Lor learned that sound brought consequences with it. And later that silence brought the same. You are ill, Glorious. Very ill, my dear. There it was in its simplicity, a small clean click of a word—ill. A sickness, they told her, growing inside her head like some black burgeoning flower.
Later they put her in a room of her own, with no explanation why. The only object in it was a spherical glass toad that sat on an otherwise empty dressing table, unmoving and wide eyed, seemingly startled when the sun slashed light upon it. She was grateful for its presence amidst the starkness. Secretly befriended it, despite its inanimate stillness. The glass glinted with colors, twisting like a kaleidoscope.
In contrast the walls of this room were so white that in the morning she could hardly open her eyes. They, too, were bare, but for a single picture, that framed map of the world, La Carte du Monde, from the 1800s that had been the last thing she’d seen when they’d first put her under. It was worn and stained with age, tea colored and creased at the folds, where she could see it had been opened and folded and opened and folded again; five times in all, making thirty-two rectangles of locked-awayness, a hidden world in folded paper, before someone had laid it out in its entirety, mounted it and framed it behind thick, daily polished glass. Now it hung there, the macrocosm of the world, its glass reflecting back a microcosm of the little lives within it.
This was what Dr. Itzhak chose as his tool to communicate with her. He picked places from the map, some he had been to, others he had not, and told her things about them.
“Some of the villages I went to have no name,” he was saying. “They have no want for one. No one needs to know they are there. Imagine that, Glorious.”
Lor watched as he unraveled the bandages from her wrists. His glasses had slipped, as they always did, back down to the end of his nose. She had watched those who worked in his close proximity, saw how they had come to suspect it to be some sort of psychological test, a device almost to judge a person’s character by, for he seemed to arouse in them a strong, sometimes uncontrollable, desire to push the glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose when it became clear that he was not going to. He met their murmured apologies with disdain, and when he walked from the room he moved with a defiance, as if his nose led him, as if scent was the strongest of his senses.
She turned her head away, felt the pull as the gauze detached from the drying scabs. She could smell her own blood, salty, metallic. The memory of its taste filled her mouth. Who was she now? Something that had been disassembled, made sane or insane? She no longer knew which was which, if indeed there was a definition, a line that separated one from the other. It was as if she had been taken apart, piece by painful piece, and reassembled in a clumsy approximation of what she might have been before the seal of insanity had been stamped upon her.
You are ill, Lor. Very ill. That small, clean click of a word, only three letters long.
To begin with she had not heard from her father, but then a letter arrived that oddly mentioned nothing of home, his business, of her welfare or his. He chose as his topic of conversation to talk of the walks he was taking, a direct account of each particular one, pointing out the crest of a limestone hill he had climbed, the dip in a mossy valley, a rushing, cowslip-strewn stream, as if in these written accounts he might take her with him, breathe in fresh air, lift her out of whatever it was he felt she needed to be lifted out of. Two weeks later another letter arrived, a different walk, a different description of the things he saw, the journey ventured.
“The woodland anemones are out,” he told her. “The heather, the ferns, tall as a man.” She had not known this of her father, that he would have noticed these things.
“You are unhappy, Glorious,” Dr. Itzhak was saying. “This saddens me, my dear. I had hoped that by now we might have made you happier.”
She chose not to tell him that while it was true she did not feel happiness, she could not feel unhappiness either. It was as if all feelings of distinction had abandoned her. She was numb to them. She turned her head and caught his eye. He was a small man, much smaller than his authority implied. And his eyes watered easily. When his glasses weren’t slipping to the end of his nose, he had a habit of removing them and rubbing furiously, his eyelids collapsing in wrinkled folds at the corners. She wondered if he liked to walk. If anemones and tall ferns were things he would notice.
He tried to speak to her in her mother tongue, though she knew her French was better than his English. But he persevered, a show of omniscience that flitted between the two, filling in the gaps when he was lost for a word. His accent was thick. He had told her he was from Mont Saint-Michel, “an ice-cream cone of a town, plunked on the seashore”—describing it to her as if she were a much younger child. She had never been there. The gray cobbled road to it curved, he’d told her, around and around, like a spiral slide.
