“Oyster, clam, what does it matter?”
“I am a much more handsome man in this cupboard,” Loslow continues, his voice muffled once again in his confined space. “Without a mirror, I feel like a real looker of an individual indeed. With one, I always found that the reflection staring back at me was such a disappointment. I am much more content in my own skin now that I cannot see it.”
“The whole world is charmed by beauty,” Markus says. “Never be ashamed to use your good looks to your advantage, Loslow. You, too, Jakob.”
He leaves then. Three doors open. Three doors close. A warm cup in three pairs of hands. And that is all for the day.
At night Loslow dreams of his piano and his cheese, while Cherub gnaws hunks of milk chocolate. Jakob dreams of stones. When he cannot sleep, he will play a game. He will walk his way through his family’s home, a horse-drawn home, their wagon of chipped green wood pulled by a mare they’d called Borromini. He will close his eyes and see things he never noticed when he lived there. If he forces the memory, it will blur before him and he can’t quite grasp it, but if he simply imagines walking up the two wooden steps, he suddenly sees the darkened interior, light spilling in squares from the two carriage windows. He sees the roughly embroidered patterns of the rugs that cover the seats by day, the beds by night, crimson and orange and warm in color, even when the outside air is cold enough to mist his breath. And, too, the smoke of the stove, the memory of its scent in his nostrils and in his hair, wood smoke boy that he is. He will see the knots in the wooden floor and the worn green drapes that over the years the sun has bleached. A floorboard creaks by the bed he shares with his sister and his brother, a tiny bed for tiny people, set on a shelf above where his parents sleep. The three of them squeezed into it during the winter months, skin against skin, keeping the cold out. He will climb up the rungs of a small ladder, duck under the covers, warm where Malutki and Eliza are already waiting with a gap in the middle that is his space.
“Jakob, your feet,” Eliza will squeal. “Your feet, they so cold,” and she and Malutki will shriek with laughter as he dabs at them with his icy toes. Then under the flimsy blankets he smells their milky scent, muggy with days of unwashed clothes, as stupendous snores sound from their parents, who sleep beneath them.
And in the comfort of this memory Jakob, a half-blood gypsy child of Roma and Yenish, falls asleep in his triangle cupboard, his stone warm in his hand.
Long Before
ENGLAND, 1930
The vicar had said there was a scattering of four-leaf clovers in the garden, and if the children could find just one, he would make a treacle dessert that would be so sweet as to make sleep impossible for the entire night. The other children were searching. Lor was not. She stood behind a tall laburnum tree, blossoming with citron-colored flowers.
“Poisonous, darling, laburnum. Touch it and it can kill you,” her mother had told her, omniscient with a morbidity that seemed to verge on delight. Later, Lor had ventured back there alone, tantalized by that “strangely exquisite line that puts life so clearly in one’s own hands.” These, her mother’s words—“tiptoes over the edge of a cliff; a handful of pills cupped and held to the mouth; the leaning of one’s weight against cast-iron railings that might give way to rushing waters below. Just a single line, my love, between life and death.”
Lor took herself back to this hazardous spot of dabbled light, cast down by the leaves above, that was the perfect combination of sun and shade. She lingered in the shadows and watched from a place that was in between. The breeze brought scents of rattle and sweet peas on it, was leaf and wood scented. She rested her head against the bark, which was cool and smooth. Thought about what it would be like to pick and chew and swallow one of the luminous flowers. To sleep. To have earth heaped upon her.
From where she stood, she could see the adults at the table. She could hear their murmured chatter, the odd shrill laugh. There were eleven of them—all of them familiar—Larry and Gini, John, no Maggie, who as usual was absent. The woman in the blue pleated dress was sitting beside Andrew, locked in closeted conversation, she leaning more toward him than he to her, as if she understood him entirely. Lor wondered if she only had one dress. Vivienne sat at the other end of the table dressed in mauve, which gave her a ghostly waif-like look, as if she were only half there.
The conversation was stilted, forced slightly. It was the second party in two days, and they had said all there was to say at the first. Vivienne was already loose on gin and humming quietly at the end of the table, indulging her own drunkenness with a look that seemed to slur as she glanced over too frequently at the woman in the blue dress.
