Jakob’s Colors (25 page)

J
akob came out of the woods alone eventually. Clutched a small wooden box in his hands. A small blue stone in his pocket. Left a small boy beneath the trees, curled into himself, sleeping not to wake. Left a small girl up by the foot of a white tree that was no longer white. She, too, sleeping not to wake. The other children lay heaped around the trunk, still now, unmoving. Quiet as the mice their parents had spent their whole lives asking them to be.

“Ma,” Jakob called when he saw her. “Ma.”

She was beside a mound of earth, the scent of it on the breeze, warm and damp, suffused with dew-drenched grass. She turned. Stifled her sobs, pulled him to her.

“All that we know, Jakob. Remember all that we know.”

Her tears fell upon his face. They fell like warm rain. He did not wipe them away, caught them in his own eyes, tasted the brine of them on his lips, and thought of the sea snails who wept their violet tears. How he and his father would collect them after the rise of the Dog Star or before the first days of spring, diving down to the depths of a shallow reef, rising through streams of light to catch the colored tears that did not fade, that grew brighter beneath the hot sun, brighter against the gusty wind.

“Not this. Remember, not this,” his mother pleaded.

His father had seen them. Had put down the spade that he held in his hands. Jakob felt the grip of him, his arms around his chest, his shoulders, the firmness of his hand upon his head. Felt the two spaces where his brother and sister were not as the three of them clung to each other.

Afterward they dug their own grave. Those without spades used their bare hands. A crowd of gypsies digging dirt. Even Jakob—a half-blood gypsy child of Roma and Yenish, small boy, barely eight, scraped back the soil, his fingers raw from the stones and roots that they struck. Some who dug fell, and were beaten until they stood. Some never stood. The sun rose in the sky behind the tree, did not stop its ascent. It was the very end of a hot summer. Its residue lay burning on the branches. The horizon lay flat as a pan, blue gold and as distant from them as it could ever be.

They were told to stop digging. Ordered to climb from the pit. All but ten, who laid themselves down, side by side, stranger to stranger, a husband beside his wife, a wife beside a mother, a mother beside a friend. There was no protest. No fight. Just the stark recognition that all was lost and that what was left to be endured was the very ending of it all.

Jakob clutched his parents' hands tightly; his father on his left, his mother on his right. Their hands trembled. Grass grew under their feet. The sun was white in the sky.

“
Nie lekaj sie
—Don't be afraid, Jakob,” his father said, his voice weak and wavering.

“I am not afraid, Da. Can see a tree with high branches. Lead white its trunk, streaked with ochre, and behind, always the blue of the sky that is full of that lapis lazuli, the sound of a lullaby. Bluer than it's ever been, Da.”

“Yes,” his father said. “Bluer than it's ever been.”

The soldiers lined up above the pit. One of them threw the stub of his cigarette to the ground. He did not tread out the fire and it singed a pale flower black. The officer with his embroidered swastika stood with his feet at the very edge of the pit. Jakob heard the first gunshot, smelled the cordite in the air. He heard the next. And the next.

“Bury me standing,” a man whispered near them. “I been on my knees all my life.”

And then the whack of metal against bone, the smack of a rifle butt breaking the thin skin that hung like dirty cloth. He fell. Dropped down, down until the ground caught him.

The gunshots continued, a white noise amidst the song from a lark, flitting through the flaming forest.

The three of them were the last to climb down into the pit, the last to lie side by side. Beneath them some of those already shot were not yet dead. Those who lay upon them ran the back of their hands across their cheeks, held their hands as they breathed their last breath. They lay down on top of strangers. They broke already broken bones, forced blood from already bleeding wounds—blood on skin. Skin on blood. Layer upon layer.

Once again to Jakob it seemed that life was not life, death not death. For in those final moments it was not the horror or the brutality of death that endured. All that there was in that pit, by the Y-shaped tree that reached for the soaring sky, was the sweet ache of love. For in the final moments of life, it was the last thing anyone would feel. It was the price for it.

Jakob clutched his box to him, squeezed his mother's hand, felt her eyes on him.

“
Nie konczy sie tutaj
—It does not end here, Jakob,” she whispered.

