Jakob crawls on, faster now, dragging the earth with him, thick pads of it collecting on his knees, on his elbows, on the scuff of his sack shoes.
“So you on Gillum, and I on Valour,” he whispers to himself. “With Malutki behind me and Eliza behind you. ‘Hold tight to your horse’s mane,’ she says to me. ‘Grip clumps of his coarse hair in your hands. You are brave and strong in this land that is not known by you or me, or anyone before us.’ ‘Keep safe that vas of indigo,’ he tells himself. ‘Keep safe that vas of malachite green. Head on toward the west and that setting sun that’ll shine the life back into you.’” As shouts sound behind him that he blocks out with his words.
Then he hears the gunshots. The echo cracking against the air. His screams die inside him. He turns his head to the earth. He cannot bear the sound of them. He keeps on crawling across the soil that eventually changes to grass, the brightest green, growing thicker the closer he gets to the woods. He is no longer sure which forest he is heading for, or which field he is in. This field or the one he left behind him. He looks for the Y-shaped tree on the mound. Sees no such tree. There is only the market and the sight of others fleeing behind him. But it is that field he returns to now. That field. That forest.
Back and forth, back and forth, he had run, from the woods to the grass fringes, several times, seeking out their scent on the wind. Could he smell it? Could he? He was not sure. Was no longer sure of anything. When did solidity leave him? When did the sky fall down? Step by step, yard by yard, he felt the distance between him and them opening up, the fallen leaves etching out the space between them. A lone bird flew above, crossed his path, and then flew back, low across the blood-wet grass, a flash of metallic green on his open wing. All my heart’s there, he had whispered into the night. All my life. He did not shed tears. He could not. Only the wind cut into his eyes and blinded him as he sought to head onward, strangely to nowhere other than a place that would put more distance between him and the one place he could not bear to be distanced from. Malutki, he sobbed. Is it the worst? The very worst?
Behind him more gunshots sound. And with that the woods disappear. The field. That place. He crawls onward, the market behind him once again, and Walther, waiting somewhere in the cluttered stalls.
You must run, he tells himself. You need to leave. You cannot linger.
“Zyli wsrod roz,” he whispers. “They lived amongst the roses. Nie znali burz. And they did not know of any storms.”
Finally the trees hide him once again, until he is but a shadow beneath the leaf-blown branches. He lies still, his breath rasping. His heart fissured. He cannot bear to think of the man whose last words to him had been full of the fight for survival and the promise of hope. He cannot bear to wait for the man whom he had known only for his apple and his kindness. Cannot bear for him not to come.
Te den, xa, te maren, de-nash. Run if you can. Always if you can. So in the safety of the forest darkness, once again Jakob, a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish, pushes his weak-limbed body up from the ground and, with his wooden box clutched in his hand, a stone in his pocket, begins to run.
Before
AUSTRIA, 1943
That night, after they had climbed the stairs from De Clomp before it became too crowded, after they had spent the day moving with the squares of sun-warmed light that fell through the window of their room, Lor lay in bed looking up at the ceiling that was covered with mold dots. Below she could hear the musicians in the bar, smell the wood smoke from the fire that seeped up through the floorboards, permeating their clothes, their hair, their skin. The bed still smelled of the someone who had occupied the room before them. A smell of stale beer and garlic sweated out in the night.
Jakob lay beside her, not quite asleep.
“Gillum and Valour,” he mumbled. She stroked back the hair from his face, looked down at the soft curve of his wind-burned cheeks.
“In the morning, the dust has settled,” she began. “So you have no need to be a camel any longer. It is warm, but not too warm, the wind strokes all the burning heat from the air. We rest for we are weary. We sleep long past sunrise and wake only when the rays burst from behind the shade of the trees around us. We break up the bread ration we have for that morning and share it out.”
“Is there jam?” Jakob asked.
“Do you want there to be jam?”
“Yes. Something sweet.”
