They come on a weekly basis, first to pillage what little food the old man has foraged, then to question, to seek out the pathway from the camp to the border, where people still flee to escape.
“I tell you this not to scare you,” the man says, seeing that Jakob has stopped. “But so that there is only truth between us. Then you can come to trust me. Come, please, there is no one here. There have been no visitors for the past two days. Come, I can take care of you.” Again, he takes Jakob by the hand and pulls him toward the farmhouse. “How old are you?” he asks, as he leads him through a loose-hinged door that swings open too easily to keep the fear at bay. They enter the woodstove warmth of his stone house.
“Eight,” Jakob replies, finding his voice in the rawness of his throat, spitting out bits of peat and moss. He is pushed gently down onto a small stool that hides his head from window height. The man pours him a cup of water. His eyes watch nervously as his hands move hurriedly from object to object, despite their geriatric awkwardness.
“My name is Markus,” he says eventually. “And yours?”
Jakob can hardly bear to say it. “Please,” the old man says. “Be brave. Tell me your name so that I can help you exist again.”
“I am Jakob,” he says finally, and Markus nods approvingly.
Jakob drinks quickly, taking in great gulps.
“Slow,” Markus warns him.
After he has finished, the empty mug is refilled with a thin soup of potato roots and seeds, barely more flavored than the water, but hot inside him.
“You have a destination you are heading for?”
Jakob shakes his head.
“There is someone who can take care of you?”
Again Jakob shakes his head.
Markus shrugs. “You will not live through a winter in the forest. Once the snow sets in.”
He fills a metal bowl from a tank outside and he washes him with a piece of rough linen. Jakob lets the old man wipe the dirt and another’s dried blood from his face, his hands, up and down the length of his skinny arms and across his chest, his ribs a wiry birdcage for his fragile heart. Markus does so tenderly, silently, stilling the tremors with his touch, and when he has finished the water in the bowl is dark and murky, but full of things Jakob cannot bear to throw away. Gently Markus pours it over the earth outside.
“Back to where it came from,” he says softly. And afterward, “You will have to hide. I can keep you safe if you hide. You can rest until you are strong again. It is cramped, but it is warm.”
Jakob is given one of three cupboards beneath the stairs, the lowest in the row, a small tight triangle of a space where wedges of light slash through the cracks in the door. But he can be a triangle; the hug of his arms around him, the scent of his knees against his nostrils, scratched and scarred; his eyes, mole-like now, blinking back the dim light. He finds a way of sleeping, legs curled up into his chest, and come morning there is a way of stretching every part of himself, one limb after the other, his feet slipping into the lowest cavity of the stairs. His eyelashes scrape against the closeted walls. He can smell the wood chippings on which he sleeps. He holds handfuls and smells the locked-awayness of them, wondering if he, too, will smell that way soon.
He is used to scents of grass and soil, scents of the wind before rain, rain before sun, sun before dark. He is used to horse scents, dusty hides, hot oated breath in the palm of his hand, and the feel of their soft downy pelt against his knuckles. Of feathers and the yolk of cooked eggs. Of lemongrass and the lavender that his mother rubbed in her hair. He has never known four walls. Never bricks and mortar. He closes his eyes. Breathes in splinters. Breathes out his past.
It is then that he hears a shifting of fabric behind the highest wall of his cupboard. That and then farther away, more muffled, a sudden cough that gives rise to a spasmodic eruption of phlegm-filled chokes. Jakob does not move. Engulfed once more, fear, like floodwater, filling his triangle.
“Jakob,” the voice closest says, softly spoken. “That is your name?” Jakob stays silent, dares not answer. “It is all right. You will see it is all right?” the voice says, intruding into his only space. Jakob curls up, longing for silence and darkness. These are the only places of life for him now. He feels he can exist only inside them.
A long night draws on, full of moon shadows that slide past the gap beneath his cupboard door, lengthening, then shortening with the arctic light of dawn. He sleeps, sleeps deeply for the first time in a long time, and strangely, when he wakes, what he feels first is the warmth of his cupboard, the solace that there is no more running to be done, no more food to be foraged, paths to be followed. He has found a place now that in the very constriction of its size offers a sanctuary from the world outside.
