At the end of the summer, they planned a party in the hope of prolonging the frivolity that came with the warmer weather.
Vivienne took Lor to buy new wineglasses from the market, five different sets: Waterford glass, Baccarat glass, Boston Crown, Steuben, and Bohemian crystal, a mishmash of double-or single-footed rims and baluster stems. Some were perfectly intact; others were chipped.
“It isn’t the done thing,” she had said. “But let’s start a trend. Pretend it’s some new fad from America.”
On the day of the party the skies were clear and filled with birdsong. Vivienne wore an ivory chemise that was matte in the shadows but which shone in the light. The garden was full of orange blossoms that did not smell of oranges. The new glasses gleamed, filled to the brim with white wine the color of her mother’s dress. Lor and her mother picked handfuls of honeysuckle and sat on the lawn together, their legs tucked up beneath them, sucking up the sugar water that came in such tiny quantities they were left always wanting for more.
“Nature’s sweets,” Vivienne said. Her dark hair was cut sharply around her face, bobbed just below her cheekbones. She wore lilac eye shadow that flashed when she blinked. Her lipstick was so red it looked as if it hurt. “Stay close,” she whispered in Lor’s ear. “Stay close.” Then she tipped back her head and laughed at nothing at all. Her laugh was something that should be discarded. Like a veil. But Lor did not know that yet.
“So I walk a little too fast,” Vivienne sang. “So I laugh a little too loud. But what else can you do, at the end of …”
Andrew stood by the rose garden that was due its second bloom. He stood tall, his dark hair shining. The woman he was now talking to wore a blue dress, pleated just below the knee. Her calves were long. Her ankles slender. She was almost as tall as he. They stood side by side, she touching his sleeve, just a forefinger on the cuff, the nail manicured and sharp. They were both smiling.
“Don’t stare, darling,” Vivienne said, smoothing down her dress. “Why don’t you get Mommy another drink? Gin, please.” She held out her glass and cocked her head playfully. Lor took it, wove waist high through the chatter and the lacquered air. There were a multitude of shoes, stilettos that punctured the grass and soiled brogues. The man in a dinner jacket who exchanged the wineglass for a crystal tumbler, which he half filled with gin, half with lemon bitters, smelled of the oranges the orange blossoms should have smelled of.
Lor took in the faces around her. She was familiar with them all. They came and went from one another’s parties, a vision of solidarity against whatever it was they were against. Conversation amongst them was like a story. It strove to be intellectual, but their intelligence was something that was sought out, muddled together and hoped for, rather than something they had been naturally blessed with. Quietly they competed with one another, each victory of erudition rejoiced over behind smiles of platitude. But within the confines of their group they remained obliviously unchallenged, and the superiority with which they spoke was merited only by the fact that they were wealthy—moneyed up, jazzed up, boozed up, “fabulous” as long as they believed it. Not one of them lived fully the life that they had. They spent their waking hours dreaming of living an entirely different one, one not filled with the legacy of war and the quiet guilt that accompanied having survived it unscathed.
When Lor returned with the glass of gin and lemon bitters, her mother’s eyes were full of tears.
“Thank you, my love,” she said as she tipped back her head and took a large loud gulp, a single ice cube clanking. Lor reached for her hand. “They liked the glasses. Remember, darling, you can sway anyone to believe anything if you speak with enough conviction.”
A shadow fell across them. It was John, a man with a handlebar mustache, whom Lor had not seen amongst their crowd before. Her mother seemed to know him already. He was slightly older than Lor’s father, his hair tinged with gray, and immaculately dressed. Uncreased and polished. His navy suit was so dark it was almost black.
“You look well, Vivienne,” he said, standing tall above them.
“I am well, John. The summer suits me. How is Maggie?”
“Much better, thank you.” He was softly spoken, a look in his eye that held a quiet weariness, an ambivalence almost about wanting to be present at all. “Been told to rest. Excitement best avoided,” he added.
“Oh, and our house is simply spilling with it.”
They both fell silent. John cleared his throat self-consciously. Then momentarily he and Vivienne stared at each other, a moment that almost openly acknowledged the failure of their conversation.
