Jakob’s Colors (7 page)

O
n the first day of his second week, the door to Jakob's cupboard opens earlier than usual, and Markus stands grinning in front of him, unable to contain his excitement as he holds out a bowl steaming with a familiar smell that Jakob hardly dares to recognize. His mouth fills with saliva.

“It is rabbit,” says Markus. “It was in the backyard. Can you believe it? Right there in front of me. I spied it through the window.” He hands Jakob the bowl of stew, strips of meat bobbing in the steaming liquid. “I thought they had all fled with the end of this world. I got it with my slingshot. Eat it slowly. Make sure you chew it. Your stomach will not be used to the richness.”

Jakob nods wordlessly. Rabbit is something he has dreamt of.

Loslow squeals from his cupboard next door, words of elation already muffled as he speaks through mouthfuls. Jakob takes his first bite, savoring the flavor and the texture. He chews hard. Chomps down gently on his tender teeth. He swallows. Bites and chews again. He feels his stomach swell. Feels the warmth of it, and the sudden surge of something in his limbs. They quiver. His hands shake. He takes a second mouthful, a third, then devours it
thoroughly. When finally he lays down the spoon with an empty clank, his jaw aches.

He slumps back against the stair wall as a memory surfaces.

“Like peeling an apple,” his father had taught him, as he laid the rabbit out gently on the table, its white stomach still warm, its eyes wan and glinting. “You skin it whole. Slowly. Tear it, you ruin it.”

Jakob had used his own knife. He had pressed into the center of the rabbit's throat and brought the knife down toward its stomach.

“Cut it like it were a suit to be undone,” his father had told him. “Straight down the middle. An' for the arms and legs, where you having the seams.”

It had cut easily, the silver sharpness of the knife slicing through the flesh, red and raw and sticky with warm blood. He continued, hearing his father's steady breathing beside him. When he was done, he looked up.

“Now undress it, as you undressing yourself,” his father said with a satisfied nod, and Jakob had peeled away the skin. Later he washed, dried, and prepared it with care. His mother had made him mittens from the skin of that first rabbit. Jakob had given them to his younger brother after he had squealed and choked with envy. Jakob had knelt down and pulled them onto Malutki's tiny hands, hot in the summer sun, and watched him totter off, clapping his new rabbit-skinned mittens together. He had worn them all that day and all that night though his palms grew pink and clammy.

Fleetingly he sees his brother's face, bright, luminous, full of contentment. Rushing toward him as he had on that day. But then there is the tree again. Up on the mound, leafless, twisted and shaped like a Y. He sees it as he first saw it, bone white in the moonlight, later silver against the sun, and his brother's face beyond, eyes wide. There seems to no longer be one memory without the other.

“Now you are a man,” the officer with his nuggets of aluminum wire had told him. That officer who only moments before had held his own head in his hands and wept. “All men hold secrets from their mothers.”

Jakob squeezes his eyes shut, holds tight to his knees. Waits for the pain to pass, the haunting of it to cease. Malutki. Malutki. Tiny hands that cup and squeeze his face when Jakob holds him. Is it the worst? Again he asks. Is it the very worst?

His sister had lifted her foot up from the ground, asked if the grass felt pain.

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

Two doors down, Loslow's voice is sounding out in the meat-scented air, jarring him back to his cupboard space. To the comforting warmth and the company beyond the plasterboard wall.

“My family life used to revolve around food,” he is saying. “It used to be part of the delight of living. Now it is the only thing that separates us from the dead.”

Listen to him, Jakob tells himself. Listen to Loslow telling his tales.

“Stay cheerful tonight, my friend,” pleads Cherub. “We have just feasted.”

For a time there is silence from Loslow's cupboard, but for the pitter-patter of his fingers back and forth upon the floor, and Jakob dreads that this will be it for the night, that the chatter he now finds such a comfort has ceased and that they have lost him to his piano.

But then Loslow's voice comes out of the darkness once again. “I once knew a man who was addicted to plaster,” he says, his tone decisively lighter. “We lived together in Verona for a brief time. He was a strange fellow. He was the accountant for a firm of accountants, all suited and stripe tied. Left for work at seven, lunched at midday, returned at six. No surprises. No secrets. Except for this addiction, which he only admitted to when the hole in his living room wall became too large to hide.”

Jakob listens, loosens his clasped hands.

“His room was next to mine. I could hear the scraping through the walls. He used to chip at the plaster with his nails. He had the hands of a stonemason, not of an accountant. At night he'd crave the plaster like a smoker craves cigarettes. He'd wake at hourly intervals. He used to collect the dust and lick it from his palms, lapping it up like a dog.