“I was in Africa for inoculations,” he continued, the stench of iodine filling the room as he dressed her wounds. “I began in Kigali, the capital, on the city outskirts at the soldiers’ stations, and from there went out into the villages. In Rwanda everything is green. Especially when the rains come. There is so much of it that the ground can slide away from where one is standing. Houses can disappear down steep slopes—trees, whole forests. The days begin in sunshine. Bright skies that trick everyone into leaving their washing out on a line. The rains come in the afternoon. Drops as large as thumbnails. They hammer against the skin. People are bruised by the rain there.”
She imagined bruises on her arms, so big and plum colored that they hid her laddered scars.
“They speak French there,” he said, feigning insouciance as slowly he rebandaged her wrists with a crisp white dressing. “You speak French very well, don’t you, my dear?”
She nodded. Her family had spent many summers in Antibes. She remembers a house that they had rented there, one that overlooked the sea. What it had felt like to stand on the wide veranda and look out at the ocean that seemed perpetually to be lit in sunlight. There was always music playing in that house: jazz or blues, merry, upbeat songs that defied anyone to feel otherwise. She remembers feeling almost sick with it.
“I have never been as far as Antibes,” Dr. Itzhak was saying. “To Africa, yes. But in my own country I have been as far east as Paris, as far south as Toulouse. I have not even seen the Mediterranean. They say it is azure, the sea there, not blue like the Atlantic, not green like the Pacific.”
Yes, she thought. The sea is azure there; the sand on the ocean floor is white. Because of that it was the only ocean she did not mind swimming out of her depth in.
“It is a calm sea, yes?” the doctor continued. “Not an angry sea?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It is calm.” But how it could roll in. She was remembering the whale that had been beached up on the shore that summer after a storm. The waves had seemed higher than the house, had swept in black and frothing beneath the night sky, crashing splinters of white upon the sand. In the days afterward the whole town had fought to save that whale. People came with buckets, with pots and pans, with metal bowls and metal cups, anything that could hold water. They dug deep into the sand, dredged down, bringing the sea up and around the vast mound of blubber. They worked tirelessly, relentlessly, as the sun set and rose in quiet vermilion. They did this for three days and three nights. But the whale hadn’t survived. No one was sure of the moment of its actual passing, just that it had passed while they were scooping water around its flanks. Afterward, a sort of sad relief settled over the dredgers, as if mostly they had expected it, as if the battle had been with time, for it to pass and for death to arrive so they might put down their buckets and their spades and go back to the rhythm of their usual lives. No one had moved that whale. In the days and weeks following, people walking the beach had watched it rot away, the flesh darkening gradually from pink to gray to black. From that house she could smell the stench of rotting blubber.
Imitative: something that is not quite genuine. Yes
, she thought, that was the right word to describe those songs.
The doctor had stopped what he was doing, stood watching her, his head tilted. Past him, through the window she could see the mountains, their frosted tops arrows to the sky.
“We are finished here then, my dear,” he said finally. “You should sleep now.”
She did. When they let her. Sometimes she slept for days.
This Day
AUSTRIA, 1944
Then there is an afternoon, when the chill of winter is ceasing and the edges of spring are flickering through the cracks in Jakob’s door. The air smells less of rain, more of grass. It is dryer, fresher. It drifts through the gaps in the house, as if carried in on the wings of passing moths. Markus comes to him.
“Jakob,” he whispers. “Jakob, I would like you to see the sky.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Markus?”
“The sun is setting. It is beautiful. I long for you to see it.”
“I see it,” Jakob says. “I see it every day in that chink of window.”
“That is not the sky, Jakob,” says Cherub’s voice from next door. “You are a boy. You should see the sky once in a while.”
Jakob hesitates. “I am afraid, Markus,” he says finally.
“There is no one here. The barn is empty. It is safe. We can watch from a hidden place. Cherub is right. You are a boy. Once in a while you must see the sky.”
