Jakob’s Colors (6 page)

At these times there is a sound that Jakob becomes aware of, when he and Cherub are playing and Loslow is silent. A pitter-patter of something back and forth across the floor.

“What is that sounding, Cherub?” he eventually asks. “Mice?”

“No, that is Loslow. He is playing his piano.”

They wait until the sound of nimble fingers upon the floor stops.

“You are a pianist, Loslow?” Jakob asks.

“Yes. I have owned a piano since I was six years old. I began to play when I was five, and for my next birthday my parents knocked through the wall of their kitchen to fit a grand beech-veneered Weinbach into our home. As a consequence of their sacrifice, I practiced hard. Now I play for the Vienna Philharmonic, twice as a soloist. You must not let a war stop you practicing the one thing you have worked so hard for. My imagination demanded that I brought my piano with me,” Loslow tells him. “Can you bow, Jakob? I don't suppose you've ever had the opportunity.”

“No, I never need to be bowing.”

“Well, that is something we must see to when we get out of here. To bow well is to make a gentleman of you. And to be a gentleman is one of the most useful tools a man can learn.” He pauses. “Hear this,” he continues. “I saw a thing in my hometown. A bomb had exploded in the main street, beside a breadline of thirty men and women. They'd been waiting in the cold for over three hours for their bread, and in the end they never got any. But the next day, this old man he comes with a violin and he sits on this fire-charred chair, outside where the breadline had been, dressed in his formal black evening clothes, and he plays. He plays terribly, a screeching sad song that is painful to everyone's ears. But nevertheless, without fail, every day after this he plays as artillery gunfire explodes around him. And every day, after he has played, he bows, as if an audience were applauding him. I love that he does this. He is no longer afraid, you see, and because of that I like to think he is still playing. Do you not think so, Jakob? Do you not think that old man is still playing his tuneless song?”

But the yes sticks in Jakob's throat and will not sound. He leans his head against the cupboard darkness, hearing the wooden planks
contract with the coming cold of night, and watches the light beneath his door lengthen and slowly ebb.

That night he wakes to the sound of sobbing, a retching, haunting sound, full of tears and mucus. It is Loslow. All the clipped aristocracy rubbed from him, in the rawness of distress.

“Please, no?” he cries. “Don't hurt him. Please no.”

And behind that he hears Cherub. “It is okay, my friend,” he is whispering, his voice calm and clear. “It has passed now. It has passed.”

“What is this world we live in?” Loslow is asking. “I cannot bear it.”

To which Cherub replies the same thing, over and over again, like a lament. “It has passed. I am here now. I am right here.”

Curled in his cupboard, Jakob listens to the endless sobs that rack the night, and the continuous stream of Cherub's comforting words, on and on until eventually the sobbing stills. Until eventually Loslow goes back to his precious piano, to his past of vinegar and newspaper with which his mother used to polish the ivory keys. Back to the place where he would play and play, until there was only the music.

For Loslow does not know if he was born with it or not. He's read Proust and Helmholtz, from the biomusicology manuals he once ordered in abundance. And neither one of them can really explain why he can recognize a perfect middle C on the piano, or the E of a passing bicycle bell. Or how when he plays in D major he hears also a tractor outside droning in E-flat, so that sometimes he struggles to follow his own tune, such is the other a part of it. He knows what key birds are singing in, knows the chink of a crunching pebble, the smack of a lake wave, even what pitch the wind is making as it blows through the sails of a boat. He is one in ten thousand, the manuals tell him—he and his perfect pitch.

But when he plays he forgets all of this. All that exists is the rise and fall of his heels and the intake of a breath. When he touches the notes upon the wooden floor, he hears the sound of Brahms, Rachmaninov, Horowitz, and Gilels. Sounding out into a tiny space that hardly holds him.

In the morning nothing is said of the night before. Loslow is talking about cheese. Cherub is talking about names.

“My real name is Sergei,” he tells Jakob. “But no one has ever called me by that name and I have never liked it. You should like your name. It is who you are, what you stand for in the world. Jakob is a good name?”

“It is my da's name,” Jakob replies.

“So there you go, then.”

In the darkness Jakob nods, the tip of his fifth finger on Cherub's thumb. He does not tell him then that he owns two names. Of the secret name that was whispered, only once, into his ear as he screamed himself into the world, to confuse the demons in their vengeful hours. But for then, this name has not been uttered since.

