Jakob’s Colors (21 page)

“D
o you hold places in your head?” Lor asked Yavy as they walked home one day from the stoneyard through the evening shadows. “Lives, perhaps, is a better word?” She had several. Lives in which to venture and linger a little while. She did not know if it was relative to the individual. Whether the fragile had fewer, the strong more. Or perhaps it was the frail who needed to hide more frequently? “Do you?” she asked him.

“I hold places in my head, yes,” he told her.

“Do you wish to live in them?”

“Often.”

“Now?”

“Not now,” he said, and lifted his head to look at her. Briefly she felt the back of his hand against her own.

“Yes, not now,” she agreed, but moved away, awkward with it. “Might we again?” she asked quietly.

“We
will
again. Truly. Sadly. When we are in need of them.”

They were on the street where De Clomp stood and already they could hear the music from the corner several hundred yards away, the upbeat tempo, the blare of a swinging saxophone, the quick and nimble
fingers gliding back and forth upon the keys of the old and much-played Manualo piano. They stood, not knowing quite what to say.

“They'll be dancing inside,” he said.

“Can you dance?”

“Can you?”

“Yes, I can dance.”

He grinned.

“You are surprised?”

“Yes.”

“I am too quiet?”

“Yes.”

They reached the door to their building, where the loudness within could be felt vibrating against the wood as Yavy pushed himself against it.

“Let me wash the dust from me first,” he said. “Alfredo will holler if I come in looking this way.”

At first, while she waited, she hovered outside the entrance, allowed herself to glimpse through the smoky windows the sinewy bodies within. They were playing Duke Ellington, and for a moment she let herself remember the parties of her past, so many parties, where she had watched the adults from some darkened corner of the garden, spinning and tapping their heels, arms linking arms, hands clasping hands, ruby and diamond clad, a stolen caress that the caresser hoped would not be seen. So much skin against skin as, decorated and luminous, they spun each other around and around. And from that place beside shrub or tree, forgotten beneath the frivolity, Lor had mimicked them, had danced as the night drew on, awkwardly with her own shadow.

She pulled open the door to De Clomp. There were several people dancing, others already leaving empty tables and empty chairs, gradually shifting them aside to make space for movement. There seemed to be no shyness in the room. The music had outstripped it, made it irrelevant beneath the rhythm. Alfredo shouted across the musty interior when he saw her. She was grateful for the sight of his familiar face, took up a stool at the bar near him and beside Elpie, who was
without his hat. The old man patted her leg and grinned with the pleasure of seeing her.

“So, you are here for the bewitching hour,” Alfredo said. He studied her face intently for some time.

Near them, a couple got up to dance, both of them short, as if they were together because of their height. Lor turned her head to watch them. They seemed to blink back at each other with a self-conscious reserve, but with every twist and turn their limbs moved more freely, the beat softening their shyness. Lor watched their newfound confidence, smiled at it.

“You are all misty eyed and forgetful, I see,” Alfredo observed.

“She is in love,” Elpie muttered.

Lor did not reply.

“You do not know it?” Alfredo asked.

She looked back at them and nodded. “I know it,” she told them.

“And he, too. You know he, too, is misty eyed?”

Yavy appeared then, in the doorway to the bar, his hair and face clean, flushed with the speed with which he'd washed. She watched him seek her out amongst the crowd, saw the tension in his face slacken, as if simply seeing her reassured something inside him.

“Perhaps not that,” she murmured at length. She felt afraid suddenly. She had seen the wrong turning of love.

Yavy raised his arm in the air, but then seemed to hesitate as if sensing that some sort of shift had taken place since he had left her. His look was questioning. Across the throng of dancing heads they stared at each other.

Yavy moved toward her, navigating himself with the slight shift of his shoulder, the soft force of his hand. Lor looked down, saw his shoes before she saw him. They were worn and scuffed, covered still with a film of stone dust, the stitching open at the side of his right heel.

“You need new shoes,” she muttered, and looked up. He was staring at her with that look of his, defiant, timeless.

“Yes,” he said.

“You need new laces.”

“Yes.”

He waited for her to say something else, but she could not speak. She felt stripped bare, fearful he might, in time, see the void inside her. “Please,” she begged eventually. “Please.”

