The next time Markus brings food, there are chunks of chopped cheese melting in the soup and slices of egg, the yolk gleaming like jewels in the murky liquid.
“Where?” Jakob asks in amazement.
“My neighbor. He has a golden goose! I will have another one for you tomorrow.”
“I did not know you had a neighbor. I thought there are only fields surrounding your home.”
“Everyone has a neighbor. No matter the distance between them.”
The flavor fills Jakob’s mouth. Never before has cheese tasted so rich, so salty. He can feel his whole head burning with the flavor of it.
“Loslow, you are happy?” he almost shouts. “You are happy for your cheese?”
“Jakob, it is like heaven has descended upon our little world. I cannot wipe the smile from my face. My cheeks are aching with it,” Loslow tells him.
Jakob chews slowly, savors his mouthfuls, hears his own teeth chomping through the soft textures.
“And you, Jakob, you are happy?” Cherub asks him.
“More than. More than,” he replies between mouthfuls. “My feet, they are growing, Cherub.”
“Yes, Jakob. Eat up. Soon you will be as cramped as we are in our cupboards.”
Afterward he slumps against his warm wooden walls and dreams of golden geese, streams of them in an empty sky.
“You have to have a vision, Jakob,” Markus tells him during this time. “You have to find something to grasp onto, to feel it inside the very depths of yourself. A longing as strong as loss. We are magnificent in this way. We can rise above the very worst. Believe it, Jakob. Seek it out.”
Seek it out, Jakob repeats to himself.
“See the colors. Na spourz ne kolory,” his father whispers in his right ear. Then his mother in his left, “So you are on Gillum and I on Valour,” she tells him. “With Malutki and Eliza behind. We have stepped up our pace now, left the Forest of the Light-Footed behind us, left the madness of the wind there. We are seeking out, heading for fields so vast they cover the whole land. To the farthest horizon will be the color blue, bright as the sun in our eyes.”
From then onward, occasionally there is something special floating in the broth of Jakob’s soup, but even if that is not so there is always more of everything: a larger bowl, more potato to gnaw and suck, more liquid to burn the lining of his chest. They eat in silence. The scrape of their wooden spoons against the china of their bowls. And afterward Loslow will ask, “You can feel your stomach swell, Jakob? Is it rotund and bursting?”
“Yes, Loslow,” Jakob will reply. “I am fat with it.”
“Almost fat with it.”
“Yes, almost. Almost.” And he will hear Loslow chuckle and imagine the smile on his face.
He thinks again of his mother at these times. How she could not cook. How every meal was as tasteless as the last, and how between the five of them there seemed an unspoken pact that this was not something to be acknowledged openly. For his mother tried so hard, worked so relentlessly to create something that resembled the food she saw being cooked on the kampania, the rabbit and the beef stew. No one had the heart to tell her that no matter the content of herbs and spices heaped into a dish, no matter the effort, the kneading, the rolling, the chopping, the braising or the frying, each and every meal was as bland as the last.
Only once had he found her weeping because she could not cook. She had dropped a pot, a stew of some sort, which had splattered across their wagon floor, slipping down the gaps in the wooden planks.
“It is of no matter,” she had said, picking the food up from the ground: a hunk of chicken, cubes of potato, diced pieces of carrot. “No matter.” But the tears that streamed from her eyes said otherwise. He knelt to help her.
“No matter, Mamo,” he had repeated. “No matter at all.” She had smiled weakly and they had cleaned up together in silence and afterward she had wrapped him in her apron and held her to him long enough for him to feel the warm of her through the cloth.
Long Before
AUSTRIA, 1931
In the end Yavy took her from the Institution by boat, a small wooden skiff of faded green and red. There was the echo of his hammer ricocheting down by the lake in the early and late hours of each day, the patching up of wood and iron, watertight so that the lake would not seep in through the rotting planks and drown them before they reached the far side. There was his nightly sawing of the bars that crossed her window, steady, slow. The fear of what they would do if they found him there in the night, spitting sparks out onto the lawn. When he left, Lor’s head ached with watching him. On the final night there was the muffled smash of glass, before she climbed up and out of that place, touching him as he helped her down from the stone coping, the heat of him on her arms, his hands gripping her elbows, her waist.
