Jakob lifted up a snail, looked at the underside of it. “Drying up in the sunlight, Ma,” he said.
Lor was barely listening. To the right of where they were sitting was the place she had once regarded as “her place,” or “his place,” sometimes “their place.” Either way, it was where she and Yavy had once known to look for the other. In the far corner, beneath a bookshelf stacked and cramped with old books, leather covered with hearty browns, mahoganies, and greens. It was so familiar, even after all these years. She could remember clearly how it had been to enter De Clomp and see him there, slumped and reading or pushing away the contents of his plate, a last small mouthful resting in its center, which he would unconsciously leave. Unlike the Romans, she used to think, who vomited in bowls so they could consume more, but deliberately left a morsel to inform their host that they were full. For Yavy it was something deeper than that. A need to know that, should he need it, there was food enough for him to eat. That he would not starve.
“De Clomp. The Shoe,” he had said the very first time they had sat in that place, before it had become their own. “If you had to, would you go choosing them shoes over your winter coat?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes. Water first. Food. Then shoes. If that was the choice.”
He had gone on to tell her a story about shoes, a pile of shoes in a village where he had once lived.
“So high it reached the rooftops of them houses,” he had told her. “We piled it for a month of Sundays. Gathered in the village square after church, an’ when that bell rang out we took off our shoes, children and adults, flinging them into the center of that square.” He used his hands when he spoke, gesticulated for emphasis. She loved to watch him, listen to him, a bright light in a room.
“And when every one of us was shoeless an’ that bell sounding out again,” he said, “as quickly as we discarded them, we found them, clambering through that pyramid of shoes for our single pair, seeking out our friends’ instead, our mothers’ or our brothers’, throwing it to them, again seeking out our own. An’ at the end of it all, when that mound of shoes was no more, if all of us had found our pair, then we’d won the game. If not, we had lost.”
She smiled with the memory. When it came, war had not been such a shock to him as it had to her. He had lived with the fight for survival long before it.
Behind the bar Alfredo was clinking glasses and bottles together. From time to time he looked across at Lor, his face questioning, but never asking. She could study his face in the morning light. Certainly it had aged since the last time she had seen him, but aged merrily. His was a giant of a face; the splayed expanse of his nose, the round shelf of his chin. The local children laid coins across it, and made him chew tough hunks of meat, awed that the coins stayed balanced. Of Italian descent, his parents had fled Italy in the diaspora of the 1860s, fleeing poverty and a cholera epidemic that had wiped out fifty-five thousand Italians living in the south. Like his father, and his father before him, Alfredo was a tower of a man, a bulk of bone and flesh. His size was something he’d had to plead forgiveness for all his life, and the clumsiness that came with it, forever knocking against the world around him. He had ventured outside his hometown only once and that was to see the bear pit in Bern, where he’d stared down into the dry-eyed silence of two cramped beasts and felt akin to their bulk in a way he had never felt with any other human being before. Up above, the electric lines had spanned from house to house, lighting up the bears’ dumb suffering beneath, and he’d longed to take them back with him to the dark of his own sky. At night with his wife, he slept shallowly, afraid that he might roll and squash her small frame. He had never found a wedding ring to fit his fourth finger. The muscle bulged there like a walrus.
“I have something special for you,” he said, seeing Lor looking at him. He disappeared out into the back and returned with something hidden in his giant hand. “For you and the children.” In his palm lay a lemon that he placed upon the bar as if it were made of glass. It was rough, the outer skin shriveled somewhat, but the yellow of it stood out against the night-brown of the wood surface, like a small star.
“We couldn’t,” Lor said. “You must have it.”
Alfredo shook his head. “They grow them here. Most are taken, but a few …” and his eyes shone. “Here,” he said, bringing out a knife and cutting her a waxy slice, an inch thick. “Eat it all, skin and everything. It will change something. It will begin something.”
She did as he said, crunched into the pith, the citrus sharpness making her eyes water. She had not tasted anything like it for months.
“You’re crying, Ma?” Jakob asked, his eyes forever watchful.
“No. It’s the lemon. It is sharp.”
“I can try it?”
“You can. Or we can dilute it with water.”
But he wanted to taste it as she had tasted it, and his eyes filled like her own and he laughed because of that, and she thought how long it had been since she’d seen him laugh and how she’d forgotten how beautiful he was.
“I love you,” she told him.
“Yes,” he replied simply. He sucked the sourness down to the skin. Ate the skin, then licked his fingers.
“What did it change?” Alfredo asked him.
“Made me like a bell, my whole self ringing,” Jakob replied.
Alfredo watched them as he continued to polish his rows of glasses.
“I will do all I can to hide you,” he said at length.
“I know.” She reached for his hand. “But he is not here.”
“No.”
“I thought …”
“I know.”
“Have you heard anything?”
Alfredo shook his head. “I will ask around.”
Lor smiled sadly. “We need to sleep and eat well. That is all. Is that possible?”
“Yes, that’s possible. I can feed you.”
She watched him, aching for the normality of polished glass, and wondered if her life had ever been that way.
“Don’t be afraid no more,” Yavy had told her. “We’ll be safe here awhile. No one will be finding us.”
