“I used to collect. I used to collect stamps,” Loslow is telling them. “I had over two thousand by the beginning of the war. They filled four leather-bound books, each of them labeled in the order of the date I acquired them. Seems futile now, but you know it gives me comfort to imagine them, sitting where I left them on the shelf in my library. I was always searching for that rare one that might make me a fortune. You know the most famous stamp in the world, the Red Magenta, came about simply through mischance. Simply because an anticipated shipment of stamps in Guiana did not arrive. The local postmaster there ordered the printing of an emergency replacement batch. There is only one of them left in the whole world. A small ship sailing on a sea of bright magenta. It sold for three hundred thousand francs. Do you collect, Jakob?” he asks.
“I am not sure,” says Jakob, squeezing the stone in his hand, feeling for his box, as the line of light under his cupboard door darkens.
“Perhaps you should begin. I think it is good for the soul. Part of our makeup. Like nuts to a squirrel.”
He is interrupted by the sound of Markus’s shoes shuffling faster than usual across the stone slabs. “They are coming,” his voice hushes outside the cupboard doors. “Be silent. They are coming over to the house.”
Loslow stops talking immediately. Voices sound from the kitchen, abrupt, clipped. There is the noise of furniture scraping across the floor. When the door to the kitchen opens and boots sound on the stone flags, Cherub pushes a finger through the hole in the partition between them. Jakob feels for it in the darkness and peers through the crack beneath his door. Light spills out into the hallway. A shadow streaks across it.
The fear slips through him, immediate, sudden, like stepping over from white to black. He clenches his stone in his hand to stop from shaking, afraid that even the movement of air inside his cupboard might give him away.
“Your pictures are not straight,” a voice is saying with an accent that brings dread, and Jakob listens for something recognizable in the guttural tone—the sound of honey. “Why are your pictures not straight?”
“I had not noticed,” Markus’s voice replies.
“How? How do you not notice a thing like this? You are too busy perhaps? You clean one window. You can clean no more?” There is no reply. “I asked if you were too busy?”
“Perhaps.”
“These pictures are precious to you?”
“Not in value, but in sentiment, yes.”
“So I ask again, what is it that keeps you so busy that you cannot straighten your precious pictures? Cannot clean more of your windows? With what, old man, are you so busy?”
There is no honey. No honey in that voice. The officer is moving around the floor. Jakob can hear the shifting of a picture straightened on the wall.
“It is difficult to find food. It is time consuming,” Markus replies.
“Yes, that is true. But you find it?”
“Not enough.”
“You have enough to feed a guest?”
“A guest?”
“Yes, a boy, a young boy?”
“There is no boy.”
“That is funny. Someone said that they saw you in the yard with a boy.”
“No, there is no boy.”
“A mistake then.”
“Yes, a mistake.” There is a long silence. “Perhaps I can find you something to eat,” Markus offers eventually.
“I would appreciate it. They talk of you as a brave man in the village. You fought in the Great War?”
“Yes, I did.”
“So are you still as brave an old man as I have heard?” the voice is asking.
“What have you heard?” Markus’s voice replies.
“Enough. You are proud to be of use to your country?”
“Yes, I am proud.”
“I have heard this. Proud enough to stand up for what you believe in?”
“Yes.”
There is the smack of a sound that comes suddenly and then a thud upon the floor. “So be proud, old man. Stand up for what you believe in.” Silence. “Stand up. Stand up, old man.”
“Please,” is all they hear Markus utter. Again they hear the smack of something. “Please. Please.”
Jakob squeezes his eyes shut. He waits for his cupboard door to swing open. Waits for the sound of gunshots and the hot pain that will follow. Sich setzen. Gypsy scum. Sich hinsetzen! Sit down! And behind the view of a Y-shaped tree that broke the flat of the horizon.
