Jakob’s Colors (9 page)

T
he summerhouse had not been used in years. In fact Lor could not remember an occasion when it had been. Perhaps not in her lifetime, but there were photographs, worn and faded, sepia in tone, that suggested it might once have been more than just a relic of decoration in the far corner of the top lawn. That there had at one stage been dancing and merriment behind the stone walls. The polka, the mazurka, the galop, the waltz, the cotillion—had they been danced there? Had her mother and her father swung each other around in this long rectangular room? It was beautiful, magnificent, more like an orangery with its long floor-to-ceiling windows, and its roof that sat like some slick-brimmed hat. Ivy hugged and wove around the crevices, cut back each year, growing more vigorously the next. In the past it had been a subject of much speculation that despite the windows being locked, never opened, the roof sealed and boastfully leak proof, leaves mysteriously seemed to find their way into the interior, to blow somehow across the cold stone floor, where they were found months later, dried and crumpled, bleached of all color, alongside the carcasses of gauze-winged butterflies and long-abandoned cobwebs.

It was here that her father moved her mother's paintings; emptying out the room she had used in the house, singlehandedly carrying her paints, her brushes, her half-finished canvases, her unrealized dreams. So it was here that Lor went, waiting until the main house was still, before creeping out under cover of darkness to venture up the ornamental stone steps, past the smiling cherubs, the pruned privet hedges that this summer had been shaped like bizarre birds in flight, geese perhaps, not quite graceful enough to be swans, wildly wingspanned and open beaked as if fleeing in fright. She reached the summerhouse, the stone moonlit, ghostly, like some otherworldly apparition, the windows reflecting back the black abyss of clear sky. The door handle rattled, loose in the socket when she turned it. The door needed a firm shove to open, but then she was there, amongst the debris of neglect, and the bright half-imagined worlds of her mother's canvases stacked upon one another. Paints covered most of the floor. Pots that had never seen the light of day, tubes immaculately labeled: vermilion, fuchsia, teal. Untouched brushes of horsehair and sable. Now mere scintillations that there had been at least the hope of some brilliance.

“Mother,” Lor called. “Mother, where are you?”

And from out of the cobwebs and the shadows she came, dressed in gray, in silk brocade.

“I am here, my love, don't shout. Don't shout.”

Lor wept. “I miss you.”

“Don't fret so. I'll make it go away. It is easy.” And she took a palette knife from a wooden box that was engraved with the letters V and A, sharpened it purposefully, first with a whetstone, holding it in the palm of her hand as if it were something delicate and precious.

“Like this,” she said, gently pulling up Lor's sleeve and dragging the blade across her flesh.

Lor looked down, watched a line of blood seeping like jeweled beads across her arm. She didn't flinch. Instead, something else washed over her: a stilling peace. Her mother stroked back a strand of her hair.

“My beautiful girl,” she said. “Is it not so that the most tender things in life come after pain? Kindness after brutality. Peace after war. Love after loss.”

Yes, thought Lor. The tender things. There had been so much noise in the world. So much metal. So much stone. So much scraping of it, the endless chatter, the words that said one thing but meant something else entirely, the sound of laughter when it seemed more appropriate that there should be the shedding of tears; the split between two wants; the coarse pleading of someone to “Stop,” to “Not stop,” because . . . because . . . ; the grind of water in the radiators as a scalding bath was filled; bruised skin burning—all of it, like the screech of chalk on a blackboard to Lor's ears. An endless stream of bewilderment that left her with sudden bouts of fury, wanting to march through all of them, to clear them all away.

The parties had not stopped. They had glided seamlessly from one to another as if nothing of consequence had happened. The same conversations, desultory and full of strained cheerfulness. Mumbled apologies for her loss, the odd hand upon her shoulder, on the small of her back, but there was no time to pause, to sit in the dark of grief. The woman in the blue dress had vanished like her mother. So had John. His wife's illness had worsened, they said. He was tending to her more vigilantly. Other than that, everything else stayed the same. The chatter, the demented frivolity as they guzzled bottle after bottle of wine. But now, in the quiet solace of this forgotten place, there was this peace, this stilling pain that was sweetly exquisite.

It was as if her mother stayed with her for days after that. She could hear her voice, a murmur that filled the background of everything. When it quieted and eventually silenced, and when the missing of her again became claustrophobic with longing, Lor went once more to the summerhouse and simply found her there again. Gradually this act of a blade slicing through skin, once endured, led to a stillness like none other she had felt before. Like the rush of steam just before the boil and whistle of a kettle. Or the settling of windblown leaves after a breeze had passed through and left. A softening of limbs, a focusing on the sound of silence.

