To begin with she could still herself this way for minutes. Afterward, when it became more of a ritual, she could still herself for hours. Later still, for days. Strange passages of time when she seemed unable to speak, stupefied in her own quiet inertia. It was a disappearance of self, like her name; a low note that seemed unfinished and barely audible.
Standing on the threshold of the garden and the timeless, half-forgotten house, she would stare up at the growing moon, lost beneath the crescent glow of it, as her blood dripped to the earth onto stiff sprouts of freshly cut grass.
There you are, she said to herself. There you are. I just have to find you.
She lived this way for months. Hid in the shadows, unseen, unnoticed.
But then perhaps because he knew he had been avoiding her, perhaps because he too missed Vivienne with a longing ache; either way, one day Andrew took Lor up to the far wall on the upper lawn to see something. A hidden family emblem buried under cascades of overgrown ivy. He swept back the layered stems, a cigarette in one hand, to show, engraved in the mottled stonework, a crest with the words Um Rexum Avioli circling around it.
“What does it mean?” she asked, content simply to be in his company.
“Something about honor,” he told her. “Always about honor. Whatever that is.”
It was a seemingly languid interaction on his part. On hers the very opposite, the seeking for some sort of affirmation when he looked at her, a shine in his eyes that perhaps betrayed more depth of feeling than he showed. Or at the very least that he found her presence welcome. Strangely, it was as she turned, hopeful of seeing this, that he carelessly flicked the ash from his cigarette. It landed above her wrist line, singed a tiny circle of skin there. He began a somewhat comical exploration of the damage he had done, almost relieved for the distraction, and it was then, in the pulling up of her shirtsleeve, that he saw the raw crisscross scarring that ran like a broken ladder from her wrist to her elbow.
He stilled. The air seemed to sink around them.
And though he had then caressed one of the less tender marks with his thumb, though he had lingered to examine them, before momentarily looking up into Lor’s eyes, it was the embarrassment of such an intimate discovery rather than the cuts themselves that seemed to distress him most. For afterward he had walked away, dazed it seemed, inertly stricken, clutching his head as if he’d knocked it on some overhanging branch.
His cigarette was left smoldering on the grass. A line of yellow smoke coiled into the air and dispersed somewhere. She picked up the stub between her thumb and index finger, rolled it between them, before taking it to her lips and inhaling deeply.
The vicar was called in the next day. He arrived with pity in his eyes, syrup in his voice, as if he believed he could soothe Lor’s grief with his tone. In one hand he carried a brown paper bag filled with vanilla beans, in the other a bottle of elderflower wine. The beans were for Lor; the wine for her father. Whispered discussions took place beside the musty bookshelves. A comforting hand patted against her father’s back. The cupping of her own knees. Low spoken questions, which were asked, but not answered. Her mother’s doctor was called. Again more whispers beside the bookshelves. Lor listened to the smattering of their words, as she lay in the sunlight that spread out over the chaise longue.
It was decided that the matter best be dealt with immediately, so as “to avoid further decline,” that “new treatments in Austria were proving remarkably effective” and that perhaps Lor, and her father, would “benefit from the privacy of distance,” being from a family of local repute. Three days later a black car arrived. Men in white coats held Lor down and sedated the tears from her, while the vicar and the doctor told her that everything would be fine, that she should not be afraid. While her father put his head in his hands, and wept, calling out his wife’s name over and over again.
“Forgive me,” he whispered as Lor’s eyes closed and lost all sight, all sound of England.
Part Three
Before
AUSTRIA, 1943
Lor knew if they stayed much longer it would be too hard to leave De Clomp. Already they were settling into the warmth of the place, already her children were letting down the barriers of the last few weeks. She felt their resilience diminishing; a sense of quiet inertia settling in her own bones, a trick of the senses that left her feeling that Yavy was close; that he was here. But he was not here. He was far from here. She had witnessed the very tearing of him from her.
