Jakob’s Colors (3 page)

J
akob is curled up on sacks of cabbage that stink and ferment beneath the warmth of his sleeping self. Still unwashed, still covered with another's blood, his breath is shallow and scratching in his chest from so many nights of cold air. He sleeps deeply, after a day's toil, as the market packs up around him, a clatter of wooden boards and metal frames, dismantled with the precision of habit. He sleeps so deeply that he does not stir, not a single limb or sleepy shudder, and so he does not experience the gradual shift from sound to silence as the sellers leave, the disappearing trundle of cartwheels, the ebb of voices heading for a place they can call home. He does not experience the shift from company to solitude, the cooling of a sunlit day to a honey-colored dusk. The shadows lengthen, hang like sleeping phantoms. The light fades. The night wraps around him, camouflaging him on his soft makeshift bed. He hugs his box to him. The stone in his pocket presses into his skin, imprinting a mauve bruise of time passing.

He sleeps dreamlessly, and then, as the sun slips back up over the hilltops and the dawn shadows creep finger-like over him, there is motion once again. People return to start another market day; the clip-clop of horses' hooves, the steamy blow from velvet nostrils,
the unpacking of carts, the opening of shutters, the clatter of metal and wood, the clank and grind and the tap, tap, tap of a hammer, all transforming the empty space back into the market of the previous day, back into the maze of cluttered stores; silver trinkets, teapots, incense, and jewelry that drip like water drops from wooden brackets as scents of sandalwood, sun-warmed leather from the trappings of old saddles, and the blue smoke of cigarettes fill the air—all of it overladen, to hide the fact that this is a wartime market, striving to live as it did before, despite the lack of fresh produce, despite the overriding stench of decay and sweet fermenting fruit that seeps up from the almost-empty food stalls.

Laughter sounds as the sun slips out from behind a cloud, sending shafts of pinholed light down through the gray sheets above them, and everyone believes in that moment that “There is a heaven after all,” a sign at last amidst the wreckage of the present day. And it is then that Jakob moves for the first time, shifting in his premorning sleep, with the mention of the word heaven. He rolls onto his back, blinking back the fog of sleep, oblivious at first to his whereabouts. Then he's alert, upright once more, as if to be caught sleeping were a crime. He buries his box beneath the cabbages, climbs down off his mound, his clothes stiff with congealed mud and grime. He sticks out in the crowd with his shoes of sackcloth; a sad clown of a boy. The loss that he feels lies beneath his skin like a pool below the finest layer of silk. The slightest tear and it flows over and around, the weight of water above him. His hands are jammed into his trouser pockets to save his fingers from the chilling wind. He hovers beside a pile of bruised cucumbers, longing to lick the skins, then moves on to the next stall, where a toothless woman hooks a rat onto a rack already heavy with pink-skinned rabbits, broken necks lolling their heads against their spines.

He turns, accepts the cup of goat's milk she hands him, and lingers, drawn toward the warmth of human touch, with a longing, a memory, for something more.
Me kamav tu
. I love you, and a hand tender across his brow. He longs to lean his head against the woman's stained apron, but instead he walks away, on past the man in the next
stall, who is shoving two live chickens into a wooden crate so small they can hardly breathe.

Jakob searches the ground, stooping again and again, picking the butts of heel-trodden cigarettes from the mud. Later he will steadfastly unravel each of them, collecting the tobacco in tiny mounds and rerolling them back into cigarettes; a ratio of ten butts to one new cigarette. He collects the discarded apples, too, the half-rotten ones, will separate the bad from the not so bad, selling them at a fifth of the price of the fresh green and scarlet apples in the stalls.

Now, though, as he crouches down, his face close enough to smell the earth, his hands stained with rancid fruit, he feels the vibrations beneath his feet, the heavy rumble and grind of something that is machine, not alive, and with this sound the dread sweeps through him, as sudden as hot to cold, dark to light. He drops his knees to the damp ground, curls his spine inwards, small as an egg. Only his head he lifts, and through the legs of wooden stall tables he sees the line of trucks approaching from the gravel road toward the market square, spitting up stones and grit in the deep tread of their wheels, engines hammering through fumed clouds. They fill the gray slate sky, the fractured light that had seeped from heaven. They block out all other noise as if the very world itself were hushed by their arrival. They come to a stop in a well-practiced line, and beneath the sound of engines left running, growling like dogs, fifty soldiers, maybe sixty, he cannot say, climb down into the mud.

“Do you have papers?” Walther is asking, standing behind his stall of discarded junk that in certain lights shines like some metallic jewel. “If you have none, you should go now.”