To begin with she could still herself this way for minutes. Afterward, when it became more of a ritual, she could still herself for hours. Later still, for days. Strange passages of time when she seemed
unable to speak, stupefied in her own quiet inertia. It was a disappearance of self, like her name; a low note that seemed unfinished and barely audible.

Standing on the threshold of the garden and the timeless, half-forgotten house, she would stare up at the growing moon, lost beneath the crescent glow of it, as her blood dripped to the earth onto stiff sprouts of freshly cut grass.

There you are, she said to herself. There you are. I just have to find you.

She lived this way for months. Hid in the shadows, unseen, unnoticed.

But then perhaps because he knew he had been avoiding her, perhaps because he too missed Vivienne with a longing ache; either way, one day Andrew took Lor up to the far wall on the upper lawn to see something. A hidden family emblem buried under cascades of overgrown ivy. He swept back the layered stems, a cigarette in one hand, to show, engraved in the mottled stonework, a crest with the words
Um Rexum Avioli
circling around it.

“What does it mean?” she asked, content simply to be in his company.

“Something about honor,” he told her. “Always about honor. Whatever that is.”

It was a seemingly languid interaction on his part. On hers the very opposite, the seeking for some sort of affirmation when he looked at her, a shine in his eyes that perhaps betrayed more depth of feeling than he showed. Or at the very least that he found her presence welcome. Strangely, it was as she turned, hopeful of seeing this, that he carelessly flicked the ash from his cigarette. It landed above her wrist line, singed a tiny circle of skin there. He began a somewhat comical exploration of the damage he had done, almost relieved for the distraction, and it was then, in the pulling up of her shirtsleeve, that he saw the raw crisscross scarring that ran like a broken ladder from her wrist to her elbow.

He stilled. The air seemed to sink around them.

And though he had then caressed one of the less tender marks with his thumb, though he had lingered to examine them, before
momentarily looking up into Lor's eyes, it was the embarrassment of such an intimate discovery rather than the cuts themselves that seemed to distress him most. For afterward he had walked away, dazed it seemed, inertly stricken, clutching his head as if he'd knocked it on some overhanging branch.

His cigarette was left smoldering on the grass. A line of yellow smoke coiled into the air and dispersed somewhere. She picked up the stub between her thumb and index finger, rolled it between them, before taking it to her lips and inhaling deeply.

The vicar was called in the next day. He arrived with pity in his eyes, syrup in his voice, as if he believed he could soothe Lor's grief with his tone. In one hand he carried a brown paper bag filled with vanilla beans, in the other a bottle of elderflower wine. The beans were for Lor; the wine for her father. Whispered discussions took place beside the musty bookshelves. A comforting hand patted against her father's back. The cupping of her own knees. Low spoken questions, which were asked, but not answered. Her mother's doctor was called. Again more whispers beside the bookshelves. Lor listened to the smattering of their words, as she lay in the sunlight that spread out over the chaise longue.

It was decided that the matter best be dealt with immediately, so as “to avoid further decline,” that “new treatments in Austria were proving remarkably effective” and that perhaps Lor, and her father, would “benefit from the privacy of distance,” being from a family of local repute. Three days later a black car arrived. Men in white coats held Lor down and sedated the tears from her, while the vicar and the doctor told her that everything would be fine, that she should not be afraid. While her father put his head in his hands, and wept, calling out his wife's name over and over again.

“Forgive me,” he whispered as Lor's eyes closed and lost all sight, all sound of England.

L
or knew if they stayed much longer it would be too hard to leave De Clomp. Already they were settling into the warmth of the place, already her children were letting down the barriers of the last few weeks. She felt their resilience diminishing; a sense of quiet inertia settling in her own bones, a trick of the senses that left her feeling that Yavy was close; that he was here. But he was not here. He was far from here. She had witnessed the very tearing of him from her.

They had collected in one of the city's smaller squares, a gathering of gypsies, three hundred or so, adults and their youngest, those not of school age. They had stood beneath a clear sky, beneath the slanting shadows of tall city buildings that cast ship shapes across the stone paving. Some stood with the bright sun in their eyes longing for shade. Others stood in the chilled shade longing for sunlight. But mostly they were content, heads down in the act of listening to the gypsy chief, Marli Louard, a tall man, all lengths and angles, whose hands and feet seemed at odds with his limbs. Despite this, he carried about him an air of optimism, his cheeks rubicund with the outdoors, as if he had rubbed across them all things rough, bark and brittle leaves, as a celebration of the ruddiness by which his life was navigated. His speech
invested hope in a future that up until that moment had seemed cut with only bleakness. The crowds listened to him, smiled with delight, pleased that they were still capable of creasing the corners of their lips up to the corners of their eyes, however tentative their optimism. For in recent years the light from them had dimmed, and it had taken much courage to come to that square. There had been much rousing of spirits, as if they could no longer sit in the shrunken shadows of who they had become and had now the opportunity to dine on a feast of hope, to rally resolution. However transiently they knew it might last.

