The Boy Who Saw in Colours

by Lauren Robinson

  *Chrome Yellow*Classic Rose*

  A HARROWING BUT OBVIOUS LECTURE

  Tomas didn’t disturb me for three days, but on the fourth day, he came.

  “Come on,” he said. His smile was faint.

  His voice did not sound like him. “Bring your sketchpad, too.”

  I went, sketchpad under my arm.

  When we got to the tree, I realised that we wouldn’t be going much further.

  We sat on the grass, and for a good fifteen minutes, Tomas searched for the words. When they arrived, he stood to deliver them. He rubbed his eyes and sniffed hard. First, it was a question. “Do you love Von Bacchman?”

  The noise of the shock poked me. “What?”

  The question was repeated, and he elaborated. “I saw you and him. That night with the radio.”

  I breathed. “Yes.”

  Tomas exhaled and smiled. “Okay.”

  “You’re not angry?”

  “You’re my brother.”

  “But, I’m a homosexual.”

  Silly Josef, is what Tomas was thinking.

  “You’re still my brother.”

  I smiled, but it would soon be erased. Tomas was not finished.

  He spoke about our past – about our mother and father and their band of merry men. About the executions in Munich city centre, black coated men in funny hats, and the men with the pink triangles. I listened to it all without looking up. I was drawing nothing on my sketchpad – invisible circles.

  Then came more words – the crucial, life-and-death, no laughing matter words.

  “Josef.” He stood proud while I sat. He walked back and forth between the tree and me, the sun magnifying his shadow. It turned him into a giant.

  The painted words were scattered about, perched on our shoulders, and dangling from our arms.

  He remembered what happened three days before.

  “Josef, if you do anything like that again, we will all be in serious trouble.”

  I had no words. I cradled my head.

  “Act like a man. People are dying out there.” He had my attention now.

  “I know. Everyone treats me like a child, and a stupid one at that.”

  “You act like one.”

  He walked a fine line between making me want to punch him and soothing me enough to keep me calm. He fed me sentences and watched with his pale eyes: desperation and placidity.

  “You will be taken away.”

  “It’s not fair.” I shook my head.

  “Life isn’t fair, Josef.”

  Tomas was worried that he was on the verge of upsetting me too much. But he took the risk. Better to swerve into the lane of too much sadness rather than not enough. My compliance had to be absolute.

  He took hold of my sketchpad, flicking through the stories of our pasts. The boy who sat on the moon, the man who climbed a ladder to the stars, the marching coats, and the freckled-faced Von Bacchman. Tomas stood with no emotion on his face. I realise, now, how much bravery that took. How could such a thing come from such a tiny human? That boy was meant to change the world.

  I retorted, “I want us to win, but to do that through fear?” I felt nauseous.

  “No.” More head shaking.

  “That’s a coward’s way out.” I was sure Tomas could see the colours flying, landing on each strand of the grass until the whole field was covered.

  “A last choice plan.” I was tearing apart at the seams. I must say it was beautiful.

  “Cowa…” Towards the end, Tomas looked at me and made certain that I was focused. “Josef, listen to me.”

  He gave me a list of consequences.

  “If you keep doing things like that…”

  The defiant left-handed Heil Hitler.

  Listening to music from the enemy.

  Loving freckled-faced hand-holding boys.

  And running into the road after men with pink triangles.

  It didn’t matter what it was.

  What mattered was that they were all punishable.

  “For starters,” he said. “I will take each of your paintings – and I will burn them.” He was acting like a tyrant, but it was necessary. “Got it?”

  My frown hardened.

  He wouldn’t, I thought.

  Tomas must’ve heard me because the next thing was a match being struck and the colours on fire.

  “No. What the hell are you doing? Stop it!” My eyes could not sustain my tears any longer. Tomas’ words restrained my attempts to reach for my sketchpad.

  “Tomas!”

  The flames caught rather well.

  He stopped it before it lit entirely, and he put it out on the grass, stomping hard. I don’t know who was more shocked: Tomas, myself, or the sketchpad. I picked it up and hugged it.

  In anger, I turned to my brother. “Tomas, I was always there for you.” Heavy breathing. “Always standing by your side when you called.” I had to speak in short sentences to avoid the inevitable breakdown of emotions. “But I can’t live my life only for your cause.”

  He tried his best not to show it, but I was sure that it broke his heart. Quietly. “It’s not for me. It’s for Germany. You act like you don’t even like your country.”

  The shock made a hole in me, very neat and precise.

  “Do you understand me, Josef?”

  “Ja. But it’s not fair.” Tears welled. “What about my dreams?” I bit my tongue. “They forced us here and made us wear all these different coats.” A painful pause. “What if we didn’t want to?”

  “Don’t cry, Josef. Please.”

  “What about my hopes and dreams? What about me?” I was crying now, in earnest. “I am so sick of all of these conflicts forced upon me by adults.”

  Tomas decided again on the contemptuous.

  Two big, stupid words.

  GROW UP.

  He had to remain hard, and he needed to strain for it. “They are going to take you away. Do you want that? I can’t lose you, too.”

  “Nein.”