“There would be no jam, but there might be honey if we can find bees in the Forest of the Light-Footed.”
“Why Light-Footed?”
“Because there are no sounds in the Forest of the Light-Footed. Not from creatures anyhow. Just leaves in the trees and maybe the occasional wingbeat from a bird passing over, but they are barely perceptible.”
“There are bears in this forest?”
“There are bears, but they are silent bears. Only the air gives them away, the sudden gust of their hot breath as they roar with rage. If we feel that we must ride, ride like we’ve never ridden before. Can you do that? Are you afraid to do that?”
Jakob shook his head. “No, Ma. I am not afraid at all,” he told her, and all she could see was the fear in his eyes.
“We are faster,” she told him. “Faster than the bears. Faster than the Ushalin. They who linger on the lines and crosses and who must stop for their Worship Ceremonies that without fail or pardon they have to partake in. They must find the exact moments between day and night, between dark and light, to say their prayers. For they venerate neither. It is the void of things that they worship. A nothingness that moves like a great wave of black ink rolling in from sea to shore, washing over everything in its path with the color of disintegration. At the hours of worship they stand in their ranks, a crowd so vast it fills the slope of the highest hill. They wear robes made out of wind, headdresses of rain, boots of ice. At the hour of dawn, when they look at the sun they are blinded to the day. At the hour of dusk, when they look to the moon they are blinded to the night. It keeps their will resolute. Keeps them unseeing. They see the world only in monochrome.
“After the dark cloud of their worshipping has passed, the flowers come out crumpled in the Ushalin Lands, ragged and withered. They bloom without color. If you look at them against the clouded sky you cannot see them. If you water them they wither more. The wan, gray sun there burns them to cinders. The wind strips the stamens away. Then the Ushalin make their sacrifices of dry leaves and the carcasses of dead insects to a God who cannot see or hear or speak. Who makes known his feelings with roars and grunts and by thumping his fists down hard upon a bed of rock, his left for pleasure, his right for wrath, again and again until the whole of Ushalin reverberates with the sound, and those worshipping him will feel the pounding deep inside their skulls. Their heads will be full of the pain of it for weeks, for years.
“That is why we are faster. Because to sustain such bleakness takes great effort. Our task is easier than theirs. Far simpler, because what we seek was there from the very beginning. What we seek is, without effort or restraint, present before our very eyes.”
“Yes,” Jakob whispered, almost asleep now. “Before our very eyes.”
“But we will be riding against the wind in this forest,” she told him. “And this wind, though it is slight, can drive you mad if you let it. So close your ears. Put your hand over your nose and mouth. Don’t let the wind drive inside you and it will not touch us. It will not harm us if we do that. There are always ways to stay safe—you know this? Always if you learn them and seek them out, then there is no reason to be afraid.” He did not answer her after this, and she knew she had lost him a while back, that he had not heard about the wind as he slept.
She turned toward him, curled her body against the warmth of his back and tasted the brine of dried tears on her own lips. They would move on soon, she knew that. Tomorrow? The day after? There seemed to be no place safer than the next. To stay was to be found. To run was to be captured. There was no ending to any of it. To find him. That was
all that there was.
“Yavy,” she whispered, just to hear his name. “Yavy.”
Over and over she went through the last moments of seeing him, rewrote them, redreamed them. But always in the end when she opened her eyes, nothing was changed. He was still gone.
She lay on the bed and listened to the music downstairs in the bar, tried to ward off the soporific drone that was filling her ears.
“Can take you from here, if you wish it,” he had told her all those years ago, in that place they had first run from. The scent of him; wood smoke and something other: grass, soil, both rain drenched and sun dried, lake water, both deep and shallow. “Been here long enough to know they gonna knock the life out of you if you stay.”
“How? How can you?” she had asked.
“I can. If you wish it.”
“I am afraid of you,” she had told him.
He had bowed his head. When he had looked up again, he was smiling. “Remember,” he had said. “Nothing staying the same. You not knowing it yet, but you can trust me.”