“Nice to see you again, Vivienne,” he said quietly. It was only as he walked away, vanishing into the crowd, that Lor saw the twisted gait to his left leg, the slight drag to it as he moved.
“He was shot, two days before the war ended,” Vivienne said as though it was something vague and distant. Lor sucked at the honeysuckle. “Mommy’s pretty, isn’t she, darling?”
“Yes, very pretty.”
“He brought lilies. A huge white bouquet of them.” She sighed. “Tell me a story. I need a horse, a blue-black horse of a story.”
“Othagos?”
“From the hunting accident?”
“Yes, the stray arrow that came from a bow no one had fired.”
“Yes, I remember him. He’ll do just fine.” She lay back on the lawn, her ivory dress grass stained where her shoulder blades met the ground.
“Everyone knew that Othagos had a glass eye,” Lor began. “But no one knew that he could see through it, that he could see into the heart and mind of anyone who rode him and could judge therefore whether to go fast or slow, to go left or right, be lost or found, before he was told to do so.”
“Never bring lilies to a party, darling,” Vivienne said quietly. “That’s what the dead smell of—they are the flowers left to rot on the lid of some beloved’s coffin, for God’s sake. Stay close to Mommy, won’t you? Stay close.”
People left in dribs and drabs. Bottles emptied. Discarded glasses, lipstick stained, glinting in the tender heat of the late sun.
“To the survivors,” Larry, one of their oldest friends, drawled, swaying in the center of the lawn. “To the ones who made it rich while all around them tumbled down. Are they all in this garden?” He laughed, lurching forward. “All’s fair in love and war,” he slurred.
Gini, his wife, dressed in a cream trouser suit that looked as if she were naked in certain lights, started pulling on his arm.
“Larry, shut up. No one wants to hear your lamenting. Vivienne, I’m taking the child home,” she said. “Can’t hold his damn drink.”
Vivienne wasn’t listening. She was looking across at Andrew. Lor caught the light in her eyes, a glint of tears welling again at each corner. He was talking to John. Both of them stood in a cloud of cigar smoke, puffing it from the side of their mouths with the exaggeration of two people in stilted conversation. The woman in the blue pleated dress had disappeared. Lor had not seen her go.
“Cigarette, darling?” Vivienne asked brightly, swinging her hips as she approached them. She reached out, touched Andrew’s arm. He endured it. Her nails were not as long as the woman’s in the blue pleated dress. He pulled out his cigarette case, silver and discreetly initialed, and turned briefly to light the cigarette in Vivienne’s mouth. She leaned forward and looked up at him. Her lips twitched with a smile. Andrew did not see it. He turned away, put his hand back in his pocket, and continued talking. She flinched, was wise, almost wise to it.
They were discussing tobacco. Lor’s father owned the Trimborne Tobacco Company in the West Country’s Tobacco Valley, and several tobacco shops around London, York, Bath. Now they were branching out toward the Continent with a new establishment in Paris.
“Oak-paneled shelves, mahogany floors. Anything you can touch in them, you can smoke,” her father was saying.
He had taken Lor to the factory for the first time that spring. She’d stood beneath the dark vastness of it, watchi
ng black smoke billowing from the towering chimneys above, and then had peered through the iron bars of the elevator, which clanked and creaked, the floor beneath her vibrating as the shaking cables heaved it up the shaft. Down below lay the cavity of the factory—a Dickensian cave of crumbling stone, the machinery rattling with ancient decay.
“Some of this stuff is nearly a hundred years old,” her father had said, his voice echoing around the walls. He sounded younger than he normally did, oddly eager, alert.
Lor remembered how he had heaved back the metal doors and how she’d breathed in, tobacco fumes stinging her eyes. The back of her throat had burned. The room in front of them was huge. Workbenches that ran from one end of it to the other, rows and rows of hunched backs working in the summer heat. He had led her onward and upward, to giant machines that rolled out cigarettes in their thousands, to pasting floors, sorting floors. He had wandered down the aisles of each, straight backed. She’d never seen him look so tall.