“How is it that Markus found you, Cherub?” he asks eventually.

“It was I who found him. He is the uncle of a friend of my father's. I was at the library when they took my family. When I got home, only my father's friend was there to greet me. He gave me Markus's address along with a bag of bread and sausages. And I left my home and did not look behind me because I wanted to believe it was not the last time I would see it.”

“I will wish for that, too, wish for it not to be the last time.”

“Thank you, Jakob.”

Occasionally there is the sound of a not so distant train clacking over the tracks. The rattle of it rings in Jakob's ears, bleakly familiar. Tuchun tuchun tuchun. Metal on metal. A hot spark and the cradle-rock back-and-forth motion.

“A goods train,” Loslow will say. “Simply a goods train.”

But Jakob does not hear him. Already he is back inside the cattle cart, cramped against the metal walls. He feels his brother's heel in his ribs, bare toes in the crease behind his knees. He smells the grease of his sister's hair next to his own, feels her hot breath on his cheeks. The sweat crusts on their bodies. The stale stench of urine seeps into their skin. Nothing to do but sleep and fear. When it rains, the air smells of mushrooms. When it doesn't, it smells of blood.

“You,” the guard is calling from the open door on the other side of the carriage. “Gypsy scum.
Habt ihr verstanden
? I said sit down.” He is talking to the man who stands, staring at the sky, at the Y-shaped tree
that breaks the flat of the horizon, his face luminous with nostalgia. “SIT DOWN.
Sich setzen. Sich setzen
,” the guard yells.

“Jakob,” Loslow is calling. “It is just a goods train, just a goods train.”

But Jakob sees the tree, sees the crowd of children rounded up beneath it, who sit upon damp earth, dirt smeared and sucking their fingers, choking on their own tears. He sees the sun, white on the horizon, the shadow of a Y cast over the green grass. The man and the almost-smile that crosses his lips.

“Jakob,” Loslow calls, bringing him back to the cupboard darkness. “A goods train, simply a goods train.”

“You can squeeze that cochineal beetle between your fingers,” Jakob hears his father's voice telling him. “You can pop it dead, so that its blood staining your palms. The reddest dye in the world, this blood. The treasure of the Aztecs and the Incas.”

Jakob runs his fingers over the walls of his cupboard. Holds sawdust in his hands. Presses it to his face, inhales palmfuls of it. Becomes a triangle once more. Yes, he tells himself—it is a goods train. Just a goods train.

But at other times throughout the week the army trucks arrive, dropping off one group and picking up another, and then there is no escaping from remembering the fragility of the place in which they hide. They hear them trundling down the track to the house. The wood rattles with the weight and speed. The ground vibrates. They hear voices outside behind the stone yard, and occasionally in the kitchen. At these times they will not move, trying to ascertain whether they are village voices or accent stained. Jakob holds his breath. He presses his palms down hard on the floor to stop his hands from trembling, and after the voices disappear his joints ache.

Every afternoon Markus's steps sound in the hallway. Jakob recognizes them by the low shuffle of his feet that never really leave the ground and the ratchet-click of his knees when he bends to open the cupboard door.

“Were they here, Markus? Were they here?” Loslow asks.

“They came for my leeks,” he will tell them. His leeks, his apples, his beans. “My precious leeks. As if they had sniffed them out like dogs.”

When he gets to Jakob's cupboard the boy will see the crimson marks that he wears like a bracelet on his right wrist, or his left, the slight tremor of his hand, a bruise on his face that in the oncoming days will change from mauve, to violet, to dull viridian green.

“They hurt you, Markus,” Jakob says over and over, a boy again, weeping with the sight of him.

Markus shrugs. “A firm handshake,” he always answers. “A mere slap. Simply bravado. That is all.” And then, “Jakob, my boy, you are going to be such a handsome man when you grow up,” as if this were his way of building Jakob's strength. Then he allows Jakob to rush swiftly to the latrine, a bucket placed at the opening of the doorway to the cellar stairs, where he rids himself of twenty-four hours of confinement, and fleetingly catches a small chink of the sky in the hallway window: blue, gray, mauve in the earliest hours, peach in the latest, clear or cloud covered. He spies it through the dirt-smeared glass. Sometimes lingers.

