Jakob’s Colors (20 page)

T
heir camp lay on the edge of the forest, set amidst a grove of maples. Sporadically the wind blew in short, sharp gusts, balmy and dusting them with leaves of rust and gold. The ground on which they slept was soft with those that had already fallen, the scent of the now buried summer still seeping up through the layered carpet. Around them towering ferns sheltered them as they slept, bowing and swaying in synchronized circles, like some troop of forest guards, while above, wide-winged birds loomed high in the branches of spruce trees, contemplating migration, before taking off into a sky rubbed with thumbs of thin cloud.

“Where do they go, Ma?” Eliza asked as she watched them. “The ones that die. Why don't they fall from that sky?”

“I don't know,” Lor replied. She had only ever seen one bird fall from the air, dropping onto the ground in front of her with a dull thud. Only one. In all the years she'd walked beneath the crescent of the sky. With the very randomness of death, there must surely be many more that died with a suddenness that caught them in flight?

“If I was flying when I was alive,” Jakob said. “I would want to be flying when I was dead.”

Malutki sat on the ground clutching his bare feet, a halo of late sunlight catching his white-blond hair. His shoes lay beside him, the laces tucked into the worn leather sides as she had taught him to do: “A mouse's home where you must tuck in his whiskers.” Taught him to do as she herself had been taught.

They had celebrated his third birthday only three days ago with blackberries from a greener field, way behind them now. He had spat them out for their bitterness, staining his lips maroon. She let her hand rest beside his, her finger to his tiny thumb, which was calloused at the knuckle where he sucked it. She tilted her palm toward him, cupped his hand and felt his skin. He was watching with deep intent a line of ants that were moving across the ground in front of him, each laden with a blade of dry scrub grass.

“They are the strongest creature on the earth, you know? For their size,” she told him, but he didn't hear her. He continued to stare and draw in the soil.

Jakob got up to collect the wood she had asked him to get, the kindling first, then the thick dry sticks that would burn quickly, smokelessly. His hair was dark in contrast to Malutki's, tinted slightly at the tips with the summer sun, his gray eyes gleaming beneath an unruly fringe.

She could not bear to look at any of them for long. She could not differentiate her love from the fear of losing them. She wondered if it would ever be possible to feel one without the other again. To feel love without pain.

Jakob lit the fire from the base, his face tense with concentration. The dry sedge-grass caught alight quickly, coiling a thin line of smoke up through the sticks. He knelt and, bending his head to the fire, blew gently until the flames grew burning the cold and the damp from the wood, crackling and spitting sparks into the air. Lor watched, afraid of the fire's revealing light, but more afraid of the cold.

The sun had almost set and was turning the earth orange. In the dusky half-light everything was a contrast of light and shadows.

“You know it's only them red bits that are heaven, Ma?” Eliza said, eyes sleepy as she curled herself beside the warmth of the fire.

Lor leaned against the fallen tree behind them. It was moss covered and entwined with vines that clung to it.

“
Zyli wsrod roz
,” she whispered to herself. “We lived amongst the roses.
Nie znali burz
. And we did not know of any storms.”

“Tell us more, Ma,” Jakob asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“At those saffron fields, have we filled another vessel?”

“Yes, we have filled another. We are full of contentment because of it. We can hear Gillum and Valour softly chomping, happy for the oats in the fields that we've gathered for them. Happy for the rest and the shelter. As are we. And tomorrow we know which direction we are heading, following the river upward and onward, over the brow of the hill to a valley that knows we are coming and to a field of violets. The Ushalin are far from us now, what with their crisscrossing paths, and their endless wayward missions that take them this way and that, as we pick up our pace and stretch out the distance between us. To be sure they are busy still with their Worshipping Ceremonies, but there is a hesitation before they kneel now, a subduing of their raucous laments. They are less sure than they were before, less justified. They know we are close to the completion of our task. That our vessels are nearly full.”

