name alfredo lajoie painted diagonally across the front in bold white letters and a handle made of frayed rope. Inside there was a change of clothes for all of them, borrowed clothes that Alfredo's wife had ferreted together from neighbors and friends and which still smelled of the lives of the people who had once worn them. And, too, a rug to keep them warm; bread, cheese, a book, one Lor remembered Yavy had liked, that he had read and reread, scouring through the age-stained pages. She felt closer to him in the presence of something that he had touched.

Alfredo had fed them well that last night, before they had left. With a blundering kindness, as his bear-brown eyes welled, he had placed on the table before them great hunks of bread, spread thickly with pale yellow butter, the salty-sweet aroma seeping up from a small glazed dish.

“And for you, Lor,” he added. “A whole pot of
pâté de lapin
.”

He had picked off the lid, the scent of it wafting up, saliva spilling into all of their mouths.

“How?” Lor had asked him. “Butter, lemons,
pâté de lapin
? How?”

Alfredo had shrugged. “The pâté, my wife made you. The butter, she saved for you. The lemons, I stole.”

“Go carefully,” he had told her later. “Please, go carefully.” He was aware that De Clomp was a place she had arrived at only to leave. It was enough that he could offer her that. In the past, the present, perhaps again one day. Clumsily he said farewell, hid his loss and trepidation for them badly. They left him holding a jar with two snails within it for his safekeeping and four badges embroidered with the letter Z that he was to burn.

The station was busy, crowded on the platform. Lor stowed her children between the coats and the warmth of shuffling bodies, avoiding anything in uniform, and moved steadily up the platform toward the middle of the train. She pulled them past the Lucky Flower Tea Stop, the smell of strong coffee and cigarettes wafting from the door as it opened and closed, slamming on its hinges. On, past the lighting attendant's office, which looked dark and unattended.

Jakob held Malutki's hand tightly. Eliza smiled, a stiff forced smile, and stared fearfully ahead. The train stood on the tracks, smoke billowing from its funnel, misting across the platform in great clouds that dispersed skyward. People vanished, then reappeared through it. They no longer looked at one another. They carried a worn, depleted look in their eyes. The scaffolding of their faces dilapidated, derelict, almost as if they had abandoned their very selves. Even the manner in which they walked had been stripped from them, and they could no longer hold their heads up high. They looked at the ground, scuttled from here to there.

“
Dokumente. Reisepass
.”

Lor heard these words being shouted behind and ahead of her, from one end of the platform to the other. “
Dokumente. Reisepass. Dokumente. Reisepass
.” She stopped, put her hand up to her chest, felt for the bulge of forged papers that Alfredo had given her, fat in her breast pocket.

“Show them only when you have to,” he had told her. “I fear they are not so good as to deceive the sharpest eye.”

“It is all right, Ma,” Jakob assured her, and he took her hand from her chest.

“Yes, it's all right,” she replied.

Ahead a milk cart was being pushed through the crowds toward them, tin jugs rattling and sloshing precious milk over onto the platform. A dog, mangy and flea infested, dipped its head and licked at the white puddles until it was kicked by hurried passing feet and disappeared yelping into the throng. The milk boy himself was young and slight, no more than seventeen years of age. He struggled with the weight of the cart, looked faintly alarmed, his face an expressive mix of nervous twitches.

A woman who had been sitting on one of the nearby benches got up and was shuffling toward him. Her face and hands were dirt smeared and she looked older than she was, but she was dressed in clothes that, though worn and faded, held a residue of finery: her skirt a velvet of darkest green; her shirt a creamy linen, intricately embroidered. Her hair was stringy and hay colored. It looked as if it had not been washed in months, and yet she had clipped it back from her face with a small silver clasp, as if somewhere within her there lay a semblance of effort still to be made. Perhaps for the baby that she held in her arms, which was swaddled in the softest wool, soiled and frayed now, but still kind against its skin. Lor watched as she dropped to her knees beside the cart, kissed the milk boy's feet, begged him for some milk.

