Jakob’s Colors (8 page)

“You mustn't fret,” he whispered. “I will take care of you. I will.” But he seemed more lost than she had ever seen him. A frightened boy, barely older than herself.

It was the only time he showed her shed tears. In all her young years. But he recovered himself quickly. She watched, standing still at the far end of the room, trembling slightly with a hand on the back of a leather chair, as he stood tall, the stolidity that would accompany him from then onward setting over his face. He fell silent. Stayed that way. She wanted to shout, to shock the silence back out of him. Instead she told him that she would not fret, that she knew he would take care of her, and when he then left the room and returned to his study and the comfort of his dark wood-paneled walls, she found herself tramping across the lawn from the house to the field, then to the river, where she stumbled down the muddy banks and filled her pockets with stones. She waded out through the waters, in up to her thighs. She let her hands rest on the surface, the cold of it rushing against her fingertips. She moved one way, then the other. Afraid of the depths. Back to the shore, back to the river. Squeezed her hands, stroked back her own hair. Scoured the banks for kingfishers.

“No, I shan't swim. I shan't swim a single stroke,” she heard her mother say.

The wind grew restless. A strong northerly wind that held in it the ice of the winter to come. It blew the leaves from the trees, then blew where they had fallen, picking them up and depositing them in the currents, where they drifted past her, too swift to catch. Each one left her behind, flashed a farewell of green, then silver. When she could no longer feel her feet she filled her hands with river water and drank it till her head ached.

Finally she gave in, let what courage she had mustered slip from her, turned and waded back to the damp, silted banks, where she climbed up across the field, her dress waterlogged. She dragged her feet through the moist green grasses. Felt a great lethargy fall about her. She tipped her head up to the low gray sky. It was the lowest she had known it, a baleful sky of wax white, sickly almost, as if, were she to reach out and touch it, her hands would be filmed with a mist of illness. A great darkness was building up behind the fringe of woodland that filled the hill, a surge of black rain that, when it came, would be torrential, would thrash from the sky and quickly swell the river to the upper banks, perhaps flood the lower fields.

She walked toward the house. It loomed against the horizon. There was no desire to be anywhere. The light had gone, deserted her.

She entered the house through the back door, peeled off her clothes, leaving them in a puddle heaped upon the pantry floor, her shoes full of dank river water. Then she lay down naked in the small nook by the fire, curled into a small ball, listless, inert, upon the rug that was still stained with soil from Kerala. She lay there and heard the door to that room open, saw the shadow of her father linger, hesitate on the threshold.

“Lor,” she heard his voice, questioning, alarmed. She turned, covered her nakedness with her arms, her hands.

“Yes, Father,” she replied, her voice so low she was not sure he heard it. He stood staring down at her for a long time. She lay looking up at him. Then she reached out her hand, held it out into the air. There was a brief moment when he looked as if he might move toward her, a hesitation, a want. But in the end he withdrew, shrank back into the distant familiar. Then he stepped over the threshold and closed the door softly behind him. Lor turned back to face the fire. Later she found someone had removed the stones from her coat pockets and crudely sewn up the openings.

H
is is a life of warm confinement, broken only by the daily trip to the bucket at the foot of the stairs and a view of the sky through a grime-smeared window. Jakob longs for the sight through this window. Aches for the moment when Markus will open his cupboard door and free him for a few minutes only. In time the old man lets him linger. Lets him peer upward from beneath the ledge, his hand reaching out as if he might touch the sky.

“It is bright today, Markus,” Jakob will say. “So bright.”

“It is, my boy,” the old man will confirm. “It is a bright winter's day.”

Sometimes there is snow fringing the four corners of the glass. Other times there is rain, rattling against the pane from a sky of rubbed chrome, but even that merely smears the dirt, never washes it away.

“I am afraid to clean it,” Markus tells him. “Afraid to make it stand out.”

“It's of no matter,” Jakob tells him. “No matter. I see all that I need.”