She looked across at his father then. Jakob watched her smile, watched her close and open her eyes. Her blue to his gray. She had never looked so alive.

“You remember the shoes?” she asked him. “The pile of lost shoes, for a month of Sundays?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you ever win? Did you find every pair?”

“Often we won,” he told her. “Often.”

His mother pressed her head against Jakob's. A shadow fell over them. Jakob looked up. There he stood above them, the officer with his embroidered swastika and his nuggets of shiny aluminum wire,
his face set in calm concentration as he moved along the line, firing a single shot with each step.

“
Zyli wsrod roz
,” his mother whispered. “
Nie znali burz
.” Then suddenly she was silent, ashen skinned. The grip on Jakob's hand loosened, then broke. He felt the cold where her palm had been. She let go of him. She let go of him for the last time. Left her England and her life in his hand.

“I was there, Mamo,” he wanted to tell her. “I was there. Holding your hand when you died.”

On the fringes of the pit above him a bee hid in a flower. He waited, waited for his bullet that he had earned because he was now a man. His back against the damp of another, his eyes to the sky, and then suddenly he and this officer, whose skin smelled of cologne, whose breath of licorice, whose name he did not know, looked at each other. Jakob caught the indecision in his eyes. The gun that was pointing at his head quivered slightly. Jakob looked right down the barrel of it, wondered at the dark coil within. But then the officer pulled back his gun, moved on one step, and fired. Jakob felt his father jolt beside him, and from his lips exhaled a last sound. Strangled and faintly absurd, as if when death finally came it was still a surprise. As if his life itself could not let go of living. Jakob felt his father's blood on his skin, warm, gummed as sweet sap. He lay there smelling cordite, feeling the wind on his face.

Later rough soil was thrown down, piled upon them, hiding them, forgetting them. Jakob felt stones hit against him. He felt them strike his skin, his ribs, bite into the soft tissue at the side of his head. The faces he knew disappeared, bit by bit, until all that was left was layers of stones—stones on stones on stones.

And then there was silence. Time shifted, moved from the moment that was the very end, to one that was not. A moment that was indefinable. Without a name. To the rest of the world they now ceased to exist. They were as words uttered over and over until they ceased to mean anything, just a sound swirling around. They were the disappeared. The vanished. The forgotten.

Pe kokala me sutem
. He slept on the bones buried beneath him.
Bi jakhengo achilem
. Became without eyes in the dark depths. Wished only to sleep and not to wake. To be as those around him. Already he had lived long enough. Already there was nothing left of him. Even the fear had withered, like desert grass.
Te merav
, he thought to himself.
Te merav
. May I die now?

It does not end here, Jakob, he heard her voice replying.
Nie konczy sie tutaj
. It does not end here. He clutched his box to him. He wept. He waited, barely able to breathe in the pocket of air in the crook of his father's right arm. He shifted his head in the airless space, crushed beneath mounds of loam and silt. He breathed in grit. He waited until the air was too stale to breathe one more breath, and then finally he pushed his arm up through the cloying earth. He scraped aside the stones, the splintered roots, soaked with blood, until his fingers felt the wind. And then, through a crack in the earth, he caught a glimpse of the blue lapis lazuli sky.

He lives.

Why, he does not know.

Why him, he cannot bear to ask.

When finally Jakob falls silent, Cherub pushes his finger through the hole in their wall. He does not take his hand away that whole night. Jakob curls himself into an exhausted sleep upon the floor, and in the morning, when he wakes, Cherub's hand is still there, the small of his index finger pushing through the hole in their partition.

O
n the floor of the workshop Lor and Yavy had lain in each other's arms until the sun had risen and streamed in through the windows, lighting up shafts of dust pale citron. The light of it woke their children. Jakob saw his father first in the fog of his own sleep, rubbed his eyes, and sat up in the uncertainty that what he was seeing was something to be believed.

“Da,” he called. “Da, have we found you?”

Yavy sat up, let the tears stream his eyes.

“This day?” Jakob asked. “This day, we have found you?”

