A man entered the shop. “Is there anyone here by the name of Josef?”
“Yes. Who is this?” Müller was confident, but he wanted to be sure. When the blond man’s voice trembled, he knew.
I came from behind with paint on my hands and tired eyes.
“Josef.”
At first, I didn’t know.
“What happened to you?” He cried it rather than spoke it. “I’m so sorry.”
My hands studied his face. Stupsnase. Yes, it was him. He sounded so old.
I collapsed into Tomas’ arms, and we wept on the floor.
But it didn’t end there.
There was more.
Sit back down.
They stole my breath and heated my skin. My defences were just paper. Paper soaked by the falling drops of rain. Beauty like a book and cherry tobacco. Mama and Papa.
My heart has been ripped out so much, so why, then, does it feel so full?
My body cried for the missed time we will never make back. My head was pulled in with a calloused finger. They ate me with their eyes as if they couldn’t quite believe I wasn’t part of an almost forgotten dream.
My name is Josef Shulman. Tomas took back what they stole from us.
Epilogue
I died in 1957. I was thirty.
It was far away from the destruction of Munich, and even farther from my childhood in Berlin. I felt like an outsider in my own hometown, and there was something profoundly saddening about that. When I returned, the only thing that changed was me. We didn’t learn a damn thing. Tomas and I moved to a faraway suburb in Melbourne, Australia, and that is where we remained.
I met a lot of characters who taught me the meaning of life, but none came close to Rouvon Bacchman and his freckled face.
I received a letter penned from him. The page felt so light, but the words were heavy. The contents are unimportant to you, but I memorised the words. He told me he was getting married to a nice German girl, that the tears he cried that Christmas evening in ’43 were true and he was sorry. Our memories kept us in touch.
A man on the train became a life-long friend. He helped me to my feet when I fell in my blindness. His hands were chapped and raw – all calloused up, like a sailor’s thumb. I didn’t care that he was an Arab, nor did he care that I was German. We just knew we were friends.
How can you live a lot of life without living a lot of life? I somehow managed it at thirty, and it made me both want to do no more living and live a lot more.
It was the small, mundane things that made me hold on.
The colours, the paintings and sometimes the people. The people who showed me what it’s like to live.
Tomas.
Oskar.
Mama and Papa.
Rouvon.
The unnamed war friend.
They were just a few of those souls who touched me more deeply than they realise, existing now only in my thoughts – as colours, not people.
We are our stories.
The Boy Who Saw in Colours Page 30