In the end she sat back down on the edge of the bed, stilled herself, willed her thumping heart to steady. The bird was flying into the glass, over and over, a rhythmic smash that must eventually shatter its tiny bones. She sat on her hands, turned her head from the sight of it and listened only to the thud and flutter of wounded wings. Over and over and over. Thump. Thump. Thump. Until it became a white sound, rhythmic and undecipherable.
Eventually, though, the battered flight slowed, and finally, far too finally, the bird lay spent on the sill, against the glossy white that reflected back its image as if it were floating on the surface of water. Lor did not move. The bird lay unmoving. Only its left wing flickered sporadically.
They sat like that together, the bird and she, motionless, lulled eventually by their own silence, as outside the dawn light became morning light. Gray to blue.
The stillness in that room did not break until Dr. Itzhak arrived on his morning rounds, opening the door with his quiet manner, the movement of which sent the bird hurling itself one last time into the glass, as if the green world beyond was taunting flight. Afterward, it fell back and lay motionless on the sill.
Dr. Itzhak took a key from his pocket to unlock the window. A sudden rush of air came into the room. Scents of thistledown and cedar, moth mullein and goat’s rue, uncut grass and cut grass. But the bird did not stir.
“It is dead now,” he said, and he lingered, his hand resting on the side of the sill, as if marking the moment of its life passing. “Not of your doing, Glorious,” he muttered quietly. “Not of your doing.”
Afterward he took her pulse, fussed and inspected her wounds, which were healed now, sealed like secrets. She did not take her eyes off the bird. Convinced herself that she could see it still breathing.
It was the boy who had stood in the rain who was shortly sent to collect it. He knocked so quietly that Lor did not hear him the first time, and it was only when he knocked again that she called out, and then lay there waiting in anticipation of something fearful. He entered with that look, still unafraid, still defiant. She pulled the covers up and around her. Her face flushed dark. He walked toward the windowsill, but before he got there he stopped, reached into his pocket, pulled something from it and placed it on the side table by her bed. It was a berry, perfect, sanguine red.
“Growing all over this garden,” he said. “You see them, you pick them, eat them. No one be troubling you.” He spoke with an odd mix of languages, some French, some German, and then strange words she could not decipher. He seemed to flit sporadically from one to the other as if he did not differentiate between any of them. He nodded toward the berry, and so she picked it up, hesitant, unsure if this was allowed. Slowly she brought the berry up to her lips, then bit into the crunch of white pulp that spurted sweetness into her mouth. He did not take his clear eyes from her. Then suddenly he smiled, a reticent smile; halfway hopeful, halfway unsure. She wavered on the brink of smiling back. She had not smiled for months. Suddenly so much lay in the simplicity of a smile.
She looked at his clothes. He wore an old woolen suit that was too large for him, cut coarsely at the hem to fit, the sleeves rolled up over his wrists. The pants were held up with rope that he’d threaded through the belt loops. The suit was worn and soiled, not like the starched gowns of the patients who wandered the wards.
He leaned over the bird, one hand reaching out, hovering just above its chest. He lowered two fingers onto the line of its breastbone, massaged it in slow circular movements. Then he bent down and gently blew against its face.
“Still warm, this bird,” he said.
At length there was a tiny movement, a slight shift of the bird’s right wing. Then another. “Heart’s beating,” he told her. “Coming to now.”
“It is not dead?” she asked him.
“Not dead. Just stunned awhile is all.”
Gently, he lifted the bird into his hands, held its head against his fingers, cupped it to his chest. Lor saw its eyes blink open, bead black and startled. It lay warm and alive in his hands. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to feel the life of it, but she was embarrassed for him to see her arms. Self-consciously she looked down at them, the pink lurid scars that ran from her wrists to her elbows. It was too late to hide them.
“Someone been hurting you?” he asked, softly.
She lifted her head, thought she caught that distant look in his eyes.
