Jakob’s Colors (22 page)

A
fter that first night together, it was as if something had been awoken inside him, as if with the nearness of her, and the revelation that she felt as he felt, he dared to reveal himself. Yavy walked with a sense of boundlessness, with the careless delight of discovery, idiotic with the rowdy happiness that seemed to accompany first love. It spilled from his stride over into the collecting of his colors, where for the first time he would study them openly in front of her, would not hide the fascination he found in each one.

Until, one day, he brought home a rock. A rock that he carried in a wooden barrow, rattling it down the cobbled street, the sound of which she could hear before she could see. He lugged it up the stairs, stopping at each landing to collect his breath. She felt the denseness and the weight of it as he placed it down upon the wooden table. It lay there, commonplace, matte gray, and jagged in places, nothing remotely unusual to catch the eye.

“You know what it is?” he asked Lor. He had that look, that look of light about him. She shook her head, waited patiently for him to tell her. He was hardly breathing, as if these moments before were of significance, to be noted as the very beginning of something. Finally
he took up his chisel and hammer, took his time to place the former in the very center of the rock before he smashed down upon it with the latter, jarring his arms with the impact, hitting once, twice, three times before he knocked against the tender grain that split the stone in two. Only then did Lor see the color at its center, sea blue and brilliant, glistening with pyrite. Yavy placed one half of it upon the windowsill where the afternoon sun rays fell across the cut plane.

“You see?” he said eventually, his voice low. “Three colors in this one stone?” He traced his finger over the place where the stone was at its darkest. “This, they calling
rang-i-ob
. Means the color of water.”

Next he traced his finger along the contours of turquoise that splayed outward across the center. “This,” he said, “is
rang-i-sabz
—the color green. And this,” he said, stroking his finger around the third, that was tinged with streaks of violet, “is
surpar
. Means red feather. The color of fire, that deepest of flames lying at the very core.”

She watched his face, the way his eyes bored into the stone, as if the secret it held within would hold the answer to whatever it was he was seeking. In these moments, it seemed to Lor that to him this was all that there was, this blue, this clear hue, unspoiled, undefined. It seemed to speak to the very depths of his soul.

“What is it?” she whispered.

He turned the stone around in his hand as if he had not heard her.

“Lapis lazuli,” he said finally. “From the country they calling Afghanistan, from the valley of Sar-e Sang.”

After this he began to hang about the apothecary's near the stoneyard, studying the jars, the ointments upon the highest shelves. He talked to chemists, doctors even, sought out books on minerals and pigmentation, lugged them home, studied the pages with unflinching concentration, and for hours she lost him to them. And then, when it seemed he had absorbed everything he could on the subject, when he had devoured, read and reread, questioned and requestioned, he began.

Each day, from work, he brought home his tools: hammers, chisels, stumbled in with a large metal tub full of them. To find paint in a lapis stone was delicate, he told her. It was a complexity of minerals, of sodalite and lazurite. In the best grades there was more sulfur, which
shimmered violet in the stone, and in the worse grades more calcium carbonate, which dulled it gray. To make paint, all of these impurities had to go. He told her it was like making bread. For three days he lovingly kneaded a dough of finely powdered lapis resin, wax, gum, and linseed oil, his hands moving rhythmically, molding with tender deliberation. Only then did he coax out the blue. He placed the dough in a bowl of wood ash and water and began to squeeze and press for hours at a time until the silver ash slowly transformed. Then he dried it, setting it down upon the warm wooden floor, in the center of light cast through the nine-squared windowpane, and moved it as the sun moved, like a dial, until it had dried into a small powdery mound of lapis blue.

But he was not content with that first batch. Nor the next. Time and time again he set out to extract the brightness of color that he knew lay within the grayness of the stone. Obsessively, over and over, seeking out that perfect pressing until finally, in the low late light of an afternoon, when his hands were stained blue, the dye caught in his nails, in the cracks of his palms, he stepped back.

“What is it?” she asked him. “What is it?” He was pale. A sadness seemed to hang about him. It filled the room, palpable, like something she might touch. Suddenly he seemed terribly young.

“There,” he whispered. “The sea. The sea, as you meant to see it.”

