The Boy Who Saw in Colours

by Lauren Robinson

  The Boy Who Saw In Colours

  Lauren Robinson

  Lauren Robinson

  Copyright © 2020 Lauren Robinson

  All rights reserved.

  Lauren Robinson has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Author website http://laurenrobinsonauthor.co.uk

  Cover design, editing and typesetting by Henry Hyde https://henryhyde.co.uk

  For the friends who gave me the stories.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. The Day The World Ended

  2. The German Who Loved The Jew

  3. Bad Decisions

  4. Questions And Melting Ice-Cream

  5. Secret Suitcases

  6. Monsters and the Midnight Marathon

  7. Darkness and Match-Stick Soldiers

  8. The Castle on the Clouds

  9. Boy: Unknown

  10. The Forgotten Name

  11. The Background People

  12. Sweaty Pyjamas and Swastika Soup

  13. Screaming Dominoes

  14. The Painted Markets

  15. The Good Jew

  16. Rinse. Dry. Repeat

  17. The Street Walkers

  18. The Puppet-String Man

  19. Tomas and the Painted Js

  20. Oskar’s Tobacco Heart

  21. Handprint Birds

  22. Oskar’s Gift

  23. Tumbling Colours

  24. The Fight

  25. The Pink Swastika

  26. From Destruction to Abstractionism

  27. The Word Whisperer

  28. Forgotten Letters to the Führer

  29. Stolen Tobacco

  30. The River of Souls

  31. Colours

  32. Youth and Punishment

  33. The First Black Moon

  34. The Dangerous Kiss

  35. The Prince and the Thief

  36. White Feathers and Radio Waves

  37. The Ladder to the Stars

  38. Blood and Honour

  39. The Music Man

  40. Kaleidoscope Waves

  41. Synesthesia

  42. The Men with the Pink Triangles

  43. The Colours On Fire

  44. The Road to Goodbye

  45. The Forgotten War Friend

  46. Brotherhood

  47. Victory

  48. The Last Colours

  49. Tomas. S

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  I can still remember how the colours used to make me smile.

  My fingers are crumbling; my breath is whispering. I’m not afraid of death, but I didn’t want him in the room when it happened. He was the last one, leaving the fluorescent light glowing just the way I like it.

  People are rather punctilious about death, and it’s avoided at all costs in conversation. It’s a last choice topic, not embraced in a meaningful way. People cover their eyes on the way down to save themselves from the terror.

  I’ve always wondered why.

  There are many reasons, really, but here are two.

  One: it’s scary as hell.

  Two: it’s the exact opposite of what so many people obsess over – youth, productivity, vitality, results.

  But regardless, you can’t run from it, escape it, or cower in the corner. It will find you and drag you out if it has to. It’s not afraid of you.

  And if death is inevitable, you should try to die well. Die right.

  I’m not sure if I did. Was my life lived in full? Did I take up enough space without taking up too much? Righting all of my wrongs and adding a little wrong to my rights? I don’t think there is a way to know for sure. There is no handbook for these things. Almost everything has rules except for the most critical details.

  How to die. How to live.

  Excuse me for barging in like this. I’m sorry if I did too much damage to the door. Please, trust me. If you don’t know how, trust anyway.

  But of course, an introduction. A name to a face. A voice.

  A beginning.

  Where are my manners?

  My name is Josef Schneider. That’s Josef like Yosef. You’re with me, ja?

  That wasn’t always my last name, and I didn’t learn the forgotten name for many, many years after it was stolen from me. Ripped from my identity and in its place, a new name was sown.

  Where did it go?

  Masked, coated men took it away.

  But we will get to the specifics soon enough. Until then, I will tell you this. I am, of course, a person. Or a shadow of what used to be a person. A memory that’s still alive in the hearts of some. Over the years, your perception was shaped to result in you abusing me with defamation, calling me “evil”, saying, “he deserved it.”

  “Rot in hell, you Nazi pig.” That one is my personal favourite because I was never a member of the NSDAP. I was seventeen when World War Two ended. One had to be twenty to vote.

  Yet, at times, I would agree with you. Maybe I did deserve it. Perhaps it was a way to atone for my sins.

  You can decide for yourself, however pointless that may be. You don’t know what it was like. We are the only ones who can say anything about it.

  The survivors with the scars.

  The people who were actually there.

  But I suppose you have to blame someone.

  That’s what humans do, isn’t it?

  Find someone to blame.

  And you can’t blame just one person. So, blame a whole generation? What about the ones with their lives on the line? The lives of their families? The children? Do we blame them, too?

  Anyway, I think such black and white thinking is dangerous.

  Everything needs a bit of colour.

