Jakob’s Colors (17 page)

“So our task being set, Ma?” Jakob asks.

“Yes. Our task is set. We have our seven vessels that hang strapped to our saddles. We have our indigo, our night caught in a glass jar. We have our malachite, cut from the azurite we found in the copper caves. ‘Don't be afraid,' I tell you. ‘We are almost safe.' The Ushalin are fearful of us now, for they know the power of what we have. They know that if they catch us, all we need do is hold a vessel up close against their sightless eyes, burn the gray of them to tinder. Scorch it and blind the blindness from them. And they know, too, that one color adds to another, that by the time we fill our seventh vas, and we will fill it, it will be the very end, because for the first time they will see the world as it is meant to be seen. They will see the green of the land, the blue of the sky, and after that they know that their God will roar. He will holler and shout and tip back his mighty head and thump his mighty fists and command them to kneel before him. And they know that this time they will not be able to do this, for the great sun in the sky, the yellow of which they have never seen before, will hold them captivated, will hold them mesmerized with wonder and that as they stand beneath its giant orb in new worship, their blind God will drown beneath the ink-black waves that roll in from the Ushalin Sea, that he will cough and choke and flail his arms, all to no avail, for the Ushalin will not rush forth to save him. They will stand back and witness his demise, and eventually he will sink down and disappear beneath the thick waves. And those flowers that withered beneath their once wan sun, and those leaves that dried up, will blossom and the Ushalin people will not, ever again, be able to heap ash over their land.

“So we move onward, heading for those saffron fields, fields so vast they cover the whole land. When we reach them all we will see from the tips of our shoes to the farthest horizon will be the color blue, a steely brightness against the light.”

“I remember them, Ma,” said Jakob. “I remember them so clearly. ‘We best be delicate in our gathering,' Da told us. ‘We best be exact, pick each stamen like we are dancing, hands steady, eyes clear.' We weren't rushing, were we, Ma? We didn't rush when we picked them saffron stamens, even though we were racing 'gainst that setting sun?”

“No, we did not rush. Your hands were steady. Your eyes were clear.”

In a way, she thought, that was what they had now become. A story that they carried around with them like their tattered suitcase, telling it and retelling it over and over, in an effort to find some semblance of sense in their lives. Sometimes it felt to Lor that she could no longer differentiate between the story she was telling and the life they were now living. Both seemed as real or unreal as the other.

At length they reached a place where two fire gaps met, and there, in the cross of vertical and horizontal, sank down beneath a blanket of fallen pine needles, the light of fireflies flitting in the air around them. Jakob curled his body around Malutki, Eliza hers around his. Lor placed the rug over them, heaped leaves upon it, and by the time she herself lay down, coiling around them like a wall, they were asleep.

It was not long afterward that she heard the plane overhead, the thrum of it in the distance like some gargantuan insect. And then the advancing whistle that seemed to suck the air out from the trees as it passed above them. Lor looked up, caught the black cross beneath the wing of the Messerschmitt. It was so low she could see the oil stains on its yellow nose cone and pick out the rivets on the underside of its wing. The tops of the trees swayed and bent their heads toward the noise. She listened to the sound of the engines ebbing, disappearing into the sky, drawn up into the silence of it, until they were barely perceptible at all. The children shifted in their sleep but did not wake.

“Yavy,” she whispered. Restless with the hope of him. “Yavy, where are you?”

T
hey had arrived unseen. The soldiers. They had mingled with the crowd of gypsies that was gathered in the square to hear Marli Louard give a speech about unity and to pray together for, of all things, “Peace.” These people, who had already faced the gradual chiseling away of their lives. Already their names had been registered, their prints taken, fingers stained with black dye that would remind them for days afterward that they were now listed, numbered
Zigeuner
—the untouchables.

“Is that what we are, Da?” Jakob had asked.

“It's all that we ever were,” Yavy had replied. “Give no matter to it.”