He took her hand, pulled her up from the bar stool, held her close enough for her to smell the scent of him, still of outdoors, of wood smoke and something other: grass, soil, both rain drenched and sun dried, lake water both deep and shallow. The scent of him now had become a sort of representation of everything known. She could feel his breath in her ear, the warmth of his cheek that was almost touching hers. They stood like this for one entire song. Stayed with this slow, touching stance that seemed to her not quite dancing, not quite standing still. All she was aware of was the slightness of things between them: his shoes beside her shoes, a strand of his hair that touched her temple, his thumb against the ridge of her shoulder blade, slowly circling.

“
Me kamav tu
,” he whispered. He pushed his lips against her ear, swayed in the awkwardness of something that was to end between them as something else was to begin. “
Me kamav tu
,” he said again. In the lamplight of late evening they could have belonged anywhere.

They danced that way for only one song. When it was over Yavy took her hand, pulled her out and around to the door that led to their room. They climbed the stairs, wise with what was to take place, then stepped over the threshold and stood, ill at ease, listening to the muffled vibrations from downstairs. Outside it was raining. It had not rained for weeks. The dry top layer of sediment in the upper gardens and parks of the town was loose, caught easily in the torrents that rushed downward, bringing scents of wet soil on the wind. Their window was open, the thin drapes drifting like some half-visible ghost. Lor rushed to put her head out and hang it under the sky. The cloth on her sleeves and chest darkened and changed form, sticking to the outline of her skin. She drank the rain, as she had seen him do, felt the metal of the sky in her mouth.

“You are happy?” he asked, watching her from the center of the room.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You are no longer afraid?”

She looked back at him. “Of being found?”

“No, not of that. Of being alive.”

She pulled herself back inside, stood listening to the rain. She looked down toward the rush of water in the gutters for the answer. Then she turned to face him. “I am as afraid of being alive as not being. Is there one without the other?”

“Don't be afraid,” he told her.

“How not to be?”

He moved toward her, as if in this he could make it so. And somewhere in the middle of that movement there was a small and silent-enough space for him, Yavy, to draw her close. She felt the line of him against her. The bones of his pelvis, the hard plate of his chest. He did not touch his lips to hers at first, but held them a hair's breadth from hers. She felt his breath against her face. He moved closer. Kissed her. His lips cold, his breath hot. Her first. Not his.

Afterward she looked away, her face burning.

He cupped his hands about her face, kissed her eyes and the soft pulse of her temple.

“Can I?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

He did not undress her. He laid out the quilt from his bed upon the floor, laid her down upon the softness of it and lifted her skirt. She felt his hands upon her, stonecutter's hands, rough and calloused. His shirt was wet now, like her own. He moved over her, bore down not the full weight of himself, but kept his arms taut, holding himself above her. Then she felt the sudden sharp cut as he broke her. She felt the wooden boards beneath the quilt. Her spine rubbed across the ridges, the skin on each knot singing. She heard the rain outside. A fountain of it pouring into the guttering. Then her name, Lor. The way he said it. An admission. He was spent quickly as if, in this act alone, his boyhood pushed through, the too eager yearning that made swift his desire. He shifted slightly to ease his weight from her. She heard his breath in her ear. She felt his heart beat against her own. Pressed him to her, wanting not to be empty of him.

It was only afterward that they saw each other naked for the first time. He undressed her, her clothes like water fern as he peeled them away. He
undressed himself, hid a shyness, covered it with solicitude, as they lay side by side on the bed, one honey skinned, the other pale as milk. Her hand rested against his chest, cupped as if something undiscovered hid in her palm. Her damp face lay tilted against his jaw. He stroked the fan of her hair as they fell asleep in their room of cluttered colors.

Outside the pale light of morning rose in the east. The rain had stopped, gradually, and now there was smoke from an open brazier seeping up into the air. There was the sound of carts splashing over the wet cobbles, and later the thrum and hoot of a rushing motorcar. Swifts woke on the upper eaves and flitted off above the rooftops. The air cooled and moistened, damp with dew. Lor and Yavy slept, breathing softly, the lines of their bodies entwined, until the light woke them.