“So I walk a little too fast,” she murmured. “And I talk a little too much, and I’m reckless, it’s true, but what else can you do … at the end of a love affair.”
“I’m learning the tambourine,” announced Gini.
“Can you learn the tambourine?” Vivienne asked.
“Yes, apparently you can. I have a teacher, an actual teacher who specializes in it. He says it’s all about the rhythm.”
“Don’t you have any?”
“Apparently not. I fall over a lot. The doctor prescribed this to me, literally, scribbled down ‘music lessons’ on one of his official prescriptions, and signed it.”
“How very modern.”
“Yes, very.”
Before they left, Andrew had made a point of fetching a bottle of red wine from the cellar, where a film of dust made the bottle look older and worth more than it probably was. It sat unopened on the table, amidst the many bottles of homemade drinks that the vicar had made: elderflower wine, dandelion and pear, jugs of sloe gin and glacier punch, which sloshed in blue-bottled glasses in a haphazard combination of bizarre new tastes.
“They are all from the garden,” the vicar was boasting, nodding toward the flowers that lay scattered across their plates. “And you can eat each and every one of them.” He was wearing a sombrero hat, slanted on his head, hiding the mop of thinning gray hair that hung down from his scalp in sweaty strands. He looked older than he really was because of years spent traveling to the colonies, where he slept rough and preached hard. He liked to hold sermons at dawn on the top of a hill overlooking the river and the countryside beyond. His sermons were about life, rarely about God. He could just as easily have been a politician, an actor, a showman with a philosophy he longed to share. All he needed was a stage, but the pulpit had offered itself to him first. That was how it seemed, at any rate, to his closest friends, and probably to the crowds who attended his sermons and loved them despite the lack of religious piety.
Heads turned to see the sloping flower bed that he was now pointing to with an exuberance that verged on hysteria. The bed was bursting with pastel-pink daylilies, planted without order or symmetry.
“One should pick them in the sunshine to get the full flavor. They taste quite different on a day that is overcast.” The entire meal was about the flowers. Even the honey that threatened to sweeten the sticky toffee pudding was dandelion honey, with lemon slices and vanilla bean. Eventually Lor’s father leaned across the table, picked up his bottle of red wine, and opened it with a small pop that filled a pause in the conversation. He poured himself a large glass.
“And the smile on my face isn’t really a smile at all,” Vivienne murmured, watching him.
When finally a little later there was a lull in the conversation, she began a series of stories, all of which Lor, and probably the others, had heard before, with a tendency to laugh before each punch line, as if the tale were so funny she could barely voice it. Each laugh built up an expectation that the story could never match, as if Vivienne were deliberately setting herself up to fall. She filled up her own glass, finished the wine, and made no attempt to hide how quickly she downed it. She looked across at Andrew as she drank, her eyes staring at him over the rim. The wine bottle stood on the table, drained to the color of emptiness.
“Is this what you wanted, darlin
g?” she said when she’d finished, indiscreet now.
Lor shrank back, pushed her forehead into the bark till it hurt, and thought of the laburnum flowers once again.
Her father had not responded to her mother’s question. “A life of swell parties?” Vivienne continued.
“You sound like an American.” Gini laughed, blinded by her own intoxication.
“Pure Hollywood, darling.” Vivienne’s voice broke slightly. “I’ll do anything for you,” she said, looking back at Andrew. He looked down.
“Cigarette?” Larry offered too eagerly. Vivienne snorted and got up. She made a show of balancing herself. John reached out a hand, rested it on the small of her back.
“Steady there,” he said.
She moved around the table, stopped at a corner, and held onto it.
“Give him the choice, one of his cigarettes or me?” she said, her words half mocking, half spat out with a precise derision that wavered almost as a plea. “No contest.” The glass in her hand shook.
Please, Lor, thought. Please hush the things you are going to say. But there was no silencing her now. She was in full swing. Unstoppable.