Already they were made to wear a black triangle on a band around their arm, categorized as “asocials,” alongside prostitutes, vagrants, murderers, and thieves. Already they were prohibited from entering parks and public baths, their children forbidden from attending public schools. Yavy's children knew this. What they did not know was that already camps were being built at Maxglan, Salzburg, Burgenland, Lety, and Hodonín. That there were gas chambers at Chelmo. That five thousand Roma from Lodz were being moved there. That already they had tested this gas on two hundred and fifty Romani children and that it had killed every one of them.

In the square, gathered as they were, there were men around them who did simply as the man next to them might have done. They scratched their noses, pulled down the cuffs of their sleeves, shifted their weight from one foot to another, stared upward and listened enraptured to the words of solidarity that resonated loudly from Marli Louard. It was a dishevelled looking crowd, people of all ages, young and old, listening with a bright hope in their eyes. So at first no one noticed the quiet gathering up of certain individuals. It was only when a child's scream broke through the mumbled chants of prayers that heads turned, bobbed up above the crowd to see where and why such noisy tears were being shed. And when the mother's scream echoed her child's, and the recognition that all was not well spread through the crowd, the swell of a commotion began, the sudden understanding that the man beside them was not as they were—a man head bowed in prayer—but someone to be feared, someone who with the sudden pull of a trigger had the power over who lived and who did not.

It was the crowds themselves, though, that separated Yavy from Lor, the swelling mayhem that carried her and their children one way, and he another, as if they were floating above high blue-black waves, slowly being torn apart on different currents. He fought, grabbed, and clawed with his hands to move against the tide of people coming toward him, and briefly he caught glimpses of them up ahead, but each glimpse always farther away than the last. Lor's face, her eyes frantically searching for him, as if to lock her gaze to his would defy the physical distance between them.

Lor
, he called.
Lor
. Hoarsely. His voice breaking.

And then, when in one moment they were there, bright eyed—Lor's scarf ruffling in the wind, Malutki's thumb pressed against his mother's chin, Jakob, a glimpse of the sun on the crown of his head—in the next, they were gone.
Yavy
.
Yavy
. His name called blindly from a distance. Until he could no longer hear even that.

He went first to the
kampania
, but the soldiers were everywhere, rounding up his friends, his neighbors of the past six weeks. Already they had taken his horse, his beloved Borromini. Already they had
ransacked their wagon, pulled off the door, smashed the windows. He waited until they had gone, then crept out from his hiding place beneath the steps to his wagon, set right a table, held his hand against the brow of a dying horse, hid in the shadows, then made his way back to the square, now a mess of broken chairs. He wandered the streets, asked people he thought he recognized, asked people he did not, but there was no trace of Lor or his children.

He hid for a time in the woods, on the western side of the camp, watched it daily to see if she would come. He lived off berries, washed in the stream, drank the icy water, but still she did not come.

In the end he left, for there was nothing else to be done but that. He left behind the chip in the steps that Eliza had made when she wanted to prove to him that she could chop wood as well as he; the handful of pebbles from a clear riverbed that Malutki had risked frozen feet to collect; a quilt that Lor had stitched together—too long at one end, too short at the other. The bike that Jakob had learned to ride on, wheels spinning, his arms outstretched, the closest to flying he could get without his feet leaving the ground. He left behind all of it. Their life dismantled in the time it took to turn from north to south.

He went cross-country, across field and wood. Went on foot, stole eggs and bread, following the mountain pass and then the stream where he could, the stream that he knew eventually wove from one estuary to the river, eventually to the lake. He left signs along the way, signs to show a path was safe; a white cloth tied to an overhanging branch, an arrow on an ancient trunk. In the hope that she would find him in that place of magenta and teal, of crimson and cobalt blue.