But Jakob cannot move. From his place beside the cabbages he is watching the officer who has climbed from the third truck in the line, the eagle and the swastika on his shoulder hand embroidered with white silk and tiny nuggets of aluminum wire. This man whom he has witnessed with his head in his hands. This man, who had built a fire, who had collected the wood himself, teased the flames, and who, when the tears in his eyes had spilled down his cheeks, had not wiped them away.

Jakob is back in that field, looking up once again at the tree. He sees it upon that green mound. Leafless, twisted and shaped like a Y. Sees it bone white in the moonlight, silver against the sun. And his brother's sweet face. Malutki, his eyes wide, fleetingly fearful. Hot hands . . . hot breath, despite the dawn cold . . . and that look that cut between trust and uncertainty. “It's all right, Malutki. It's all right,” Jakob had assured him.

Jakob crouches lower, unable to draw his eyes from the face of this man, who is fingering his stubbled jaw as if to reset it from a journey's slumber. It takes only the distance from the truck to the nearest stall for the officer's body to awaken; for the faint military flourish, the straightness of his spine, the frenetic activity that seems to accompany his every move, to return. His eyes slide over the scene before him, minatory suddenly with an alertness that seems to take in everything and anything. The soldiers around him are stocking up, filling wooden crates with whatever they choose at random. The stalls are ravaged, one by one, emptied with a rough efficiency that leaves behind a mess of the discarded; the old, the bruised, the battered, a debris of the unwanted.

“You work here, boy?” The voice sounds above him, a golden voice, husky and resonant as honey.

Jakob keeps his head down, pushes his quivering fingers into his pockets, and nods.

“You work here with whom?”

Jakob cannot find his voice. There is only silence inside him.

“He is here with me,” Walther says, standing tall behind his stall, and from his breast pocket he pulls out his papers. The officer takes them, looks over each word. His skin smells of cologne, his breath of licorice. Finally he lifts his head and stares at Jakob. He hardly blinks.

“You are afraid?” the officer asks eventually, handing Walther back his papers. Jakob still says nothing. He cannot.

“You are afraid?” the officer asks again, sterner, determined of a response.

“Yes,” Jakob whispers. Tears spill from his eyes, run hot down his filthy cheeks.

The officer shakes his head. He looks almost sad. “Men are never afraid. You're a man, aren't you? Aren't you? So then. Stand up. Stand up and show me your papers.”

Behind him the soldiers are clambering back onto the trucks that are weighted down now with what they have taken. The market is coming back to life. There is the chatter of dismay. Fears, tenuously voiced. The toothless woman is weeping loudly for the loss of her rabbits. The officer turns, irritated by her sobs, moves angrily up the aisle toward her.

“You must go,” Walther whispers. “Without papers? You must run. Don't worry. I will find you. Wait for me in the woods. You know how to make a smokeless fire. You can survive anything with a smokeless fire. Now go.”

Up ahead the woman has ceased her crying and the officer with his hand-embroidered white silk and his nuggets of aluminum wire has stopped in the center of the path. He stands with his back to Jakob, unmoving, as if he has stopped to consider something.

“Go,” Walther whispers. Jakob drops down onto his stomach, lays his cheek against the cold earth. He crawls forward, pushes with his elbows along the sodden ground, the skin on his knees scraping with grazes that he won't feel until much later, as behind him the trucks are circling in clouds of grit, the ground once again vibrating.

Only the officer still stands in the market, turning now, his eyes searching, questioning, perhaps remembering. Jakob crawls to his cabbages, forages for his wooden box, moves on past the makeshift tables, the earth fungal scented and full of orange, a Cremona orange, that hides a miniature world of insects that know nothing of the world above them. He longs again to be an ant. For insignificance to save him.

“The best violins in the world, they come from a town in Italy,” his father had told him once. “Cremona, they calling it. Varnish, the color of a tiger's pelt, a shimmering orange, the recipe for it gone, lost centuries back. People of that town been searching for it ever since.”

“To paint their violins with?” Jakob had asked.

“Yes. Because it don't just make them violins shine, this Cremona. It makes them sing, too, an' the locals, they believing that once they
discover the secret of their instrument's color, they can find the soul of any song.”

“The boy?” he hears the officer shout, still honey voiced. “Where is the boy?”

Jakob keeps on crawling across the orange soil.

“The boy?” he hears again. “
Wo ist der Junge
?”

Then there is a shout and a whistle that splits the air with its shrillness, and once again soldiers are clambering down from their trucks. There are cries and the rush of moving feet. People are fleeing, broken from their ordered lines, jarring and knocking against tables, against stalls, heading, like Jakob, for the dark of the woods.

Jakob crawls on, faster now, dragging the earth with him, thick pads of it collecting on his knees, on his elbows, on the scuff of his sack shoes.