Then he had pulled from the pocket of his oversized coat a small book, navy blue and leather bound with gold embroidered along the spine, small enough to hold in the palm of one hand.
“I don’t know what it reads. It’s in your language,” he told her. “But I thought you’d like it to run your eyes over.”
She had picked it up, had traced her hand down the length of the spine, opened the brittle pages, and smelled the musty scent of a book that had not been read in a long while. It was a book of old English folk stories.
“You like it?” he had asked, and for the first time she had heard a nervousness in his voice.
“I like it,” she had assured him.
“Very much?”
“Yes, very much. Thank you for it,” she had said, and when she looked his face was lit up with pleasure, as if she had given him something, not received it.
“Do you think I would feel it if he were dead?” she asked Alfredo now, quietly.
He did not answer. Lor looked away. Outside the sun had risen over the rooftops and was flooding in through the windows of De Clomp. They should not stay down in the bar for much longer. Already there was a scattering of people out on the streets.
“I will find him,” she said.
This Day
AUSTRIA, 1944
Jakob is curled up on sacks of cabbage that stink and ferment beneath the warmth of his sleeping self. Still unwashed, still covered with another’s blood, his breath is shallow and scratching in his chest from so many nights of cold air. He sleeps deeply, after a day’s toil, as the market packs up around him, a clatter of wooden boards and metal frames, dismantled with the precision of habit. He sleeps so deeply that he does not stir, not a single limb or sleepy shudder, and so he does not experience the gradual shift from sound to silence as the sellers leave, the disappearing trundle of car
twheels, the ebb of voices heading for a place they can call home. He does not experience the shift from company to solitude, the cooling of a sunlit day to a honey-colored dusk. The shadows lengthen, hang like sleeping phantoms. The light fades. The night wraps around him, camouflaging him on his soft makeshift bed. He hugs his box to him. The stone in his pocket presses into his skin, imprinting a mauve bruise of time passing.
He sleeps dreamlessly, and then, as the sun slips back up over the hilltops and the dawn shadows creep finger-like over him, there is motion once again. People return to start another market day; the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the steamy blow from velvet nostrils, the unpacking of carts, the opening of shutters, the clatter of metal and wood, the clank and grind and the tap, tap, tap of a hammer, all transforming the empty space back into the market of the previous day, back into the maze of cluttered stores; silver trinkets, teapots, incense, and jewelry that drip like water drops from wooden brackets as scents of sandalwood, sun-warmed leather from the trappings of old saddles, and the blue smoke of cigarettes fill the air—all of it overladen, to hide the fact that this is a wartime market, striving to live as it did before, despite the lack of fresh produce, despite the overriding stench of decay and sweet fermenting fruit that seeps up from the almost-empty food stalls.
Laughter sounds as the sun slips out from behind a cloud, sending shafts of pinholed light down through the gray sheets above them, and everyone believes in that moment that “There is a heaven after all,” a sign at last amidst the wreckage of the present day. And it is then that Jakob moves for the first time, shifting in his premorning sleep, with the mention of the word heaven. He rolls onto his back, blinking back the fog of sleep, oblivious at first to his whereabouts. Then he’s alert, upright once more, as if to be caught sleeping were a crime. He buries his box beneath the cabbages, climbs down off his mound, his clothes stiff with congealed mud and grime. He sticks out in the crowd with his shoes of sackcloth; a sad clown of a boy. The loss that he feels lies beneath his skin like a pool below the finest layer of silk. The slightest tear and it flows over and around, the weight of water above him. His hands are jammed into his trouser pockets to save his fingers from the chilling wind. He hovers beside a pile of bruised cucumbers, longing to lick the skins, then moves on to the next stall, where a toothless woman hooks a rat onto a rack already heavy with pink-skinned rabbits, broken necks lolling their heads against their spines.
He turns, accepts the cup of goat’s milk she hands him, and lingers, drawn toward the warmth of human touch, with a longing, a memory, for something more. Me kamav tu. I love you, and a hand tender across his brow. He longs to lean his head against the woman’s stained apron, but instead he walks away, on past the man in the next stall, who is shoving two live chickens into a wooden crate so small they can hardly breathe.
Jakob searches the ground, stooping again and again, picking the butts of heel-trodden cigarettes from the mud. Later he will steadfastly unravel each of them, collecting the tobacco in tiny mounds and rerolling them back into cigarettes; a ratio of ten butts to one new cigarette. He collects the discarded apples, too, the half-rotten ones, will separate the bad from the not so bad, selling them at a fifth of the price of the fresh green and scarlet apples in the stalls.
Now, though, as he crouches down, his face close enough to smell the earth, his hands stained with rancid fruit, he feels the vibrations beneath his feet, the heavy rumble and grind of something that is machine, not alive, and with this sound the dread sweeps through him, as sudden as hot to cold, dark to light. He drops his knees to the damp ground, curls his spine inwards, small as an egg. Only his head he lifts, and through the legs of wooden stall tables he sees the line of trucks approaching from the gravel road toward the market square, spitting up stones and grit in the deep tread of their wheels, engines hammering through fumed clouds. They fill the gray slate sky, the fractured light that had seeped from heaven. They block out all other noise as if the very world itself were hushed by their arrival. They come to a stop in a well-practiced line, and beneath the sound of engines left running, growling like dogs, fifty soldiers, maybe sixty, he cannot say, climb down into the mud.