T
he street ran from north to south so that at midday the sun shone down it from above, bleaching the stonework. De Clomp stood in the middle of it, facing west, always busy, always crowded, flushed faces peering through the old cross-barred windows and out onto the cobbles that had been put down one by one, hand by hand, in a week centuries back. The front door stood at street level, yet despite this a rail still jutted out alongside the building, to aid the number of drunks who stumbled out from the smoky interior. Vine leaves wove up the outer stone wall, the branches bowing over the street with the weight of inedible grapes that grew fat and purple in the summer months but that never sweetened.

By day it was a place to buy coffee and bread, a place to eat delicacies of polenta, risotto, or herb-scented salads as sunlight spilled through the windows falling onto bowls of precious sugar lumps knobbed firm by wet silver spoons. By night it was a jazzy glass-clinking club of bad wine and fast whisky shots, full of dim light and moving shadows.

As they reached the door the boy saw that the girl was afraid, was as closed as an egg. “It'll be all right,” he told her. “You listen to me. It'll be all right.”

Her eyes darted nervously up to his face. They were young. She just fifteen, he a year older.

“What if it is not?” she asked, still dressed in his clothes that were too big, rolled at the ankles, at the wrists, worn and still damp from the two days and the three nights that it had taken to get to De Clomp, fragments of chipped paint stuck to their skin, of faded red and green, from the wooden skiff that they had rowed upstream until they could row no more.

“It'll be all right,” he said again as he tugged hard at the jarring door.

The moment they stepped over the threshold, blurry-eyed faces took them in, looked up and down the length of them suspiciously. Two musicians were cramped in the corner, under an archway, which forced the woman to stoop uncomfortably to one side. Her long hair hung loosely across her face as she played on a five-stringed harp, while the man, with a heavy unkempt beard, played on a flute, his thick fingers skipping out the notes. He stood. She sat. The melody was slow and sad.

The man behind the bar was tall and wide, the features of his face bulbous, swollen with years of holding his drink. Only his hair was thin, haphazardly wispy, windswept despite being indoors. He looked up as they approached.

“Yes?” he inquired.

“I'm looking for a job,” the boy said. “An' if you have it, we're in need of a room which I'll have to be paying for with my laboring for the time being.”

The man studied the boy's earnest face, glanced down briefly at the girl's attire, the damp mud stains that seeped up from around the hem of her pants. She kept looking back at the door. “Don't look so afraid,” he told her. “This is a place for drunks and dreamers, sometimes for those who need somewhere to hide.”

“We're not in need of nowhere to hide,” the boy said brashly.

“As you like.” The man paused. “The stonemasons three streets from here,” he said eventually. “They are always in need of good hands. Elpie can help you with this.” He nodded to an old man at the end of the bar who was seated on a high stool, smoking a pipe
with one hand and in the other holding a wide-rimmed leather hat. Which he was eating. At intervals he tore at the leather with yellow tobacco-stained teeth that ground in slow cow-chew motions, his mouth slowly darkening with tannin. He wore a murky-green corduroy suit, his left leg twisted around the leg of the high wooden stool to balance himself. His right leg was missing, cut off at the thigh so that he had to wear his trouser folded up and pinned beneath his sagging buttock cheek. A pair of wooden crutches leaned against the bar beside him.

“Elpie lost a bet,” Alfredo said by way of explanation.

“What was the bet?” the boy asked.

“That his hen would not lay an egg on Sunday.”

“Damn hen,” Elpie spoke, his voice graveled. “For four Sundays she'd not laid an egg. On the fifth I make a bet. She lays the damn egg. And so . . . my hat.” He took another bite from the rim, tearing at it with his yellow teeth.

“That gonna make you sick?” the boy asked, and the old man shrugged and told him that a bet was a bet, and if he couldn't keep it he should never have made it in the first place.

“Besides,” he finished. “You never eat it all at once. A little by little, day by day, until your stomach grows accustomed to it.”