Afterward, everything blue held within it some veneer of lazuli for her, as if it, too, had been molded and ground and soaked from rock and touched with a distant sorcery. Watching, it was as if something had alighted in him, a shy possession of sorts, an act reminiscent of something witnessed a long time ago, too long to be remembered, but engraved somehow inside him. His was a blind guide, ghost-written from the past. A passionate discourse unfolding between him and this distant memory, arcane and mysterious, like some bright star on a clear night, navigating his hand, his heart, to work its magic, to turn the dullest of stones into the most brilliant of hues. All that there was, was this blue boundary that had to be possessed first, then discovered, eventually unveiled.

Gradually their room transformed itself into a laboratory, bottles of liquids and iron salts, labels with names of chemicals she had not
heard of before: potassium ferrocyanide, sodium carbonate, ammonia, citric acid, borax, gelatin. Rocks of malachite were strung up over tubs of red vinegar, the copper changing within hours from rust to green. He ground indigo leaves, pulped and dried them to a powder, mixed them with palygorskite and heated them in copal resin to a rich dark zaffre that could color a night sky at that moment of dusk to dark. He fired ochre to the almost-black of midnight. Cooked white lead to the yellow of noon. Cooked it again to the red of dusk. He soaked saffron with egg white, transformed the scarlet stamens to citron golds. Discovered the magic of salt. Mixed it with mauve-tinged azures, violet reds. Boiled roots, and thickened the dye with turpentine and alum. He found vermilion sunsets in mercury sulfide, fired them to an orange cinnabar. He ground berries to a pulp, discovered purple when he mixed the juices with acid, ultramarine when he mixed them with alkaline. He ground up malachite, found cyan and celeste, celadon and olive. Ground up madder, found crimson, ruby, and alizarin. Crushed azurite, inhaled lungfuls of deep blue, as if the air were now visible.

Then he bound these colors, set them, with gesso, plaster, linseed oil, sap from cherry trees and resin from sweet pines. He melted wax. Dabbed at his creations with paintbrushes made from fine horsehair, and swept colors across reams of white parchment paper, over and over, until he'd sought out some arcane perfection. His pigments were luminous and brilliant. They did not fade in the sun, in the wind or the rain. They lifted skies and made rich the blue-red earth.

Y
avy pumped a few spouts of water from the well into a tin bowl and shaved without soap. The blade snagged his skin. The well stood beneath a small alcove under the ice-clad stone arches. He remembered he had watched Lor there once. From afar, as she had looked down into the dark depths. He had watched the curve of her nose, tilted slightly upward, her dark lashes, the tendrils of hair falling haphazardly about her face.

“God help me,” he was sure he heard her say. “God help me.” The first words he'd ever heard her utter, before a shadow appeared through one of the stone arches and she was led away. And that was when he had decided that if not God, then he.

Back in the kitchen Drachen was staring out through the window, one hand playing with a packet of precious Gauloises.

“When I first came here in the winter, I used to dream each night of swimming in the lake waters,” he said. “How deep do you think it is?”

“Deep.”

“I will miss swimming in the shallows once the winter comes again. How will we bear it?”

“Of course we will bear it.” Moreali flicked his hand dismissively as he pushed back a chair from the table. Even sitting he was tall. He didn't fear his height. He didn't hide it. He knew the luxury of being able to sit up straight. He stood now, moved his long limbs to stoke the fire, faltering as he did so, like some mismanaged puppet. His singing gave a balance to his frame. When he didn't sing, he mastered the art of falling down. He tripped and fell through life, but with a blitheness, always recovering himself with a smile, a sweet acceptance that the living of days was a haphazard exploration and there was to be no escaping the tumbles that came one's way.

“When winter comes we will embrace it,” he said.

Drachen pulled a cigarette out from the packet of Gauloises, crumpled now, almost empty, and lit it. He inhaled deeply. The smoke seemed to disappear somewhere inside him for the air was clear on his exhale. He opened the stove door, warmed his hands against the dying embers. He smelled of the kerosene he'd doused his hair in, to kill the lice.

Yavy went to the ballroom, stood at the open door and watched the children inside. Most of them were sleeping, lulled into lethargy by the loss that washed over them the moment they woke and did not disappear until sleep found them again. He did not wake them.

The fence they would have to cross beneath that night was eight feet high, crudely alarmed with a line of hanging cans, each filled with a handful of stones. There were two barricades, lit by hurricane lamps, fifty-five yards apart. The first was guarded by Germans, the second by Swiss. Their dogs on long chains barked during the day and howled at night. The guards silenced them with bullets fired into the sky.