“Ah, tobacco, a subject Andrew never fucking tires of,” Vivienne was saying to John, rolling her eyes in despair, half-mocking, half-resentful. Her cigarette was now a line of ash, unsmoked and smoldering. John was swilling his drink around in his glass. In the garden the light was changing.
Vivienne dragged finally on her cigarette, then turned away, the smile struggling on her lips as she searched the throng. When she found Lor her face broke with relief and she stumbled toward her. The honeysuckle that hung from the high back wall flattened in a pocket of wind. Lor watched a woman’s hat flutter from her head. Auburn locks fell down her back. Her father’s head turned.
“Want to run away?” Vivienne asked, leaning against the trestle table and crossing one foot over the other. Her cream shoes were grass stained like her back. Lor did not reply. “I want them all to go now. Need some peace,” she said, stroking the hair from her daughter’s face, but more as a show of resilience than as a gesture of affection.
The garden emptied. Bethany, their housekeeper, was clearing away plates of discarded food, her hair tightly twisted with the narrow rollers that she wore every night, removed every morning. The man in the black dinner jacket was collecting glasses. Five o’clock. The light like melting butter. Andrew turned around in a patch of it, alone now.
“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” he said, his face lit up. He shines, Lor thought. No one left to see it but she and her mother. Vivienne couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“Wind’s changing,” she said finally. “I’m cold.” She moved closer to Andrew. “Lor and I have dined on honeysuckle. We shan’t want a thing for dinner.”
He looked at her then. Seemed about to say something as his eyes wandered over her face. His hand shifted. Seemed almost about to reach out to her. But then he stared back down at his empty glass, let his hand rest on the stem. The shadows on the lawn lengthened. Starlings were descending, pecking at discarded crumbs, their wings tucked by their sides like folded handkerchiefs.
“I’d better get on,” he said eventually. “Got some things to clear up before tomorrow.” He flicked his cigarette stub onto the grass, ground it out with his shoe, and walked briskly across the lawn and into the house.
“Mommy’s pretty, yes, darling?” Vivienne whispered.
“Yes,” Lor replied.
“Oops, too much to drink,” her mother mumbled. “Everything’s giddy. Come on, let’s make tea, sober the old gal up a bit,” and she pulled Lor by the hand across the lawn and into the house.
This Day
AUSTRIA, 1944
As he runs, his tears cut against the cold wind. Jakob—a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish. Barely eight years old. He moves fast, pushed by fear that keeps him running, night after night. Pushed by loss that slips into the raw meat of him, into the pulsing of blue veins, the slab of his liver, the sponge of his right lung, stabbing there with a pain that is the only thing he recognizes. He can smell the woody scent of fallen pine needles seeping up from under his feet, and the stale heat of past days released from the soil’s dampness. Forest moss softens his steps in places and cloves of garlic spit scents upward with his tread, stinging his eyes. He runs through a blur of tears and hears the sound of his own breath in his ears.
When he rests he makes his smokeless fires, warms his hands and feet and heart, and sleeps under layers of leaves. Dreams again of clawing at the warm earth, his mouth clogged with clay, his eyes with darkness. He never sleeps long. Fear wakes him. Loss wakes him. At intervals he hears the trickle of a shallow stream, the song of water rushing over smooth pebbles that is familiar, soothing. He tries to keep the sound of it in his right ear, for want of some direction, for the certainty that he can quench his thirst should he need to. All streams lead to the river. All rivers to the sea. Would the sea save him? Could he walk forth into the choppy waters, until his eyes filled and blinded? Would he be forgiven if that was his choice? To run and not stop until the waters found him?
Not yet. Not yet. In the past they had buried their dead in these forests, buried them along the way, laid loaves of bread upon their chests, sprinkled berries over their heads. People grew old beneath the ancient trees. They said prayers and heaped earth upon them.
When you burying the people you love, the earth changes, his father had taught him. You could hold, in a single handful of soil, sun warmed, damp with precipitation or silver with frosted ice, all the love you ever felt for that person. There were scattered pieces of so many lives beneath the turf. He should not be so afraid. He sees the shine of two eyes glinting out of the blackness; a hare perhaps, a bullfrog?