His name was called then, from somewhere outside in the corridor, abrupt and reprimanding. And then he was gone, taking the waking bird with him, and Lor was left with the sweetness of the berry that still lingered in her mouth, and his name: Yavy.
Long Before
SWITZERLAND, 1927
Them Authorities are finding it mighty hard to get a placement for the likes of me, they say. No one wanting a bounder, a boy that runs. So I watch the others coming an’ going, some looking like they’re heading to a family who might treat ’em with a little loving, while I stay stuck in this dark place being more polite an’ low each day.
Mostly to get by, I remember that place I still calling home. Remember our horse, Blesham, how we hitched him up to the front o’ our wagon and fed him good oats an’ hay. How we traveled with our chickens an’ our rabbits, and how I was loving them whether they were clucking an’ skipping at my feet, or being chopped up an’ steaming in a bowl for my dinner.
My work was filling up our horse’s bucket and brushing the sweat from his hot hide, making the grain slick an’ silky, and feeding them chickens, and playing with them rabbits. Learned how to whittle wooden nails at a young age, whittling them so sharp they can be hammered down easy. One stroke, two. Like that wood was a slice o’ butter. And not ever do I think of hammering them nails into that boy Jesus’s feet an’ hands. Not ever.
I long for them gypsy nights, when we would light our way with that huge paraffin lantern that rocked in the wind leaving a trail o’ scent we could smell half a mile away. Long for that sweet-sounding music, instruments tuned, violins, that cimbalom player knocking chords out in arpeggio with his cloth hammers as them castanets sounding out the beat.
Sometimes we roast sweet hedgehog, which we is catching in our traps. Cook it in a cube o’ clay that dries solid. Split it apart, and watch how them prickles an’ skin stick to it quick, so when we open it up there is a meat so white an’ tasty smelling, our mouths are watering before they’ve even filled. Or we is roasting stuffed pheasant, or wild boar, chomping on a can of sardines that we mix up with a sweet lard.
I long for them days when we were making balls out o’ our own jackets. How we stuff them full an’ sew ’em up, playing soccer with trees or shrubs for our goals. Long for our caravan, with its two door wings, that we would let down to let the light and that clear breeze in. How we’d lie with our heads on them door wings in the daytime, feeling that big yellow sun raying down on our cheeks.
Sometimes I go to a school close to our kampania. Never a day being happy there, though. What with them children laughing at my clogs, tying their satchels in front of their chests as they playing at being airplanes, flying past me an’ knocking me to the ground.
Some of them girls at those schools though, they’d take the edge off a good beating, with their pink lips an’ long lashes. Never kissed one before. Know their pa’d be mighty mean if I getting near ’em, so that be enough to stop me doing it, but not enough to stop me dreaming.
Then there’s my ma, who wraps me up tight in her apron and holds me ’til I squeal. Don’t know when she gonna grab me, when not. So mostly I circle out of her reach, but sometimes I is wanting her arms around me, so I close in, and she catches me quick. Remember, too, the sight of her, when she has a headache, how she set up some vinegar on a cloth that she ties around her head. Or when she is wanting to keep that mighty sun off her face, how she ties a rhubarb leaf over her crown, and no matter how hard we laughing at her, or how many times we asking her to take it down quick, she sits proud an’ straight backed and gets on wi
th the work she got about her. And if we laughing too long, she makes us a rhubarb hat of our own, forces us to wear it, and we half hating her for that, half loving her, despite the others mocking.
Free an’ easy in our playing, we are, knowing our ma and pa be close by, and supper coming soon enough, and come that bright moon shining we gonna be wrapped up tight in our beds, hearing the people we love most in the world snoring down below.
But even then, I know my ma and pa don’t sleep so softly as me. Got them troubles of the world on their shoulders. Ain’t long in a gypsy boy’s childhood before he knows the world’s not walking by his side, that it’s gonna give him a fight each day he got to stand up to.