“Don’t mistake it for pride in his product,” Vivienne ranted on, bright now, lustrous with clarity. “No, it’s guilt. It’s guilt that drives Andrew Hullingham Trimborne. Because you know, everyone, not only was he excused from fighting for his King and Country, for the mildest of nearsightedness, he was also given the one damn thing he might be proud of. He was handed his tobacco company on a china plate with not a single chip in the enamel. Didn’t have to fight for the damn thing like most people.”
“Shut up, Vivienne,” Andrew said from his chair.
“But charity comes at a cost, doesn’t it, my darling? Tell them what you did for this glorious empire.” She looked around the table. When no answer came, she laughed again, as if it were funny. “Oh, for goodness sake, don’t pretend you’re not all dying to know. What on earth is wrong with the Trimbornes, you want to ask? Well, nothing as it turns out … we just had to take on a name. That’s all. Just the one. Some cousin of a distant cousin gave Andrew the entire Trimborne Tobacco Company and Sons. Because you see, there never were any sons, only poor childless Trimborne, who found Andrew, his closest living relative, and then all Andrew had to do was adopt a simple godforsaken name and continue the family line. But oh, don’t you know how it rattles him not to have his own name up there in lights. Want to be a star, darling? To shine brightly? So fucking Hollywood.”
“Jesus,” said Andrew quietly.
“I imagine that’s a private matter between you and … ,” John muttered.
“Is it? Is it really, John?” And she looked directly at the woman in the blue dress when she said this. The woman didn’t look away, and for a long moment they both stared at each other. Lor looked, too. Felt in that moment that there was little contest. Her mother was a drunk. The woman in the blue pleated dress was not.
“When I met him, he was such a star,” Vivienne said quietly, her eyes glistening now. “Weren’t you, my sweet love? Such a star. So much potential. We used to drive around the countryside in his Bentley. One of only seven, he told me. Unique, as I thought we were. Of course, it wasn’t at all. He’d lied. Embellished, if you’d rather. Just a regular old thing he’d fixed up and polished until it shone.
“I met his family for the first time only after I’d agreed to marry him. And that was when I knew. Knew that he embellished. We drove up to Newcastle, squeezed into their tiny terraced house that stank of meat. There were smears of butcher’s blood on the kitchen floor. How aristocratic. I was marrying a damn butcher’s son. A simple Geordie boy. ‘Are you likin’ it, luv?’ they kept asking me. ‘Likin’ what?’ I asked. ‘Us,’ they replied.”
Lor’s father stood up and walked around to her.
“And I did. I always did,” she murmured as her tears spilled over, smudged the kohl around her eyes.
“Please, Vivienne,” Andrew whispered. “Please, that’s enough.”
“I love you,” she sobbed.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
“We’re drowning. Why are we drowning?”
Andrew said nothing. A hand against the table as if to steady himself. A hand in his pocket.
“Why?” She pushed again.
“Because you relentlessly want of me,” he said suddenly, his face full of blood, his voice, like hers, breaking. “Want me always to fill the space and vacuity that is you. I cannot. I am as empty as you are.”
“Is that true?” Vivienne wept. “Is it?”
“Yes,” he told her. “Yes, it’s true. We are the cowards of a nation.”
“Is that what you feel you are?”
“It’s what I feel we all are. You, me. The whole horrible gang of us.”
“But I love you.”
“So you say, Vivienne. So you say. Over and over.”
And then he left, walked out of the grounds, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other clutching his lapel, down the single-track country road, leaving John to take home Lor and Vivienne, who by now was silent, spent with gin and tears.
This Day
AUSTRIA, 1944
On the first day of his second week, the door to Jakob’s cupboard opens earlier than usual, and Markus stands grinning in front of him, unable to contain his excitement as he holds out a bowl steaming with a familiar smell that Jakob hardly dares to recognize. His mouth fills with saliva.
“It is rabbit,” says Markus. “It was in the backyard. Can you believe it? Right there in front of me. I spied it through the window.” He hands Jakob the bowl of stew, strips of meat bobbing in the steaming liquid. “I thought they had all fled with the end of this world. I got it with my slingshot. Eat it slowly. Make sure you chew it. Your stomach will not be used to the richness.”