They had collected in one of the city’s smaller squares, a gathering of gypsies, three hundred or so, adults and their youngest, those not of school age. They had stood beneath a clear sky, beneath the slanting shadows of tall city buildings that cast ship shapes across the stone paving. Some stood with the bright sun in their eyes longing for shade. Others stood in the chilled shade longing for sunlight. But mostly they were content, heads down in the act of listening to the gypsy chief, Marli Louard, a tall man, all lengths and angles, whose hands and feet seemed at odds with his limbs. Despite this, he carried about him an air of optimism, his cheeks rubicund with the outdoors, as if he had rubbed across them all things rough, bark and brittle leaves, as a celebration of the ruddiness by which his life was navigated. His speech invested hope in a future that up until that moment had seemed cut with only bleakness. The crowds listened to him, smiled with delight, pleased that they were still capable of creasing the corners of their lips up to the corners of their eyes, however tentative their optimism. For in recent years the light from them had dimmed, and it had taken much courage to come to that square. There had been much rousing of spirits, as if they could no longer sit in the shrunken shadows of who they had become and had now the opportunity to dine on a feast of hope, to rally resolution. However transiently they knew it might last.
Yavy stood listening, his face full of rapture. Lor had not seen that look of his in a long while and she squeezed his arm, stroked her fingers down the length of his back. Eliza stood between them, jittery and moving from foot to foot. Jakob sat on the stone flags, stiller than she, calm and listening, with Malutki beside him. All was well in those moments when Marli Louard filled the square with words of hope.
So the commotion, when it came, was all the more shocking, for where in one moment they were rich with expectation, a light in their eyes that seemed brighter after the slow months that had passed, in the next they felt the current of menace that surged up from nowhere, a shift from peace to chaos, that spilled along the cramped quarters of the market square like floodwater. Then a baby’s cry sounded, a haunting sound, the very worst. And next a whistle that cut through the air.
That was when chaos broke out. People began running, before their minds had even grasped the notion of danger and escape. Running blind, before questions could form on their lips.
Marli Louard hesitated. He stopped, then started, then stopped again, silenced eventually as he tried to understand the swell of movement around him. He did not run. He did not leave his stand. Stood instead in gawky disbelief that this moment, when all was well with the world, could have broken.
A single bullet hit him in the center of his chest. He swayed slightly, paused before his long angular body crumpled to the ground. His limbs collapsed in on themselves. He lay with his legs in the square, his head on the platform, his face lit with surprise and incomprehension, eyes blinking as he watched the scene unfolding around him. As slowly his life ebbed away.
Lor grabbed Eliza’s hand and screamed for Jakob to follow. Yavy was being pushed in the swell away from her. She saw his face only once, looking back, searching for her, his skin grayest in the mass of gray faces around them. His eyes found hers, briefly. Stared at her with a look of abject dismay, bewildered that she could be so far from him. He grasped at the air. Fought to be near her.
But the crowd surged, pushing him one way, she another, the swell carrying her and the children, stumbling forward on unsteady feet, treading blindly over fallen bodies, already damaged beneath t
he trampling of boots. She saw a boy in a green coat screaming for his mother. A headscarf that had unraveled, daisy strewn with yellow, spiraling up over their heads before it sank into the crowds, was trampled underfoot. A silver button, on the collar of a fleeing man, caught the light, twinkled ahead of them like some small beacon. It seemed everyone was heading toward it, following this lone individual who ran up ahead of them, following a tiny light as if it might guide them to safety. A woman beside her was weeping. As if already she had decided the worst was to come.
“The schoolhouse,” she sobbed, grabbing onto Lor’s arm, pulling at her wrist. “Will they have taken the children in the schoolhouse?”
Lor did not know. Her own children were not old enough for the schoolhouse, a slanted wooden structure that let in the rain, situated on the kampania itself, now that the local schools were closed to gypsy children. She looked down at the cracks in the pavement, held onto her footing so as not to fall, with the weight of the woman who was almost leaning herself upon her now, as if she could no longer stand with the fear of what she was imagining.