It is at night that they suffer cramps and at night when each of them lets the tears come, as if the darkness were a sanctuary for pain. When the cramps tear at his limbs Jakob learns to stretch into them,
pushes his heels, his toes, the length of his calves, against the pain, so that at first it intensifies and sharpens and then just when he thinks he can bear it no more, the pain will ebb with a sudden clarity, like the ending of a loud noise, or the sudden stopping of rainfall. Cherub holds his pain silently. Loslow screams. His chilblains sting him. At night he binds them tightly in cloth.

Yet despite the cramps and the confinement and the dark, Jakob is not often afraid in this triangle of a space. The wood is warm and the closest thing to being held that he has felt in a long time. Sometimes the darkness around him feels infinite, as if behind him the space opens out and he is as insignificant as a mollusk. He cups his foot in his hand, rests the heel in his palm.

“Jakob,” he whispers on occasion. “Jakob,” just to hear his own name. He strokes a lock of hair from his face. He kisses his own arm. And presses his thumbs against his toes. He no longer knows who he is on the earth. What defines him.

“We existing in the eyes of another,” his father had told him once. “That is why we seeking them out.” Jakob no longer knows in whose eyes he exists. But for a gray-eyed old man, he is not seen by anyone. He is a boy in the darkness. He lives in the void. Without light. Without color.

He wakes. He sleeps. He dreams of his mother. Dreams of a day in late September when maple leaves were turning burned and gold, but when the warmth of summer was still in the air and in the ground. They had waded out downstream, the cold water lapping at their shins, too strong for his sister and his brother to join them, so it had been just the two of them. Just the two of them beneath the dappled light, the water's surface tinged with the dark green of the canopy above, and he had asked if she had ever done this when she was a child. Were a river, and a stony riverbed and her bare feet things of her past? For it seemed to him, of the few things he knew about her then, that this would not be so. That his childhood and hers were not familiar to each other in any way, and he was always seeking to find ways in which the two might meet.

“Yes,” she had told him. “Yes, this is something I remember as a child. Bare feet and wading through water. My family, they had a house with a river running right through their land.”

“A river and a house, where we have neither?”

“Yes.”

He had thought about this for a while.

“We have no photographs on the walls of our wagon, Ma?” he had said eventually. “Everyone we know has photographs on the walls of their wagons. Why so?”

“Sometimes you leave a place too quickly. You take yourself, but little else. Perhaps our photographs still hang on walls. They are just not our walls.”

“But we will never see them?”

“I don't know. Perhaps, one day we might see them.”

He'd been pleased about the river, about the wading through it, been pleased to have found a memory they could share, and she'd seen that, and had cupped her hand over his knee and held it there until they were both dry. And in the warmth of that dream Jakob sleeps deeply.

Mostly, though, the nights are broken with the creaks and shifting of the ancient floorboards above their heads, or with the wind that seems to swell in the night like an incoming tide, whistling through the cracks and crevices. And if not that, then the sound of Loslow sobbing will pull Jakob from a sleeping slumber. A guttural sob that resonates from somewhere low down inside the older man.

“You could not have saved him,” Cherub is saying one night. “You could not. Please, Loslow. Try to let it go. Grieve for him, yes, but try to let this go.”

“I have seen the places they will take us, Cherub. I have seen them. I have looked for him, looked and not recognized his face among the crowds within them. I have stood behind this high fence, day after day for a whole week. Watched shaven-headed men and women grapple on the ground to fight a child for a piece of moldy bread, watched them lick their steel bowls clean. Day after day, until I could bear it
no longer, until I would stare into their eyes and see not a trace of thought cross them. We are right to be afraid, Cherub. We should be more than afraid. Man is not man anymore. Or worse than that, man is the very essence of all that he should be. When I came upon this place it was death I had surrendered myself to, not a sanctuary. I had obliterated all hope of a sanctuary ever existing in this world again.”

“But it does exist, Loslow. Everything that ever did exist, still does.”

“I know, Cherub. I know,” Loslow sobs. “Just at night. At night in the darkness, when all I can hear is my own breath, my own heart, then I cannot find the belief of that.”

Jakob does not speak during these spells, and he does not speak of them afterward. Instead he opens his box, runs his fingers over the contents: a stone, a petal, a piece of colored fabric in the palm of his hand. Jakob closes his eyes. Small boy, barely eight years old—a half-blood gypsy child of Roma and Yenish. Rusted ochre from a mossy bough. Steely white from the sap of a chestnut tree. A Cremona orange that can make a violin sing.