He listens for the croak and sporadic whine. Hears something indecipherable. A cry. Strange forest noises that will remain nameless in the black of night. Stay with me, he wants to cry. Stay by my side. Simply the light of another’s eyes, the companionship of it, even if the only existence shared is the experience of sight. Is there comfort in that? If not, then what? Then what?
“Nie lekaj sie—Don’t be afraid, Jakob,” his father had said, his voice weak and wavering. “See the colors. Tell me what you see, Jakob, my boy?” he had whispered.
Jakob looks, seeing movement everywhere, shadows where there are no shadows, shapes where there are no shapes. Even the crack of his own feet over brittle twigs punctures him with the conviction that he is caught, and every moment that passes he imagines iron-boned hands grabbing him.
But night after night they do not find him. He succeeds at least in this single task. And then finally, from sheer exhaustion, he finds a dwelling in the ground, a crack of rock and soil. He falls into it, stumbles down and lays his head on the still sun-warmed rocks, the gold dust of lichen sticking to his cheek. Forest slugs slither over him, moist like his sister’s kisses. He licks the salt from his stone. He sucks the cold out of it and imagines it is water.
“Mamo?” he hears his own voice pleading, claustrophobic with longing. “Mamo?” And the answer. Always silence.
“What do you see?” she had once asked as he closed his eyes and tilted his face to the sun. “It does not have to be darkness. It does not have to be cold.” She was talking of death as she held him in her arms.
For two nights and a day he lies in the dampness of the dwelling, clutching his box, his stone, hiding in the darkness and the fog of his own sleep, racked with dreams of nostalgia, waking always with the pain of recognition that the nightmare is the life he is now living. Ceri pe phuv perade. As if the sky has fallen to the earth. Jag xalem. He eats fire. Thuv pilem. Drinks smoke. Thaj praxo. Becomes dust.
But on the second morning a voice wakes him.
“Are you alive?” a man asks softly, and when he looks up a pale lilac-veined hand is reaching out for his. Jakob shrinks back. His voice is lost in the earth. His hands hold clumps of it. In that moment he feels that he has lived long enough, that he should like to stay as he is, curled up against the dewy morning cold, in a ball of damp leaves, waiting till the blood dries up inside him. There is nothing left. Even the fear has withered
, like desert grass.
May I die now? he thinks to himself.
“Don’t be afraid,” the man says. “You must not be afraid.” He pulls Jakob up, the grip on his arm so firm Jakob is unable to resist. He looks up to a face that seems unused to smiling, a face made gentle with years of melancholy. He is a gray old man under the silver stubble of his shaven head. As if the colors have left with his smiles. “You are all right,” the man says, seeing the tremor in Jakob’s limbs. “Everything will be all right. I promise you that.”
Too weak to resist, Jakob lets himself be led out of the dark woods, the dirty light of dawn creeping through the breeze-blown leaves, a sky of chrome blue in the east that seems too blue for their lives. They move across a field, keeping to the shadows and a dip in the eastern hedges. They stumble down a slope to the broken-tiled roof of a small, low farmhouse, the land long since taken from it on a day when soldiers had arrived and claimed it as their own. The old man tells him that they had eaten all the livestock, feasting off the herd of long-lashed cows. They had taken eggs, still warm, from beneath the feathers of roosting hens, stripped unripe vegetables from the ground, ravaged time as carelessly they ripped open the earth. They now used the farm and the pillaged village beyond it as a stopover from one valley to the next.
The German border lay a day’s journey north from here. The Swiss a day’s journey south. And there were rumors of a work camp a day’s journey farther west, where slivers of people, ghost remnants, hollow eyed and hollow hearted, dug earth behind high barbed wire fences. The farmhouse and the nearby village lie between all three of these, the old man explains. Passing trucks, filled with passing soldiers use the barn as a place of refuge. Soldiers sleep there, on makeshift beds to break their daylong journeys. Their trucks made by convicts. Bolts and cogs, wheel clamps, suspension cables, hammered into place with the intention of disintegration. Regularly they break down. Regularly they need to be mended. And so the barn is full of tools and spare parts and lingering soldiers who lie lazy in patches of sunlight, smelling of grease and gunpowder and hay.
Jakob’s Colors Page 5