“Will they have taken the children in the schoolhouse?” she shrieked again.
“I do not know,” Lor told her. “I do not know,” and gently she lifted the woman’s grasp off her, and moved on, her hands clasping her children’s, studying the ground as they ran, the guttering alongside the buildings. The clutter of cigarette ends, where beneath the eaves of the central office building, on a more usual day, people stood to smoke as if there was still leisure in the day. A can of tooth powder that was being kicked alongside the ground on which they ran, rolling from foot to foot.
She looked up, checked where they were, caught again that silver button still glinting in the light and stumbled on, toward it, because sometimes one just needed to blindly follow a light. Any light. Away from Yavy. His face in that crowd, being pulled farther from her. Away from the calling of her name. Over and over, shouted hoarsely, desperately, until she was too far from him to hear it. Until he was gone. Until he was only an image behind her closed eyes.
Downstairs in De Clomp, she could hear the music starting. Outside it was already dark. She closed her eyes, as if to check that she could still see Yavy there. Standing with his hand raised in the air, as he would always do, a last turn before he rounded a corner for a day’s work, a morning’s errand, an evening’s task. Always, after he had kissed her good-bye, a last look, a last farewell.
And yet, before that, there had been a time where he had had to say good-bye twice, when he would bid farewell and then return to bid farewell again, as if the act of separation itself was too much to bear, as if he did not trust that he would see her again. But slowly, day by day, he had been reassured, with all the times when she had still been there on his return, waiting with a meal, a home made clean, and gradually, in time, he had let go of that second good-bye.
Yes, they must leave De Clomp now. They must set off for the one place left where she felt she might find him, while she still had the resolve. For what else was there but that?
Long Before
AUSTRIA, 1931
In that room, that white room with its exact square of blinding light, the girl was tied down. Her bones were so slight beneath the thick leather straps, the metal buckles weighed against her flesh, leaving imprints. Her shrieks, her sobs of confusion at being trapped in this way, had brought the swiftness of running feet over cold stone floors; two men, two women in crisp white coats who smothered her with their immense weight; firm gloved hands, a mix of hot breath on her face; garlic scented, sweet, sour, sleep stale, and the stench of ammonia, that stung her eyes and burned the back of her throat.
Thirteen years old, her small legs and arms restrained against the hard board beneath her, leaving gray bruises upon the knot of her wrists and ankles. Her screams rang wildly. But once expelled they seemed to dissolve against the dense walls, as if the ancient stone were swallowing them up, silencing her like the thousand others who’d been silenced before.
She kicked out, thrashed her legs, punched, spat. Became the underside of all things smooth, raw and rough and full of edges. Something cold and metallic was forced into her mouth, pushed between her teeth. She retched, tasted her own bile, her own blood. Her tongue lay fat against her teeth. A needle was jabbed into the flesh of her arm. A cold stream of liquid pulsed into her, chemical and cloying.
Then there was a moment when the fight went from her. Fled, like her screams. She waited, was as a boot, laid open and unlaced, anticipating the kick of intrusion. The light glared off the metal instruments that lay upon white tables. A foot shifted its weight, a black-laced shoe, polished, immaculate. She studied the shadow of evening stubble upon the cheek of the man whose face was closest. Saw the color of his eye, the green hazel tinge, the small stain of reddish brown in the center of his left iris as if someone had dabbed at it with a fine-tipped brush. He was looking at the distant wall, seemed distracted, as if his mind were not where his body now resided but had taken him off to some more trivial reflection.
Then it began. The spasm of her limbs. The uncontrollable jolting of her legs. The wrenching of her spine that twisted and made ugly her genteel past. Her feet kicked out on the hard bed. Saliva filled her mouth, ran down her chin. Her eyes rolled back and then too quickly the world went from white to black. The last thing the girl remembered was the sound of her own breathing, the sharp fight for air, as if she were drowning, and above her head, the view of a tea-stained map of the world: La Carte du Monde, where the brown of the deserts met the green of the hills.