They had rushed to him then, Jakob, Eliza, Malutki, all three of them piling from the floor onto him, breathing in his scent, the leather and the wood of him, the roughness of his stubble on their silken cheeks, taking in the sound of his voice that soothed the steps they'd walked away, erasing all the fear and doubt of the past weeks. There was laughter ringing out like it had not sounded for an age, exalted, faintly frenzied with relief.

“Da, you are more grubby than me,” Jakob told him. “You smell of them trees along the way, of all those farmed soils we walked on by.”

“Da, are you smaller, 'cos I am bigger?” Eliza asked him. “My feet are the size of my arm, from wrist to elbow.”

They had questions, of the square, of Borromini, of the mountains they would climb tomorrow. He answered them where he could. Made up what he couldn't; Borromini he had left in a field, chomping trampled grasses with a herd of lazy cows; their wagon he left where they had left it, intact beside the bosky banks, full up and brimming with the things they owned.

“So where are we heading, Da?” Jakob asked. “What will it be like, this place 'cross them snowy mountains?”

“This place is my birth land. We calling it Switzerland. We'll be heading on up into those mountains and down into them yonder passes. Will wait there patient, in a life full of easy living, 'til it's time to head down to that salted ocean, to ride a boat 'cross them choppy waters to your mother's land. A place you knowing as England,” Yavy told them. “You say it clear to yourself. You call out the name of that England.”

Jakob did so. Felt the sound of it on his tongue.

“Ma, what's it like, the England?” Eliza asked her, and they watched their mother's face as she reached down deep into her past, quizzical with images she had long suppressed.

“In England,” she told them, “there is the greenest grass. It is famous for its grass, and there are meadows that are awash with wildflowers and woodland paths full of bluebells and anemones.”

“What are anemones?” Eliza asked.

“They are windflowers,” she told her. “They open only when the wind blows.”

“What else is there in the England?” Jakob asked.

“There are sandy beaches full of colored parasols and swarms of humanity. And there are shingle beaches where you'll not find a single soul, where tall white cliffs drop down into a milky ocean, and smooth round pebbles rattle onto the shore, so loud your own voices are drowned beneath the sound of them. We'll make flower chains
and elderflower cordial. I'll buy you Raleigh bicycles, Vimto, Marmite, and Bird's Custard to try.”

“What is custard?” they asked. “What is Vimto?”

“It is a drink full of bubbles that sing inside your nose. We'll buy a radio and dance to ritzy songs. We'll buy a painted wagon and a Welsh cob horse, whose hooves look like boots for the snow. We will ride down country lanes strewn with cowslips, sleep in woodland glades and green fields. Feel the English rain and the English wind in our hair.”

“How is that rain?” they asked. “How is that wind?”

“Like apples,” she told them. “Fresh and sharp.”

Later, when Eliza and Malutki had fallen asleep with these pictures in their heads, half-smiles of anticipation on their lips, Yavy took something from his pocket and handed it to Jakob. “Have this,” he said. Jakob looked down. A tiny stone of bright lapis lazuli lay in his palm. “From beyond the seas,” his father said, stroking Jakob's bangs from his eyes with fingers that were faintly stained, that still held a memory of blue about them. “A keepsake. For all that we are,” he told him.

“For all that we are,” Jakob repeated.

And then, much later, when Jakob's own soft snores sounded out into a honey dusk, syrupy with shadows, and so still, it was as if the world itself were holding its breath with the portent of the night to come, when they would creep from one country to another, from war to peace, Lor and Yavy lay facing each other, side by side, hip to hip, breathing green shoots of breath onto the other.

“Is pain the price we pay for love?” she whispered to him.

“Yes,” he replied simply. “Pain is the price.”

She was silent for a long time. “It is worth it,” she said at length.

And later.

“'Long that road,” he told her as a tenderness passed between them, her skin like silk, their fingers moving over each other. “Round that bend. Build a mound of shoes a month of Sundays. Dismantled to be built again. Call on that horse and wagon, toward the setting
sun. Call on that horse and wagon, toward the rising sun. Eyes on that bend. Heart beating with expectation.” He held her, kissed her lips, her clouded eyes, all despair stripped from them as they moved toward a place of light that ended all past pain.

“And that thing we never living without,” he whispered. “That thing we call
Apasavello
. The Belief. In life, in the hope of it.”