When he took her again there was a tenderness, her skin like silk, their fingers moving over each other with a lightness. He explored her with a bewildered pleasure at such freedom of time and touch. When he found courage enough to look at her, his eyes were questioning, almost sorrowful, as he took her in, a slight frown that resonated across his brow as if to see her hurt him. He moved slowly. The soft hill curve of her pelvis against his belly. The cloud of her eyes. She was trembling when it was over, lay spent and curled in lonely comprehension. Felt the cold of the wind through the open window on her damp skin, as if the husk of her old self had been discarded to reveal a new layer, startled and touched. It took time to bring words back between them. To return from touch to sound. As if in those moments before they had loved each other like a mutual suicide, all despair stripped from them, moving toward a place of light, that ended all past pain. They lay baffled by the simplicity of a biology that had bound them.

“You are my
romni
,” he said at length. “My wife.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Your wife.”

And it was then that she, Lor, her name unfinished and barely audible, understood that to him at least she was the sort of someone who could light up a room.

A
day when Jakob can feel the heat from outside brushing in beneath his cupboard door and the scent of cornflowers on the breeze. Markus gives him a small parcel. It is wrapped in a smooth sheet of cowhide and bound tightly with a leather lace.

“For you,” he says. “It is a gift.”

Jakob unbinds it and looks down at the contents splayed upon the sheet. There is a knife, a blade that folds in against a smooth wooden handle that has been varnished and inlaid with a line of silver either side. There is a piece of flint, a small drinking flask, a fork, an arrowhead, a long oval sharpening stone, and a round compass cased in brass.

“For the forests?” Jakob asks.

“Yes, for the forests.”

“To survive?”

“Yes, for you to survive.”

Markus rests a hand upon Jakob's head, keeps it there. “There is a man who goes by the name of Moreali,” he says. “He crosses people over at the border. I have sent word, he knows you are coming and he will help you, Jakob.”

Jakob feels the weight of Markus's hand on his head. Wants to feel it there forever.

“Help me where, Markus? This is my home.”

“Always.”

“I tell you, I have no other.”

“You told me you are half an Englishman. Perhaps it is the half that will save you. One can have many homes, Jakob. Remember, day by day. Time changes everything. Makes everything. Undoes everything. You cannot fight it, only learn it, accept it.”

“I am afraid.”

“I know. I know. I am afraid also. Afraid for the loss of you.”

Markus hands him the flower, indigo in color, that they had seen when he took him to look at the sky. It has been pressed and dried. “For your collection” is all he says.

Jakob holds the flower in his hand, smells it. There is a slight hint of its scent, more a memory than a reality. And that is how the past feels like to him now. As a dream, but one he will always wake from.

Even in his cupboard he can recall the stench of the cattle trucks, the memory of animal hide and dung, beneath the stench of human sweat and shit. He is inside them once again, sitting in silence, cramped upon the floor. They have stopped somewhere. He feels his brother's heel in his ribs, bare toes in the crease behind his knees. He smells the grease of his sister's hair next to his own. Night is falling. People shift in the airless space, peer through the wooden slats. Jakob can just make out the silhouettes of passing people, shuffling like silent shadows, thin as rope.

“Give me, God, two big wings,” the woman next to them whispers. “That I may fly away.”

When eventually the doors slide open, the sun has already risen, a white light in their eyes, blinding them.

“Out, everybody, out,” the German who had shot the man for his Y-shaped tree shouts, his voice brittle in the stillness of outside. “
'Raus, 'Raus, schneller
. Join the back of the line. Faster, you filthy shits. Follow the man in front of you.”

Jakob clambers down from the truck, his knees stiff. He wonders at the soldier's words, where they had first come from, who had first
uttered them, who had followed, who had led. Eliza grips his hand. He feels his father's hand on his head, the heat of it.

“Don't be afraid, Jakob,” his father says, his voice weak and wavering.

Jakob looks up. The trucks, five of them, drum in front of him, engines running. He looks past them, to the right and to the left.

“A tree with stark branches,” he whispers. “Lead white, charcoal at the base where the bark is still clinging, and behind it the green of the grass.”

His mother is beside him, with Malutki in her arms. Jakob grips Eliza's hand tighter and they join the line that is shuffling out across the field and up toward the Y-shaped tree. Ahead, an officer stands on a mound, staring down at them. He is a tall man, the eagle and the swastika on his shoulder hand-embroidered with white silk and decorated with aluminum wire. His skin smells of cologne, his breath of licorice. He looks right at Jakob as he passes, and what Jakob most recognizes in his eyes is a sadness that seems as anguished as his own.