Jakob’s Colors (18 page)

“You're smiling.” He grinned.

“Yes. You are proud,” she said.

“Of myself?”

“Yes.”

He hesitated. “You are right. Going to make us a life. A little life, an' wrap it tightly around us. That'll be good?” he asked and he seemed earnest with the question.

“Yes,” she said. “That'll be good.”

“A
mute,” they calling me now in that Institution. But I am no mute. They knowing I can talk. Just done talking to them with their lightning that burns me, come right or wrong thing I say. Seems to make no matter to them. That first time, after I wets myself in my sleep, they strapped me down, strapped my arms an' legs so tight. Do you know what it's like to not be free in your own limbs, like you is drowning in some slurry pit? Smelling some nasty smell that makes the back of your throat gag an' choke. Chemicals floating like clouds around that white room. They say I won't feel nothing, but they lying. They never had no lightning themselves. Don't know that it burns deep, like a fire melting a hole in your insides. So I learn to stop that lightning. Say nothing. Stay ice cold inside, an' that is why they calling me, a “mute.”

I watch them “patients,” when they first come into this place. Laughing, crying, screaming. But alive an' bright eyed. Then, after they are carted off, locked behind them big doors, given that lightning, they return all silenced an' dead eyed.

But then them doctors deciding this silence of mine something they got to stop, and this time they laying me in a tub of water,
freezing cold an' aching at my bones, and covered with a plank of wood so I can't get out. Keep me in this freezing water for an age, coaxing out the talk from me. By the time they're done, my head seeing only a gray fog and I can't be talking even if I choose to. Left with only confusion. If I talk I get the lightning, and if I don't, they drown me deep. Seek out some place in between—stay silent, lest they speak to me, and then answer with just as little as I can say. Be small an' meek, so they don't notice me with all that racket that hammers through them white walls. Stay low an' small as a mouse. Just silent enough and just loud enough for them to think I no longer crazy. Like I turned around to find my senses. And day by day, they giving me a little more freedom. No lightning rods. No icing water. No chemicals in my body that do my head something wrong. Give me odd jobs to do here an' there. See how good I am with my hands. That I know the odds an' ends of things. And I keep my head down low, stay mighty helpful, so they grow to be needing me more than I needing them.

And all the while, them Authorities begin their Education of me. To knock that gypsy stupidness out of me, they say. Teach me gentile ways of talking so that people don't just be seeing a “gypsy scum” soon as I open my mouth. First book they give me is that book of fairy tales that God wrote, and I pick out them letters, putting them together one by one, sounding them out on my tongue. That Bible's full of beautiful tales and I am famished for them once I get the hang of them words. Love the magic of that boy Jesus, with his fishes that could feed five thousand souls and that boy Moses with his parting of the waves. So my speech gets better and my reading's good, and for a while I stop knowing who I am, 'cos the voice inside of me sounds a whole lot different from the one I go speaking out loud. Slowly I am changing. A different voice outside. A voice locked inside, sinking deeper. Hidden down so low an' deep, I can barely find myself. And all the while I tell them nothing of the thoughts inside my head, of how I talk with my ma and pa, how I keep them close. How I'm working out that magic that gonna keep my
soori
alive. Remembering my pa, kneeling by the firelight, beside that mound o' white crosses that he pulled over to the fire pit, dug wide an' deep. How, one by one, he placing
them in those wily hot flames, burning all of them. And all the while my ma sat weeping. Weeping an' afraid and telling him we all gonna end up in that fiery furnace of hell. But I know no devil man watching over my pa and his fire. 'Cos he knows you can't be leaving them mounds of wooden crosses to rot in the wind an' rain. Best to burn them, one by one, each with a prayer an' a nod of my pa's head.

“
Ashen Devlesa, Romale
. May you remain with God,” he whispers, over an' over, a prayer for each of them crosses. Takes him eighteen days to burn all of them, eighteen days an' two thousand five hundred utterances of them prayers. That is what I remember. After I losing them. Losing all my life. All my heart.

T
he next day, when Lor woke, Yavy was again already gone. Once more she looked to the room to save her, studied it with the belief that there would be safety if she accustomed herself to it. She got up. Cut herself some bread, some butter. She sat on the floor beneath the window, hugged the sunlight that fell through the nine rectangular windowpanes. She opened the book Yavy had brought her, found a crushed insect in the center page, a small mayfly, its carcass perfectly intact as if it had been flattened and dried like some cherished flower. She turned the pages, smelled them, skimmed her eyes randomly from one word to another, traced her fingers over the drawings, and felt her heart stir.