See the colors, Jakob. See them.

He is standing in a blue field of saffron flowers that are opening as the sun sets. He is barely five years old. They have traveled for weeks to get there for the end of October, the peak of the harvest, across the Pyrenees, through northern Spain where bulls with horns the size of tusks run down cobbled streets and big-breasted women knock back dirt-smeared glasses of sangria, down toward the south where it grows hotter and sparser until they find themselves standing on the torrid plains of Castilla–La Mancha, looking out across a desert of dust.

“Nothing here,” Jakob cries. “All this way an' nothing here, Da.”

“Wait,” whispers his father. “You be patient. Wait for that bright sun to go down. Then some magic happening before your eyes.”

They sit watching as the opaque skies fill with black-winged kites that circle and hover on the air currents. They hear the call of warbler birds, the hammer of a lone woodpecker, a flash of green as it flits from one stark tree to another. The sun drops lower, sinks like a hot metal spoon over the horizon, streaks of vermilion cutting across the
skies. And then, and only then, as the first stars begin to shine, do the thousands upon thousands of crocuses begin to open their petals and bloom. By morning the desert floor is carpeted in a sea of blue: mallow in the shadows, violet in the light.

“Why blue, Da?” Jakob asks. “Why not yellow?”

“The flower is blue. The stigmas scarlet. Only the dye's yellow,” his father tells him.

They would bloom for just one morning. By the day's end they would be gone. They have only until noon to harvest them. Until noon to gather each of the three stamens from the center of each flower.

“And yet . . . and yet, we cannot rush. We best be delicate, exact in our gathering, for if we handle them flowers too roughly, even if the wind blows too strong, that color will start fading away, disappear like a mist. We must collect them tenderly, carry them in straw baskets that we hang from our arms and do not swing. We best be steady, like we're dancing, a fluid movement that we must repeat over and over again.”

“Like we are dancing,” Jakob repeats. “Like that.”

The memory feels tentative, distant suddenly. He tries to grasp it, to hold it close. But it disappears as transiently as it had come, and once again there is only the cupboard darkness and the remnants of Loslow's laments.

If at night, though, Loslow is capable of plunging them all into the depths of despair, in the day he lifts their spirits, brings laughter and a world not of this time to their space beneath the stairs. The daylight hours bring a thoughtful frivolity to his state of mind.

“Loslow, what are you hearing,” Jakob asks, when the drumming of Loslow's fingers sounds across the floor. “When you play? You hear your piano?”

“Yes, Jakob, I can hear it.”

“Does it fill your ears, like you are there with the very sound of it?”

“Yes, only that. I hear only that.”

Jakob closes his eyes. Sees his colors. “Yes,” he tells him. “Yes, I know that of you.”

At intervals along the passing months Markus comes to cut their hair, because of the lice, but Loslow refuses to be shaved, “to be shorn like a sheep,” as he puts it, so he insists that Markus cut his hair in a style that makes him laugh.

“That is the only criterion,” he tells him. “It has to entertain you. It has to make you smile.”

So Markus does, and through the cracks in the door Jakob can hear him chuckling at his own creations, at the quiffs and curls he leaves on the top of Loslow's skull, describing the end results to them as best he can.

“He has a monk's cropped top,” he tells them. “Devil horns, a clown with a smile upon its brow. Loslow, you look like a girl.”

“You are rich, Loslow?” Jakob asks him afterward. “In your life before this one?”

“Comfortable mostly, but never rich. A pianist is never rich. I used to teach when I wasn't playing. I loved to teach. Like searching for a shell you love on the shore. You never know when a student will surprise you, when they will burst forth and excel your deepest expectation.”

“They say all Jews have gold. Do you have gold?”

“No, no gold,” Loslow laughs. “You know there was a time, several centuries back, when tulip bulbs were more valuable than gold. Imagine that. A time when flowers were the most expensive things on the earth. And so . . .”

“And so?”

“We should remember that.”