Jakob’s Colors (19 page)

A
gain his dreams have Jakob clawing at the warm earth above him. His mouth is clogged with clay, his eyes with darkness.
Pe kokala me sutem
. He sleeps on bones.
Bi jakhengo achilem
. Becomes without eyes. Again he breathes in grit and stifles his screams. Again he scratches the loose soil away until his hands are raw. He scrapes aside the stones, the splintered roots, soaked with blood, until finally his fingers feel the wind. And then, through a crack in the rubble, he catches a glimpse of the blue lapis sky.

“Jakob,” he hears Cherub calling. “Jakob, you are all right?”

He has been weeping. His cheeks are wet. The sound of his sobs lingers in his ears, like the indentation of something. He does not know if it is the worst. Is it, Cherub? he wants to ask. Is it the very worst? He is back in that field, crouched down low behind the blackness of bracken, his knees upon that soft blanket of damp moss. He can hear his breath in his own ears, shallow bursts. He should run, he knows this. He should run far and fast. But he cannot bear to leave. Cannot bear to go where the scent of them will no longer reach him. He sees the tree, bone white in the moonlight, stark and stripped of all its bark. No movement around it, no wing beat or scurried dance,
as if all else has fled with what has just passed. All my heart's there, he whispers into the night. All my life.

“Jakob,” Cherub asks again. “You are all right?”

“Yes, Cherub,” he says eventually. “I am all right.”

But he is near again, that officer, the eagle and the swastika on his shoulder hand embroidered with white silk and tiny nuggets of aluminum wire. He is near with his head in his hands, clasping thick clumps of his own hair. “So you have earned yourself a bullet,” he is saying, over and over, until Jakob cannot bear it anymore. Is it the worst? Is it?

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

The cow shifts its head, jerks it slightly upward. Its leg scuffs at the ground. The flies spiral upward, a black seething mass, the oilcloth glint of their wings blacking out the sky and the view beyond. Is it the worst? Is it?

“Cherub?” he asks out of the darkness.

“Yes,” Cherub answers, without pause, as if all he has been doing is silently waiting for Jakob to speak. “I am here.”

“You have brothers and sisters of your own?”

“I have three brothers. One older, two younger. I am the middle son.”

“You know where they are?”

“No, I do not.”

Jakob sits awhile in the stillness of his own waking. And then. “If I dream of dying, do I know what it is to die?”

Cherub is quiet for a moment. “What is it like?” he asks eventually. “Your dying? Is it dark?”

“Neither light nor dark.”

“Cold?”

“No, not cold.”

“Not so bad then. If I dream I have sucked a lemon, if I can taste the sharpness and the tang of it, who can say that I have not sucked a lemon when I wake?”

“But we know what it is to suck a lemon. In life we knowing that.”

“Yes.”

“An' we not know what it is to die.”

“No.”

Jakob is quiet awhile. He holds his feet in his hands, and wonders at the size of them. Would they be the same size as his mother's now? She had such small feet. Would he be able to place his foot heel to heel against hers and see his own toes above her own? Could she wear his shoes, he hers?

“What's it like, Cherub, your home?” he asks eventually.

“I lived in a small town in the mountains. We would fish in the summer, snow-trek in the winter.”

“I've never been in an avalanche.”

“Neither have I. But I have heard them. They sound like thunder, only there is no lightning to light the sky before they come, so they come without warning, out of nothing, and the sound of them continues on long enough for you to doubt that you are hearing anything at all.”

“Can you survive an avalanche?”

“Yes, you can. For as long as you find a pocket of air, the coldest air.”

“Yes, for as long as. And it is light in this pocket?”

“I think it would be light.”

“Yes. I think that snow would be white enough to hide that dark.”

Jakob imagines it, this tiny space that is not cloying with soil or rubble, but full of the lightest snow.

“Come here,” she had said to him and he had done so.

She had brought him down onto the grass in front of her, and wrapped her arms tightly around him. “Tilt your face toward the sun and close your eyes,” she had instructed and he had done so. “Do you see darkness?”

“No.”

“Do you feel cold?”

“No.” She squeezed him harder.

“Do you feel alone?”

“No.”

“This is what death is. Not a place you should be afraid of.” That is what she had taught him.

Jakob and Cherub remain silent until they hear the familiar shifting of Loslow waking, the theatrical drama of yawns that accompanies the stretching of limbs, the knee bones that click as they straighten.

“Loslow, tell Jakob about your cities. Loslow is a man of cities. He has lived in more of them than any man,” Cherub tells him.