He feels for his box, pushed down into the lowest corner of his cupboard. The wood is smooth, warm, the metal clasp a crescent of silver beneath his touch. He opens it, finds a flat, lake-smoothed circle of glass, pale as cloud when he holds it up against the crack of light beneath his door. He presses it between his thumb and forefinger. Strokes it back and forth around the curved edges. Holds it to his lips. To his cheek, against the lids of his eyes. He thinks he hears the lake in his ear, as if the pebble had lain for so long on the silty bottom that the sound of it had somehow penetrated through and remained.
“Jakob,” the voice next to his says again, slight and shaky, hesitating on the harder consonants as if to expel them from his mouth takes effort. “Jakob, that is your name, yes?”
Jakob replaces the glass and closes the lid of his box.
“Yes,” he whispers, finally able to speak. “That is my name.”
“And Cherub is mine.”
In the end it turns out that there are two others in the adjoining cupboards. The voice closest to his belongs to Cherub, and the voice next to Cherub’s belongs to a man called Loslow. Both of them are Jewish.
“Jakob, have you ever tasted Swiss chocolate?” Cherub asks.
“No,” Jakob whispers, and because he cannot see Cherub’s face he imagines what it might look like, matching the voice to someone he has once known and liked: the tall and wiry twenty-something boy on the rusty black bike who used to bring his family news, wind chased and avian with the flight of his wheels, and whose wide, smiling mouth exuded contentment.
“Jakob, it’s the most wonderful taste in all the world. It’s like the creamiest, sweetest milk you’ve ever tried, and then it’s more than that. It’s like café crème, honey, and bitter cocoa all together. That is what Swiss chocolate is like.”
“I most long for cheese.” Loslow speaks then, whose voice in contrast is aristocratically clipped and hoarse, an older man, Jakob imagines, with cheekbones of distinction and polished silver hair that shines like quartz. “The strongest, bluest cheese,” Loslow says. “The kind you can smell through walls.”
Jakob comes to recognize the tips of Cherub’s fingers through a tiny hole in the partition between their two spaces. It begins with a game that is unspoken, a silent dance between their hands. Jakob has to guess which of Cherub’s fingers is pressing into the hole. He does it by the feel and size of each tip, the roughness of Cherub’s forefinger and thumb, the smallness of his fifth.
At these times there is a sound that Jakob becomes aware of, when he and Cherub are playing and Loslow is silent. A pitter-patter of something back and forth across the floor.
“What is that sounding, Cherub?” he eventually asks. “Mice?”
“No, that is Loslow. He is playing his piano.”
They wait until the sound of nimble fingers upon the floor stops.
“You are a pianist, Loslow?” Jakob asks.
“Yes. I have owned a piano since I was six years old. I began to play when I was five, and for my next birthday my parents knocked through the wall of their kitchen to fit a grand beech-veneered Weinbach into our home. As a consequence of their sacrifice, I practiced hard. Now I play for the Vienna Philharmonic, twice as a soloist. You must not let a war sto
p you practicing the one thing you have worked so hard for. My imagination demanded that I brought my piano with me,” Loslow tells him. “Can you bow, Jakob? I don’t suppose you’ve ever had the opportunity.”
“No, I never need to be bowing.”
“Well, that is something we must see to when we get out of here. To bow well is to make a gentleman of you. And to be a gentleman is one of the most useful tools a man can learn.” He pauses. “Hear this,” he continues. “I saw a thing in my hometown. A bomb had exploded in the main street, beside a breadline of thirty men and women. They’d been waiting in the cold for over three hours for their bread, and in the end they never got any. But the next day, this old man he comes with a violin and he sits on this fire-charred chair, outside where the breadline had been, dressed in his formal black evening clothes, and he plays. He plays terribly, a screeching sad song that is painful to everyone’s ears. But nevertheless, without fail, every day after this he plays as artillery gunfire explodes around him. And every day, after he has played, he bows, as if an audience were applauding him. I love that he does this. He is no longer afraid, you see, and because of that I like to think he is still playing. Do you not think so, Jakob? Do you not think that old man is still playing his tuneless song?”