“That what happening when you become unseen,” Yavy told her. “When you become invisible they’re not so careful with their watching. Not seeing what happening beneath their very eyes.”
Strangely there was a space for a farewell inside her. She would have liked an ending to her time with Dr. Itzhak. But yesterday on his rounds he had inquired only politely of her health, seemed somewhat harassed and hurried. She had studied the points of his face, the corners of his mouth, always set in grim contemplation of the tasks at hand, tasks he wholeheartedly believed in, with a practiced suppression of his heart. When the parting had come, it had been fleeting and insignificant. His mind had been on other things as he had stood on the threshold of her room, nodding distractedly before closing the door as a mere afterthought behind him.
She stood now gazing back at her room. It looked strangely gray and vacant against the night dark. She took from it only a letter, one of her father’s that described a walk across the greenest grasses.
Grass so green it is as if all the beginnings of everything were heaped across those rolling hills, those valleys of leaf and willow, of dandelion and anemone. And a wind, fresh and sharp, apple and salt scented.
It was all that she possessed of her old life. Like a husk, the rest of herself she discarded. Yavy gave her clothes, his clothes, which smelled of him; wood smoke and something other: grass, soil, both rain drenched and sun dried, lake water, both deep and shallow. She drew them on, too large, rolling up the cuffs and trouser hems, the scent of the outdoors upon her. Then, all too quickly, there was the rushing over the dew-drenched lawn, weak limbed, cold, afraid of looming shadows, and then the clambering down to the boathouse, the wading through icy water, the shock and the half thrill of it. She did not know where the light had gone. There seemed to be none. The sky was black. The water blacker. He helped her into the boat, which was hidden in the grasses amongst the nests of small shy warblers and reed buntings. They flew up through the darkness, twittering angrily. Then there was the breeze on her skin. She breathed it in, tasting silt and brine. The air felt full of mist, mouthfuls of it that sank into her chest, soaked into her bones. She shivered. Pulled his clothes, already dank, around her. Watched the shadow of the Institution disappear behind them as Yavy rowed out across the lake, a vast sea of tideless darkness, guided by nothing, it seemed, but his own senses. He said little. Asked at intervals if she was all right, if she was not too cold. She lied and said she was not.
Slowly the silhouettes of the mountains on the far side of the lake loomed closer, the sheer cliffs, fissured and cracked, disappearing into the dark waters. For a while he rowed alongside them, the only sound his oars cutting through the surface, and the echo against the rocks. She felt the depths beneath them, the undiscovered darkness. There were no stones in her pocket. No want of them.
Eventually they reached the river. He fought the currents as far as he could, but it was the beginning of spring and the waters were flooded, full with rain from the mountains that had been blocked by storm and snow. The current was higher, faster, thrashing in torrents over boulders and gullies. He got them to the shore, heaved the boat up onto the shingle and helped her from it.
&
nbsp; “We best heading for the largest town,” he told her.
They walked as far as she could. Sometimes it felt as if she slept as she walked, lulled to the rhythm of her own steps, weak still with months of medication and immobility. In the end he caught her as she stumbled, pulled her down into the long river grasses to sleep upon the cold earth.
“You are weary,” he told her. “Best you sleep now.” She lay beside him, felt the warmth of him, vaguely aware of a dawn sky bleeding out above their heads and the cry of a lone buzzard circling above.
They had not until now been together in either the confines of a room or beneath the height of a sky. Alone, she had known him from within the stark staleness of that white room, and he from a garden at winter’s end, when the trees were still bare and leafless, the light low and bright enough to burn their eyes to tinder. Now they lay together amongst reeds—too tired to dream, but in the intimacy of sleep they drew the mutual loneliness from each other.