Malutki and Eliza were asleep before she had finished, but Jakob turned around to face her.

“You'll be there, holding my hand when I die, Ma?” he asked.

“So much talk of dying?” She was afraid when he spoke of it so, afraid there was some legacy passed on from one generation to the next.

“Will you?”

“I hope to die long before you,” she whispered.

He fell silent for a time. And then, “So I will be there, holding your hand?”

“You are always there, Jakob,” she told him. “Even when you are not near me, I feel you there. Now hush and sleep.”

He turned away with his face to the forest. She listened to his breath lengthening. “Jump your shadow, Jakob,” she whispered. “You are the sun.”

For a long time afterward she lay awake, listening to the sounds of the night-forest; the crack of brittle twigs breaking as they fell, the wing-swish of a passing owl. All of them rang with the threat of discovery. She watched a slug moving up the bark, oblivious to them, glistening as the low light struck its back.

When the fire began to dim she fed it with more wood, cautious, watchful, always afraid. Sometimes the fear broke through inside her, like a pebble dropped into a pool, the circles slowly expanding until there was nothing else. It drowned out the entire world of blue and green, her children's faces.

“Yavy, what are you most afraid of?” she had asked him once.

“Them dead hours,” he had replied without hesitation.

“What are they?”

“When that ticking of a clock sounding out in the stillness of the day, and all that there is, is the room in which you standing, that chair, that table, that tick-tock, tick-tock. When everything is just what it is.”

“So to move on?”

“To see a road ahead.” He nodded. “To have a hope, always, 'round that next corner there's the possibility the country of your dreams waiting there. Sure enough that's a reason.”

“Is it never just the sound of the horse's hooves, never just a wagon, a road?”

“Yes, that, too, but that road ahead always seems bright, shinning a light right down to where you are sitting.”

“Always bright?” she had asked.

“Always,” he told her.

It was much later when the sound of something moaning cut into her half-sleep. Something between a cry and a groan. It carried on the air, vibrating against the tree trunks around her. She could not tell where it came from. The darkness had swallowed up all direction.

She stumbled up toward the brow of the hill. Up there the trees no longer blocked out the sky. The stars spilled across the blackness, glistening like quartz. Ahead, on the edge of the hill, she could see the bulk of something lying in the long corn grasses. She stepped forward. Breathed in. Breathed out. And then she saw, with relief,
that it was only a cow in labor. It lay on its side, its matted fur a chalky white, the breath steaming from its nostrils in short shallow bursts. Of its newborn calf, only the head and front legs had emerged into the night air.

On seeing her, the mother bucked, kicked out with her legs, tried to lift herself from the ground. Lor stepped back into the shadows, waited, as she had once done with a bird that had been trapped in a white room. The cow stilled. There was nothing she could do but to return to the camp. She lay listening to the muted groans that carried on into the night, until in the end she fell asleep to the twisted lullaby of it.

The dawn brought silence and a change in the wind direction that carried with it the stench of something foul. She woke with the warmth of sunlight filtering through the sparse canopy onto her face. She listened. A low persistent hum came from over the brow of the hill, a white noise, barely decipherable.

She climbed the slope to the crest where the sound was louder. The air pulsed with it. She saw the flies first, a seething cloud, the oilcloth glint of their wings blacking out the sky and the view beyond. Beneath them she saw the bulk of the mother cow, still where she had left it the night before. She moved closer, flies in her hair, in her eyes, hovering around the corners of her mouth. She leaned over its hefty form, saw the mass of insect legs crawling one on top of the other.

The cow was still alive while the flies fed off it. The calf was not. Its head and front legs still protruded from its mother as they had done the previous night. What was left of the birthing sac squirmed with flies, feeding off the blood that had seeped across the grass and darkened and dried like tar in the sun. Already the birds had pecked out its eyes. Only two dark hollows remained.

How was it possible, Lor thought, in this world of horrors, for nature to match it with one of her own? There did not seem room for the two to exist alongside each other.

