Jakob’s Colors (5 page)

“Cigarette, darling?” Vivienne asked brightly, swinging her hips as she approached them. She reached out, touched Andrew's arm. He endured it. Her nails were not as long as the woman's in the blue pleated dress. He pulled out his cigarette case, silver and discreetly
initialed, and turned briefly to light the cigarette in Vivienne's mouth. She leaned forward and looked up at him. Her lips twitched with a smile. Andrew did not see it. He turned away, put his hand back in his pocket, and continued talking. She flinched, was wise, almost wise to it.

They were discussing tobacco. Lor's father owned the Trimborne Tobacco Company in the West Country's Tobacco Valley, and several tobacco shops around London, York, Bath. Now they were branching out toward the Continent with a new establishment in Paris.

“Oak-paneled shelves, mahogany floors. Anything you can touch in them, you can smoke,” her father was saying.

He had taken Lor to the factory for the first time that spring. She'd stood beneath the dark vastness of it, watching black smoke billowing from the towering chimneys above, and then had peered through the iron bars of the elevator, which clanked and creaked, the floor beneath her vibrating as the shaking cables heaved it up the shaft. Down below lay the cavity of the factory—a Dickensian cave of crumbling stone, the machinery rattling with ancient decay.

“Some of this stuff is nearly a hundred years old,” her father had said, his voice echoing around the walls. He sounded younger than he normally did, oddly eager, alert.

Lor remembered how he had heaved back the metal doors and how she'd breathed in, tobacco fumes stinging her eyes. The back of her throat had burned. The room in front of them was huge. Workbenches that ran from one end of it to the other, rows and rows of hunched backs working in the summer heat. He had led her onward and upward, to giant machines that rolled out cigarettes in their thousands, to pasting floors, sorting floors. He had wandered down the aisles of each, straight backed. She'd never seen him look so tall.

“Ah, tobacco, a subject Andrew never fucking tires of,” Vivienne was saying to John, rolling her eyes in despair, half-mocking, half-resentful. Her cigarette was now a line of ash, unsmoked and
smoldering. John was swilling his drink around in his glass. In the garden the light was changing.

Vivienne dragged finally on her cigarette, then turned away, the smile struggling on her lips as she searched the throng. When she found Lor her face broke with relief and she stumbled toward her. The honeysuckle that hung from the high back wall flattened in a pocket of wind. Lor watched a woman's hat flutter from her head. Auburn locks fell down her back. Her father's head turned.

“Want to run away?” Vivienne asked, leaning against the trestle table and crossing one foot over the other. Her cream shoes were grass stained like her back. Lor did not reply. “I want them all to go now. Need some peace,” she said, stroking the hair from her daughter's face, but more as a show of resilience than as a gesture of affection.

The garden emptied. Bethany, their housekeeper, was clearing away plates of discarded food, her hair tightly twisted with the narrow rollers that she wore every night, removed every morning. The man in the black dinner jacket was collecting glasses. Five o'clock. The light like melting butter. Andrew turned around in a patch of it, alone now.

“Well, that wasn't so bad,” he said, his face lit up. He shines, Lor thought. No one left to see it but she and her mother. Vivienne couldn't take her eyes off him.

“Wind's changing,” she said finally. “I'm cold.” She moved closer to Andrew. “Lor and I have dined on honeysuckle. We shan't want a thing for dinner.”

He looked at her then. Seemed about to say something as his eyes wandered over her face. His hand shifted. Seemed almost about to reach out to her. But then he stared back down at his empty glass, let his hand rest on the stem. The shadows on the lawn lengthened. Starlings were descending, pecking at discarded crumbs, their wings tucked by their sides like folded handkerchiefs.

“I'd better get on,” he said eventually. “Got some things to clear up before tomorrow.” He flicked his cigarette stub onto the grass,
ground it out with his shoe, and walked briskly across the lawn and into the house.

“Mommy's pretty, yes, darling?” Vivienne whispered.

“Yes,” Lor replied.

“Oops, too much to drink,” her mother mumbled. “Everything's giddy. Come on, let's make tea, sober the old gal up a bit,” and she pulled Lor by the hand across the lawn and into the house.