Part Four
Before
AUSTRIA, 1943
They had a suitcase with them now, old and battered, with the name alfredo lajoie painted diagonally across the front in bold white letters and a handle made of frayed rope. Inside there was a change of clothes for all of them, borrowed clothes that Alfredo’s wife had ferreted together from neighbors and friends and which still smelled of the lives of the people who had once worn them. And, too, a rug to keep them warm; bread, cheese, a book, one Lor remembered Yavy had liked, that he had read and reread, scouring through the age-stained pages. She felt closer to him in the presence of something that he had touched.
Alfredo had fed them well that last night, before they had left. With a blundering kindness, as his bear-brown eyes welled, he had placed on the table before them great hunks of bread, spread thickly with pale yellow butter, the salty-sweet aroma seeping up from a small glazed dish.
“And for you, Lor,” he added. “A whole pot of pâté de lapin.”
He had picked off the lid, the scent of it wafting up, saliva spilling into all of their mouths.
“How?” Lor had asked him. “Butter, lemons, pâté de lapin? How?”
Alfredo had shrugged. “The pâté, my wife made you. The butter, she saved for you. The lemons, I stole.”
“Go carefully,” he had told her later. “Please, go carefully.” He was aware that De Clomp was a place she had arrived at only to leave. It was enough that he could offer her that. In the past, the present, perhaps again one day. Clumsily he said farewell, hid his loss and trepidation for them badly. They left him holding a jar with two snails within it for his safekeeping and four badges embroidered with the letter Z that he was to burn.
The station was busy, crowded on the platform. Lor stowed her children between the coats and the warmth of shuffling bodies, avoiding anything in uniform, and moved steadily up the platform toward the middle of the train. She pulled them past the Lucky Flower Tea Stop, the smell of strong coffee and cigarettes wafting from the door as it opened and closed, slamming on its hinges. On, past the lighting attendant’s office, which looked dark and unattended.
Jakob held Malutki’s hand tightly. Eliza smiled, a stiff forced smile, and stared fearfully ahead. The train stood on the tracks, smoke billowing from its funnel, misting across the platform in great clouds that dispersed skyward. People vanished, then reappeared through it. They no longer looked at one another. They carried a worn, depleted look in their eyes. The scaffolding of their faces dilapidated, derelict, almost as if they had abandoned their very selves. Even the manner in which they walked had been stripped from them, and they could no longer hold their heads up high. They looked at the ground, scuttled from here to there.
“Dokumente. Reisepass.”
Lor heard these words being shouted behind and ahead of her, from one end of the platform to the other. “Dokumente. Reisepass. Dokumente. Reisepass.” She stopped, put her hand up to her chest, felt for the bulge of forged papers that Alfredo had given her, fat in her breast pocket.
“Show them only when you have to,” he had told her. “I fear they are not so good as to deceive the sharpest eye.”
“It is all right, Ma,” Jakob assured her, and he took her hand from her chest.
“Yes, it’s all right,” she replied.
Ahead a milk cart was being pushed through the crowds toward them, tin jugs rattling and sloshing precious milk over onto the platform. A dog, mangy and flea infested, dipped its head and licked at the white puddles until it was kicked by hurried passing feet and disappeared yelping into the throng. The milk boy himself was young and slight, no more than seventeen years of age. He struggled with the weight of the cart, looked faintly alarmed, his face an expressive mix of nervous twitches.
A woman who had been sitting on one of the nearby benches got up and was shuffling toward him. Her face and hands were dirt smeared and she looked older than she was, but she was dressed in clothes that, though worn and faded, held a residue of finery: her skirt a velvet of darkest green; her shirt a creamy linen, intricately embroidered. Her hair was stringy and hay colored. It looked as if it had not been washed in months, and yet she had clipped it back from her face with a small silver clasp, as if somewhere within her there lay a semblance of effort still to be made. Perhaps for the baby that she held in her arms, which was swaddled in the softest wool, soiled and frayed now, but still kind against its skin. Lor watched as she dropped to her knees beside the cart, kissed the milk boy’s feet, begged him for some milk.