“I tried it once,” Loslow admits. “To see the appeal. It was so dry, it stuck in my throat. I lay awake all night waiting for the craving to begin, but it never came. He said it was just as well. That it ate away at your stomach lining. But even knowing this, he couldn't stop. In the end I had to move out. The scraping, I couldn't stand it. Perhaps we, too, are now unwittingly addicted to the stone dust of this house. We must have inhaled sackfuls of it.”

“There are worse things to be addicted to,” Cherub says.

Jakob curls up in his cupboard and wonders if he has become addicted to darkness. He has seen little light for weeks. He has not seen his own face for months. He wonders if his skin has dulled, if beneath it he is as black as the cupboard dark, the air inside his lungs thick with wood dust as he breathes in splinters.

Again, he reaches for his box, finds a leaf, pressed and dried, an autumnal red, he knows, burned and streaked with maroon. He closes his eyes. “There you are,” he whispers to himself. “Just have to find you. Just have to look harder.
Spourz na kolory
, Jakob. Tell me what you seeing.” His father, his face all in earnest as he speaks.

“What is it?” Jakob had asked him once, his head table-height, as he watched the man he most loved in the world kneading a dough of finely powdered resin, of wax, gum, and linseed oil.

“Lapis lazuli,” his father had whispered.

“Lapis lazuli,” Jakob repeated. “Lapis lazuli.”

“Listen. A lullaby of sounds. Can fall asleep to it.”

“What will it look like when you are done?”

“You remember the sea of the Mediterranean? Like that. A color without edges, without end. Italians call it
oltramarino
—from beyond the seas.”

“And does it come from there, Da?” Jakob asked, shifting so that he leaned his weight against his father's right arm.

“Comes from a country they calling Afghanistan, from the valley of Sar-e-sang,” his father told him. “That is where those gem mines are. Where those painters of the past finding their seas.”

“You ever been there?”

“No. Most difficult place to find on earth. Surrounded by mountain peaks and valleys filled with roaring rivers, it is. Mine shafts, two hundred an' seventy yards long, dug horizontally into the mountain. Those miners lit their fires beneath the rocks where the soot blackened their skin. Threw icy water from the rivers 'cross it, watched that rock cracking with the change of temperature. There, they finding their lapis lazuli.”

His father had kneaded that dough for three days. Only then did he begin the process of extracting the color, soaking it in a bowl of wood ash, squeezing and pressing it for hours until the liquid was saturated, until his fingers were stained blue, for weeks, for months, for years afterward. He dried that mound in the sunlight until all that remained was a powdery pigment of bright shimmering lapis lazuli that was indeed the color of the deepest bluest sea.

N
o one spoke on the journey home. John drove his steel-blue Aston Martin steadily, two hands on the polished walnut wheel that slid easily between his manicured fingers as he rounded corners at a safer-than-safe speed. Vivienne fell asleep on the backseat, her head in Lor's lap, her hair splayed out like a lacquered fan across her daughter's knees. Lor sat silently staring out at fields of swaying corn, sporadic pools of poppies clumped on the outer fringes as if they were aware of their brightness and wary of intruding. At intervals she rested her hand on her mother's head, held fistfuls of her glossy hair.

When they got home, John helped Vivienne out of the car. She let him, leaned her body against his and smiled at everything he said. He took charge, seemed to visibly expand, ordering strong coffee to be made and for the chaise longue to be moved away from the window to a darker corner of the front room. John with his too-slick mustache, his sickly wife who never seemed close to recovering from whatever it was she needed to recover from, and that veil of some unspoken horror of history past that left his leg to drag behind him. He seemed to regard it with disgust as if it were something pathetic that crawled in his wake. Occasionally his lips quivered. Occasionally
his fists clamped. Now, though, standing against the mantelpiece, he looked like a robust and magnificent male.

Vivienne looked up at him and slipped off her shoes, curling her legs beneath her.

“You're an angel, John. Truly you are.”

Lor was sent to her room. It was late. Dark. Supper would be brought to her. She sat on her bed and for a while tried to recount the roads from the vicar's house to her own home. Would her father walk, she wondered? Would he know the way, blindly fumbling cross-country through bracken fronds and shrubbery, no moonlight on this cloud-covered night? Or would he stick to the roads, risk a passing drunkard behind the wheel, who might swerve at the sight of him lumbering ahead in the darkness, swerve but not miss the man on the road lost too deeply in his own thoughts. She closed her eyes. Tried not to imagine the horror that might unfold.

Much later, she heard a sound, the breaking of something: glass, china. Was he home? She opened her door and listened. She crept down the wide staircase, dimly aware that what she was doing might be wrong, but urged on by the violent shifting of a piece of furniture back and forth, back and forth.

Tentatively she sat down upon the middle step of the stairs, looking down through the polished banisters, and from there eventually witnessed John slip silently from their house, closing the front door with barely a click of the latch. It was his face that struck her. There was a look of fury upon it, there clearly visible in his pale eyes, in his pallid face that seemed in those moments to be full of bleakness and regret. Lor heard his car start out on the drive, heard the slight spin of the wheels as they caught on the gravel, and then the slow ebb of the engine as it hummed down the lane, faster than when he had arrived.