“Please,” Markus says again, a whispered plea, hoarse, stuttered. “Please …”
A shadow moves across Jakob’s doorway. He can just make out the black boots and the soldier’s khaki coat. He is tall and broad. His bulk bulges inside his jacket. The padding is bursting at the seams. Jakob hears the rattle of the cattle trucks in his ears. 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. He sees the tree on the mound. Sees the children crowded beneath it, dirt smeared and grazed. Sees the hard-set face of the officer as he lights and coaxes the flames of his fire, a man who only moments before had held his head in his hands as he wept.
But through the crack in the cupboard door there is no eagle, no white silk or aluminum wire. Jakob cannot see his face, but he knows the officer in the hallway will not smell of cologne, or carry the scent of licorice on his breath.
His sister lifts her foot from the ground, asks if the grass feels pain.
His father’s voice. Nothing wasted. Nothing futile. The memory of his blue-stained fingers as he used to sweep back his hair.
Jakob remembers the cow, its fur damp and matted. Its wide-eyed look, long lashed and pleading. It had shifted its head, jerked it slightly upward. Only once, before it lay still, its expression one of mild surprise as the breath was stifled from it.
“Zyli wsrod roz,” Jakob whispers. “They lived amongst the roses. Nie znali burz. And they did not know of any storms.”
He can hear the long, drawn-out breaths that betray the soldier’s stony calm. He can smell the oil and the gasoline on his hands, the cut grass on his shoes. He listens. Hears the shift of moving fabric. A boot scuffs. Then silence. Then the grunt of effort as Markus stands, the grind of his knees as he rises.
“Come, I can find you something to eat,” he says. He hears the shuffled steps on the stone flags, hears the heavy tread of the soldier following. The door to the kitchen closes again and the voices continue muted from behind the wood.
“You have earned yourself a bullet,” the officer had told him, his face streaked with muddy tears as he had looked up from his fire, and Jakob had witnessed the straightening of his spine. Knew that he was no longer caught in that no-man’s-land between thought and action.
Inside their cupboards, Loslow and Cherub do not utter a word. Jakob lies curled on his side, hugs his knees to his chest, inhales their scent.
“So you are on Gillum, and I on Valour,” he whispers to himself. “With Malutki behind me and Eliza behind you. We are far beyond that Ushalin World now. Far beyond them deserts of smoke and ash that eddy ’cross them Great Plains, splintering against those who stand in their path. You carry that indigo in your right saddle, a glass vas full of the night, and in your left that malachite green, what we cut from the azurite we found in them copper caves, cut and welded and ionized with fine wine. We ride fast ’cross them golden sands, till we find that crevasse, no wider than the length of you, no deeper than the height of me. An’ we sleep safe in the hiding down low of there, sleep deep through that long night.”
They do not get any food that evening. They have to wait until the next day. When Markus comes to them that afternoon he brings only bread.
Loslow sobs when he sees him. “My friend. My dear friend.”
“Why, Markus?” Jakob hears Cherub asking, his voice tight in his throat. “Why do you hide us?”
“Because.”
“Because—why?”
“That is it? Really?”
“Perhaps my life is not as precious as it once was,” the old man whispers. “For your company, it is worth the risk.”
“You are an angel,” Loslow weeps.
“Only in the hell of this life. We live in a time of angels and devils, but not a single one of us is either.”
“You are right,” Loslow says. “War, it is mankind’s illusion. Our longing for the pendulum that swings from peace to the extreme. A lust for something other than the beat of the ordinary.” He is a rush of words suddenly, talking so quickly they spill out like his tears.
When Markus opens Jakob’s cupboard door, Jakob sees the deep laceration across his right temple that is still bruised and inflamed, the gash on his lip, the blue wound beneath the knuckles of his hand.
“Hello, my boy,” Markus says, forcing a smile.
“Why, Markus?” Jakob asks. “Why?”
“When you can hurt a man without consequence, perhaps the temptation is uncontainable.” And then, “You know you cannot stay here much longer. You must get to Switzerland,” he tells him. “When it is time, that is what you must try to do. You must run south and not stop until you reach the lakes. Remember that, Jakob. Be invisible and swift. You can be that?”
