Jakob’s Colors (24 page)

T
hey returned from the river that night, after the first attempt to cross, all seventy children and the three of them, Drachen, Moreali, and Yavy. An attempt which ended because of the patrol planes that were circling the skies above, in search, not of them, but of something other. But as Yavy had crouched in the woods, looking out at the rushing river and the barbed wire fence beyond, he was sure he caught on the wind the faint calling of his name, out from across the still waters of the lake that shone to the distant right of them. He felt he could not move, could not take a single step farther from the Institution, crouched there as he was amongst withering ferns and thorny bracken. So it was with great relief that when Moreali said they should abandon flight that night and turn and go back, Yavy did so with an eagerness of heart. And behind him, the silent crowd of seventy children followed in his steps, trusting him, as they had first done so.

Back at the Institution he settled them once again in the ballroom, told them not to worry, that the day would come, tomorrow, or the next, when they would leave this place for white mountains. And then, tentatively, for he was afraid of what he would not find, he crept across the lawn, hugging the shadows of the privet hedges, down to the workshop.

All was silent as he moved up the path toward it. All was dark. He pushed open the door, let a faint gray light streak across the floor, as scents of dry rot stirred in the air. He peered through the dark, strained to make out what, if anything, lay within those four walls.

And then—there they were. Asleep in the place where he had prayed she would know where to find him. He sank to the ground, onto his knees, watching them in the half-light of dawn, watching them with disbelief that they were there at all.

Lor stirred in her sleep. Yavy could not bear to wake her. He waited. The light warmed, brightened.

Her eyes opened. Her lashes flickered. There was a moment's hesitation as she took him in, studied his face, his hands, down to the worn leather of his shoes. A tear slipped from her eye, ran down across the bridge of her nose. A sob resonated from inside her. Her hand reached out for his. He took it. And then she was sitting up, her arms about him, the lines of their bodies entwined. He felt the heat of her. Not a space left between them as they wept and mixed their tears.

“
Me kamav tu
,” he told her, crushing her head against his own. He heard her heart, looked down at her grazed and blistered feet.

“Yes, yes,” she replied. “I love you. I love you.”

A
nd so Jakob gets stronger, fitter. His limbs do not cramp as much as they used. His stomach does not ache. He remembers the feel of grass beneath his feet, the feel of rain on his face, sunlight in his eyes. Longs for them, and in those moments the lethargy of loss is replaced by the vitality of youth. Fleetingly, his thoughts come fast and furious.

“You see,” Markus tells him. “You see how miraculous we are. We can bear the unbearable. Survive the unsurvivable. You can find hope anywhere, Jakob. When I was a boy I used to find it in the snap of a slingshot. For hours my school friends and I would aim and fire at skimming stones. I dreamt of doing so all through the boredom of the classroom. Ran out with it at the sound of the bell. Even now it offers for me the very essence of happiness when I hold a catapult, to bring it up between my nose and eye, a steady hand firing out the smallest and roundest of pebbles. The sound of it in my ears as it spins through the air. The smack as it hits the center of the target.”

It is as if a euphoria has taken them over. A vision of what might be. Jakob is carried upon the wave crest of their optimism. Their stories are full of a world with small bright things.

“It is so,” Loslow adds, a rush of words suddenly. “We must not live under the law of limits. I once knew a man who used to hoard everything and anything. He lived at the end of my road. His garden was stacked high with old prams, ovens, burned-out farmyard machinery, great metal hunks of junk, rusting and wasting in his uncut grass. And the thing was, he was old, so old his back was bent. He walked with a stick, and barely at that. No one ever knew how he got the stuff there, how he dragged it into his yard. He could hardly even get through his own front door. You could see the trash piled up against the windows, dirty rat-filled rooms. The woman next door complained you could hear them screeching at night. He even shat in paper bags and stored them in piles outside. The place stank. Then the war started and suddenly everybody flocked to that garden, stealing his garbage as if it were jewels. They even took his bags of shit and used them as manure for their vegetable gardens. And he just watched, pink eyed and silent. And when his garden was empty, when they'd taken everything and anything, stripped his house and garden bare, he collected leaves, rusted dead leaves that crumbled with his touch. And he collected them with delight, his face a picture of pure happiness.” Loslow falls silent. “I used to think this man was crazy,” he says finally. “But that's not so, is it? He was just trying to make sense of a crazy world. Finding order in the chaos.”

Jakob holds his box to his chest. Yes, he thinks. Scarlet leaves that fade and crumple in the hand. Flowers that bloom, then wither. Bright for a fleeting while. In the end, what is there but these?

If their days are full of a hope, though, the scales tipped upward, at night it is as if everything they have worked so hard to push away in the light hours comes at them again. As if the past were forcing its way through, and transporting them to the place that was the very ending of it all.