So in the end Jakob lets Markus help him from the cupboard. He feels his limbs crack as he stands his full height, sways, dizzy as he looks downward to the floor that seems farther away than it ever has done.
“Come,” says Markus, taking his hand and leading him around to the back door. The old man goes first, clicks the lock and thumps at the door where the wood has expanded after rain.
Jakob hesitates. Stands there on the threshold as light bursts upon him. It is that which takes him back, that square of the outside when it is spied from the confined dark of indoors. Once again he is trapped within the cattle cars, watching the face of the man light up at the sight of that lone tree that had broken the flat of the land. Sees the almost-smile that had crossed his lips. Hears the shouts that followed. Sich setzen. Gypsy scum. Sich hinsetzen.
“I am afraid,” he whispers to Markus again.
“Come,” and Markus takes his hand and slowly he leads him from the threshold of inside to out. Jakob has not ventured outdoors for the past four months. He has not seen the raw light of nature or heard the sounds of it.
He closes his eyes to begin with, cannot open his lids against the glare, and therefore what he feels first is the wind, only slight, a breeze of freshness that brings scents of wood anemones and sun-warmed pine needles and the promise of rain.
“It is spring?” he asks.
“Almost, almost,” Markus replies.
Markus leads him around the side of the house, keeping to the shadows that are navy with dusk, toward the water tower. Jakob blinks, slowly lets the light into his eyes. It aches to walk. The heels of his feet feel tender.
“Look up,” says Markus, and finally Jakob opens his eyes, lifts his head, and for the first time in four months he sees the vault of the sky above him. He sways, reels beneath the space. He crouches down, gasping. It is the palest of blues, barely blue at all, and there is not a single blemish to blot the clearness of the air up there, but for the sickle of a new moon that smiles on its side, faint and silver. In the west the sky is reddening, rays of cinnabar, burned like spice, that seem to stretch and stain the distant horizon, deepening in color as the sun sinks farther below the crest of the skyline. Jakob spies a chevron of birds, skimming the air like torn rags. He cannot fathom the sight of them, the impossibility of something so miraculous existing in blissful oblivion to the turmoil below. He trembles, awed, a boy with a kite, a shudder of something close to hope.
Around them dragonflies mate in the thin evening air, dancing hopefully heel to toe. He sees a trail of ants, busy and oblivious. A flower of deep indigo that is opening before its time. A white petal already lost, already withered; the carcass of a bee that has not survived the winter, its abandoned nest clinging to the eaves above it. He spies buds on the trees, the folded leaves of a copper beech, clenched like fists, streaks of blood red inside waiting to burst open. Everything is luminous before him. As if before his months of darkness he had seen the world through clouded glass.
Markus cups his hand in his and pats the back of it. “It is good, yes. I am so glad that you came to see it.”
They sit down on the slate stone steps and Jakob lets himself lean against the old man. He has not felt the warmth of another for such a long time. He feels the heat of him through skin and bone.
“You are alone, Markus. Why?” he asks.
“Is that the way you see me?” Markus is surprised. “I suppose I can see why. That is not the way I see myself. I was not always alone. I was married for forty-six years. No children. That did not happen for us, but I was a husband. Part of a pair. I still see myself as that. My wife died only a few months before the war began. I nursed her through a year of sickness, and was with her when she went. I held her hand, watched her eyes close, heard her last breath.”
Jakob looks at the old man’s face, at the creases around his eyes, the crumpled jawline, and imagines how easy it would have been for someone to have loved it so long.
“I am glad of that,” Markus says in the end.
They stay like that for an age, just a boy and a man again, nothing else in the world as the light from the sun disappears and the night wraps around them.
“Thank God it was I who found you,” Markus whispers. “Thank God.”
Jakob picks up the fallen copper leaf, a creamy stone that is threaded with veins of orange. Holds them tight in his hand.
Later, when all the light from the sun has gone and the stars blink in the blue-black above, Markus returns Jakob to his cupboard beneath the stairs.
“What was it like?” Loslow asks him. “Tell us exactly what it was like.”