From the living room there was no sound. She walked to the threshold of the door. The lights were off, the moon shining in through the open drapes.

Vivienne was sitting on the floor in a patch of cold light. Lor could see only her back, exposed in the mauve dress, the knot of her spine, the skin taut as if the bone might puncture through. Lor walked
around to face her, saw how she held clumps of silk in her hands, clutched them to her chest. She seemed dazed, lost in some distant spot upon the wall. Her hands were stained with lily stamens, like brush strokes of rust.

“What is it, Mother?” Lor asked.

Vivienne looked up. “Darling,” she said. Then looked back down. “I'm fine. Really, I'm very fine. Go back to bed.” She closed her eyes, ending the conversation.

Lor returned to her room, wavered between fretful sleep and wakefulness.

Much later the covers shifted, and she felt her mother's cold body slip into the bed beside her. They lay there in the darkness until the gray dawn light crept through the cracks in the curtains and then through the gap beneath the door. Then, as silently as she had come, Vivienne stole from the bed and disappeared down the corridor to her own room, leaving Lor alone again with the stillness of the house.

Andrew did not come home at all that night. Nor the next. Her mother glanced out of windows as she passed them, opened and closed the front door, swooned from one empty room to another, picked up trinkets and put them down again.

Three days later Lor found Vivienne in her room, studying herself in the full-length mirror.

“Which one, darling?” her mother asked, holding up two dresses, one of sky-blue silk that covered her shoulders, the other a decorous black halter neck of chiffon studded with tiny silver beads. “Day or night?”

“Day,” said Lor quickly.

“Day it is, then.” Vivienne slipped into the blue dress. Her skin smelled of lemons. Her breath of gin. “Do me up?” She pulled her stomach in. Lor slid the zipper up her back. The silk clung to her. “Pretty?” she asked, stepping back.

“Very.”

“Wish me luck, darling. Bethany's here. I shan't be later than eleven.”

“Where are you going?” Lor asked.

“Out for dinner.”

They sat on the stairs together, clutching their knees, waiting for the bell to ring. When it did, Bethany answered it, pulling back the heavy front door to reveal John. He had shaved off his mustache. The exposed skin looked paler than the rest of his face. It made him look younger, but less elegant.

“Hello, John,” her mother said, standing.

“Vivienne, Lor,” John replied with a nod. He looked nervous, was playing with a pair of brown leather gloves as if he couldn't decide which hand to hold them in. Bethany welcomed him in and disappeared. Her shoes sounded on the kitchen tiles. The hallway felt empty without her.

Lor's mother swayed leisurely down each step toward him.

“You're lovely,” he said, but looked away as he spoke.

Vivienne turned back to Lor.

“You'll miss me?” she asked as they reached the front door. She looked vulnerable suddenly, apprehensive.

“Yes,” Lor replied, and then they were gone, muffled voices sounding outside. Lor listened to their steps across the gravel. Heard the slamming of car doors, the engine starting, revving, and then the wheels crunching stones before gradually all sounds disappeared and they had gone.

Lor went back upstairs, climbed out of her bedroom window onto a flat section of the roof, and sat amongst the chimney pots and the stone turrets, watching the white moon rising. It was that tranquil hour when it felt not quite night. When the light was mallow, almost transparent. High up there, above the house, excluded from the happenings that went on inside, she felt safe from their intrusion. Down below, she watched rabbits grazing on the freshly mown lawn, imagining they were alone. The lead guttering was littered with the carcasses of bees that, she fancied, might have died in fruitless search for a sprouting flower up there among the turrets.

She waited until it was dark and too cold to remain outdoors any longer before finally taking herself to bed. The house lay still beneath her. She could not hear Bethany or the kitchen help. She fell asleep to the familiar silence.

Hours later, the sound of bath water gushing from the taps woke her. She pulled off the covers, felt the rush of night air, and crept up the landing. The floorboards in her mother's bedroom creaked. The bed covers were rumpled and thrown back. She knocked softly on the bathroom door. When there was no answer she opened it.

Her mother was sitting in the tub, in a shallow puddle of rose-colored water. She held a sponge between her thighs, absent-minded in the washing of herself. The kohl was smudged around her eyes. The whites of them were pink, rose tinted like the water. When the sponge dropped from her hands Lor saw the bruising on her thighs, noticed too the marks on her arms, laced fingers across her wrists.

Her mother looked up, her face tense, as if she were seeking to comprehend something. “It's late, darling. You should be asleep.”

“I heard you running the bath.”