“Move on, Jakob. Move on,” Markus urges him. And reluctantly he does so.

Markus hands him a hot cup of watery soup on his return, nervous and eager for him to be hidden once more. And Jakob crawls back into his cupboard, catches through the cracks in his door a glimpse of Cherub passing: white cloth, white limbs, thin as thread, and clamps his eyes shut so as not to see more.

There are small hunks of bread to be had, and an occasional potato that he sucks and gnaws, and always this one cup that Jakob holds to warm his hands first. Clover he thinks, mallow, sometimes nettle. He will take a gulp, when it is still too hot, feeling the sting on his lips and at the back of his throat, the deep throb as it swills into his chest. And this is a pain he looks forward to, such is it an event in the hours and days that pass so slowly. He longs for a lemon. For the citrus sharpness to come after the heat, as his gums bleed.

“You'll get to have the girl of your dreams,” Markus says, and Jakob catches the flash of his granite-eyed smile before the door
closes and once more there is only cupboard darkness. “The world is your clam.”

“Oyster. You surely mean the world is his oyster,” Loslow says with a gritty chuckle, as he in turn hobbles back from the latrine, the sound of his bare feet padding on the wooden boards.

“Oyster, clam, what does it matter?”

“I am a much more handsome man in this cupboard,” Loslow continues, his voice muffled once again in his confined space. “Without a mirror, I feel like a real looker of an individual indeed. With one, I always found that the reflection staring back at me was such a disappointment. I am much more content in my own skin now that I cannot see it.”

“The whole world is charmed by beauty,” Markus says. “Never be ashamed to use your good looks to your advantage, Loslow. You, too, Jakob.”

He leaves then. Three doors open. Three doors close. A warm cup in three pairs of hands. And that is all for the day.

At night Loslow dreams of his piano and his cheese, while Cherub gnaws hunks of milk chocolate. Jakob dreams of stones. When he cannot sleep, he will play a game. He will walk his way through his family's home, a horse-drawn home, their wagon of chipped green wood pulled by a mare they'd called Borromini. He will close his eyes and see things he never noticed when he lived there. If he forces the memory, it will blur before him and he can't quite grasp it, but if he simply imagines walking up the two wooden steps, he suddenly sees the darkened interior, light spilling in squares from the two carriage windows. He sees the roughly embroidered patterns of the rugs that cover the seats by day, the beds by night, crimson and orange and warm in color, even when the outside air is cold enough to mist his breath. And, too, the smoke of the stove, the memory of its scent in his nostrils and in his hair, wood smoke boy that he is. He will see the knots in the wooden floor and the worn green drapes that over the years the sun has bleached. A floorboard creaks by the bed he shares with his sister and his brother, a tiny bed for tiny people, set on a shelf above where his parents sleep. The three of them squeezed
into it during the winter months, skin against skin, keeping the cold out. He will climb up the rungs of a small ladder, duck under the covers, warm where Malutki and Eliza are already waiting with a gap in the middle that is his space.

“Jakob, your feet,” Eliza will squeal. “Your feet, they so cold,” and she and Malutki will shriek with laughter as he dabs at them with his icy toes. Then under the flimsy blankets he smells their milky scent, muggy with days of unwashed clothes, as stupendous snores sound from their parents, who sleep beneath them.

And in the comfort of this memory Jakob, a half-blood gypsy child of Roma and Yenish, falls asleep in his triangle cupboard, his stone warm in his hand.

T
he vicar had said there was a scattering of four-leaf clovers in the garden, and if the children could find just one, he would make a treacle dessert that would be so sweet as to make sleep impossible for the entire night. The other children were searching. Lor was not. She stood behind a tall laburnum tree, blossoming with citron-colored flowers.

“Poisonous, darling, laburnum. Touch it and it can kill you,” her mother had told her, omniscient with a morbidity that seemed to verge on delight. Later, Lor had ventured back there alone, tantalized by that “strangely exquisite line that puts life so clearly in one's own hands.” These, her mother's words—“tiptoes over the edge of a cliff; a handful of pills cupped and held to the mouth; the leaning of one's weight against cast-iron railings that might give way to rushing waters below. Just a single line, my love, between life and death.”