A
s he runs, his tears cut against the cold wind. Jakob—a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish. Barely eight years old. He moves fast, pushed by fear that keeps him running, night after night. Pushed by loss that slips into the raw meat of him, into the pulsing of blue veins, the slab of his liver, the sponge of his right lung, stabbing there with a pain that is the only thing he recognizes. He can smell the woody scent of fallen pine needles seeping up from under his feet, and the stale heat of past days released from the soil's dampness. Forest moss softens his steps in places and cloves of garlic spit scents upward with his tread, stinging his eyes. He runs through a blur of tears and hears the sound of his own breath in his ears.

When he rests he makes his smokeless fires, warms his hands and feet and heart, and sleeps under layers of leaves. Dreams again of clawing at the warm earth, his mouth clogged with clay, his eyes with darkness. He never sleeps long. Fear wakes him. Loss wakes him. At intervals he hears the trickle of a shallow stream, the song of water rushing over smooth pebbles that is familiar, soothing. He tries to keep the sound of it in his right ear, for want of some direction, for the certainty that he can quench his thirst should he need to. All streams
lead to the river. All rivers to the sea. Would the sea save him? Could he walk forth into the choppy waters, until his eyes filled and blinded? Would he be forgiven if that was his choice? To run and not stop until the waters found him?

Not yet. Not yet. In the past they had buried their dead in these forests, buried them along the way, laid loaves of bread upon their chests, sprinkled berries over their heads. People grew old beneath the ancient trees. They said prayers and heaped earth upon them.

When you burying the people you love, the earth changes
, his father had taught him. You could hold, in a single handful of soil, sun warmed, damp with precipitation or silver with frosted ice, all the love you ever felt for that person. There were scattered pieces of so many lives beneath the turf. He should not be so afraid. He sees the shine of two eyes glinting out of the blackness; a hare perhaps, a bullfrog?

He listens for the croak and sporadic whine. Hears something indecipherable. A cry. Strange forest noises that will remain nameless in the black of night. Stay with me, he wants to cry. Stay by my side. Simply the light of another's eyes, the companionship of it, even if the only existence shared is the experience of sight. Is there comfort in that? If not, then what? Then what?

“
Nie lekaj sie
—Don't be afraid, Jakob,” his father had said, his voice weak and wavering. “See the colors. Tell me what you see, Jakob, my boy?” he had whispered.

Jakob looks, seeing movement everywhere, shadows where there are no shadows, shapes where there are no shapes. Even the crack of his own feet over brittle twigs punctures him with the conviction that he is caught, and every moment that passes he imagines iron-boned hands grabbing him.

But night after night they do not find him. He succeeds at least in this single task. And then finally, from sheer exhaustion, he finds a dwelling in the ground, a crack of rock and soil. He falls into it, stumbles down and lays his head on the still sun-warmed rocks, the gold dust of lichen sticking to his cheek. Forest slugs slither over him, moist like his sister's kisses. He licks the salt from his stone. He sucks the cold out of it and imagines it is water.

“Mamo?” he hears his own voice pleading, claustrophobic with longing. “Mamo?” And the answer. Always silence.

“What do you see?” she had once asked as he closed his eyes and tilted his face to the sun. “It does not have to be darkness. It does not have to be cold.” She was talking of death as she held him in her arms.

For two nights and a day he lies in the dampness of the dwelling, clutching his box, his stone, hiding in the darkness and the fog of his own sleep, racked with dreams of nostalgia, waking always with the pain of recognition that the nightmare is the life he is now living.
Ceri pe phuv perade
. As if the sky has fallen to the earth.
Jag xalem
. He eats fire.
Thuv pilem
. Drinks smoke.
Thaj praxo
. Becomes dust.

But on the second morning a voice wakes him.

“Are you alive?” a man asks softly, and when he looks up a pale lilac-veined hand is reaching out for his. Jakob shrinks back. His voice is lost in the earth. His hands hold clumps of it. In that moment he feels that he has lived long enough, that he should like to stay as he is, curled up against the dewy morning cold, in a ball of damp leaves, waiting till the blood dries up inside him. There is nothing left. Even the fear has withered, like desert grass.

May I die now? he thinks to himself.