“Please go to bed.” Then to herself, rather than Lor, “He feels it, the aloneness. I expect he puts his anger into it.” She looked back up at her daughter, her eyes, the flecks of pebbled gray around her pupils, clear suddenly. “Don't fret. I like it. It is quite something to be female, you know,” she told her. “The unfathomable power we have, the unfathomable lack of it.”

“I don't know what you mean, Mother,” Lor said.

“No, my love. I don't suppose you do. Now go back to sleep. You'll suffer for it in the morning if you don't.”

Lor did as she said but woke in the night to find her mother curled at the foot of her bed, smelling of something sour.

The next day was spent in distant abstraction. Vivienne drifted restlessly from her canvases to outside, a watchful eye always on the driveway, her head tipped to listen for the arrival of Andrew's car. She sang and stroked her belongings. Tied and untied her hair. But he did not come home until the very end of that week.

When finally his wheels did sound on the gravel drive, coming to a halt with a slight spin, he clambered out with a forced air that all was usual, that nothing was remotely untoward. He greeted them with well-practiced ease, poured himself and Vivienne a drink, briefly rested his hand upon Lor's shoulder, talked vaguely about work, about Paris,
which was where he claimed to have been. He did not mention John. He did not mention the woman in the blue pleated dress. Vivienne smiled through her tears and did her best not to cling to him.

Throughout the following week he drifted in and out of the house. Monosyllabic when he did speak. Vague and absent when he did not. Vivienne danced around him.

“Do you know what to boondoggle is?” she asked, trying to be comical. But he hadn't heard her. He was lost too far inside himself to hear anything she said.

“It's to waste time,” she told him. He managed a smile and then left the room.

For a month they limped through the passing days and nights. There was the act of hopefulness because to live without it would have been unbearable. There was politeness, her mother and father passing each other in hallways, corridors, dark musty corners of the house. Occasionally they found themselves in the same room, were forced to witness what they saw in each other's eyes. There might then be a rare reaching out, the touch of a hand upon a hand when the witnessed grief became too hard to bear. But there was no natural sufficiency to survive whatever it was they were trying to survive. Mostly there was an awareness that they were building toward something; that this deadening state of limbo would not last. And in the end it didn't.

“Are we drowned yet?” Vivienne asked him one evening.

“Almost,” he replied. “Almost,” and again he left the room.

She took to standing in the river again with her pockets full of stones. Lor found the stones. Took them from her. But Vivienne found more.

And later in her workroom, crouched amongst spilled paint, beneath a canvas awash with streaks of lurid color, Lor found her holding a palette knife in her hand.

“Mother,” Lor whispered when she saw her. “Mother, are you hurt?”

“Always,” her mother screamed. “I am always hurt.”

Lor knelt on the ground, let her mother cling to her, weep upon her dark stains of kohl that bled out across the collar of her blouse.

“
Zyli wsrod roz
,” her mother whispered. “
Nie znali burz
.” Over and over to herself like a lament.

When a week later Lor found her once again in that room, lying in a square of polished light, surrounded by paint tubes that had been opened, spread out onto her canvases and the floor around her, she asked again, quietly from the doorway, if she was hurt. This time though, there was no reply. Vivienne looked like she was sleeping, her face set in blissful repose as if at any moment she might open her eyes. Her expression gave nothing away. She faced the window and the pale sky that had not held a single cloud for days. She was dressed as if she'd planned to go dancing. It was only when Lor stepped forward that she saw the pool of blood that spread out beneath her mother's still body. Already it had darkened from red to deepest indigo.

Lor rushed to her, held her mother's bloody wrists in the air, held them to her chest as if the thumping of her own heart might stir Vivienne to wake.

“Mother,” she cried. “Mother.” She lifted Vivienne's weighted head up from the ground, held it in her lap, hushed her, told her all would be well. All would be well. Why the threat of stones, when in the end the choice was so much bloodier? There had been no sign that this day would be her mother's last. She had not talked to Lor differently, had not reached out to touch her more frequently. There was nothing that could be interpreted as a farewell. It was as if death, when finally it did come, had arrived in a fleeting moment of decisiveness, startled and abrupt.

Lor called for her father, called for Bethany, tried to steady the tremor in her voice. Rushing steps sounded down the corridor. Her mother in her arms, eyes still closed, face still sleeping. People looked younger when they slept, Lor thought. Even younger when they slept not to wake. As if the child they once were had come to take their hand and draw them away.

Andrew fell to the floor beside them. There was a twisted expression on his face. A confusion that looked like it might never leave him.

“Get her out,” he shouted. “Get her out.” By her he meant Lor, and soon Bethany's arms were upon her, pulling her away, down corridors
to the kitchen and the warmth of the stove, where the older woman fussed and chattered and tried to hide her shaking hands.

Hours later Andrew himself confirmed unnecessarily to Lor that her mother was dead. He stood at one end of a room, she at the other, hid at first both his distress and his tears, before he stumbled in his delivery, before he choked and bent his head.