  But that’s enough of that. Like I said before, you can decide for yourself.

  Which brings me to me, a colour. Do you want to know?

  Well, I’ll tell you who I am.

  Or who I was.

  I was the boy who saw in colours.

  A boy who had paint on his hands and a dried smile.

  But now, all I will ever feel is an everlasting numbness of all senses. Everything is black, with what seems like no chance of even a glimpse of light.

  Just dust and me – floating in the air.

  All I will ever hear is my own breathing and the sound of the smell of my footsteps echoing in the world.

  Forever.

  Some background.

  I loved to paint. Although, just saying that I loved to paint would be an injustice. It spoke to me from within. It expressed my deepest core, translating my messages when words weren’t enough. If you will, painting for me was worth more than a million syllables.

  Ever since I was a little boy, I was always curious about art because I couldn’t find its rules. It wasn’t until I was six years old that I realised art had no rules. It was a field without a convention, and that’s what made it so exciting to me.

  I always thought of the world in a much different way than most tend to.

  I see in colours.

  I see people in colours.

  I see memories in colours.

  I see you as a colour, too.

  I know that the number four is mustard yellow. Mother always insisted that numbers couldn’t have colours; or months, or letters, or people, but I thought that was nonsense.

  First the colours, then everything else.

  That’s how I see.

  Odd perha
ps, but that’s the way it is.

  I see myself as red. I like red. People said it suited me.

  I do, however, try to enjoy every colour I see – the whole rainbow: a million flavours and scents, none of them quite the same taste and sound as the last. If you put a colour to your ear, maybe you can hear it. Listen.

  The number six is the colour of the night. A hug smells sticky, like chocolate, and listening to music tickles the back of my neck – everything blending into one sensation.

  Who wouldn’t want to experience the world in full sounds and colours? I’ve learned to fear the silence because that’s where the bad memories live. The colours keep me company.

  Why do I require the company of colours?

  The guilt.

  The survivors.

  The ones that didn’t make it.

  The remaining scraps of humans left over.

  I drowned the sheets of grief until it rendered me useless. There are people I still cannot bear to look at, but over time visions came slowly creeping into my senses, and I could feel their frightened souls and beat-up hearts floating in the colours. Sometimes, they’d smile at me, nod and pat me on the back. That hurt even more.

  Which brings me to the story I am telling you tonight, or today, or whatever time and colour.

  It’s just a small story, really.

  About two brothers,

  A doomed friendship,

  Some colours, and;

  Quite a lot of swearing.

  The story I’m about to disclose cannot be found in any history book. They say that history is told through the eyes of the survivors, but no one groups us with those reported survivors, and even fewer people tell stories about us.

  Until now.

  I was born and raised in coffee-stained Germany. This Germany was ageless and waited up for me at night. It had no beginning and no end. I belonged there, and in my heart, I will always belong there. Whether or not the Germany of my childhood was saved or lost in the end, you will have to decide for yourself. This is a true story. I was there, and I remember.

  Innocence. Love. Childhood.

  I think about them now and then; think about the old days when I was a child. If only now. I would feel free, unrestricted, like paper in the sky. Jumping over fires and wishing that the world would never end.

  Floating. Flying.

  The colours. I’ve collected them, you know. I placed them in a book, and I gave it a name.

  THE COLOUR THESAURUS

  I love to collect colours. They help me find my voice when words just won’t do. I will let you look at it, and you can fill your own stories with them if you like.

  First off was ghost white – the brightest white you could imagine. Blinding, almost. And I know what you’re thinking, white isn’t a colour. It’s just some nonsense – a light. Well, I’m here to tell you that it most definitely is a colour. It’s not just a colour. It’s every colour you could ever think of smashed together and blended to create a beautiful, new colour – a base for everything.

  We were travelling to God knows where. A desperate journey.

  We would have made it, too, if it wasn’t for the cold fingers and smell of agony.

  I knelt next to my grandmother’s side; her lips were a corroded brown colour, peeling away like cracked paint in desperate need of redoing. Her hands were slippery and cold, like ice cream. And her dark eyes stared blankly at the ceiling.

  She lay on the floor.

  My thoughts scurried, as did my breathing.

  Why Oma?

  Why now?

  Why?

  HOW IT HAPPENED

  She was begging. “Please,” but she would never finish her sentence.

  Then quieter. “Please.”

  Then she stopped begging.

  She began to relax, started to struggle for breath, moaned, and exhaled.

  She mumbled a bit. We couldn’t understand it.

  My grandfather took her hand, and her eyes flew open. She lifted her head and her gaze locked on his. He was startled and began to cry. He told her he loved her. She said she was sorry. And she began to fade.