“You are Yavy,” she had said.
“Yes. I am he.”
And then he had gone, defiantly striding out from the shadows and out across the moonlit lawn of that place, and she was left knowing that her life was broken either way, and that if he had the will for it she would go with him. Strange what life became. She was not who she had set out to be. Was not then who she was now. There was cotton where there had been silk, braids where there had been silver clasps and diamond bands. Mint and lavender, which she picked, softened and rubbed across her skin, where once there had been perfumes compounded with expensive vanillin and coumarin. She dried her children’s eyes with an apron she’d sewn with her own hand, and wore an amulet around her ankle that she could not take off for the half belief of what would become of them all if she did not wear it. She knew how to read the signs left along the road, the arrows and the lints from tree to tree. Could recognize the speras: a straw band tied to a branch or post, its narrower side pointing toward a road that was safe, its thicker end to one that was not. Four grooves—four carts. A circle carved in the wood of a welcoming door. A rag tied to a branch of a telegraph pole, a bone wedged into a crack of tree bark, a broom left on the ground. Signs of safety, where gypsy folk might pass.
All three of her children had been born in a wagon, had been lulled to sleep from the earliest age by the rock of Borromini’s hooves. At night they fell asleep to the wind whistling through the wooden slats. At day they woke to scents of horsehide and wild garlic. Lor had made beads and strung them around her children’s necks, told them if they became invisible, that way, she’d always find them. She learned how to twist and break a chicken’s neck, was both sickened and full of self-congratulation. She wore skirts that flared, wore beaded bracelets on her wrist, braided flowers into her hair. She was like a photograph that had been taken twice, one negative casting its shadow over the other, blurred, each picture not quite correlating to the other. Who was she now?
She grappled for understanding. There were words missing. She could not remember the name of any English tree. There were vast holes in her story like moth bites in a tapestry, and the moments of clarity that she had, the threads of memory that drew her onward to the next, moved like a snail’s silk trail, unraveling too slowly.
Part Two
Long Before
ENGLAND, 1929
Her house lay in a Somerset valley that on fresh summer mornings was covered with a blanket of mist. It was a high Georgian building, three stories, with a whitewashed facade and a mass of wisteria that each spring bloomed purple flowers over the large ground-floor windows, blocking out the morning sunlight and casting a ghostly lilac hue throughout the ground floor. Only the back of the house showed the paint peeling, the exposed stone bruised with age, rivulets of rust running down from roof to ground. Not for the lack of money, but rather for the indulgent foreboding that this lack might one day arrive.
Inside, the house was decorated grandly, too grandly some would say, for the size of the interior, which was not as vast as the imposing furniture implied. There was so much of it; a mahogany breakfront bookcase dwarfed the living room doorway. It held no books, instead a collection of Wedgwood miniatures, a gift passed down through the generations, admired and vaguely fondled. A dining room table, a George IV oaken slab, fumed but too long. The chairs sat cramped against the wall around it. Surreptitiously, the thinner guests were seated upon them. A Liberty washstand, one of a kind designed by Archibald Knox, sat redundant in the marble-floored hallway, scarred with cigarette burns, a scattering of silver, daily polished picture frames of family long perished smiling up from the marble surface. Persian rugs covered the oak floorboards. Indian shawls draped across worn leather ottoman chairs. Elaborate tapestries hung from the walls above reams of glossy magazines that lay unfingered, unread. Everywhere there was too much clutter, crowded trinkets that no one was allowed to move, bought with a compulsion, the easy delight of spending, that could take hold weekly, daily even.