“Yes, for my sins.” Loslow yawns again. “The countryside is more of an enigma to me. I am afraid of insects, of birds, of feathered wings. One cannot escape them. It is not something easily admitted, but I am indeed a city man in my very heart of hearts. I have lived in several. In Leningrad, where the whole flow of the river freezes over in winter. The fish are caught in the ice there, a bubble frozen above their gills. You can drive a truck across the thickness of it. The whole city gleams with a layer of frost. The stone shines.”

“And Vienna?” Jakob asks, half wanting to know, half not. “You ever lived in Vienna?”

“Ah, Vienna I know best of all. Vienna is where I was born. You can hear music on every street corner, in every square. It is a city of angels.”

There was no music, Jakob thinks. There was no music in Vienna for the brief time he had known it. Certainly no angels. There was a square. And there were chairs, upturned chairs, scattered and broken, as if some orchestra had been about to perform, and somehow the music had exploded the ordered layout of the open-aired auditorium. As if the time they lived in was being played out in the chaos of wrecked chairs. Wrecked chairs and the body of Marli Louard, who lay still with his head on the same stand he'd been speaking from, his shirt stained with blood that had darkened from red to eggplant. Jakob had stood alone in this square, alone for a moment only, but a moment long enough to feel an immense emptiness, a void that he felt he would never fill. There was an absence of sounds. No birdsong. No current of voices. Just a spiraling wind that brought with it a single sheet of paper tumbling across the cobbles. It spun upward and over his head.

“Jakob, please,” his mother had called behind him, her face twisted with anxiety. “Come away, Jakob.”

The letter caught against the leg of one of the chairs, flapped against it, the words hidden. Jakob walked toward it.

“He is not here. Come away. Please, he is not here,” his mother had cried again, frantic now. She was afraid. They were all afraid. He took
the letter, writing scrawled across it, folded it in his pocket, felt the weight of it there, and then did as his mother asked. Left the scattered chairs and upturned tables, that splintered space, the last place he had seen his father. Taking Eliza's cold hand, he fled.

“What is it?” she asked him as they ran. “What is it you have found?”

“Just a letter,” he replied. “A letter I found in the wind.”

And later he had pulled the letter from his pocket, unfolded it, tried to decipher the scrawl that swept slanting across the page.

Jakob read the words over, again and again, as if the answer to everything lay in the slanting scrawl. He longed for those hills, those valleys, that apple salted wind.

“What would we make of our lives if we were to live them over again, knowing what we knew at the very end?” The officer had asked him that, sitting as he was beside his fire. That officer with his embroidered swastika of white silk and aluminum wire. After he had wept. After he had dried his eyes. Jakob did not understand him then, wonders if he understands him now.

L
or went to meet Yavy the following day, waited for him outside the house in which they cut the stone, waited in the stillness of late afternoon, in the heat and long shadows, when the light was at its most luminous and there was an edge to every line, a definite ending to one object against another. She stood listening to the chip and grind of the men at work. A faint cloud of chalk dust seemed to hover just above her head, along the entire street, strangely redolent, aromatic almost, as if it carried with it the scent of wild flowers that had woven their way up through the cracked rock, before a blast of dynamite sent it exploding outward into the world to become something else: a bell tower, a church, a cathedral, a field of white gravestones.

“You are here,” he said, when he saw her, his face covered with a fine film, like some quarry ghost come to haunt her. He smelled of grout and pitch.

“Yes. I came to walk with you.”

“I like that you did that.”

“Yes.”

She went again the following day, became familiar with the sound of hammer on stone. Stood by the doorway and watched the last
remnants of his day. He was quick, lighter than the others, younger, too. She watched him pound in the clout nails against mortar and slate. Listened for the sound of each hit, for the musical tone within each one, a note she could find on any piano from the stones they would keep, or else the wayward tone that resonated from the damaged stones that they would discard. He pushed in the dowels, caulked seams, hoisted up lifting tackle.

He worked hard but dropped his tools as soon as the bell rang for the end of the day, stayed never a moment longer than that. He looked out for her, rushed to her with an eagerness that almost betrayed him before he reached her, stepping back to put a space between them, walking by her side as they strolled home through the maze of narrow alleyways, witnessing the packing up of stalls, the slamming down of shop shutters, the opening of bar doors, the hum of lazy evening chatter. That shift from day to evening, from work to play, when the light spun almost imperceptibly from gold to blue. Occasionally they veered off balance in their stride, brushed against the other, mortified, and yet, in those moments, aware only of the touch of the other, everything around them diminishing in sight and sound. They steadied. Walked on, let in the space once more.

They tried out their languages on each other. Wore them like clothes, changing the way they moved as they spoke. They both spoke French to each other, a smattering of German, but sometimes she used English. Sometimes he used Romani. They learned a little of each. Spattered one with another. Felt them move inside their mouths, against their tongues, their lips, like something they could taste, then swallow.