  There was a shiver, a slight twitch, and she was gone.

  She just decided not to exhale anymore.

  To my right, my little brother’s arms were folded. His face was blank and decorated with frozen tears. He shook her arm, but she was gone.

  At twelve years of age, I became intimate with death. I witnessed the extraordinary transformation from body to ghost of this particular life lived. She became something else, something immaterial, like memory, love, and presence.

  My heart, at this point, was slippery. And loud, so loud. It tasted metallic. The whole world could hear it.

  Grandfather knelt, holding his wife’s limp, lifeless body in his swollen arms.

  Our mother and father were asleep. They were holding hands. Soon, they would wake up with the same distraught look in their eyes as our grandfather, and Mother could only utter two small words.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  For me, the next thing was a staggered, onslaught of thoughts and massive movements. If you can’t imagine it, think battling for breath and suspended sorrow. We were hanging in that room.

  We wrapped her body in a sheet. The unsavoury thought of throwing Grandmother overboard was enough to make us get off the boat when it docked. There was nothing else to do but to go home and pretend as though nothing had happened. Death interrupted our plans.

  Next, is grey.

  It was, if you like, the darkest moment before the dawn.

  The second time I saw a dead body, I was barely sixteen years old. There was a crack in the air as loud as thunder, but without the raw power of a storm. I recall a blank-faced man lying on the ground in his stiffness. It took me a few hours to realise that he was dead. His last words stuck to his lips like paper.

  There was a man, staring, whose face was a white slate of nothing. My mind doesn’t want to recall anything from that day. However, sometimes, I must. I force myself to believe that it happened at all.

  A man with kind eyes took off his coat and covered the body with an enormous amount of sadness in each movement. He started pulling at my jacket. “Don’t be afraid.” The last thing I remember was a van and screaming. I forget the rest, but I know it was painful.

  The last moment, the moment I remember most vividly, was red.

  Red is a theme in my life.

  I looked up. The sky was not like the sky. It felt more like the sun had swallowed it whole. It was apocalyptic, catastrophic. In some places, it was crumbling ash, and there were veins in the redness. Earlier, my friends had been playing there, on the street that looked like an oil painting. I can still hear their colourful echoes, their feet tapping on the road with aqua breaths, their voices laughing. They seemed to be spoiling in the sun, but they didn’t care. They embraced it.

  Then came the Americans, the Germans, and the bombs.

  All together.

  I heard a man shout some words, and then a second explosion.

  Within minutes, there was a sudden outburst of shrapnel and words; anger sprinkled in for good measure. A river of blood streamed down the streets until it led to the bodies that would be frozen there forever – stuck on the pavement like glue. There was a man whose chest was cut open – he screamed that he had no more legs. Next to him, a shaking man. I could feel him grabbing at my coat. The damn air felt sick. He spoke to me, but I ran. I could feel no cold, but I was shaking.

  People at the scene were chasing away photographers, not wanting their agony to be material for the world. They were trapped in a moment of awful sorrow, and they didn’t want it to be a spectacle shared by strangers. The journalists were looking for someone to blame, and we were right there – Hitler was not.

  “Was this what the Nazis wanted?”

  “Was this what Hitler promised?”

  “Do you think this is a punishment?”

  “Is that the reason for all of this?”

/>   Of course not.

  Don’t be stupid.

  It probably had more to do with the bombs that were thrown down by the tiny humans hiding in the clouds.

  Dust filled the air, my lungs, and my eyes. God, that awful dust stung. It made me cry soapy howls of despair and rage.

  I felt it all.

  I was kneeling in a pool of rubble.

  The wall saved my life.

  Apart from anything else, all I wanted to do was go home. To paint, to draw, to see my little brother. Just one last time. I was dying for it – the safety of it – the home of it, but I couldn’t move. Also, home didn’t exist anymore. It was now part of the mangled landscape. If the end of the world were a place, I was sure it looked like that.

  My eyes bled from all the colours.

  The trouble was, who could ever come and save me? Who would crouch down? Take me in their arms? Tell me everything will be okay?

  No one.

  That didn’t happen.

  No one crouched. No one spoke.

  That wasn’t allowed.

  Would you have?

  Be honest.

  Instead, I picked up my battered soul from the rubble and continued on the path that was no longer there.

  I tripped.

  I fell.

  I got back up.

  Now, when I look at the memories in my hands, I see a long line of colours, but it’s those three alone that resonates with me the most. Over the years, the colours have become a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes the black fits just right, then the white and the red. Other times, they are jumbled so wholly that the colours are unrecognisable. Once in a while, I see them so clearly, I am back in the skin of the scared, little boy.