“Don't think him insane,” Alfredo told them. “He is a hero in these parts. Won a medal for that leg. Stumbled across the enemy's camp during the war, lost his way in the mist, and held up fifteen men at gunpoint. He led every single one of them back to the allies. The air still itches where that leg used to be, isn't that so, Elpie?”

“Indeed. That in itself is enough to drive a man insane.”

The musicians had picked up the tempo. Despite the instruments they had to play with, they were masterfully serenading an old Cole Porter song. The girl turned to hear it. She closed her eyes. Listened to the familiar rhythm of a tune she had not heard for a long time now. The allies of whom they spoke were not her allies. They were her enemies, or rather her country's enemies.

“How long will you be staying?” Alfredo was asking.

The girl opened her eyes.

“Awhile, perhaps,” the boy told him.

“I have two rooms. The cheaper or the more expensive? The lighter or the darker?”

“The cheaper.”

“And the lighter. You can pay for it when you start work.” The man handed them a key that looked as if it had been forged especially with him in mind. It was heavy and ridiculously large. “The room is at the top of the house.” He smiled. “And should you be in need of anything, I am Alfredo.”

The girl had begun to shake, to look again nervously at the door. The boy took hold of her arm, thanked Alfredo for the room, bid farewell to the old man, and took her to a door at the side of the bar that led to the lodgings above. They climbed the three battered flights to the top floor, the boy ahead, looking back every so often to check perhaps that she was still there, that she had not turned and run from him. On the tiny landing he fumbled with the heavy key, until eventually the latch clicked and the door opened. He stepped aside for her to enter. She did so, not knowing quite how to stand, what to do with her hands, her feet, once they had stopped moving. He walked to the window, looked down onto the lamplit street, pulled across the curtains, which were worn, thin, and punctured with pinholes of light where young moths had feasted. He turned back to the girl.

They stood then in the center of the room, suddenly just the two of them. A room that wasn't filled with the sound of others screaming or the fear of intrusion. It was a room that for the time being was theirs and theirs alone. Four walls that looked out over the red-tiled rooftops and chimneys billowing with wood smoke; a mottled mirror and a narrow loose-sprung bed. They stood together in the center of this room, still for the first time in a long time, and in the silence that surrounded them there was a rawness, a self-consciousness, that had been hidden behind the noise and the chaos of before. The girl was still shivering, her thin arms wrapped around herself, the damp of the past days buried in her bones. The boy fetched the woolen rug that lay over the bed, pulled it around her.

“Don't be afraid,” he whispered.

She shook her head, felt tears in her eyes.

“You do not know my name,” she said finally.

“So you be telling me.”

“It is Lor.”

“And mine?” he asked.

She already knew it. “Yavy.”

“Them tears are bright in your eyes, Lor,” he said. “No matter if they spill over. Don't be thinking back,” he told her. “I been long used to not thinking back. Tell me what you want of your life. What you dream of in your while-away days.”

She said nothing and at length he turned and set about making a bed for himself on the floor, coiling himself into a single blanket.

“You'll sleep there?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“It is not too hard?”

“Not too hard.”

“It is warm enough?”

“It is. Now you lie down, an' you dream of them sunflower fields we'll be finding one day. And you'll sleep soundly.”

She looked at him, the earnestness with which he spoke. Was it really so simple, she wanted to ask. As simple as that? Catch a dream? Hold on to it?

She lay down upon the bed, felt the springs creaking beneath her, felt the exhaustion of days past. There was the sound of pigeons cooing in the eaves, the thrum of a distant engine. Momentarily it filled her with alarm, but, too weary now, she closed her eyes, let her tears spill from them.

Later she woke in the darkness, afraid of where she was, the familiar tremors in her chest as the space seemed to open around her. She sat up, could not still the trembling in her hands. She listened for his breathing, so soft she could barely hear it. Already the room had become a refuge without past or future, a place where it seemed they could be still for a while.