Jakob nods wordlessly. Rabbit is something he has dreamt of.
Loslow squeals from his cupboard next door, words of elation already muffled as he speaks through mouthfuls. Jakob takes his first bite, savoring the flavor and the texture. He chews hard. Chomps down gently on his tender teeth. He swallows. Bites and chews again. He feels his stomach swell. Feels the warmth of it, and the sudden surge of something in his limbs. They quiver. His hands shake. He takes a second mouthful, a third, then devours it thoroughly. When finally he lays down the spoon with an empty clank, his jaw aches.
He slumps back against the stair wall as a memory surfaces.
“Like peeling an apple,” his father had taught him, as he laid the rabbit out gently on the table, its white stomach still warm, its eyes wan and glinting. “You skin it whole. Slowly. Tear it, you ruin it.”
Jakob had used his own knife. He had pressed into the center of the rabbit’s throat and brought the knife down toward its stomach.
“Cut it like it were a suit to be undone,” his father had told him. “Straight down the middle. An’ for the arms and legs, where you having the seams.”
It had cut easily, the silver sharpness of the knife slicing through the flesh, red and raw and sticky with warm blood. He continued, hearing his father’s steady breathing beside him. When he was done, he looked up.
“Now undress it, as you undressing yourself,” his father said with a satisfied nod, and Jakob had peeled away the skin. Later he washed, dried, and prepared it with care. His mother had made him mittens from the skin of that first rabbit. Jakob had given them to his younger brother after he had squealed and choked with envy. Jakob had knelt down and pulled them onto Malutki’s tiny hands, hot in the summer sun, and watched him totter off, clapping his new rabbit-skinned mittens together. He had worn them all that day and all that night though his palms grew pink and clammy.
Fleetingly he sees his brother’s face, bright, luminous, full of contentment. Rushing toward him as he had on that day. But then there is the tree again. Up on the mound, leafless, twisted and shaped like a Y. He sees it as he first saw it, bone white in the moonlight, later silver against the s
un, and his brother’s face beyond, eyes wide. There seems to no longer be one memory without the other.
“Now you are a man,” the officer with his nuggets of aluminum wire had told him. That officer who only moments before had held his own head in his hands and wept. “All men hold secrets from their mothers.”
Jakob squeezes his eyes shut, holds tight to his knees. Waits for the pain to pass, the haunting of it to cease. Malutki. Malutki. Tiny hands that cup and squeeze his face when Jakob holds him. Is it the worst? Again he asks. Is it the very worst?
His sister had lifted her foot up from the ground, asked if the grass felt pain.
“No,” he told her. “That grass never feels no pain.”
Two doors down, Loslow’s voice is sounding out in the meat-scented air, jarring him back to his cupboard space. To the comforting warmth and the company beyond the plasterboard wall.
“My family life used to revolve around food,” he is saying. “It used to be part of the delight of living. Now it is the only thing that separates us from the dead.”
Listen to him, Jakob tells himself. Listen to Loslow telling his tales.
“Stay cheerful tonight, my friend,” pleads Cherub. “We have just feasted.”
For a time there is silence from Loslow’s cupboard, but for the pitter-patter of his fingers back and forth upon the floor, and Jakob dreads that this will be it for the night, that the chatter he now finds such a comfort has ceased and that they have lost him to his piano.
But then Loslow’s voice comes out of the darkness once again. “I once knew a man who was addicted to plaster,” he says, his tone decisively lighter. “We lived together in Verona for a brief time. He was a strange fellow. He was the accountant for a firm of accountants, all suited and stripe tied. Left for work at seven, lunched at midday, returned at six. No surprises. No secrets. Except for this addiction, which he only admitted to when the hole in his living room wall became too large to hide.”
Jakob listens, loosens his clasped hands.
“His room was next to mine. I could hear the scraping through the walls. He used to chip at the plaster with his nails. He had the hands of a stonemason, not of an accountant. At night he’d crave the plaster like a smoker craves cigarettes. He’d wake at hourly intervals. He used to collect the dust and lick it from his palms, lapping it up like a dog.
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