Yavy stood listening, his face full of rapture. Lor had not seen that look of his in a long while and she squeezed his arm, stroked her fingers down the length of his back. Eliza stood between them, jittery and moving from foot to foot. Jakob sat on the stone flags, stiller than she, calm and listening, with Malutki beside him. All was well in those moments when Marli Louard filled the square with words of hope.

So the commotion, when it came, was all the more shocking, for where in one moment they were rich with expectation, a light in their eyes that seemed brighter after the slow months that had passed, in the next they felt the current of menace that surged up from nowhere, a shift from peace to chaos, that spilled along the cramped quarters of the market square like floodwater. Then a baby's cry sounded, a haunting sound, the very worst. And next a whistle that cut through the air.

That was when chaos broke out. People began running, before their minds had even grasped the notion of danger and escape. Running blind, before questions could form on their lips.

Marli Louard hesitated. He stopped, then started, then stopped again, silenced eventually as he tried to understand the swell of movement around him. He did not run. He did not leave his stand. Stood instead in gawky disbelief that this moment, when all was well with the world, could have broken.

A single bullet hit him in the center of his chest. He swayed slightly, paused before his long angular body crumpled to the ground. His limbs collapsed in on themselves. He lay with his legs in the square,
his head on the platform, his face lit with surprise and incomprehension, eyes blinking as he watched the scene unfolding around him. As slowly his life ebbed away.

Lor grabbed Eliza's hand and screamed for Jakob to follow. Yavy was being pushed in the swell away from her. She saw his face only once, looking back, searching for her, his skin grayest in the mass of gray faces around them. His eyes found hers, briefly. Stared at her with a look of abject dismay, bewildered that she could be so far from him. He grasped at the air. Fought to be near her.

But the crowd surged, pushing him one way, she another, the swell carrying her and the children, stumbling forward on unsteady feet, treading blindly over fallen bodies, already damaged beneath the trampling of boots. She saw a boy in a green coat screaming for his mother. A headscarf that had unraveled, daisy strewn with yellow, spiraling up over their heads before it sank into the crowds, was trampled underfoot. A silver button, on the collar of a fleeing man, caught the light, twinkled ahead of them like some small beacon. It seemed everyone was heading toward it, following this lone individual who ran up ahead of them, following a tiny light as if it might guide them to safety. A woman beside her was weeping. As if already she had decided the worst was to come.

“The schoolhouse,” she sobbed, grabbing onto Lor's arm, pulling at her wrist. “Will they have taken the children in the schoolhouse?”

Lor did not know. Her own children were not old enough for the schoolhouse, a slanted wooden structure that let in the rain, situated on the
kampania
itself, now that the local schools were closed to gypsy children. She looked down at the cracks in the pavement, held onto her footing so as not to fall, with the weight of the woman who was almost leaning herself upon her now, as if she could no longer stand with the fear of what she was imagining.

“Will they have taken the children in the schoolhouse?” she shrieked again.

“I do not know,” Lor told her. “I do not know,” and gently she lifted the woman's grasp off her, and moved on, her hands clasping her children's, studying the ground as they ran, the guttering alongside
the buildings. The clutter of cigarette ends, where beneath the eaves of the central office building, on a more usual day, people stood to smoke as if there was still leisure in the day. A can of tooth powder that was being kicked alongside the ground on which they ran, rolling from foot to foot.

She looked up, checked where they were, caught again that silver button still glinting in the light and stumbled on, toward it, because sometimes one just needed to blindly follow a light. Any light. Away from Yavy. His face in that crowd, being pulled farther from her. Away from the calling of her name. Over and over, shouted hoarsely, desperately, until she was too far from him to hear it. Until he was gone. Until he was only an image behind her closed eyes.

Downstairs in De Clomp, she could hear the music starting. Outside it was already dark. She closed her eyes, as if to check that she could still see Yavy there. Standing with his hand raised in the air, as he would always do, a last turn before he rounded a corner for a day's work, a morning's errand, an evening's task. Always, after he had kissed her good-bye, a last look, a last farewell.

And yet, before that, there had been a time where he had had to say good-bye twice, when he would bid farewell and then return to bid farewell again, as if the act of separation itself was too much to bear, as if he did not trust that he would see her again. But slowly, day by day, he had been reassured, with all the times when she had still been there on his return, waiting with a meal, a home made clean, and gradually, in time, he had let go of that second good-bye.

Yes, they must leave De Clomp now. They must set off for the one place left where she felt she might find him, while she still had the resolve. For what else was there but that?