She learned that
avri
was “outside,” that
adre
was “in.” She learned that she was
miro
, that she was quiet. That she was
khushti
, that she was good.
Love
was the word for money.
Kamav
the word for love.
Ruv
was the wolf they ran from. She was not
dinilo
, he told her. She was not crazy. She was
rakli
, a
rinkeni rakli
, a pretty, bright-eyed, nongypsy girl.

Slowly, gently, they began a little life. It was a simple life, filled with conversations of stones and layered bricks, of the music that seeped up from the bar, already part of the past and imprinted with
the memory of when it had first been listened to; of the strange food that they found in the market: cheese that was veined green and blue like a map of land and water, olives that were so sharp they stripped the moisture from their tongues; bread that they pulled apart and chewed until their jaws ached.

There was Alfredo, who talked mostly of love and wine, and a few familiar faces at the bar; Elpie, who, undeterred, was halfway through his hat; the two musicians who sang but never spoke; the men Yavy worked with. They found a corner in De Clomp that became their own, beneath a bookshelf stacked with old books, leather bound with warm browns, mahoganies, and greens, where shyly they would look for the other coiled upon a comfy chair.

For a time they hung out with the balloonists and the mystics and the opera singers who joined them in the lodgings for the season, a trickle of traveling salesmen who arrived one Sunday and left the next, who clambered up the stairs with cases of elaborate costumes or boxes of equipment that cramped the landings so that only the slimmer visitors could squeeze past. Alfredo hollered and complained, then laughed and poured out whisky shots, while Yavy and Lor listened to tales of starlit performances and flights across quilted skies. Until summer bled into autumn and the balloonists and mystics and opera singers returned to a distant place that was their home. Then once again, it was just the two of them.

Slowly Lor peeled off her past life as if it were something that could be discarded. It remained an imprint, dreamlike and only tangible in sudden moments when she was caught off guard, when a memory surfaced before it could be repressed: stirred by a bend in the road, the crown of someone's head, the gait of someone's stride, all reminiscent of another time, another place. Palpable, almost, as if she could reach out and touch the past.

When you lose something you love, darling, you live another life beside the one you are living. The life that would have been. Her mother had once told her that, staring as she did into some vacant space. “It walks only one step behind you. Like a shadow. That at times, just as when the sun is at its zenith in the sky, it can brush
right up against you, overcast and blur out the life you are living altogether.”

Less and less that happened to Lor now. Only sometimes would she will the past to return. “Are you there?” she would ask. “Are you close?” Only sometimes, when at night her fears seemed insurmountable. She floundered then, sought to grasp the familiar, the chaotic known, but where once there had been only solace in such a seeking, now there was trepidation at what might arise, the half-acknowledged truth that she no longer wanted to disappear. To hold stones in her pockets. Now, in the dim light of a room that was her own, with a boy who had faith enough, it seemed, to be near her, she wanted to grow old and gray.

For Yavy it seemed he had always lived this way, the ease with which he navigated himself through the day, as if the years before had been erased. There was no reference to them, ever, just a steady reassurance that they were safe, that the life they now lived was known by him. He knew how to move, to act within it.

Only with the colors did there seem to be some sort of legacy from the past. They began again gradually, like an absentminded habit. He came home from work one day with a small piece of flint, a copper hue sparring out from the very center into a dark-gray rim. He placed it on the dresser, sat down to take off his dusty shoes. Lor took it up in her own hand, ran her finger along the sharp edge, felt the warmth of him still upon it.

She looked over at him standing as he was beside the window, his face half-lit, half-shadowed. His left hand slowly undoing his laces. His right held against the pane as he stared out and over the chimneys to the sky beyond, a look in his eye that seemed wistful and full of some sweet longing. Lor turned away, felt this was not something she should bear witness to, and placed the flint in a jar for safekeeping.

A few nights later he came home holding a strip of thin parchment paper, rose colored and crumpled, that he opened out from its discarded scrunch, smoothing it with a tenderness of touch. He looked at it for a time, as if it held the answer to something, but then talked of other
things: of the line upon line of bricks they had dismantled that day, of the strength of an arch that held the weight of three floors upon it.

Another time he held a piece of stained cut glass; a handful of green-colored leaves; a torn tartan cloth; later still a chipped china tile laced with flowers of celadon. Lor collected them in places, upon the shelves, upon the walls. Gradually the surfaces became cluttered, the walls covered. The light in the room transformed, accentuated, brightened. Even their voices changed within it, muffled and dimmed as if sound were being exchanged for sight.