  “Good.” His grip on nothing tightened. “They will drag you away, like those men in the van. And you won’t ever come back again.”

  And that did it.

  I was now sobbing uncontrollably, wiping at my eyes with my forearm. I knew that Tomas was dying to pull me into him and hug me. He didn’t.

  Instead, he squatted down and took the eye contact I wouldn’t give him. He unleashed his quietest words so far. “Verstehst du mich?” Do you understand me?”

  His face hardened.

  “Stop crying.”

  I nodded; I cried, now defeated and broken.

  I loved to paint.

  I loved Father.

  And I loved Rouvon Bacchman.

  But I loved my brother more.

  Tomas sat beside me and produced a small bag. He tried to stop his hands from trembling before he offered it to me. “Want a Pfennig frog?”

  “Nein.”

  My feelings were on fire, and all I could do was sit on the grass and cry. I was still that twelve-year-old boy who clung to the door in the Inland snow. I hadn’t changed at all.

  Two brothers sat side by side on the Inland grass and watched the sun fall into the River Seehund.

  “Are you alright?”

  No answer.

  But he didn’t need the answer.

  Life is one big contradiction. My sense of wonder was a little tired, but I knew it was beautiful. Life is amazingly awful, and then it’s awfully amazing. But we have the in-between emotions, too, and those are the ones people take for granted the most – the in-between colours. We have to let in the in-between.

  “I”m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  Days later, the air in Inland was different. Oskar did not smoke, Tomas did not speak, and I did not defy. When I was called upon, I went; when questioned, I answered; and I did not cry.

  Sadness came to visit me every night, and all I could do was push it away and say, “I’ll see you again”. I never spe
nt time with it; I never got up and showed it to the door. It sat on my bed. I pushed it away and refused to befriend it because I was afraid of the darkness it would have unveiled in me.

  Compassion is difficult. You feel for undeserving people, and you can’t speak of it for others would not understand your heart.

  I was always only one step away from becoming like Hitler myself.

  Almost.

  One thing always stopped me.

  Humanity.

  Some facts about Adolf: fifteen-year-old Josef addition.

  If I were born in your shoes, I couldn’t promise that I wouldn’t turn out like you.

  How were we supposed to know? You don’t speak unless spoken to. That’s how it was for me growing up, at least.

  It’s hard growing up. You try on shoes that they expect you to fill and you realise that they don’t fit. They were never made to fit. So, you tailor your own shoes, but they are not good enough. They have holes and let in water, but you patch them up so beautifully. They all think you’re mad because you are.

  Every generation has one. Every generation has someone like you in it.

  You were a boy who had paint in his blood, but others ridiculed you. They burned your paintings to the ground, and you were reborn from it.

  I am that boy, too.

  Everyone is.

  We all have some darkness trapped inside us. What makes us who we are is the road we choose to travel.

  I wish I could have known you back then. When you had that paintbrush in your hand, and you told the world how you would paint it many different strokes of brilliant. Maybe we could have been friends.

  Now – now I just pity you. I pity you because you will never know how it feels to be remembered for being good. And I realised that being good is far more important than being remembered.

  It frightens me, what humans are capable of. A modern, advanced, cultured society can rapidly sink into barbarity and genocide.

  44

  The Road to Goodbye

  *Royal Blue*Russet*Russian Green*

  In the last couple years of the war, the children were mobilised in the Volkssturm, the German version of the Home Guard, and fought on both eastern and western fronts. A lot of them were sacrificed in Berlin, some as young as twelve or thirteen.

  In ’44, some of us got letters, too – half of our class.

  Our moment had finally come.

  I was doodling when I saw the men in black delivering the letters.

  Penn Pichler came bursting through the door. “They’re here. They’re here.” He nearly fell over Simons’ feet.

  “Who? What’s all this commotion for?”

  “Our conscriptions.”

  I was already at the letterbox. What had remained empty for so long had a letter. A giant letter that was heavy on my hands. So heavy.

  Simons delayed finishing the class that day. She prayed with us, and when we left, she wept. “We are robbing these children of adulthood,” she said. I placed a daisy on her table, and she did not throw it away this time.

  For most Germans, the guilt began after the war had ended, and our crimes surfaced. The majority of us would suffer in the east and the west; some in their minds, others would be punished with starvation and poverty. But two souls whose colours were ready for their punishments were Oskar and me.

  I could not save the men in the pink triangles.

  He could not save me.

  Both were punishable.

  It gave Teichmann a good reason to swear – she was not a good woman for a crisis. We were sitting around a table in the hall. She raised her voice at Oskar before lowering it again. What she said was the truth.

  “We can’t send those boys off to war. It is a suicide mission, Oskar. An absolute suicide mission. Josef will be killed in an instant. No, you must… write to them, and tell them that we will not send our boys… we will not send our boys.”

  Teichmann was not talking about us then. Oskar’s hand found hers.

  “It’s my fault, Oskar. I shouldn’t have gone to the van. I shouldn’t have.”

  Oskar placed his hand on my shoulder. “You needed to, little man.”

  Teichmann’s voice was not wavering, but it was smiling.