“So you on Gillum, and I on Valour,” he whispers to himself. “With Malutki behind me and Eliza behind you. ‘Hold tight to your horse's mane,' she says to me. ‘Grip clumps of his coarse hair in your hands. You are brave and strong in this land that is not known by you or me, or anyone before us.' ‘Keep safe that vas of indigo,' he tells himself. ‘Keep safe that vas of malachite green. Head on toward the west and that setting sun that'll shine the life back into you.'” As shouts sound behind him that he blocks out with his words.

Then he hears the gunshots. The echo cracking against the air. His screams die inside him. He turns his head to the earth. He cannot bear the sound of them. He keeps on crawling across the soil that eventually changes to grass, the brightest green, growing thicker the closer he gets to the woods. He is no longer sure which forest he is heading for, or which field he is in. This field or the one he left behind him. He looks for the Y-shaped tree on the mound. Sees no such tree. There is only the market and the sight of others fleeing behind him. But it is that field he returns to now. That field. That forest.

Back and forth, back and forth, he had run, from the woods to the grass fringes, several times, seeking out
their
scent on the wind. Could he smell it? Could he? He was not sure. Was no longer sure of anything. When did solidity leave him? When did the sky fall down?
Step by step, yard by yard, he felt the distance between him and them opening up, the fallen leaves etching out the space between them. A lone bird flew above, crossed his path, and then flew back, low across the blood-wet grass, a flash of metallic green on his open wing. All my heart's there, he had whispered into the night. All my life. He did not shed tears. He could not. Only the wind cut into his eyes and blinded him as he sought to head onward, strangely to nowhere other than a place that would put more distance between him and the one place he could not bear to be distanced from. Malutki, he sobbed. Is it the worst? The very worst?

Behind him more gunshots sound. And with that the woods disappear. The field. That place. He crawls onward, the market behind him once again, and Walther, waiting somewhere in the cluttered stalls.

You must run, he tells himself. You need to leave. You cannot linger.

“
Zyli wsrod roz
,” he whispers. “They lived amongst the roses.
Nie znali burz
. And they did not know of any storms.”

Finally the trees hide him once again, until he is but a shadow beneath the leaf-blown branches. He lies still, his breath rasping. His heart fissured. He cannot bear to think of the man whose last words to him had been full of the fight for survival and the promise of hope. He cannot bear to wait for the man whom he had known only for his apple and his kindness. Cannot bear for him not to come.

Te den, xa, te maren, de-nash
. Run if you can. Always if you can. So in the safety of the forest darkness, once again Jakob, a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish, pushes his weak-limbed body up from the ground and, with his wooden box clutched in his hand, a stone in his pocket, begins to run.

T
hat night, after they had climbed the stairs from De Clomp before it became too crowded, after they had spent the day moving with the squares of sun-warmed light that fell through the window of their room, Lor lay in bed looking up at the ceiling that was covered with mold dots. Below she could hear the musicians in the bar, smell the wood smoke from the fire that seeped up through the floorboards, permeating their clothes, their hair, their skin. The bed still smelled of the someone who had occupied the room before them. A smell of stale beer and garlic sweated out in the night.

Jakob lay beside her, not quite asleep.

“Gillum and Valour,” he mumbled. She stroked back the hair from his face, looked down at the soft curve of his wind-burned cheeks.

“In the morning, the dust has settled,” she began. “So you have no need to be a camel any longer. It is warm, but not too warm, the wind strokes all the burning heat from the air. We rest for we are weary. We sleep long past sunrise and wake only when the rays burst from behind the shade of the trees around us. We break up the bread ration we have for that morning and share it out.”

“Is there jam?” Jakob asked.

“Do you want there to be jam?”

“Yes. Something sweet.”

“There would be no jam, but there might be honey if we can find bees in the Forest of the Light-Footed.”

“Why Light-Footed?”

“Because there are no sounds in the Forest of the Light-Footed. Not from creatures anyhow. Just leaves in the trees and maybe the occasional wingbeat from a bird passing over, but they are barely perceptible.”

“There are bears in this forest?”

“There are bears, but they are silent bears. Only the air gives them away, the sudden gust of their hot breath as they roar with rage. If we feel that we must ride, ride like we've never ridden before. Can you do that? Are you afraid to do that?”

Jakob shook his head. “No, Ma. I am not afraid at all,” he told her, and all she could see was the fear in his eyes.

“We are faster,” she told him. “Faster than the bears. Faster than the Ushalin. They who linger on the lines and crosses and who must stop for their Worship Ceremonies that without fail or pardon they have to partake in. They must find the exact moments between day and night, between dark and light, to say their prayers. For they venerate neither. It is the void of things that they worship. A nothingness that moves like a great wave of black ink rolling in from sea to shore, washing over everything in its path with the color of disintegration. At the hours of worship they stand in their ranks, a crowd so vast it fills the slope of the highest hill. They wear robes made out of wind, headdresses of rain, boots of ice. At the hour of dawn, when they look at the sun they are blinded to the day. At the hour of dusk, when they look to the moon they are blinded to the night. It keeps their will resolute. Keeps them unseeing. They see the world only in monochrome.