Lor took herself back to this hazardous spot of dabbled light, cast down by the leaves above, that was the perfect combination of sun and shade. She lingered in the shadows and watched from a place that was in between. The breeze brought scents of rattle and sweet peas on it, was leaf and wood scented. She rested her head against the bark,
which was cool and smooth. Thought about what it would be like to pick and chew and swallow one of the luminous flowers. To sleep. To have earth heaped upon her.

From where she stood, she could see the adults at the table. She could hear their murmured chatter, the odd shrill laugh. There were eleven of them—all of them familiar—Larry and Gini, John, no Maggie, who as usual was absent. The woman in the blue pleated dress was sitting beside Andrew, locked in closeted conversation, she leaning more toward him than he to her, as if she understood him entirely. Lor wondered if she only had one dress. Vivienne sat at the other end of the table dressed in mauve, which gave her a ghostly waif-like look, as if she were only half there.

The conversation was stilted, forced slightly. It was the second party in two days, and they had said all there was to say at the first. Vivienne was already loose on gin and humming quietly at the end of the table, indulging her own drunkenness with a look that seemed to slur as she glanced over too frequently at the woman in the blue dress.

“
So I walk a little too fast
,” she murmured. “
And I talk a little too much, and I'm reckless, it's true, but what else can you do . . . at the end of a love affair
.”

“I'm learning the tambourine,” announced Gini.

“Can you learn the tambourine?” Vivienne asked.

“Yes, apparently you can. I have a teacher, an actual teacher who specializes in it. He says it's all about the rhythm.”

“Don't you have any?”

“Apparently not. I fall over a lot. The doctor prescribed this to me, literally, scribbled down ‘music lessons' on one of his official prescriptions, and signed it.”

“How very modern.”

“Yes, very.”

Before they left, Andrew had made a point of fetching a bottle of red wine from the cellar, where a film of dust made the bottle look older and worth more than it probably was. It sat unopened on the table, amidst the many bottles of homemade drinks that the vicar had made: elderflower wine, dandelion and pear, jugs of sloe gin and
glacier punch, which sloshed in blue-bottled glasses in a haphazard combination of bizarre new tastes.

“They are all from the garden,” the vicar was boasting, nodding toward the flowers that lay scattered across their plates. “And you can eat each and every one of them.” He was wearing a sombrero hat, slanted on his head, hiding the mop of thinning gray hair that hung down from his scalp in sweaty strands. He looked older than he really was because of years spent traveling to the colonies, where he slept rough and preached hard. He liked to hold sermons at dawn on the top of a hill overlooking the river and the countryside beyond. His sermons were about life, rarely about God. He could just as easily have been a politician, an actor, a showman with a philosophy he longed to share. All he needed was a stage, but the pulpit had offered itself to him first. That was how it seemed, at any rate, to his closest friends, and probably to the crowds who attended his sermons and loved them despite the lack of religious piety.

Heads turned to see the sloping flower bed that he was now pointing to with an exuberance that verged on hysteria. The bed was bursting with pastel-pink daylilies, planted without order or symmetry.

“One should pick them in the sunshine to get the full flavor. They taste quite different on a day that is overcast.” The entire meal was about the flowers. Even the honey that threatened to sweeten the sticky toffee pudding was dandelion honey, with lemon slices and vanilla bean. Eventually Lor's father leaned across the table, picked up his bottle of red wine, and opened it with a small pop that filled a pause in the conversation. He poured himself a large glass.

“
And the smile on my face isn't really a smile at all
,” Vivienne murmured, watching him.

When finally a little later there was a lull in the conversation, she began a series of stories, all of which Lor, and probably the others, had heard before, with a tendency to laugh before each punch line, as if the tale were so funny she could barely voice it. Each laugh built up an expectation that the story could never match, as if Vivienne were deliberately setting herself up to fall. She filled up her own glass, finished the wine, and made no attempt to hide how quickly she downed
it. She looked across at Andrew as she drank, her eyes staring at him over the rim. The wine bottle stood on the table, drained to the color of emptiness.

“Is this what you wanted, darling?” she said when she'd finished, indiscreet now.

Lor shrank back, pushed her forehead into the bark till it hurt, and thought of the laburnum flowers once again.

Her father had not responded to her mother's question. “A life of swell parties?” Vivienne continued.