  Tomas burst through the door when he learned of the news. This was what he was afraid of. He did not receive a letter.

  He began. “No, he can’t go. He is too young, isn’t he?”

  “He got a letter. They want him.” Teichmann said.

  “Why does he get to go, and I don’t? I trained for it. He didn’t.”

  No use, Tomas.

  It didn’t matter.

  “Tomas…”

  “It’s not fair.” Tomas went to the wall, standing with his back to the table and looked at the smiling Führer. His fists turned to stone.

  Returning, he took my upturned hand and cried into it.

  The goodbye was the most difficult.

  “Bis zum nächsten Mal.” I hugged him for many, many seconds. “Until next time.” When we separated, he said nothing. Just raised his middle finger. It suggested something along the lines of “Fuck off, Josef,” but it wasn’t in acrimony. He was a cavern, like his face. In fact, I thought it was absurd, and I laughed.

  Goodbyes don’t have to be painful. They can be, under some circumstances, and with the right person, tear-trippingly hilarious.

  A love from brother to brother.

  No. We were not brothers that day. We were just two teenage boys saying goodbye. There was no need to forgive or forget. He knew my mistakes, and I knew his.

  One last time.

  I was given the beautiful gift of desperation.

  “Josef, maybe you don’t have to go. If they come for you, we can run away. You and I would be brilliant forever and never die,” Tomas cried.

  “A bit late for that, Tomas,”I said.

  I held my brother’s face in my hands.

  “Stay safe, Tomas. Alright?” I brushed his darkening blond hair. “Promise?”

  “Yes, Josef.”

  One’s heart is always heavy when goodbyes are near. It is like we are not only carrying our own breaking hearts but the hearts of our loved ones too. Standing in that train station, I was sure that I carried the fragmented pieces of Tomas’ heart in my palms. I took them on the train. It was so heavy. A boy of fifteen should never have to say as many goodbyes as I did.

  I refused to tell Tomas goodbye. Even if everyone left everyone, I would not leave him. The sadness fell through his boots. He felt it fall to the floor of the train station like it was gravity. Sadness is this way. Just follow the footprints.

  “Do you have your papers? Sketchpad?”

  “Yes.”

  He was trying not to run out of last-minute miracles to put off my going away.

  I opened my mouth and felt the words stuck like glue in my throat. That’s when I knew I was making an awful mistake.

  Oskar made a promise. “I will take care of him.”

  Tomas threw it away, onto the railway tracks. “That’s my job.”

  One more hug and I was gone. I watched as Tomas’ figure became smaller, and I held nothing but the remaining colours of Tomas.

  On the train, Oskar prayed, hands clasped on the table and whispering shapes into the void, praying someone was listening.

  He prayed for his family, his Elsbeth, his boys. He hoped they would at least make it to the day that they turned twenty eight years old. He only spoke of religion that day.

  He was so devoid of colour that he didn’t even remember what it meant. He smoked his dreams away. Tobacco tears streaked.

  “Only fools and children would choose fire every time. But I wanted it, Josef. I wanted it so much. I wanted to be more. I wanted to be important – remembered.” His passion was nice.

  “You had to come here, Oskar. They were going to take your brother.” You cannot separate yourself from what you create.

  I understood in the end. “I’m a bad person.”

&
nbsp; “No, you’re not. You could not have known,” Oskar said.

  “I don’t believe you, Oskar.”

  45

  The Forgotten War Friend

  *Faces Of Light*Fulvous

  We were given half a day’s training and sent north to resist the Allied attacks along the Rhine.

  When I arrived, I wondered what those men had done do deserve such a fate. They didn’t look like men at all – they were grim reapers in uniforms. They had blackened faces. What had they seen? What had they heard? What had they done? Many of them must have been asking the same of me for they were pointing. Oskar was already making friends with the cigarettes.

  The army reminded me of how easy it can be to get humans to act the same – much like Inland. Humans really do want to belong to a herd, but no one will admit the fact. I did not. You should never, under any circumstances have to sacrifice your dignity for your destiny.

  Questions arrived.

  The first: “Welcher Tag ist heute?”

  “Montag.”

  “Jesus Christ. These fuckers thought it was Saturday.”

  The second question arrived from a man made from broken glass and was succeeded by a statement from another wearing a bruised leg.

  He tapped my shortness, and I felt the cold bitting his hands. “Jesus, look at this. They’re conscripting children now.” It was met with short spurts of laughter. “Just remember that we’re not Hitler lovers here.” He told me to watch my back. “They won’t show mercy because you’re a child. Bullets don’t discriminate.”

  Before I could ask the obvious question or give them the story about the homosexuals in the van, I was restrained by another voice from above me. His face has been erased from my memory, but his influence never had – even today.

  “Hallo, my name is ____.”

  He dragged me with his words. “In here.” The building was damp, and the smell was horrid – the second question.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  My words fell on him. He took a short breath. “You had better walk out, come in again, and tell me different.” The nameless man was said to have heard the horrors of the boy soldiers, and although he didn’t want to face it, he was prepared with a stash of lollipops. It was better than liquor and cigarettes, he thought. I was given a red one when I arrived.