“Don't be afraid,” the man says. “You must not be afraid.” He pulls Jakob up, the grip on his arm so firm Jakob is unable to resist. He looks up to a face that seems unused to smiling, a face made gentle with years of melancholy. He is a gray old man under the silver stubble of his shaven head. As if the colors have left with his smiles. “You are all right,” the man says, seeing the tremor in Jakob's limbs. “Everything will be all right. I promise you that.”

Too weak to resist, Jakob lets himself be led out of the dark woods, the dirty light of dawn creeping through the breeze-blown leaves, a sky of chrome blue in the east that seems too blue for their lives. They move across a field, keeping to the shadows and a dip in the eastern hedges. They stumble down a slope to the broken-tiled roof of a small, low farmhouse, the land long since taken from it on a day when soldiers had arrived and claimed it as their own. The old man tells him that they had eaten all the livestock, feasting off the herd of long-lashed
cows. They had taken eggs, still warm, from beneath the feathers of roosting hens, stripped unripe vegetables from the ground, ravaged time as carelessly they ripped open the earth. They now used the farm and the pillaged village beyond it as a stopover from one valley to the next.

The German border lay a day's journey north from here. The Swiss a day's journey south. And there were rumors of a work camp a day's journey farther west, where slivers of people, ghost remnants, hollow eyed and hollow hearted, dug earth behind high barbed wire fences. The farmhouse and the nearby village lie between all three of these, the old man explains. Passing trucks, filled with passing soldiers use the barn as a place of refuge. Soldiers sleep there, on makeshift beds to break their daylong journeys. Their trucks made by convicts. Bolts and cogs, wheel clamps, suspension cables, hammered into place with the intention of disintegration. Regularly they break down. Regularly they need to be mended. And so the barn is full of tools and spare parts and lingering soldiers who lie lazy in patches of sunlight, smelling of grease and gunpowder and hay.

They come on a weekly basis, first to pillage what little food the old man has foraged, then to question, to seek out the pathway from the camp to the border, where people still flee to escape.

“I tell you this not to scare you,” the man says, seeing that Jakob has stopped. “But so that there is only truth between us. Then you can come to trust me. Come, please, there is no one here. There have been no visitors for the past two days. Come, I can take care of you.” Again, he takes Jakob by the hand and pulls him toward the farmhouse. “How old are you?” he asks, as he leads him through a loose-hinged door that swings open too easily to keep the fear at bay. They enter the woodstove warmth of his stone house.

“Eight,” Jakob replies, finding his voice in the rawness of his throat, spitting out bits of peat and moss. He is pushed gently down onto a small stool that hides his head from window height. The man pours him a cup of water. His eyes watch nervously as his hands move hurriedly from object to object, despite their geriatric awkwardness.

“My name is Markus,” he says eventually. “And yours?”

Jakob can hardly bear to say it. “Please,” the old man says. “Be brave. Tell me your name so that I can help you exist again.”

“I am Jakob,” he says finally, and Markus nods approvingly.

Jakob drinks quickly, taking in great gulps.

“Slow,” Markus warns him.

After he has finished, the empty mug is refilled with a thin soup of potato roots and seeds, barely more flavored than the water, but hot inside him.

“You have a destination you are heading for?”

Jakob shakes his head.

“There is someone who can take care of you?”

Again Jakob shakes his head.

Markus shrugs. “You will not live through a winter in the forest. Once the snow sets in.”

He fills a metal bowl from a tank outside and he washes him with a piece of rough linen. Jakob lets the old man wipe the dirt and another's dried blood from his face, his hands, up and down the length of his skinny arms and across his chest, his ribs a wiry birdcage for his fragile heart. Markus does so tenderly, silently, stilling the tremors with his touch, and when he has finished the water in the bowl is dark and murky, but full of things Jakob cannot bear to throw away. Gently Markus pours it over the earth outside.

“Back to where it came from,” he says softly. And afterward, “You will have to hide. I can keep you safe if you hide. You can rest until you are strong again. It is cramped, but it is warm.”