“You sound like an American.” Gini laughed, blinded by her own intoxication.

“Pure Hollywood, darling.” Vivienne's voice broke slightly. “I'll do anything for you,” she said, looking back at Andrew. He looked down.

“Cigarette?” Larry offered too eagerly. Vivienne snorted and got up. She made a show of balancing herself. John reached out a hand, rested it on the small of her back.

“Steady there,” he said.

She moved around the table, stopped at a corner, and held onto it.

“Give him the choice, one of his cigarettes or me?” she said, her words half mocking, half spat out with a precise derision that wavered almost as a plea. “No contest.” The glass in her hand shook.

Please, Lor, thought. Please hush the things you are going to say. But there was no silencing her now. She was in full swing. Unstoppable.

“Don't mistake it for pride in his product,” Vivienne ranted on, bright now, lustrous with clarity. “No, it's guilt. It's guilt that drives Andrew Hullingham Trimborne. Because you know, everyone, not only was he excused from fighting for his King and Country, for the mildest of nearsightedness, he was also given the one damn thing he might be proud of. He was handed his tobacco company on a china plate with not a single chip in the enamel. Didn't have to fight for the damn thing like most people.”

“Shut up, Vivienne,” Andrew said from his chair.

“But charity comes at a cost, doesn't it, my darling? Tell them what you did for this glorious empire.” She looked around the table. When no answer came, she laughed again, as if it were funny. “Oh, for
goodness sake, don't pretend you're not all dying to know. What on earth is wrong with the Trimbornes, you want to ask? Well, nothing as it turns out . . . we just had to take on a name. That's all. Just the one. Some cousin of a distant cousin gave Andrew the entire Trimborne Tobacco Company and Sons. Because you see, there never were any sons, only poor childless Trimborne, who found Andrew, his closest living relative, and then all Andrew had to do was adopt a simple godforsaken name and continue the family line. But oh, don't you know how it rattles him not to have his own name up there in lights. Want to be a star, darling? To shine brightly? So fucking Hollywood.”

“Jesus,” said Andrew quietly.

“I imagine that's a private matter between you and . . . ,” John muttered.

“Is it? Is it really, John?” And she looked directly at the woman in the blue dress when she said this. The woman didn't look away, and for a long moment they both stared at each other. Lor looked, too. Felt in that moment that there was little contest. Her mother was a drunk. The woman in the blue pleated dress was not.

“When I met him, he was such a star,” Vivienne said quietly, her eyes glistening now. “Weren't you, my sweet love? Such a star. So much potential. We used to drive around the countryside in his Bentley. One of only seven, he told me. Unique, as I thought we were. Of course, it wasn't at all. He'd lied. Embellished, if you'd rather. Just a regular old thing he'd fixed up and polished until it shone.

“I met his family for the first time only after I'd agreed to marry him. And that was when I knew. Knew that he embellished. We drove up to Newcastle, squeezed into their tiny terraced house that stank of meat. There were smears of butcher's blood on the kitchen floor. How aristocratic. I was marrying a damn butcher's son. A simple Geordie boy. ‘Are you likin' it, luv?' they kept asking me. ‘Likin' what?' I asked. ‘Us,' they replied.”

Lor's father stood up and walked around to her.

“And I did. I always did,” she murmured as her tears spilled over, smudged the kohl around her eyes.

“Please, Vivienne,” Andrew whispered. “Please, that's enough.”

“I love you,” she sobbed.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

“We're drowning. Why are we drowning?”

Andrew said nothing. A hand against the table as if to steady himself. A hand in his pocket.

“Why?” She pushed again.

“Because you relentlessly want of me,” he said suddenly, his face full of blood, his voice, like hers, breaking. “Want me always to fill the space and vacuity that is you. I cannot. I am as empty as you are.”

“Is that true?” Vivienne wept. “Is it?”

“Yes,” he told her. “Yes, it's true. We are the cowards of a nation.”

“Is that what you feel you are?”

“It's what I feel we all are. You, me. The whole horrible gang of us.”

“But I love you.”

“So you say, Vivienne. So you say. Over and over.”

And then he left, walked out of the grounds, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other clutching his lapel, down the single-track country road, leaving John to take home Lor and Vivienne, who by now was silent, spent with gin and tears.