The cow was barely breathing. Its fur looked damp and matted. The air rasped from its chest, heaving up and down in sporadic shudders.
Its brown, long-lashed eyes looked up at her, wide and unblinking as if it were slightly surprised by the predicament it now found itself in.

She knelt down beside it, put her hands around the calf's neck. She pulled, pushed her hands into the soft flesh that held it, tried to open up a space whereupon it might slip freely from its mother. The corn stems swayed. The wind buffeted, changed direction, wafting the stench of death over her. She retched. Moved back. The calf would not shift.

The cow would die slowly, she knew that. If she left it, the calf would gradually rot inside it. In the end she chased the flies from its face, then gathered up the edges of her skirt, and pressed it over the cow's mouth and nose, pushing her full weight down upon them. The cow's head jerked upward. Only once. A hoof scraped across the ground, left a mark upon the earth. It lay there, its eyes wide, staring into her own, blinking momentarily, until finally the breath was stifled from it and it lay still.

“Dear God,” she said aloud. “Dear God.”

Always bright, Yavy? Always. I cannot see it.

“Always,” she heard him saying. “No matter what is happening around you, always that road ahead.”

And it was then that she saw Jakob behind her, standing not ten feet away, silently watching. She stared at him, her eyes filling. But he shook his head.

“It's all right, Ma,” he said. “It's all right.”

“Is it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She turned once to look at the carcass of the calf and the cow, with its black tongue lolling from its mouth, its brown eyes still staring, still pleading for she knew not what now.

Then she turned and walked toward her son.

“Sit with me,” she said, pulling him away from the scene. She pulled 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 instructed. He did as she said. “Do you see darkness?”

“No.”

“Do you feel cold?”

“No.”

She squeezed him harder.

“Do you feel alone?”

“No.”

“This is what I think death is. Not a place you should be afraid of.”

Then, Lor taking his hand in hers and pulling him to his feet, they walked back to the camp together, where he set about putting out the still-smoldering fire, kicking dust over the charred pile.

They left their home there, left behind the memory of the dead calf and cow, and took with them the dragonflies mating and the birds that flitted from the stumps and did not drop from the sky. They crossed the woods, kicking pine needles up with their steps, climbing on through mossy meadows scattered with pools of alpine bearberry and late blooms of edelweiss, then on up the hilly slopes. The ground became rockier, lichen covered and scattered with hoofprints the size of cooking pots that formed a trail they could follow.

Lor kept to a pace and the children matched it. When they grew tired they draped their shirts over the thorns of gorse bushes, made shade in which to lie down and rest their aching legs. She let them sleep during the warmest part of the day, woke them before they woke themselves. Then once again they set off.

In front of them the view stretched endlessly, the land flaming with the coming of fall, ash colored, amber and the palest of yellows, disappearing into the distant horizon after months of summer heat and fire. They walked that whole day, the shadows shortening, then lengthening as the sun reached the crest of the sky and began its descent again. They walked, full of a fragile hope that he would be there, for it was all that there was, beneath the polished dusk light, on into the blind distance.

Y
avy sat on the bed, listening. The light outside was navy blue. Only in the east was the sky paling where the sun rose. In the valley the mist had not yet lifted. It lingered above the lawn and over the flat fabric of the lake, pale as milk.

He could hear the creaking of the walls, the shifting of ancient stone in the six stories above him. The paint had long since peeled. The plaster had softened. The stone walls had mottled with a creamy rose-red lichen and crumbled in places. Old nails had buckled in the warped floorboards, stabbed their sharp heads into the heel of his feet. Last night he had pried them up from the shrunken wood. They had come out screaming, as if they had absorbed the cries of those who'd once stayed there.