“Yes,” says Jakob. “I can be swift,” he repeats, but the thought terrifies him. Warm in his triangle cupboard, wrapped in his sheepskin coat, with faceless friends, a day passing and then another, he has come to imagine that this is the way it will always be. Day after day, in a world of sound, until … until … he doesn’t know what.
He dreams of his wagon, the rattle of its wheels over rough roads, the rhythmic creaking of its axle, the occasional crack of a whip, and the wind, the wind in the leaves and the hum of flies that hung around Borromini’s head; his breath soft when he walked, streaming from him when he rose to a trot. They would move from forest to field, across field to forest. Through oat and corn and walls of swaying wheat. Breathing in wood smoke as he watched his skin darken beneath the sun.
Next door everything is silent.
“Cherub?” Jakob whispers eventually in the darkness.
“Yes?”
“You ever kill a man?”
“No, I have not ever killed a man.” Again they fall silent. “I imagine it would be a hard thing to do,” Cherub says at last.
But Jakob does not reply. Outside there is the sound of a distant train, the rattle of it across the tracks. Once again he is transported from his cupboard to the rails. Lies on the cold cattle-truck floor again, listening to the sound of the wheels on the track. The rattle and the grind, the cradle-rock back and forth. Tuchun tuchun tuchun. Metal on metal. A hot spark. A screech of wheels twisting on a bend. Tuchun tuchun tuchun. There is no water, no food. His tongue lies like a slab of dry rock in his mouth. He drifts in a torpid haze, weak with starvation.
Asleep, he hides in dreams of color. The brightest of colors: Prussian blue, emerald green, a burning scarlet. When he wakes, everything is the color brown. Familiarity comes in the form of dust and soil on the soles of worn shoes, as the cattle trucks move on across the land. There is little light, just a sliver through a slit above his head. 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 stench of stale urine seeps into their skin. The rattle of the train rings in his ears. Nothing to do but sleep and fear. When it rains the air smells of mushrooms. When it doesn’t, it smells of blood.
Tuchun tuchun tuchun, metal on metal, the cradle-rock back and forth. Tuchun, tuchun, tuchun. The rhythm of his thudding heart as he sits in the miasma of sweat and blood.
They do not stop, for two days they do not stop. Then he feels the gravity of being pushed forward, the slowing of the wheels, the sudden silence of stillness. They stop at a platform in a valley of nowhere, the doors sliding open, slamming more metal into metal as light pours into his blinded eyes. He is given only water and it is as brown as the color of his skin. Still he sips from the filthy cup his mother hands him, gulps his meager ration, and imagines the dirt that films it is from the soil of the most fertile field.
Only afterward does he notice the man opposite who is staring out at a plain of green grass, at a lone tree, shaped like a Y, that breaks the flat of the horizon. Jakob catches the rapture on his face that passes across it as if his very life depends on seeing such a tree, and not on the water that is being handed to him. Jakob watches the man’s pale eyes filling with tears. The corners of his mouth quiver, and Jakob sees the almost-smile of nostalgia that moves across his lips.
“You,” a guard is calling from the open door on the other side of the carriage. “Sit down. Hey, gypsy scum, look at me when I’m talking to you. Habt ihr verstanden? I said sit down,” the guard goes on. “SIT DOWN,” he yells. “SICH HINSETZEN. SIT DOWN.” But the man doesn’t sit down. He is too absorbed in the view of the tree in front of him.
The bullet hits him in the back of the head. Jakob watches him jolt forward, his temple smashing against the wall of the cattle truck before he slumps onto the floor. The blood flows from the wound, dripping down his neck as he lies, eyes open, still staring at the view of the Y-shaped tree he has died for. That and an almost-smile that was lost in nostalgia. The woman next to him sits trembling with his splattered blood on her cheeks. She makes no sound. A pool of scarlet seeps across the floor. The woman sits upright, her mouth a straight line, clenched but quivering tenuously with fury. Tears slip down her cheeks, one after the other, but they seem separate from her, an involuntary physical response that defies the strength of her jaw.