My pa, he’s a Roma gypsy boy. Been hearing taunts an’ cruel words all his life. From folks who stand safe steps away as they recite their limericks and their slanging insults, so that if he swings at them, they can duck an’ dive and run away with their cowardly hearts. His great-great-grandfather was a slave of the Danubian provinces. Bought and sold by princes, “advertised like furniture in a newspaper,” my ma told me. Fetching a good price for his knowledge of horses. Knew which ones to buy an’ which ones best steering clear of. He fled Austria with the wind sweet in his nose after the Revolution. Fell in love with the first Roma girl he meets. My great-great-grandmother, a dark-haired beauty who could ride a horse as good as he, smoking her own clay pipe as she riding, filling it with dried oak leaves. Bought themselves a wagon home, setting off on that lonely road, looking at horses from town to town an’ giving away their thinking for a handful of pennies. My family been traveling from that day on, moving from one place to the next, gathering up our skills, learning crafts that we see be most needed in the places where we stopping an’ sticking for a time. Misfits, gypsy scum. Infidels. Only thing that is constant is that name calling that drives us off one piece of land to another.
My ma was a Yenish gypsy girl, light skinned, fair haired, like me, from that landlocked country they calling Switzerland. Been taunted for her “witch’s blood” from when she first was walking. Seen hatred in the eyes of a child that is younger than she, a child that is smaller than she. Been stared at a thousand times, as if she smelling of something rotten. But my ma, she smells sweet as blossom.
My pa met her in a country neither of them is from, in a market on the outskirts of some shantytown. Met in a maze of cluttered stalls that my ma got herself lost in, afraid until an old ’un walks past her to piss ’gainst a wall, shouting out for her to take her eyes off him.
My pa, watching from his stall, took her hand-to-mouth gesture as shock, so he steps forward, pulling her into a metal yard, where he gets a surprise when he uncovers her laughing face. They stand an’ stare with the smash of hammers all ’round them and metal sparks flying up, and my pa said that when she flicked back her varnished hair, he knew. And they been walking this tricky world side by side ever since, past all them people who wanting to see them keep on walking by.
Same with them Authorities of mine. Finally they find me that placement, and I walk on from one set of folk to another. Some man in need of a little help in his house. Gonna be my new pa, teach me how to be a proper boy, teach me how to be deserving of society, and they tell me by the looks of him he more than capable of doing that with the likes o’ me. So I best be behaving, they tells me, lest I wanting what will come if I don’t.
I stay low an’ small. Not rising to what they calling me. And not caring where they takes me by then, ’cos I is seeking out that magic that gonna make life worth living. A magic that’s gonna keep my soori safe. I seen what my pa done with them white crosses. Know the magic of what coming from one thing to make another. Seen how it can keep a boy alive.
Before
AUSTRIA, 1931
Her days were filled with airlessness, amassed against the sealed windows like a stale gas. The morning sunlight shone through the clear glass and cast finger-like shadows across her bed from the breeze-blown wisteria leaves outside. She lay unmoving. Seeking to remember if she had always been so, or if this was, as they explained, part of her illness. Her illness. You are ill, Lor. Still so very ill. That small clean click of a word. What was insanity, she wanted to ask? What was sanity? If the two were separate she could not define within her one from the other, nor a time when she had been either or. Both seemed a mere accident of holding life together. A trick of the fragile mind hidden beneath a layer of lacquered varnish, the thickness of sugared glass.
“Do you miss your father?” Dr. Itzhak would ask. “Do you read his letters?”
“Yes,” she would reply.
“And your mother? Do you think of her? Do you remember her? Dream of her, still?”
“All of those things,” she would tell him.
“And you still see her? She still visits you?”
“No, she no longer does that.”
“And why do you think that is, Glorious?”
On these occasions she did not know what to say, what would appear sane, or insane, so she said nothing.
“I trust you to tell me if you see her again, Glorious, my dear. I trust that you will do that.” And she would nod, make her promises, and, when he left, lie there bereft.