Above him, the rest of the building loomed like an empty tomb, a gaping hole that seemed to yawn and groan. The grand stairway stretched upward from the cold-marbled hall, a chandelier vibrating from a rusty chain whenever a distant truck rattled past. At night the water thumped through the pipes like an old man's bronchial cough. Yavy found comfort in these sounds. Like the rocking of a wagon, they sent him to sleep.

The room he occupied was on the ground floor and was sparsely furnished with the discarded: chairs and tables and beds that had been abandoned by the hastily departing. It smelled of shavings from the planed slabs of old pine mixes stacked in the far corner and of the kerosene that was once used to oil down the wood.

Despite the warmer months, at night the stone seemed to leak out years of buried winters, and the temperature would become chilling. He and the others heated bricks over the fire, then took them to bed, pressing the warmth of them against their shivering bodies.

At night he dreamt of his children falling from the sky, or drifting downward into some great depth, his hand reaching out, translucent against a wall of water, unable to grasp them as they sank. He dreamt of Malutki's tiny thumb and smelled the scent of them all sleeping beside him. When he woke, the space where they were not was cold. During the day he thought of Lor, searching for memories of her in corners of the garden, in the shifting shapes of passing clouds that bruised the lawn with their blue-green shadows. Her name he could hardly bear to utter. It rested alongside his own. He could not hear one without thinking of the other. Yavy—Lor. Lor—Yavy.

He looked out through the window. The mist had seeped across the lawn, vanishing the tree trunks, so that the leaves seemed to hang eerily over the garden, burning as the summer came to an end. The whole world seemed burned to him these days. Everything was rust colored. But on the lake the water level was high, lapping over the ornate paving and up against the crumbling balustrades. There must have been a rainstorm up in the hills, he thought. Sometimes the hidden valleys muffled the sound of crashing thunder.

How much longer must they stay? he was asked daily. They were waiting for word from the other side. For men in camouflaged clothing who like him would creep out into the night, to lift the barbed wall of the border, for them to crawl from danger to safety. When they had this, it would be time to move the crowd of seventy children who lay still asleep in the early hours, on the floor of the old ballroom, once used as the Institution's dining hall. Halos of heads, lined head-to-toe: dark, fair, red, auburn, straight and curly locked. The marble slabs
had long since been lifted from their foundations so that the children lay on chalky earth, as wan as their skin, smelling schoolrooms from their past, vapored memories of chalk-dusted letters scrawled across a blackboard. It saddened Yavy how quiet they all were—this crowd of gypsy children who had come to know the kind of silence that could save a life.

They had arrived in their straggling groups over the space of a week: one as large as twenty, one as small as five. Tottered in through a broken gate in the walled garden around the back of the vast house and wandered up to the ground-floor windows, where they had found their
martiya
—their angels of the night, whose signs they had followed across hills and snow passes. Found him carving wood with a knife beside a well of clear water.

“Mr. Yakov,” they had pleaded. “Mr. Yakov, we are here.”

And now it wasn't that they never smiled—they did, and played. The girls braided one another's hair with flowers from the garden as the boys played ball with pebbles from the lakeshore, and occasionally they sang songs from nursery classes and lullabies from bedtime slumbers. But always with the quiet guilt of the living. For every laugh, every expression of joy, seemed to trample over those whose laugh would sound no more.

Yavy could not stay with them long. He could not bear to know their faces if the outcome were to end blacker than this. He felt the weight of this responsibility in his hands. The skin there crept with a numbness.

He wandered down the corridor from his room, found Drachen in the kitchen, slumped in the worn leather chair by the fire, a frown cut between his eyebrows shaped like the number seven. He was nomadic even inside. Sleep didn't come easily to him. He snatched it when he could. He lifted his head and by the heaviness of his movements Yakov could tell he had only recently administered the morphine he took day and night. He sat, the wound in his side still infected beneath the dressing, the bullet lodged somewhere deep beneath his ribs. You could smell it from the far side of a room, sweet as a fermenting pear.