“Do you have papers?” Walther is asking, standing behind his stall of discarded junk that in certain lights shines like some metallic jewel. “If you have none, you should go now.”
But Jakob cannot move. From his place beside the cabbages he is watching the officer who has climbed from the third truck in the line, the eagle and the swastika on his shoulder hand embroidered with white silk and tiny nuggets of aluminum wire. This man whom he has witnessed with his head in his hands. This man, who had built a fire, who had collected the wood himself, teased the flames, and who, when the tears in his eyes had spilled down his cheeks, had not wiped them away.
Jakob is back in that field, looking up once again at the tree. He sees it upon that green mound. Leafless, twisted and shaped like a Y. Sees it bone white in the moonlight, silver against the sun. And his brother’s sweet face. Malutki, his eyes wide, fleetingly fearful. Hot hands … hot breath, despite the dawn cold … and that look that cut between trust and uncertainty. “It’s all right, Malutki. It’s all right,” Jakob had assured him.
Jakob crouches lower, unable to draw his eyes from the face of this man, who is fingering his stubbled jaw as if to reset it from a journey’s slumber. It takes only the distance from the truck to the nearest stall for the officer’s body to awaken; for the faint military flourish, the straightness of his spine, the frenetic activity that seems to accompany his every move, to return. His eyes slide over the scene before him, minatory suddenly with an alertness that seems to take in everything and anything. The soldiers around him are stocking up, filling wooden crates with whatever they choose at random. The stalls are ravaged, one by one, emptied with a rough efficiency that leaves behind a mess of the discarded; the old, the bruised, the battered, a debris of the unwanted.
“You work here, boy?” The voice sounds above him, a golden voice, husky and resonant as honey.
Jakob keeps his head down, pushes his quivering fingers into his pockets, and nods.
“You work here with whom?”
Jakob cannot find his voice. There is only silence inside him.
“He is here with me,” Walther says, standing tall behind his stall, and from his breast pocket he pulls out his papers. The officer takes them, looks over each word. His skin smells of cologne, his breath of licorice. Finally he lifts his head and stares at Jakob. He hardly blinks.
“You are afraid?” the officer asks eventually, handing Walther back his papers. Jakob still says nothing. He cannot.
“You are afraid?” the officer asks again, sterner, determined of a response.
“Yes,” Jakob whispers. Tears spill from his eyes, run hot down his filthy cheeks.
The officer shakes his head. He looks almost sad. “Men are never afraid. You’re a man, aren’t you? Aren’t you? So then. Stand up. Stand up and show me your papers.”
Behind him the soldiers are clambering back onto the trucks that are weighted down now with what they have taken. The market is coming back to life. There is the chatter of dismay. Fears, tenuously voiced. The toothless woman is weeping loudly for the loss of her rabbits. The officer turns, irritated by her sobs, moves angrily up the aisle toward her.
“You must go,” Walther whispers. “Without papers? You must run. Don’t worry. I will find you. Wait for me in the woods. You know how to make a smokeless fire. You can survive anything with a smokeless fire. Now go.”
Up ahead the woman has ceased her crying and the officer with his hand-embroidered white silk and his nuggets of aluminum wire has stopped in the center of the path. He stands with his back to Jakob, unmoving, as if he has stopped to consider something.
“Go,” Walther whispers. Jakob drops down onto his stomach, lays his cheek against the cold earth. He crawls forward, pushes with his elbows along the sodden ground, the skin on his knees scraping with graze
s that he won’t feel until much later, as behind him the trucks are circling in clouds of grit, the ground once again vibrating.
Only the officer still stands in the market, turning now, his eyes searching, questioning, perhaps remembering. Jakob crawls to his cabbages, forages for his wooden box, moves on past the makeshift tables, the earth fungal scented and full of orange, a Cremona orange, that hides a miniature world of insects that know nothing of the world above them. He longs again to be an ant. For insignificance to save him.
“The best violins in the world, they come from a town in Italy,” his father had told him once. “Cremona, they calling it. Varnish, the color of a tiger’s pelt, a shimmering orange, the recipe for it gone, lost centuries back. People of that town been searching for it ever since.”
“To paint their violins with?” Jakob had asked.
“Yes. Because it don’t just make them violins shine, this Cremona. It makes them sing, too, an’ the locals, they believing that once they discover the secret of their instrument’s color, they can find the soul of any song.”
“The boy?” he hears the officer shout, still honey voiced. “Where is the boy?”
Jakob keeps on crawling across the orange soil.
“The boy?” he hears again. “Wo ist der Junge?”
Then there is a shout and a whistle that splits the air with its shrillness, and once again soldiers are clambering down from their trucks. There are cries and the rush of moving feet. People are fleeing, broken from their ordered lines, jarring and knocking against tables, against stalls, heading, like Jakob, for the dark of the woods.
Jakob’s Colors Page 3