When he arrived this particular morning he said, “So Glorious, you are progressing very nicely.” He held a file in his hands that he opened and studied with exaggerated interest. “I am pleased with you,” he said eventually. “I wonder if you feel ready to venture outside? A short walk around the grounds?” Perhaps he was as aware as she of the staleness inside the room. “You would like that, my dear?”
“I would like that very much,” she said, and shortly afterward he called for the nurse, a young girl only a few years older than Lor, who helped her dress, swapping her nightclothes for day clothes that were starched and ironed and coarse against her skin.
Then, after months of only that room, only those walls, that bed, she was led from inside to out, one small step bridging each. Surprisingly once there, it was not the grass, nor the breeze, nor the sunlight that she was first aware of, but the scent of her own skin. She could smell the sleep on it, days and nights of it, trapped between the sheets. As if time had decayed on her.
They were watching. She felt them. From behind the closed windows and doors. She blinked against the light, the arc of the sky above her, the lake that spread like a pool of spilled silver out toward the mountains, their white peaks hidden in other worlds above the clouds. She reeled beneath the space. Steadied herself. A jolt of air, dry-hot and scented with thyme.
Around her, other inmates were scattered about the immaculate lawn. She recognized some of them from the ward: the woman who was circling the wrought-iron bench, still tugging at her hair, wrenching clumps from her scabby blistered scalp. Another knelt beneath the apple tree, picking up rotten windfalls which she sniffed and discarded. They passed a man with hair the color of straw who rocked on his haunches and snarled like a dog, drooling pools of saliva into his hands. He spat at them as they passed. The nurse raised her arm in the air and immediately two men in white coats came running from the upper terrace. They dragged the man onto his feet, carted him away, his gait hunched and unsymmetrical. Long after she lost sight of them, Lor could hear his screams.
The young nurse led her down a path that cut diagonally across the lawn. She was a shy girl, less forthcoming than Lor, less likely than she, even, to light up a room. Her skin was pitted with adolescent scars, a sheen of grease across her nose. She smelled of that grease, as if she spread great quantities of lard across her bread each morning, so that at night it seeped from her pores.
They were walking toward the lake, following the path past shrubs that hid the Institution, strolling beneath overhanging trees of willow and ash that shaded them from the late morning sun. The nurse led her to the water’s edge where the air smelled of shadows. To the right of them was the boathouse, which looked locked and unused. To the left was a small workshop that sat at the very edge of the walled garden beneat
h thick vines of wisteria that were yet to flower. Its foundations looked strong and there were flurries of intricacies in the stonework, suggesting that originally the plans for it had been for something grander: a gazebo perhaps, a summerhouse. But now it was dilapidated, discarded it seemed, with sunlight that slanted through the windows and lit up shafts of pale-gold dust. The nurse led her onward alongside the lake, following the path past the workshop, and as they did so Lor looked through a gap between stone and wood where the door was ajar and caught a glimpse of what was inside.
She stopped. Covering every surface, cluttering every crevice, were dried petals, dried leaves, pieces of fabric, stones of ochre and malachite, lake-smoothed pebbles, tinted glass, and broken china shards. Colors, everywhere. They hung across the stone walls, lined the shelves; a chink in the wall even, where a brick was missing; an open drawer; the space under the narrow metal bed with springs that sagged. And there was variety to their shade, an ordered layout that circled the entire space. Aquas, fuchsias, indigos and teals, magentas, maroons, burnt siennas, and bright vermilion reds. Lor could name them all; a row of paint cans in her mind’s eye: cyans, limes, golds, olives, silvers, perus, tans. No color the same. All of them graduating from one to another with the slightest distinction.
“Come along,” the nurse said softly. “Come along now.” And she led her back up the path toward the Institution, back to the bleached-white walls, away from those colors.
This Day
AUSTRIA, 1944
It is at the end of the second month, the dusk is falling, and none of them can sleep for the cramps of containment.
Jakob’s Colors Page 13