“I cannot,” he told her. “I cannot.” He looked distraught, as if it was enough to navigate his cart, as if that in itself was beyond him.

“Please,” she begged over and over. “For my baby, please, sir.”

Then she held her tiny bundle out to him, the cloth falling aside, showing the baby's face. Its skin was black as a ripe fig. Its eyes were open, the light of them glazed with a glaucous film. A tiny hand peeked out from the swaddling, was held in a loose fist against its blue-black cheek.

“It is dead,” the milk boy cried. “Your baby is dead.” It had been dead for days.

The woman was not listening. “Please,” she said over and over. “For my baby, please.”

People stopped, were watching, someone was trying to pull her away, lifting her up from the ground with rough dismay.

“Please,” the mother said again to the milk boy. “Please.” And again she kissed his feet, laid her forehead upon them. In the end he gave up. His hands shook as hurriedly he reached down to give her a tin jug of milk. The woman's face broke into the sweetest of smiles, her eyes lit up with hope. She thanked him for his kindness, stood and kissed his hands again and again, stroked her child's face, whispered to it that all would be well now. All would be well. And then she shuffled back over to sit upon the bench, a faint echo of the woman she might once have been, as she rocked her baby to her, its black face to her pale one, inhaling deeply as if it was still scented with the milky sweetness of young life.

“Dear God,” Lor said, and she shrank back then. Pulled her children from the track, back down the platform toward where they had first entered.

“This way, now,” she told them, pulling them onward. “This way.”

“
Dokumente. Reisepass
,” she heard still being shouted behind them. “
Dokumente. Dokumente
.”

They knocked against the crowd, against the tide of people walking against them, out, out, hot with despair, around the station, where they stumbled onto a street, everything shut, gates closed, doors locked, shops sealed and unwelcoming. She pulled them up the length of it to where the houses stopped at the very end of town, where the fields began, where familiar high hills of gold rolled out into the distance, and a stream rushed clear over gray-brown pebbles. She pulled them back into the edges, into the shadows where they belonged, to the very cusp of life. For they were the disappeared. The invisible. The forgotten. They belonged in the gaps, in the spaces in between other people's lives.

They waited in the undergrowth, beside the stream, still with fear, taking in their surroundings: long grasses, golden at the tips, dry earth, already cold with the clear gloaming skies above, and a field of corn, high as a wall, across the track from them. Beyond, a dense woodland of spruce trees spread across the low lying valley and out into the upper reaches of the hills.

How was it, she thought, that the world around them had not diminished? That though they themselves were duller, grayer, the color of the life around them was as bright as yesterday and tomorrow.
A constant amidst the clouds of gathering change that seemed to blacken, to expand and cast a shadow over their entire lives.

We could hide up in those woods, she thought. Hide and not be frightened when we move on. But then a while or so later, after they had waited and listened to the train lurch and heave, listened to the weight of each of the carriages locking into line as the wheels churned and built momentum away from them, a cart trundled across the earth track, pulled by a horse: a shabby creature, more mule than horse. It was stubby legged and coarse haired, staring mutely into the distance ahead, its tongue lolling from the side of its mouth, its hooves treading steady under the whip. The farmer, sallow skinned, with only a few stained teeth clinging to his retreating gums, great gaps of black space showing inside his mouth, caught sight of them from the corner of his eye and pulled his mule to a halt. He picked them up as if it were an everyday occurrence, asked no questions, took the pennies Lor gave him, shrugged his head to the back of the cart. He wiped the sweat from his brow, shifted his rubber boots, and once they had clambered in amongst the hay, the rakes, the shovels and hoes, called his mule onward.

Lor lay in the back, hidden beneath a blanket of hay, her body warm against her children's as they slept. Glimpses of the night sky appeared through gaps in the grass, the ochre haze of a low moon, gigantic above the treetops. They passed bands of wood smoke from ebbing fires, the duration of scent disclosing a village, a hamlet, a lone farmhouse. Sometimes there was no smoke, only the scent of wet grass from an empty field, already drenched with dew as the cold night set in.