Jakob pulls his knees up to his chest with a familiarity that feels like home, and thinks for a long while. “It was like when you are sitting in the dust, near where you are living,” he says finally. “And it is just before suppertime, an’ while you are waiting for your ma to call, you draw chalk circles ’round them tiny insects on the road, counting how long it takes for them to escape. An’ all that there is, is that tree and that road and your family nearby, which is all that you know of anything. That is what it was like, Loslow.”
“I think that is the most you’ve ever said to us, Jakob,” Loslow replies, his voice low.
Jakob opens his wooden box, places his leaf and his stone inside, closes the lid with a gentle click. There is no sound from Cherub’s cupboard, and Jakob is not sure whether he is still awake.
“Cherub,” he whispers in the darkness. “Cherub, you awake?”
“Yes, I am awake. I was beneath your sky.”
“I want to know if you rode a bicycle when you were a young ’un?”
“Yes. I used to ride a bicycle with my brothers to school,” he tells him, and Jakob can hear the smile of the memory in his voice. “We did this every day of my childhood in the wind and the rain of winter, and the sunshine of spring.”
“When I see you, I see you on this bicycle,” Jakob says.
“I like that you see that.”
“I do see it,” Jakob finishes. “I see it.”
The next morning when Markus lets them out to use the bucket beneath the stairs Jakob sees that the window in the hallway has been cleaned, the dirt scrubbed from it, the sky faintly turquoise, clear and endless beyond.
Long Before
AUSTRIA, 1931
Again they held Lor down, the buckled straps pinching her skin, the weight of them on her ribs, pushing the air from her lungs so that she could barely breathe. Daily they did this. A ritual that had her weeping with the knowledge of what was to come. When they rolled her down those
endless corridors, the rattle of the metal trolley beneath her, the jar of the wheels over the stone flags, she could not help but scream, her sobs disappearing behind the thick wooden door that was bolted behind her. They administered the insulin. Again and again took her down into the depths of a coma. She choked, swallowed her own vomit. Called out her mother’s name. Her back arched, spasmed, her skin taut, almost translucent over the white of her bones. Her limbs hammered against the hard wooden bed until great bruises spread over her arms and legs like a map of what had been endured.
“The fight makes it harder for us, Glorious, my dear. Harder for us, harder for you,” she could hear Dr. Itzhak’s voice from the far side of the room. “I know it is difficult. I know you are afraid, but if you let us, we will make you well again.”
Afterward she was brought back to her white room. She lay down on the bed, inert, hardly able to move, the words stripped from her. She lay there, smelled the fungal scent of winter damp that permeated through the cracks in the walls, trapped inside the cement, like the leaking passage of time.
Outside for the first time in a long time it was raining. Slight at first. It tore at the air. Then heavier, slanting from the night sky and smashing against the barred glass window. It came in surges, like waves that dashed against the pane, ebbing then flowing. She longed to see it, waited for the shutdown of night, for the shifting of locks and the silence of the corridors that followed. Then slowly she lifted herself from the bed. Her legs trembled after weeks of immobility. Her head spun. She held it first in her hands, waited for her sight to steady, for the spherical toad on the desk to be still. The stone flags were cold beneath her feet. A draft blew against the back of her legs from the gap beneath the thick oak door. She longed for the movement of rain.
Slowly she crossed from the bed to the window. She pressed her face up to the cold pane and saw the leaden streaks that fell across the lake, pelleting onto the surface so that the water seemed to dance. She pushed against the lintel, shifted it upward and open until it jammed beneath the fixed bolts above. A small space, no wider than her bandaged arms. She laid her head upon the sill, moved her face up against the glass and smelled the rain and the chilled air from the mountains that were filled with the memory of snow. She pushed her arm outward, opened her palm, felt the splattering of drops, not so cold. Not so very cold. She lay that way, staring up at the clouds and the dark of the sky, until a thread of light bled through them and a crack opened up, exposing the hidden moon. Light streaked onto the lawn, turned the slate-gray rain silver. She could see the silhouette of the trees suddenly, skeletons before spring buds opened, the leafless shrubs, the outline of a rosebush, thorny and waiting to flower.
Jakob’s Colors Page 11