“I cannot,” he told her. “I cannot.” He looked distraught, as if it was enough to navigate his cart, as if that in itself was beyond him.
“Please,” she begged over and over. “For my baby, please, sir.”
Then she held her tiny bundle out to him, the cloth falling aside, showing the baby’s face. Its skin was black as a ripe fig. Its eyes were open, the light of them glazed with a glaucous film. A tiny hand peeked out from the swaddling, was held in a loose fist against its blue-black cheek.
“It is dead,” the milk boy cried. “Your baby is dead.” It had been dead for days.
The woman was not listening. “Please,” she said over and over. “For my baby, please.”
People stopped, were watching, someone was trying to pull her away, lifting her up from the ground with rough dismay.
“Please,” the mother said again to the milk boy. “Please.” And again she kissed his feet, laid her forehead upon them. In the end he gave up. His hands shook as hurriedly he reached down to give her a tin jug of milk. The woman’s face broke into the sweetest of smiles, her eyes lit up with hope. She thanked him for his kindness, stood and kissed his hands again and again, stroked her child’s face, whispered to it that all would be well now. All would be well. And then she shuffled back over to sit upon the bench, a faint echo of the woman she might once have been, as she rocked her baby to her, its black face to her pale one, inhaling deeply as if it was still scented with the milky sweetness of young life.
“Dear God,” Lor said, and she shrank back then. Pulled her children from the track, back down the platform toward where they had first entered.
“This way, now,” she told them, pulling them onward. “This way.”
“Dokumente. Reisepass,” she heard still being shouted behind them. “Dokumente. Dokumente.”
They knocked against the crowd, against the tide of people walking against them, out, out, hot with despair, around the station, where they stumbled onto a street, everything shut, gates closed, doors locked, shops sealed and unwelcoming. She pulled them up the length of it to where the houses stopped at the very end of town, where the fields began, where familiar high hills of gold rolled out into the distance, and a stream rushed clear over gray-brown pebbles. She pulled them back into the edges, into the shadows where they belonged, to the very cusp of life. For they were the disappeared. The invisible. The forgotten. They belonged in the gaps, in the spaces in between other people’s lives.
They waited in the un
dergrowth, beside the stream, still with fear, taking in their surroundings: long grasses, golden at the tips, dry earth, already cold with the clear gloaming skies above, and a field of corn, high as a wall, across the track from them. Beyond, a dense woodland of spruce trees spread across the low lying valley and out into the upper reaches of the hills.
How was it, she thought, that the world around them had not diminished? That though they themselves were duller, grayer, the color of the life around them was as bright as yesterday and tomorrow. A constant amidst the clouds of gathering change that seemed to blacken, to expand and cast a shadow over their entire lives.
We could hide up in those woods, she thought. Hide and not be frightened when we move on. But then a while or so later, after they had waited and listened to the train lurch and heave, listened to the weight of each of the carriages locking into line as the wheels churned and built momentum away from them, a cart trundled across the earth track, pulled by a horse: a shabby creature, more mule than horse. It was stubby legged and coarse haired, staring mutely into the distance ahead, its tongue lolling from the side of its mouth, its hooves treading steady under the whip. The farmer, sallow skinned, with only a few stained teeth clinging to his retreating gums, great gaps of black space showing inside his mouth, caught sight of them from the corner of his eye and pulled his mule to a halt. He picked them up as if it were an everyday occurrence, asked no questions, took the pennies Lor gave him, shrugged his head to the back of the cart. He wiped the sweat from his brow, shifted his rubber boots, and once they had clambered in amongst the hay, the rakes, the shovels and hoes, called his mule onward.
Lor lay in the back, hidden beneath a blanket of hay, her body warm against her children’s as they slept. Glimpses of the night sky appeared through gaps in the grass, the ochre haze of a low moon, gigantic above the treetops. They passed bands of wood smoke from ebbing fires, the duration of scent disclosing a village, a hamlet, a lone farmhouse. Sometimes there was no smoke, only the scent of wet grass from an empty field, already drenched with dew as the cold night set in.
Jakob’s Colors Page 16