“After the dark cloud of their worshipping has passed, the flowers come out crumpled in the Ushalin Lands, ragged and withered. They bloom without color. If you look at them against the clouded sky you cannot see them. If you water them they wither more. The wan, gray sun there burns them to cinders. The wind strips the stamens
away. Then the Ushalin make their sacrifices of dry leaves and the carcasses of dead insects to a God who cannot see or hear or speak. Who makes known his feelings with roars and grunts and by thumping his fists down hard upon a bed of rock, his left for pleasure, his right for wrath, again and again until the whole of Ushalin reverberates with the sound, and those worshipping him will feel the pounding deep inside their skulls. Their heads will be full of the pain of it for weeks, for years.

“That is why we are faster. Because to sustain such bleakness takes great effort. Our task is easier than theirs. Far simpler, because what we seek was there from the very beginning. What we seek is, without effort or restraint, present before our very eyes.”

“Yes,” Jakob whispered, almost asleep now. “Before our very eyes.”

“But we will be riding against the wind in this forest,” she told him. “And this wind, though it is slight, can drive you mad if you let it. So close your ears. Put your hand over your nose and mouth. Don't let the wind drive inside you and it will not touch us. It will not harm us if we do that. There are always ways to stay safe—you know this? Always if you learn them and seek them out, then there is no reason to be afraid.” He did not answer her after this, and she knew she had lost him a while back, that he had not heard about the wind as he slept.

She turned toward him, curled her body against the warmth of his back and tasted the brine of dried tears on her own lips. They would move on soon, she knew that. Tomorrow? The day after? There seemed to be no place safer than the next. To stay was to be found. To run was to be captured. There was no ending to any of it. To find him. That was all that there was.

“Yavy,” she whispered, just to hear his name. “Yavy.”

Over and over she went through the last moments of seeing him, rewrote them, redreamed them. But always in the end when she opened her eyes, nothing was changed. He was still gone.

She lay on the bed and listened to the music downstairs in the bar, tried to ward off the soporific drone that was filling her ears.

“Can take you from here, if you wish it,” he had told her all those years ago, in that place they had first run from. The scent of him;
wood smoke and something other: grass, soil, both rain drenched and sun dried, lake water, both deep and shallow. “Been here long enough to know they gonna knock the life out of you if you stay.”

“How? How can you?” she had asked.

“I can. If you wish it.”

“I am afraid of you,” she had told him.

He had bowed his head. When he had looked up again, he was smiling. “Remember,” he had said. “Nothing staying the same. You not knowing it yet, but you can trust me.”

“You are Yavy,” she had said.

“Yes. I am he.”

And then he had gone, defiantly striding out from the shadows and out across the moonlit lawn of that place, and she was left knowing that her life was broken either way, and that if he had the will for it she would go with him. Strange what life became. She was not who she had set out to be. Was not then who she was now. There was cotton where there had been silk, braids where there had been silver clasps and diamond bands. Mint and lavender, which she picked, softened and rubbed across her skin, where once there had been perfumes compounded with expensive vanillin and coumarin. She dried her children's eyes with an apron she'd sewn with her own hand, and wore an amulet around her ankle that she could not take off for the half belief of what would become of them all if she did not wear it. She knew how to read the signs left along the road, the arrows and the lints from tree to tree. Could recognize the
speras
: a straw band tied to a branch or post, its narrower side pointing toward a road that was safe, its thicker end to one that was not. Four grooves—four carts. A circle carved in the wood of a welcoming door. A rag tied to a branch of a telegraph pole, a bone wedged into a crack of tree bark, a broom left on the ground. Signs of safety, where gypsy folk might pass.

All three of her children had been born in a wagon, had been lulled to sleep from the earliest age by the rock of Borromini's hooves. At night they fell asleep to the wind whistling through the wooden slats. At day they woke to scents of horsehide and wild garlic. Lor had made beads and strung them around her children's necks, told them if they
became invisible, that way, she'd always find them. She learned how to twist and break a chicken's neck, was both sickened and full of self-congratulation. She wore skirts that flared, wore beaded bracelets on her wrist, braided flowers into her hair. She was like a photograph that had been taken twice, one negative casting its shadow over the other, blurred, each picture not quite correlating to the other. Who was she now?

She grappled for understanding. There were words missing. She could not remember the name of any English tree. There were vast holes in her story like moth bites in a tapestry, and the moments of clarity that she had, the threads of memory that drew her onward to the next, moved like a snail's silk trail, unraveling too slowly.