But the yes sticks in Jakob’s throat and will not sound. He leans his head against the cupboard darkness, hearing the wooden planks contract with the coming cold of night, and watches the light beneath his door lengthen and slowly ebb.
That night he wakes to the sound of sobbing, a retching, haunting sound, full of tears and mucus. It is Loslow. All the clipped aristocracy rubbed from him, in the rawness of distress.
“Please, no?” he cries. “Don’t hurt him. Please no.”
And behind that he hears Cherub. “It is okay, my friend,” he is whispering, his voice calm and clear. “It has passed now. It has passed.”
“What is this world we live in?” Loslow is asking. “I cannot bear it.”
To which Cherub replies the same thing, over and over again, like a lament. “It has passed. I am here now. I am right here.”
Curled in his cupboard, Jakob listens to the endless sobs that rack the night, and the continuous stream of Cherub’s comforting words, on and on until eventually the sobbing stills. Until eventually Loslow goes back to his precious piano, to his past of vinegar and newspaper with which his mother used to polish the ivory keys. Back to the place where he would play and play, until there was only the music.
For Loslow does not know if he was born with it or not. He’s read Proust and Helmholtz, from the biomusicology manuals he once ordered in abundance. And neither one of them can really explain why he can recognize a perfect middle C on the piano, or the E of a passing bicycle bell. Or how when he plays in D major he hears also a tractor outside droning in E-flat, so that sometimes he struggles to follow his own tune, such is the other a part of it. He knows what key birds are singing in, knows the chink of a crunching pebble, the smack of a lake wave, even what pitch the wind is making as it blows through the sails of a boat. He is one in ten thousand, the manuals tell him—he and his perfect pitch.
But when he plays he forgets all of this. All that exists is the rise and fall of his heels and the intake of a breath. When he touches the notes upon the wooden floor, he hears the sound of Brahms, Rachmaninov, Horowitz, and Gilels. Sounding out into a tiny space that hardly holds him.
In the morning nothing is said of the night before. Loslow is talking about cheese. Cherub is talking about names.
“My real name is Sergei,” he tells Jakob. “But no one has ever called me by that name and I have never liked it. You should like your name. It is who you are, what you stand for in the world. Jakob is a good name?”
“It is my da’s name,” Jakob replies.
“So there you go, then.”
In the darkness Jakob nods, the tip of his fifth finger on Cherub’s thumb. He does not tell him then that he owns two names. Of the secret name that was whispered, only once, into his ear as he screamed himself into the world, to confuse the demons in their vengeful hours. But for then, this name has not been uttered since.
“How is it that Markus found you, Cherub?” he asks eventually.
“It was I who found him. He is the uncle of a friend of my father’s. I was at the library when they took my family. When I got home, only my father’s friend was there to greet me. He gave me Markus’s address along with a bag of bread and sausages. And I left my home and did not look behind me because I wanted to believe it was not the last time I would see it.”
“I will wish for that, too, wish for it not to be the last time.”
“Thank you, Jakob.”
Occasionally there is the sound of a not so distant train clacking over the tracks. The rattle of it rings in Jakob’s ears, bleakly familiar. Tuchun tuchun tuchun. Metal on metal. A hot spark and the cradle-rock back-and-forth motion.
“A goods train,” Loslow will say. “Simply a goods train.”
But Jakob does not hear him. Already he is back inside the cattle cart, cramped against the metal walls. He feels his brother’s heel in his ribs, bare toes in the crease behind his knees. He smells the grease of his sister’s hair next to his own, feels her hot breath on his cheeks. The sweat crusts on their bodies. The stale stench of urine seeps into their skin. Nothing to do but sleep and fear. When it rains, the air smells of mushrooms. When it doesn’t, it smells of blood.
“You,” the guard is calling from the open door on the other side of the carriage. “Gypsy scum. Habt ihr verstanden? I said sit down.” He is talking to the man who stands, staring at the sky, at the Y-shaped tree that breaks the flat of the horizon, his face luminous with nostalgia. “SIT DOWN. Sich setzen. Sich setzen,” the guard yells.