When the girl awoke, the man, the doctor with the small brown stain in his eye, was there, filling in notes at the end of her bed with his small hands. He looked down at her, above the rim of his glasses, which were perched at the very end of his long nose. He was a slight man, who seemed to suppress the natural agility with which his body wished to move. As if he had been brought up with the belief that to move quickly was to move wrongly, that it implied a brashness of character or, worse, a nervous disposition, the too-eager admission of something untoward. He seemed to quell his natural speed with a studied flow of languorous motion. The girl watched him now, her vision flitting between blurred distortion and moments of too-bright clarity.
“You are back with us, Glorious,” Dr. Itzhak said. “You are back with us.”
These the words she became accustomed to hearing in those moments when she first came to, as the hours bled into days, the days into weeks. Dr. Itzhak would linger after her eyes had opened, after she accustomed herself to the light, and when she was fully awake, he talked to her of places she had not heard of.
“In Kigali,” he said, as he changed the saline drip in her arm, rhythmically, as if he were keeping time to his own words. “When you ask for directions they stoop down by the roadside and draw maps in the dust.”
Lor hid the tremor of her hands from him, afraid of what he would do if he saw them. She could feel the needle being withdrawn, the jolt as it left the vein. Then there was only the familiar tightness of the scabs on her wrists and the weight of the sheets upon her.
“You have to memorize them. I do not have a good memory, but in Kigali I always remember the maps that they draw in the dust.”
He told her these things to gain her confidence. She saw his stolen glances to check that she was listening. And she did listen, to every word, fearful of the consequences if she did not. But it was too late for confidences. For where in one moment he might be gentle, warm even, she had experienced how he could flit from kind to seemingly brutal in an unexplained instant. How with the shift of his head he could instruct a new ordeal, move her to some other room where they administered their methods of restoration and salvation. A new needle punctured her skin and she sucked in her breath.
“Everything will turn out all right, Glorious my dear,” Dr. Itzhak said. “Fear not. We will soon untrouble you.” His voice was clipped, betrayed his captious nature, his tone nasal and pinched.
Sometimes, depending on the wind, she could smell the wisteria that grew beneath the window. Other times she could smell only the dust in the room, which had dampened and dried a thousand times over. Outside it never seemed to rain. Most days sunlight slanted onto the floor. When the wedge of light reached the foot of her bed and she felt the warmth of it on her toes, she knew it was around midday.
The institute lay by the lake that was covered with mist first thing in the morning and last thing at night. In the dark hours an unnatural silence blanketed the corridors, too silent for the hundred or so inmates who slept behind the bolted doors. She lay awake listening to it. It trembled against her, seemed to vibrate in her head like an actual sound. But if silence was what she fell asleep to, it was screaming to which she awoke. The daylight hours were filled with the sounds of shrieking, distant cries that brought with them the echo of running steps down the bleached corridors, followed by an abrupt and disquieting silence.
She had been placed in a dormitory to begin with, a great barren room with wood-paneled walls and sixteen beds, filled with pallid-faced women who rolled their heads back and forth upon their pillows. There was the sound of grinding teeth, a constant murmur of distress; strange songs hummed or sweetly sung, screams that were stifled.
Come evening a wave of restlessness seemed to wash over the room. There was rocking, the rhythmic knocking of heads upon the walls. Bedpans were shaken, upturned, the stench of stale urine slopping onto the floor. The songs became more a lament, the same lines sung over and over again, hoarse, off-key. Limbs shook. Hair was wrenched from scalps. A hand slapped constantly at a bloody ear. Young girls in white aprons appeared who would wipe down the surfaces with worn damp cloths and hand out cigarette rations that for a brief period of time seemed to calm, as a cloud of mustard-colored smoke filled the room.
Jakob’s Colors Page 10