By the time Lor was eleven years old, she was used to finding her mother, Vivienne, standing amongst these possessions, poised in the center of a room as if she were one of them. She would be silent, her neck bare, her head slightly bent, staring at a place where the floor met the baseboard as her long fingers toyed with the silk of her dress. Still young enough for her dreams to cling to her, unchallenged, unrealized. Her ambitions lay in art, vast canvases that she streaked with brilliant color but struggled to fill, alternating between bouts of intense activity that were driven and frenzied and this dreamy languor that held her locked in thoughtfulness in the center of a room. Watching from doorways, Lor felt in those moments that her mother was lost to them, that if her name were called out, she would not hear it. But then, as swiftly as they had come, the reveries would break. Her mother’s hand would drop, and she would wander the room, manicured fingertips caressing the smoother objects, a high hum of a tune absentmindedly resonating from her lips as she returned to her surroundings.
There was this, this blissful inertia of youthful ambition, before age threatened to make her regretful, but then there was the other. Days, sometimes weeks, spent coiled up on the bed in her room. A shadowy obliqueness, a void, where the world was dark, as if already life had left her stale and wanting.
“Her father was killed in the war, you know? Her mother was Polish. An heiress, apparently. She drowned herself,” Lor had heard people say in hushed tones into their cocktail glasses as if that explained something. Lor had found her once in the river, standing with the water lapping against her thighs, her coat pockets full of stones.
“It’s beautiful,” Vivienne said. “This moment before. Exquisitely so.”
“Before what?” Lor had asked.
“Before after.”
Lor had looked out at the ripples and the currents that circled in wide slow pools.
“Will you swim?” she asked.
“No, I won’t swim. I shan’t swim a single stroke.” Vivienne let her fingers rest on the surface, let the water rush between them. “My mother always told me there was a family of kingfishers who lived here. I’ve never seen them. In all the years I’ve been here, from childhood to now, I’ve never seen them. Not once. What do you suppose that says about me?”
Lor took off her shoes, waded across the currents to her mother, linked her arm through hers.
“It’s not so very strong,” she said. “The current. We shan’t be swept away.”
“No, perhaps not,” her mother had said vaguely. “Zyli wsrod roz,” she whispered. “Nie znali burz.”
“What are you saying, Mother?”
“We live amongst roses, darling. Know of no storms.” And with that they had made their way back to the shore.
“You are good, you know that, Vivienne, don’t you?” they said of her half-finished paintings. “You could be great if you were more prolific. If you weren’t so afraid of mediocrity.”
Of
ten she would take Lor to the antique market in town that, now that the Great War had ended, was overflowing with lost and unclaimed objects, with widow’s wares. They never came home empty-handed. The house was filled with silver spoons, Worcester china, George III silver-shelled ladles, a baluster coffeepot, boxes of war memorabilia, a dead soldier’s medals. They bought sketches in gilded frames and faded photographs of people they had never known: a group of scholars in top hat and tails, standing on the steps outside St. Paul’s Cathedral; a crowd of Welsh rugby fans, cheering beneath newspapers held over their heads in the rain. There was an African pot in the hallway that still smelled of the sour cheese that had fed a nameless village; an oriental rug lay by the fireside still stained with soil from Kerala; a portrait of someone’s beloved family horse. Vivienne said she had a tale for each and every object, that war was the best time for stories, but somewhere, deep in the tone of telling this, there was the sad half-acknowledged truth that they weren’t her stories. That she had simply found them in a town hall that smelled of the rain brought in on the soles of other people’s shoes. Of her own story there was very little. Such was the glossy monotony of her life.
Lor’s father, Andrew, listened to his wife in silence. A heavy silence that could last for days. Like Vivienne, he was tall, broad, with dark, almost black hair, slicked back with a defined right parting that he combed meticulously into place each morning. He had a way of standing that exuded confidence rather than arrogance, a quiet authority that was unchallenged, unassailable. And though it was Vivienne who filled the chatter of a room, though it was she who delivered the stories that entertained, there was about him an unconscious shine that had him stand out amongst a crowd as if he were made of some other metal. People fell silent when he spoke, fell silent simply when he appeared. He ignored Vivienne’s reveries. Chose not to witness her bouts of decline. They were a tall, graceful couple who locked arms when people were watching.
Jakob’s Colors Page 4