She walked from the window to the door and back again, peered down onto the cobbles, pressed her face against the glass, left her breath upon it. She walked back to the door. At the sink which clung to the wall in the far left corner she found a stain, a round swill of brown enamel where the scale had built up. She stood staring at it for a while before peeling off her clothes and running a wet cloth up and down the length of herself. Over and over again, like a penance, she washed the lake water and the days of wandering from her skin.
Afterward she washed Yavy's clothes, wringing away mud-clogged grime the color of rust and verdigris. She hung them in the sunlight, strewn across the chair, across the stool, the table. She was left standing only in her undergarments.

Again she stared down into the street, always looking, searching for what she did not want to see. It was empty but for the odd boy on a bicycle that rattled by, laden front and back with groceries. The hours trickled on as the clothes slowly dried. She was grateful for that, for the rhythmic tick-tocking of time passing. She walked from the door to the window and back again. Stared at the stain on the sink, set about cleaning it, scrubbing back and forth with a ferocity that had her arms burning. When she stopped, little had changed in its appearance. She looked down at the scars on her arms, lurid still, ran her fingers over them, heard her mother's voice.

“No, I won't swim,” she said. “I shan't swim a single stroke.”

Lor sat down. Took up Yavy's book, lingered over the words, again traced her fingers over them, felt them move from her mind to her mouth, whispered them. When she looked up, the sun had begun its descent. The clothes had dried. She pulled them back on, felt the warmth of the day on them. She looked back at the book. Again her heart stirred.

It was only when the shadows on the street were no more, and the sun had dropped too far behind the buildings, that Yavy returned from his first day at the stonemasons'. He carried with him a loaf of sourdough and a jar of apple jelly, sweetened with grape juice, and a handful of coins that he had earned that day.

And then again, “I bought you this,” he told her, and pulled from his pocket what looked like a piece of blue cotton fabric. But when he let it drop open she saw that it was a dress. “Thought it might fit you better than them old clothes of mine,” he said. Then he turned away, put his face against the wall to give her privacy.

She touched the dress first, laid the palm of her hand over the fabric. Then she stripped off his newly washed pants and the shirt and pulled the dress up and over herself, smoothed down the creases with her hands. He turned back to face her. Stared with that look of his
that seemed unhurried, as if there were time enough to take her in as he wished, as if by studying her face he might know of her whole day.

“Thank you,” she said. She handed him back the small pile of clothes he had lent her. “You'll be in need of these, I expect.” And then, embarrassed, she turned from him. “There is nothing to cook with and I'm shamed to confess that even if there was, I wouldn't know how to use any of it. Not any of it at all.”

He shrugged. “So bread and jam is what I want,” he said.

They sat opposite each other on the floor in squares of light that changed from rusted yellow to a smoke blue, tore off large hunks and dipped them into the jar of apple jelly. Dusk fell.

“Them Italians singing from the scaffoldings,” he told her, his eyes bright against the cement dust that filmed his face and hair. “An' everyone who hears them is grinning. Been surrounded by smiles all day. Ain't that something?”

“Yes, that is something,” she agreed.

“Don't be afraid no more. This is a good place. No one will find us here. An' tomorrow you can brave them streets, buy what you need, for we have that now. We have money for that now, see.”

He talked more about his day, about the cracks in the stone that it was his job to detect, how if he tapped at a fault the sound was different, a note that was flat and off-key. Because, he explained, you couldn't start work if there was a crack in the first stone, because while it might begin with one, it could move from that to the next, and slowly in time there would be a scar running right through the building, and all that hard work that people had put into it could come crashing down with the slightest shower or the most timid of passing mice.

He tried to help her clear up, but she wanted to be of use, to do something for him after he'd worked the long day.

“Let me,” she insisted.

She knew how to do very little, was humiliated by this. She could feel him watching as loudly she cleared away their plates, filled up the sink and sunk her fingers into the scalding water. She had nothing to wash with, so used only her hands to scrub and clean, her fingers
burning, aware that all the while he was taking her in, with a forgiveness of everything, it seemed. As if he did not care whether she was capable or incapable, sane or insane.

That night he slept again at the foot of the bed, and she could not sleep with knowing he was there. She sat up at one point, looked at his face set softly in sleep, at the outline of it upon the pillow; the curve of his nose, the slight flicker of his lashes, the blissful and stark repose of his sleeping mouth. She sat for a long while just watching him, aware that she was intruding upon something that shouldn't perhaps be witnessed by a wakeful rational soul.