People went one way, cigarettes, loose tobacco, and saccharine the other. From the far side someone would whistle, and from the near those waiting would crawl to the wire. Quickly they exchanged their sacks, their stowaways, their refugees. Not a word was spoken, only a handshake, whereupon those helping retreated back again into the woods.

But before the wire, even, there was the river. It gushed or trickled depending on the density of rainfall up in the mountains. Those
embarking on escape had a choice: to cross when the river was full, the sound of rushing water hiding the rattle of cans when they crawled beneath the fence, or to wait until the waters were shallow making it easier to cross over emerged rocks to the other side. People had been shot on these crossings, shot in the back, with their eyes looking up at the mountains beyond.

Yavy closed the door to the ballroom behind him. Walked back out to the garden and stared out across the lake.

“Where are you?” he whispered. Where are you? He had lost the sense of them now.

L
or was sitting at the foot of the bed, her bare feet resting on the floor, her eyes closed. Yavy was at the head, leaning back against the wall.

“What's in them thoughts of yours?” he asked, the sound of his voice surprising her, for she had thought him asleep.

She opened her eyes. “You'll think me strange,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“I was thinking of mushrooms,” she replied. “Truly, that is what I was thinking of. How sad it was that I did not know which mushrooms were edible, which ones were poisonous. Often, in the woods, in the meadows of England, for you walk the country pathways as a pastime there, I would think this. Why in all the years of wandering I had not striven harder to learn and recognize which ones I could pick and cook.”

“I love that you fret so.”

“You love it?”

“Yes. I love it. The littlest things, of such consequence to you.”

“It's true. I do fret.”

“Always. But not now. I can teach you 'bout them mushrooms.”

“Yes, I know that of you.” She thought for a while. “What happens after this?” she asked at length. “What does love become? Do you know?”

“No.”

“I have seen it doesn't stay this way. That it becomes something else.”

“I have seen it staying this way. I love you. It don't be feeling like a choice.” He pulled her to him then, held her close. “Don't be afraid,” he whispered. “Don't be afraid of this.”

They were silent once more. She had sensed of late another shift within him, a fraught restlessness that manifested itself in hours of wakefulness when he would stand staring down into the dark of the street below, with that look of his that was halfway hopeful, halfway bereft.

He had found courage enough to take that first set of colors to the market. He and Lor had set them out on the three-legged stool and they had stood behind them for an entire day. Mostly people had passed without interest, bewildered perhaps by the strangeness of the wares, but in the end a local artist, Julien Biedermeier, had bought them all for more than Yavy earned in a week of stonemasonry. Julien, who was as renowned for luring pretty young girls to his attic studio as he was for his paintings of them.

“Where did you find lazuli here?” he asked, his voice soft, almost inaudible above the clatter of the market around them, but Yavy would not tell him.

After that, Yavy had sold more, if not to Julien himself, then to his friends, a rowdy group of artists who drank more than they painted, but who dreamt of colors such as those he made, and who readily bought them as quickly as he could produce them.

But it was not enough. Despite the fact that his colors could inspire the most incendiary of passions in those who found them, it was not enough. She knew that. There was a lacking, a wandering to his thoughts. Just as she had first seen him, standing that night drinking the rain, there was a look to him, an otherworldliness that seemed to separate him from the place in which he stood, so that he was never wholly there. It was that part of him which he kept hidden. He took to staring out of the window for long bouts of time, out across the
chimneypots and past them as far as he could see. He would stand there as if all else had been forgotten, as if all else, other than the distant horizon, ceased to exist. What was it he looked for? She was afraid to ask.

“Please?” she pushed eventually, as they lay there on the bed. “Tell me what it is?”

He became very still. She lifted her head. His face was pained, his brow fraught as if something weighed down upon it.

Finally he spoke. “I need something from you, but I don't know how to go asking for it.”

“Ask,” she told him.

“That road,” he said. “That road where I first come from. I need to find them old routes, to follow them seasons to the sources of those colors. But I worry it's too much to be asking of you, to live a life you not lived before. To travel with a horse, with a wagon, to be laying your head down in a different place each night?”

“You have asked,” she said. “You needn't fret so. You are seeking something?”

He nodded. “I not knowing how else to find it,” he said. “Most likely we'll be chased on from here in the end. If not by them, then by some other. Had that all my life. This moving on. Of no matter. Happens so much we end up needing that road anyways, longing for it like we under some spell we cannot lift.”

“Then of course. We can do this. Live a gypsy life. Happily we can do it. All children have dreamt of it. Did you not know that?”