For Jakob always there is the tree, that lone tree, worthy of an almost-smile and the life of the man who smiled it, the vision of which comes to him in the dark, in the wind and the rain, tapping against the pane of glass outside his cupboard, as if calling to him. Always there are his brother's eyes, fleetingly hopeful, that look that cut between trust and confusion. The cattle trucks, the rattle and the grind.

He does not know if it is the very worst. Is it, Cherub? he wants to ask. Is it the very worst? Tears sting his eyes. Spill over. So many he cannot dry them with his hands. Hope where there is no hope. Love where there is none. Color when all is gray.

The tree upon the brow of the hill, branches outstretched as if in rapture, lit silver by the passing sun. He can blink his eyes and see it there, magnificent against the steel blue sky. To begin with they were taken deep into the forest, into the thickening trees where they blended into the shadows and were not seen from the field. A crowd of children sat upon damp earth, dirt smeared and grazed, sucking their fingers, choking on their own tears, listening to the distant shouts from their parents held back in the field, their voices already full with the knowledge of loss.

Jakob sat with Eliza and Malutki, their hands in his hands. Grass beneath them. The moon still white in the morning sky. They were in a glade, surrounded by silver bark trunks, small coin-shaped shimmers of dawn light catching where the low sun spilled through the canopy above. The officer was building a fire, gathering the wood himself. He was a tall man with his hand-embroidered swastika of white silk and aluminum wire.

Jakob did not understand him, this man, whose face had been set in an untroubled calm as he led them from the cattle trucks across the field. He had moved with the authority of one who knew that whatever he said would be obeyed and acted upon. But now he sat crumpled, his face wet with tears that he had shed unashamedly before them. Jakob did not understand why he seemed at intervals to clasp his head in his hands, to tear at his own hair and mutter words that Jakob could not understand. He was both enraged and diminished, wayward to himself. Shouting at shadows, then shrinking in mood and stature, venturing, it seemed, into some scene from his past. In those moments it was as if he had absconded from the world around him, set himself apart from what was happening up there by the tree on the mound.

Jakob waited. That was all that was being asked of them. To sit and wait. If nothing else, simply to be there.

F
or the second time they set out to the river and the tall wire fence. For the second time they lifted the barbed wire border to cross into Switzerland, Yavy's birthplace. They muffled their footsteps upon soft soil. A crowd now of seventy-three children, then Jakob and Lor. Drachen and Moreali stood guard at their posts, the former on the riverbank, watching from the longer grasses, the latter behind in the woods waiting for the whistles that would sound from the other side.

The river's edge was frozen, a foot thick at the fringes but thinning as it spread out into the currents. It would crack and break easily with their weight. The children laid themselves flat and pushed their bodies out toward the meltwater. Those out front floundered to find smooth stones and rocks, slippery with river reed and moss. The older children held the hands of the younger, tried to balance themselves one against the other. To the west they could hear the dogs, barks echoing off the surrounding rocks.

Strangely though, in those moments they became children again. Certainly they were afraid, but they could not help the delight of tiptoeing from stone to stone, the thrill of the ice, the sight of the
glowworms on the bosky bank amidst the ferns, shining in the dark, damp crevices. How was it that they were held more captivated by these things than the sound of barking dogs behind them, closing in, becoming louder above the rush of water? Perhaps because all they had known of dogs were wet noses that could be pressed into the crook of their arms, soft tongues that would lick pink cheeks, bringing a child to its knees. Dogs were their allies, their friends. They did not fear their bark.

Such delights to be had in water. The sliding on ice. The slip of moss-hugged rocks. All streams lead to the rivers, all rivers to the sea. As they stood with their feet in the roiling waters they touched a future ocean, the snake coil that cuts through the land, that would eventually ebb out into the sweet saline blue.

Can you swim? they asked one another. Can you?

Can skim a stone a count o' five, a count o' eight, they told one another.

Can catch the largest fish in my hands. A fish wider than a boat.

They talked big and mighty. Told tall tales, where to hear was to believe, and to speak out was to make real. Yavy hushed them. Be silent, he told them. Silent as the dark.

In the woods, Moreali waited for the whistle from the other side to signal their course ahead. Drachen guided them from the banks behind, shrunk down, his bullet wound pressing painfully into his side as he lay upon the ground. Yavy heard his low owl-hoot, instructing them to move swiftly, not to hesitate, not to flounder.

But the dogs moved closer. Then a light beam across the surface of the river, cracking the darkness. The children hid behind big boulders. They lay flat upon the ice, their woolen clothes sticking to the dryness of it. They said nothing. Hushed their white lies and their gleeful boasts.