Below, in the cellar beneath the basement, a windowless warren of arched stone that ran half the length of the building, they could hear
Moreali singing. It was their hideaway should they be found, but it was an awful place. The damp there seemed to seep up through the concrete floor and rot upon the surface. Moreali loved it for the acoustics. He lit candles and closed his eyes when he sang, transporting himself from the rabbit warren of a world around him.

“Go,” they had said, in the first few days of knowing him, when his relentless humming had threatened to turn them all insane. “Go, sing. It is enough. Find somewhere where you can do it.” So he had. And now the songs of Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, morning after morning, came floating up through the beams and the plaster, transporting them all into pockets of his home country: the Piazza Mazzini, a tiny square hidden in the twisted streets of Castel Focognano where a fountain flowed from a bent stone tulip; a hotel in San Casciano in Val di Pesa where he'd sung from an ivy-clad balcony on the first floor; Harry's Bar in Venice, where he had stood upon a red carpet laid across the cobbles to transform the ordinary into the ornate, at a time when bingo parlors were one of the most profitable businesses in town, when porcelain-skinned prostitutes read the poems of Fóscolo, and the nights were full of ghosts that flitted past the end of the narrow streets.

“I still love and loathe that he does this,” Drachen was saying as the sound drifted through the air vents. “This morning I give him until noon. I have awoken bitterly. I'm likely to be a brute of a man.”

With Drachen there was little mystery, unlike Moreali, who except when he was singing was quiet and contained in voice. Yavy was grateful for this, however mournful Drachen's company could sometimes become. The older man said what he thought. Held very little within himself, and so long as one learned how quickly his moods passed, his company was quite tender.

Drachen sighed an almighty sigh and then slurped loudly from a cup of tepid coffee, made from the grains that they reused over and over again, until in the end there was just a remnant of a taste, more a memory.

“What's with your sighing, Drachen?” Yavy asked him.

“I was thinking that I was missing the sanctity of a place I could call home. I wait for this day. For a day when I can return there. And then I realized I could not picture this home I wait for. That perhaps it no longer exists. There is a longing always for a destination. A destination where this all ends. But there is no end, is there? This is now my home, as much as any other. I have lived with fear for so long, I can barely remember another way to live. Perhaps this is as it is meant. Perhaps this is living.”

“Perhaps,” Yavy said. “Perhaps not.”

“That is the optimism of youth talking. To be young is to hope. I fear my hope is waning. At my age, I have a choice—I can choose to hope, or choose not to. You have no such choice.”

“That morphine makes you morbid.”

“That morphine makes me speak my mind.” Drachen sighed again. “God damn it. Yakov, how can the grass outside be so dry?” His words were slightly slurred, the vowels drawn out. “When it feels like the lake is coming into the house? It is so extreme this place, too cold at night, too hot in the day. I can smell damp everywhere. I found a dead fish on the lawn yesterday. We are sinking into the lake and yet the vegetables are rotting with thirst. When will it be time? How much longer must we stay?”

Yavy did not know the answer. He, Drachen, and Moreali drew rough maps across the surface of the wooden table with chalk from the ballroom, then laid down stones for where they knew soldiers kept watch, calculated the distances between each, argued who was right and who was wrong.

Drachen's bullet wound had come from one such crossing, a few months back, when one night he had been helping three Polish Jews to cross the river. He'd waited for the whistle from the other side. But he'd been caught between the barriers when the searchlight had streaked over the river and lit them up.

That they would go at night was the only thing they all agreed upon.

“How much longer?” Drachen asked again.

“Not long,” Yavy assured him. Not long, he assured himself. “They'll come soon enough.” But by
they
he meant Lor, Jakob, Eliza,
Malutki. For it was they he waited for; they with whom he needed to cross that line from dark to light. He was sure they would come soon; that they would find him. He was sure she would know where to look. And until then, he believed that if
they
were no longer alive he would feel it. He tipped back his head and stared up at the tea-colored ceiling. The mist was lifting, tearing at the seams.