The next morning, he had again already gone before she woke. Only his earnings from the day before lay on the table waiting, like a challenge for her to go out and spend. She got up, slipped on the blue cotton dress and looked at herself in the mirror. She wondered how it was possible that the vision of familiarity before her could be in a setting so utterly unfamiliar from anything she had ever known. How was it one could live a life and then live another?

She went to the window, stared down at the street. She was afraid. Certainly afraid to go out into it, yet caught, impelled by a need for practical accomplishments and, too, a sense of intrigue, a quiet desire to venture out beneath this changed sky. For too long she had stayed in the confines of a room. Now she was afraid to leave it, yet more afraid to stay, for what might become of her if she did?

In the end the longing for the outside, the scent of fresh air, gave her courage enough to open the door to their room, to climb down the stairs, her hand trailing along the walls, mold splattered like veined blue cheese, and out onto the cobbled street upon which she and Yavy had arrived only two nights ago.

For the first time in her life she found herself on a street alone. Momentarily she stood with her back to the door of the lodgings, her hand upon the brass handle. She looked upward. A clear sky. Sparrows flitting between the eaves. Her hand twisted back and forth, warming the metal, as if she might leave a part of herself safely behind so that the rest of her might move onward. Finally she dropped her hand to her side. Took one step, then another, and began to walk on
down the street. The air smelled of sun-warmed bricks and the dried, salted meats that hung from giant hooks as she passed the butcher's at the end of their street. A pig's head sat on the trestle table, its mouth gaping and stuffed with a glazed green apple, the orbs of its eyes glinting as if they might still hold some semblance of life within them. The rest of it hung from the metal rack, sliced and stretched to expose its insides. The flies sat lazily in the air around it, then caught themselves on hanging fly coils, their legs scratching the air until they died of exhaustion.

Already the market stalls were rowdy, crowded with incomprehensible shouts and raucous tussles so animated they verged on aggressive. There were shelves of preserves, jars of pickles and chutneys. And flowers, battalions of them, strung up and swinging in the breeze or bursting from metal buckets: peonies, lady reds, and orchids; scents of crushed lavender wafting in bands and mingling with the stench of sewage.

She did not know this life, the exchange of it. She felt all eyes upon her suddenly, that she was something to be jeered at and locked away. She shrank back, disconcerted, stood in the shadows of terra-cotta, beside a wall of cool pink stone. For a time she could not move, afraid to stay, to linger, but more afraid to return to the void of herself in that room.

A man was standing on a table selling exotic live birds: a gold-crested finch, a bleached white dove. There was a green and yellow parrot, bobbing its head in agitation on a pole beside him, and beside that some sort of bird of prey, a kestrel perhaps, a kite?

“
Gut zu anderen
,” squawked the parrot. “Good to others—
Gute euch
—good unto you,” and the crowd clapped and rummaged in their purses.

“You can make anyone believe anything if you do it with enough conviction,” her mother had taught her. To act unafraid was to be unafraid. To act good was to be good.

Lor moved alongside the buildings, felt the assurance of putting one foot in front of the other. Better the movement than the static fear. She trekked the streets, walked the length of one, then another, moved
from the crowds to the sparsity of the living quarters, the cluttered alleys and crowded squares of the town center to the wider, leafier suburbs, where large houses loomed behind immaculate walled gardens, and birdsong sounded in the still quiet squares. She walked until her feet throbbed. Back then, into the throng, where she felt courage enough now to linger, to seek things out.

“Come, my love,” she heard her mother say. “You are well practiced in this. You know the exchange of this.”

With the little money Yavy had given her she first bought things they needed and things they could afford. Clothes: a second cotton dress (she had only the one), stockings. A pot, a pan, a ceramic dish that she would learn to cook with, a wooden spoon, a knife, a whetstone. She found a teapot that reminded her painfully of an English farmhouse, blue-and-white striped with a smudged marking on the base that she could not decipher. She searched for cups to match. Failed to do that, so bought a mishmash of ones that she liked.
Not the done thing
, her mother had said,
but let's start a trend, some new fad from America
. She wanted Yavy to have wine with his dinner, because in her willingness to imitate adulthood she imagined that was the way it should be, so bought two glasses that she polished until they shone. She found a quilt for his bed on the floor, and one for her own that would brighten the room with the patchwork.

Finally she climbed the stairs back up to their lodgings in the rooftops and stood relieved, pleased with herself, in the center of the room that must now be their home, for there was no other, and listened for the Italians. They were only three streets away, and sure enough, if no carts or motorcars went trundling over the cobbles below she could indeed hear them singing their arias and their songs, reaching for their dramatic crescendos. And she smiled at the thought that he, Yavy, would hear them too.