“Jakob,” Loslow is calling. “It is just a goods train, just a goods train.”
But Jakob sees the tree, sees the crowd of children rounded up beneath it, who sit upon damp earth, dirt smeared and sucking their fingers, choking on their own tears. He sees the sun, white on the horizon, the shadow of a Y cast over the green grass. The man and the almost-smile that crosses his lips.
“Jakob,” Loslow calls, bringing him back to the cupboard darkness. “A goods train, simply a goods train.”
“You can squeeze that cochineal beetle between your fingers,” Jakob hears his father’s voice telling him. “You can pop it dead, so that its blood staining your palms. The reddest dye in the world, this blood. The treasure of the Aztecs and the Incas.”
Jakob runs his fingers over the walls of his cupboard. Holds sawdust in his hands. Presses it to his face, inhales palmfuls of it. Becomes a triangle once more. Yes, he tells himself—it is a goods train. Just a goods train.
But at other times throughout the week the army trucks arrive, dropping off one group and picking up another, and then there is no escaping from remembering the fragility of the place in which they hide. They hear them trundling down the track to the house. The wood rattles with the weight and speed. The ground vibrates. They hear voices outside behind the stone yard, and occasionally in the kitchen. At these times they will not move, trying to ascertain whether they are village voices or accent stained. Jakob holds his breath. He presses his palms down hard on the floor to stop his hands from trembling, and after the voices disappear his joints ache.
Every afternoon Markus’s steps sound in the hallway. Jakob recognizes them by the low shuffle of his feet that never really leave the ground and the ratchet-click of his knees when he bends to open the cupboard door.
“Were they here, Markus? Were they here?” Loslow asks.
“They came for my leeks,” he will tell them. His leeks, his apples, his beans. “My precious leeks. As if they had sniffed them out like dogs.”
When he gets to Jakob’s cupboard the boy will see the crimson marks that he wears like a bracelet on his right wrist, or his left, the slight tremor of his hand, a bruise on his face that in the oncoming days will change from mauve, to
violet, to dull viridian green.
“They hurt you, Markus,” Jakob says over and over, a boy again, weeping with the sight of him.
Markus shrugs. “A firm handshake,” he always answers. “A mere slap. Simply bravado. That is all.” And then, “Jakob, my boy, you are going to be such a handsome man when you grow up,” as if this were his way of building Jakob’s strength. Then he allows Jakob to rush swiftly to the latrine, a bucket placed at the opening of the doorway to the cellar stairs, where he rids himself of twenty-four hours of confinement, and fleetingly catches a small chink of the sky in the hallway window: blue, gray, mauve in the earliest hours, peach in the latest, clear or cloud covered. He spies it through the dirt-smeared glass. Sometimes lingers.
“Move on, Jakob. Move on,” Markus urges him. And reluctantly he does so.
Markus hands him a hot cup of watery soup on his return, nervous and eager for him to be hidden once more. And Jakob crawls back into his cupboard, catches through the cracks in his door a glimpse of Cherub passing: white cloth, white limbs, thin as thread, and clamps his eyes shut so as not to see more.
There are small hunks of bread to be had, and an occasional potato that he sucks and gnaws, and always this one cup that Jakob holds to warm his hands first. Clover he thinks, mallow, sometimes nettle. He will take a gulp, when it is still too hot, feeling the sting on his lips and at the back of his throat, the deep throb as it swills into his chest. And this is a pain he looks forward to, such is it an event in the hours and days that pass so slowly. He longs for a lemon. For the citrus sharpness to come after the heat, as his gums bleed.
“You’ll get to have the girl of your dreams,” Markus says, and Jakob catches the flash of his granite-eyed smile before the door closes and once more there is only cupboard darkness. “The world is your clam.”
“Oyster. You surely mean the world is his oyster,” Loslow says with a gritty chuckle, as he in turn hobbles back from the latrine, the sound of his bare feet padding on the wooden boards.
Jakob’s Colors Page 6