Moreali and Drachen could do nothing but watch the horror unfolding before their very eyes, one hiding on the banks of the river behind the rocks and crannies and the other shrunk back into the woods.

The dogs did not need sound or sight. They caught the children as they reached the water, rounded them up as their tiny feet felt the
cold and small mouths gaped open in shock. A dog's bark, then its bite. Finding a child, sinking teeth into the tender flesh with slow, deliberate movement, as if there was time enough for rumination. The children screamed with astonishment, then with pain, lingering on that line between belief and disbelief before they stepped over into the cold, dark well of knowing. Then all sound was shocked from them with the realization that this was the beginning of the end.

J
akob is screaming once again in his sleep.

“Jakob,” Cherub shouts. He has never raised his voice before. “Jakob, wake up. Wake up. It has passed.”

“It has not, Cherub,” the boy tells him, his sobs raw in his chest. “It does not pass. When I run from here, it'll be a life I've not ever seen the likes of before, an' I'd rather be dying than doing without my old life. Miss it so much it stops my heart beating.”

“That is true. It will not be a life you know of,” said Cherub. “But there are different lives within one life. Lives that are still worth the living.”

“Even with the aching of the ones you've lost? I fear they'll come haunt you.”

“Would you rather not have it remembered?”

Jakob is silent. He has slipped inside himself again.

“What is it?” Cherub asks him. “Tell me?”

“I cannot. I cannot,” and he is weeping now, the youngest of boys again, curled up and crying into his hands.

“Why? Why can you not tell me?”

“For the fear of it. I fear it is the very worst, Cherub. The very worst.”

“And what of that?” Cherub asks. “What of the very worst? Tell me. I will be right here. I promise you, I will stay right here with you.”

Jakob wrenches himself up from his triangle-shaped floor. Puts his palm against the plaster. Feels the warmth of it, the grain. The splinters beneath his feet. He breathes. Breathes in and out. And at length he finds the words. Words to describe those woods and the numbness that had replaced the fear of what was happening around them.

In those moments, all he could see was the very essence of the world: There were the woodland leaves that rustled, crimson with maple. The brightness of them, torched after the summer, flamed scarlet. A startled web that tore between the breeze blown stems and drifted out of symmetry. A bird that squawked. One that sung. A lone beetle, the color of spilled oil.

He recognized, too, that the officer who had brought them there, who was gathering sticks for his fire, could see none of this, so lost inside his own thoughts was he. Jakob watched the way he stooped as if the weight of his head might pull him to the ground. He looked as though he wished to lie down, perhaps to curl himself amidst dry leaves. To sleep. To dream himself away.

Can you see them? Jakob wanted to ask him. Can you? A line of ants was battling with a ball of termite larvae twice their size. “Strongest creatures in the world for their size,” he wanted to say. “An' the cleverest. They'd collect that larvae for you if you let them. Place it safe in the shade. You could be frying it with a little oil, a little sugar. A whole meal in itself that they could give you.” A mushroom had pushed up through the mulched forest floor, a shaggy ink cap that hung like a frozen fountain. “If you pick this, it turns black an' within an hour it dissolves without a trace, as if it being some illusion an' you not ever seen it at all,” he wanted to tell him. Or ask him, ask him if these were things he knew.

The officer lit the fire at its base, crouched, watched the flames catch and lick at the air. Eventually he sat down, his eyes settling on them, lost to them. His hands were splattered with blood. His cuffs were soiled. His shoes stained.

“I have a mother,” they heard him mutter to himself. “All men lie to their mothers.” He wept then, brushed the tears away from his face with his sleeve and a roughness that verged on anger.

Malutki was gripping Jakob's arm, between his elbow and his wrist. He was gripping it still with the childlike strength that would weaken in the years to come, but that for now could hold the whole weight of himself in the grasp of his tiny fist. Jakob took his hand and waited. It was all that was being asked of him.

They came for them one by one. Two soldiers, the shadow of morning stubble on their cheeks, their eyes holding something close to contempt, something close to wretchedness, told each child that they would be taken back to their parents, who were digging a big hole beside the tree. There was the silent disappearance of one child, then another. They were too afraid to protest, too lost in bewilderment. After a time, those in the woods heard screams. Followed by the dull thudding of bone against bark. They listened to the gradual lessening of sound to silence. Were mystified.

When they came for Eliza, Malutki would not let go of her hand. A soldier began to pull the younger boy with them before the officer looked up.

“One at a time. Take them one at a time only,” he barked, staring up from his crouching position beside the fire, still glazed with tears.

Eliza looked up at Jakob. Her eyes as gray as his, as light. She lifted her foot from the ground, asked him if the grass felt pain.

“No,” he told her. “That grass never feels no pain.”

“Not even when I am standing on it?” she asked.