There was the relief of movement again, the hope that around the next bend life might be what one longed for it to be. For this brief period in time, anything felt possible again. Death was still. Life was not. Lor heard the distant sound of church bells. Wondered how long the journey would last, how far he could take them. She had specified west, only west. When the road turned, they would alight. Malutki shifted in his sleep, dug his head deeper into the crook of her arm. She bent over him, pressed her cold palm against his cheek, and inhaled
his breath. The night grew colder. She breathed out mist. Her feet and hands grew numb. Her bones ached. How old she felt. Her limbs stiff, her heart brittle.

The cart shifted over a ridge in the track. Lor started. Always now there was the steady pulse of underlying fear that they might be caught. Her grief had become a part of her now. It had coagulated and lay now set like something solid inside her.

At a crossroads, a long while later, when night was still night, but well past its zenith hour, the man pulled the mule to a halt.

“I can take you no farther than this,” he said. “I'll be turning north now. You best be following the track. It leads into the village, then out up to the foot of the pass. I expect that's where you'll be heading.”

Lor thanked him, saw that he half suspected their plight but would not pry, knew perhaps that it was better not to know. War had made people silent. They turned their heads away. Do not look. Do not listen. They hid inside themselves, where it was safe and dark.

She stirred Jakob first, stroked back his hair, kissed his forehead, and gave him the time to stretch, to yawn, to ask what he needed to ask to unravel the confusion of waking. He in turn did the same for Eliza, woke her with soft whispers and assurances as Lor hauled a still-sleeping Malutki into her arms, carried him down from the cart, and walked until the jolt of her steps stirred him.

“Jakob,” he called as soon as his eyes opened. “Jakob.”

Lor passed him over into his older brother's arms. He twisted the boy around onto his back as he walked on, Malutki's hot hands tight about his neck. They moved quickly, bleary eyed with sleep, but by now used not to question her when she embarked upon an action. How she missed the days when they would argue, when they would shout and wail and kick up a fuss. Nowadays they kept their heads low, did as they were told, seemed to know that whatever she was asking of them was something they must do.

The village was in darkness as they passed through it. The houses stood silhouetted against the clear night sky, smoke scented with fires that had long burned to embers. There was the soft bleat from grazing sheep, the clanging of a goat's bell as it dipped its head and nuzzled at
damp grass, the lone coo of a dove in the eaves. But other than that, their passing roused no human from their sleep. A dog, mangy and flea bitten, followed them to the last house, a remnant of hope in its eyes that some morsel of discarded food might be dropped before him. But then it stopped in the center of the track, by the last house before the wilderness began, as if it knew that onward was not somewhere to venture. It stood there, ears pricked, smelling their scents on the wind, until they disappeared into the darkness.

“We nearly there?” Eliza asked.

“Are you tired?”

“No, not tired.”

“Can you walk until you are?”

“Yes, Mamo.”

They walked farther, climbed the hill up into the forest ahead, then steered off the road and followed a fire gap through the trees. Lor took Malutki from Jakob, who could carry him no longer, felt the strain of him on her back. Ahead she could see the stars through the trees.

Get to where the fire gaps cross, she told herself. Walk until you reach there.

“Ma, it is easy to die?” Jakob asked her from behind. She turned and looked at him.

“Not so easy.”

“That baby was dead?”

“Yes, it was dead.”

“What do you suppose it's like to die?”

“I don't know, my love. We don't, until we do so.”

“Doesn't have to be the worst thing,” he told her.

“No. It doesn't have to be the worst thing.”

They walked on. With Jakob it seemed that always there was this pushing forward, this quest to seek out what was right. She had witnessed it in him from the very beginning. The unrelenting effort to see light where sometimes there was none.

“So I am on Gillum, and you on Valour,” he said, beside her now. “With Malutki and Eliza behind.”

“Yes,” she told him. “We have stepped up our pace now, left the Forest of the Light-Footed behind us, left the madness of the wind there and the silent bears with their hot breath and yellow eyes that gleam in the darkness. We know what it is we have to do now. We know which paths we must follow. Which ones we must ignore.”