Jakob holds his screams in his throat. Ceri pe phuv perade. The sky falling to the earth. Jag xalem. He eats fire. Thuv pilem. Drinks smoke. Thaj praxo. Becomes dust.
“Jakob,” his father calls. He is across from his son, several bodies away, but he moves to sit up in the tangled mess of limbs so that Jakob can see him. “I told you the story of that cochineal beetle?” In the darkness Jakob shakes his head. “You can squeeze that cochineal beetle in your fingers, pop it dead, so that its blood staining your palms,” his father begins, his voice shaking. “This blood, it is the reddest dye in the world. This blood is the treasure of the Aztecs and the Incas. Been used on the robes of kings, on the lips of queens. Nothing wasted. Nothing futile.” Jakob listens, closes his eyes, and lets his father’s words wash over him. Nothing wasted. Nothing futile. It was his first ever train journey.
They close the metal doors, leave them in the darkness. And when, much later with the rising dawn, they open them, the first thing Jakob sees is the Y-shaped tree. And after that, the crowd of children gathered beneath it.
Long Before
AUSTRIA, 1931
Lor dreamt of her mother that night for the first time. As if in doing so she might drift further into the madness Dr. Itzhak said tainted her. Vivienne was crouched down beside her feet, lacing her shoes. She caught a loop in her hand, wound it around the lace, yanked hard to form a tight bow, then trailed her long fingers down the length of Lor’s shoe before moving on to tie the other. Once she had done so she returned to the first shoe, pulled at the bow, unlaced it, and began again. Lacing and relacing her daughter’s shoes over and over. When Lor woke she could not envisage her mother’s face. Of her features, there was only a whiteness.
She was not taken outside again until the following weekend. The insulin shots prevented it, lulled her into that strange soporific state. But the next time the young nurse came for her, Lor asked if they might once again walk down to the lake. As they had done the first time, they ambled across the grounds, past inmates who rocked and soothed themselves with the chatter of their own voices, and once again followed the path around and down to the water’s edge.
When they reached the workshop Lor asked, “May I?” and the young nu
rse hesitated, then nodded slowly as if deciding there could be no harm.
Outside the workshop there was a stack of coarsely cut logs, set neatly in a rectangular block. They had been warmed in the sunlight and now scented the air with sycamore dust. There was an ax on a hook and a heavy garden spade resting against the wall. The wisteria vine clung to the brickwork, still empty of leaves and flowers, not yet budding. Lor wondered if when it did the flowers would cover the only window, lightening the room with a lilac hue as they had in her own house. She hovered on the shallow stoop before pushing the door wide open and stepping inside.
It was beautiful to her, the clutter, familiar. She allowed herself to walk the four walls, lifting objects here and there, examining them: a shard of green glass; a moonstone, smoothed by lapping waves; the skeleton of a leaf, so delicate she hardly dared to hold it in the palm of her hand. She moved to the center of the room, her eyes roaming from one color to the next, to the changing shift of each shade.
Behind her, the nurse fidgeted. They should go now, she said. They had stayed long enough.
“Please,” Lor begged. “Just a moment longer. Just a moment.”
A toolbox lay open on a table beside the bed. A pile of planed shavings scattered the floor beneath it. Someone had carved a wooden spoon, had woven limb bark into a shoe, cut and stripped a small fishing rod. Lor stood over that table, saw a silver blade beneath a handful of loose nails, felt claustrophobic with longing.
“Please,” the nurse said, ill at ease. “Come now. You must come now.”
But Lor could hardly hear her. She dropped down, upon the stone floor.
“I miss you,” she whispered.
“Who are you talking to?” the nurse asked.
“I miss you,” Lor said again.
And for the first time in months she came, still as lovely as ever, still as pale. “You are so thin, my love,” her mother said. “Are they not feeding you?”
Lor rested her head in the palm of her mother’s hand. It felt as if she were sinking into a tub of warm water. “I miss you so.” She rocked, wept, held her own arms around herself. She could not bear to go back to the cold. “Take me from here, please. End it. End it now.”
Jakob’s Colors Page 14