“Never when you are standing on it,” he told her.

“I'll tell Mamo and Da you're coming soon after.”

“Yes,” Jakob said. “You tell them that.”

And that was the last they saw of her. She walked through the trees, her back straight, toe-to-heel upon the grass. She walked to see her mamo and her da.

Eventually the officer who had built the fire looked up.

“You are afraid also?” he asked Jakob eventually. “You know what they are doing?”

Jakob shook his head. He could see restraint somewhere behind the clenched jaw, the eyes that seemed pink, almost tender.

“You are right to be afraid,” the officer said.

Jakob remembered the cow. He did not know why he thought of it now. How its death had seemed peaceful, almost grateful. He remembered his mother's calm, and the cow's wide-eyed look. He shook his head. He looked down at Malutki, knew that the two soldiers would come for him next.

“
Te na khuchos perdal cho ushalin
.” He heard his father's voice. “Jump your own shadow, my boy,” he whispered. “
O ushalin shala sar o kam mangela
. You are the sun. You are the sun.”

And suddenly everything else in that glade ceased to be. The tree was gone, the green of the grass, the officer, his tears, his smile that was not a smile. All that was left in that forest was a boy and his younger brother.

In that moment, Jakob, a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish, thought that life seemed not to be life, death not death. There seemed to be the existence of neither.

Am I cold? he asked himself. Am I dark? Am I alone?

No, he answered. Can feel that yellow sun beating down sharp through them leaves, lighting up this space. Light all around us. An' I am not alone. Am side by side with our little 'un, and we're beside a man whose ma embroidered his coat with her own cotton and a little loving.

Gently he took his brother's tiny hand, pulled it close to him and uttered in his ear. “Don't be afraid, Malutki. I am right beside you,” he began. “We're riding fast on our horses, holding tight to their manes with that wind whispering sweet nothings in our ears. We turn this way, turn that. Feel that wind in our hair. Off to find them right paths that'll lead us to them blue fields of yellow gold. Lead us to a place so bright we'll be blinded by the light there.
Zyli wsrod roz
, Malutki. We live amongst them roses.
Nie znali burz
. And we don't know of any storms.”

He heaped it on him, all he could think of. And then he held his hand over his brother's mouth and nose as he had seen his mother do
to the cow. He pressed down, held his palm there, airtight and hot, as the small boy's eyes widened. A faint spark of surprise, the stark inquisitiveness of the living. But that was all. There seemed to be no real fear, just a momentary attempt to breathe, a brief fight to live despite everything. The vein on the bridge of Malutki's nose pulsed, a fragile blue, fading as Jakob held his hand down and whispered all the while in his ear. “I love you, Malutki, I love you.
Me kamav tu
.
Me kamav tu
.”

What he witnessed in those final moments was the clarity of the world around him. There was the sky, always there was the sky, but the blunt edge of it was against his brother's face, the indentation of his cheek against the blue, like a photographic negative. As if the world was now inverted. Malutki's eyes were clear as pools. Alert, questioning. Full of a blameless confusion. His hand held Jakob's gently. He held it as he always did, as if they were strolling out together into the blue. And yet, throughout, Jakob saw what he always saw when Malutki looked at him. That the love the boy felt for him was certain and unwavering. He mirrored it back. Felt he had never loved him more.

And then finally, like a river loosing freshwater to a salt sea, all the life that had been, and that could still have been, slipped away to become something other, and Jakob felt the full weight of his brother in his arms, the stillness in his limbs, his unbeating heart. His little brother with his hot rabbit-mitten hands and his soft nightly snores. The vein on his nose had disappeared. The flow had ebbed. Jakob had witnessed the very end of his lessening.

“
Sa so sas man-Hasardem
. All my life. All my heart,” he whispered over and over again.

When the two soldiers returned from the field, their tread sounding through the leaves, they found Malutki dead in his brother's arms. Jakob looked up, came back to the world around him. The officer was still by his fire, tending it, but in that moment he, too, lifted his head. Slowly he took in the scene before him. At first a look of bemusement flickered across his face. But then something else. He looked directly at Jakob, his eyes full of something that neither could decipher. It was
not love, but rather an intimacy of one who knows what it was to kill another. We are the same, you and I, his eyes said.

“So now you are a man,” he whispered quietly. “You have a secret from your mother.”

And in that moment Jakob sensed the bewilderment of the past hour leaving the man whose skin smelled of cologne, whose breath of licorice. There was a visible straightening of his spine. A step back into a place of resilience. He was no longer caught in that no man's land between thought and action. He was invulnerable once more.

“That one,” the officer said, pointing to Jakob. “That one you can put with his parents.” And then to Jakob. “You live like a man, you can die like one. You have earned yourself a bullet.”