Jakob is given one of three cupboards beneath the stairs, the lowest in the row, a small tight triangle of a space where wedges of light slash through the cracks in the door. But he can be a triangle; the hug of his arms around him, the scent of his knees against his nostrils, scratched and scarred; his eyes, mole-like now, blinking back the dim light. He finds a way of sleeping, legs curled up into his chest, and come morning there is a way of stretching every part of himself, one limb after the other, his feet slipping into the lowest cavity of the stairs. His eyelashes scrape against the closeted walls. He can smell the wood chippings on which he sleeps. He holds handfuls and smells
the locked-awayness of them, wondering if he, too, will smell that way soon.

He is used to scents of grass and soil, scents of the wind before rain, rain before sun, sun before dark. He is used to horse scents, dusty hides, hot oated breath in the palm of his hand, and the feel of their soft downy pelt against his knuckles. Of feathers and the yolk of cooked eggs. Of lemongrass and the lavender that his mother rubbed in her hair. He has never known four walls. Never bricks and mortar. He closes his eyes. Breathes in splinters. Breathes out his past.

It is then that he hears a shifting of fabric behind the highest wall of his cupboard. That and then farther away, more muffled, a sudden cough that gives rise to a spasmodic eruption of phlegm-filled chokes. Jakob does not move. Engulfed once more, fear, like floodwater, filling his triangle.

“Jakob,” the voice closest says, softly spoken. “That is your name?” Jakob stays silent, dares not answer. “It is all right. You will see it is all right?” the voice says, intruding into his only space. Jakob curls up, longing for silence and darkness. These are the only places of life for him now. He feels he can exist only inside them.

A long night draws on, full of moon shadows that slide past the gap beneath his cupboard door, lengthening, then shortening with the arctic light of dawn. He sleeps, sleeps deeply for the first time in a long time, and strangely, when he wakes, what he feels first is the warmth of his cupboard, the solace that there is no more running to be done, no more food to be foraged, paths to be followed. He has found a place now that in the very constriction of its size offers a sanctuary from the world outside.

He feels for his box, pushed down into the lowest corner of his cupboard. The wood is smooth, warm, the metal clasp a crescent of silver beneath his touch. He opens it, finds a flat, lake-smoothed circle of glass, pale as cloud when he holds it up against the crack of light beneath his door. He presses it between his thumb and forefinger. Strokes it back and forth around the curved edges. Holds it to his lips. To his cheek, against the lids of his eyes. He thinks he hears the lake
in his ear, as if the pebble had lain for so long on the silty bottom that the sound of it had somehow penetrated through and remained.

“Jakob,” the voice next to his says again, slight and shaky, hesitating on the harder consonants as if to expel them from his mouth takes effort. “Jakob, that is your name, yes?”

Jakob replaces the glass and closes the lid of his box.

“Yes,” he whispers, finally able to speak. “That is my name.”

“And Cherub is mine.”

In the end it turns out that there are two others in the adjoining cupboards. The voice closest to his belongs to Cherub, and the voice next to Cherub's belongs to a man called Loslow. Both of them are Jewish.

“Jakob, have you ever tasted Swiss chocolate?” Cherub asks.

“No,” Jakob whispers, and because he cannot see Cherub's face he imagines what it might look like, matching the voice to someone he has once known and liked: the tall and wiry twenty-something boy on the rusty black bike who used to bring his family news, wind chased and avian with the flight of his wheels, and whose wide, smiling mouth exuded contentment.

“Jakob, it's the most wonderful taste in all the world. It's like the creamiest, sweetest milk you've ever tried, and then it's more than that. It's like café crème, honey, and bitter cocoa all together. That is what Swiss chocolate is like.”

“I most long for cheese.” Loslow speaks then, whose voice in contrast is aristocratically clipped and hoarse, an older man, Jakob imagines, with cheekbones of distinction and polished silver hair that shines like quartz. “The strongest, bluest cheese,” Loslow says. “The kind you can smell through walls.”

Jakob comes to recognize the tips of Cherub's fingers through a tiny hole in the partition between their two spaces. It begins with a game that is unspoken, a silent dance between their hands. Jakob has to guess which of Cherub's fingers is pressing into the hole. He does it by the feel and size of each tip, the roughness of Cherub's forefinger and thumb, the smallness of his fifth.