It was only later that she realized she must have slept, curling herself at the very end of her bed, faintly aware of the light flickering
into the room cast by a broken moon. And again of Yavy, the slow drawn-out breath of his deep slumber.

In the morning when she woke, though, he was not there. She felt the space where he was not, was bewildered by the solid sense of it. She breathed in and tried to ward off the sudden flare of fear that she knew could take hold, then rush away, like a string unraveling on a kite. A small note, written coarsely in charcoal from the fire grate, told her he had gone out in search of food.

She walked the room, found comfort in that. Studied the crevices, the carved nooks and crannies, a hinge that caught and creaked, the dark stain on a worn square of floorboard that had once been a birthmark on an old tree. She ran her fingers over the brass door handle, smooth as bone, the cupboard knobs that popped off easily in her hands, a patch on the wall that was shaped like a question mark. She sat on the three-legged stool, the only place they could sit other than the bed, and stared out of the window at the view which felt like something one could own.

It was not being by herself that frightened her. She had lived a good deal in herself. Locked away with her own thoughts as she sought to unravel the world around her. She did not easily understand it. Mostly other people bewildered her. It was the intrusion of them that she feared, the force with which they could impose themselves upon her.

Below, carts were being pushed toward De Clomp, laden high with wooden barrels of beer. Three men in worn demob suits unloaded them, rolling them down the street. They rumbled over the cobbles like a muffled storm. Lor listened to barrel after barrel being dropped down through the cellar hatch, and to the conversation that flowed beneath the sound of everything, provincial, domestic, comforting in its ordinariness. She could hear Alfredo barking instructions, wondered when it was that he had his first drink of the day and how many it took for that drunken fog, the sort that she knew couldn't be hidden, to descend over him.

She was aware that dimly, already only dimly, she was looking out for the familiar faces of Dr. Itzhak, the nurse with the grease-scented skin, those she dreaded seeing. But there was a safety within the four
walls she and Yavy now occupied, nestled in the rooftops with the chimneypots and the passing salt white clouds.

To the rest of the world he and she did not now exist as the people they had once been. And of who they were now, there was no official knowledge: no documents, no references. They were the disappeared. The vanished. The forgotten.

She pulled out the letter that her father had written her. It was all that there was of her past. She opened out the folded pages, held them up to her face, inhaled, seeking some remnant scent of home. But there was none, simply the must of wood and those words of his—
Grass so green, valleys of leaf and willow. And a wind, apple and salt scented
.

Yavy was not long. She heard his quick, light steps running up the stairs. Put away her letter. Put away her past. He brought with him milk, bread, cheese, seemed animated with all that was down on the streets below, his face lit up and pink with fresh air. He told her about the stores he had passed, “crammed with things I not knowing the name of,” and about the crowds that they could disappear into, be as invisible as they chose.

“Don't be afraid no more,” he said. “We'll be safe here awhile. No one'll find us.”

Then he pulled from the pocket of his oversized coat a small book, navy blue and leather bound with gold embroidered along the spine, small enough to hold in the palm of one hand.

“Don't know what it's reading. It's written in your language,” he told her. “But I thought you'd like it to run your eyes over.”

She picked it up, ran her hand down the length of the spine, opened the brittle pages and smelled the musty scent of a book that had not been read in a long while. Sure enough, it was written in English, a book of old folk stories, some she knew from childhood, others she had never heard of before. There were small drawings, done by a steady hand in pen and ink, some so hazy with age they were barely a suggestion of an image, as if when she turned the page they might fade further and in time disappear altogether.

“You like it?” he asked, and for the first time she heard a nervousness in his voice.

“I like it,” she assured him.

“Very much?”

“Yes, very much. Thank you for it,” she said eventually, and when she looked his face was lit up with pleasure, as if she had given him something, not received it.

He told her next that Elpie had given him that job at the stonemasons' barely three streets from where they lived. They were making bricks, he told her, for a new church that was being built up above the city, with a view that showed the whole lie of the land.