Jakob’s Colors

by Lindsay Hawdon

  There was the relief of movement again, the hope that around the next bend life might be what one longed for it to be. For this brief period in time, anything felt possible again. Death was still. Life was not. Lor heard the distant sound of church bells. Wondered how long the journey would last, how far he could take them. She had specified west, only west. When the road turned, they would alight. Malutki shifted in his sleep, dug his head deeper into the crook of her arm. She bent over him, pressed her cold palm against his cheek, and inhaled his breath. The night grew colder. She breathed out mist. Her feet and hands grew numb. Her bones ached. How old she felt. Her limbs stiff, her heart brittle.

  The cart shifted over a ridge in the track. Lor started. Always now there was the steady pulse of underlying fear that they might be caught. Her grief had become a part of her now. It had coagulated and lay now set like something solid inside her.

  At a crossroads, a long while later, when night was still night, but well past its zenith hour, the man pulled the mule to a halt.

  “I can take you no farther than this,” he said. “I’ll be turning north now. You best be following the track. It leads into the village, then out up to the foot of the pass. I expect that’s where you’ll be heading.”

  Lor thanked him, saw that he half suspected their plight but would not pry, knew perhaps that it was better not to know. War had made people silent. They turned their heads away. Do not look. Do not listen. They hid inside themselves, where it was safe and dark.

  She stirred Jakob first, stroked back his hair, kissed his forehead, and gave him the time to stretch, to yawn, to ask what he needed to ask to unravel the confusion of waking. He in turn did the same for Eliza, woke her with soft whispers and assurances as Lor hauled a still-sleeping Malutki into her arms, carried him down from the cart, and walked until the jolt of her steps stirred him.

  “Jakob,” he called as soon as his eyes opened. “Jakob.”

  Lor passed him over into his older brother’s arms. He twisted the boy around onto his back as he walked on, Malutki’s hot hands tight about his neck. They moved quickly, bleary eyed with sleep, but by now used not to question her when she embarked upon an action. How she missed the days when they would argue, when they would shout and wail and kick up a fuss. Nowadays they kept their heads low, did as they were told, seemed to know that whatever she was asking of them was something they must do.

  The village was in darkness as they passed through it. The houses stood silhouetted against the clear night sky, smoke scented with fires that had long burned to embers. There was the soft bleat from grazing sheep, the clanging of a goat’s bell as it dipped its head and nuzzled at damp grass, the lone coo of a dove in the eaves. But other than that, their passing roused no human from their sleep. A dog, mangy and flea bitten, followed them to the last house, a remnant of hope in its eyes that some morsel of discarded food might be dropped before him. But then it stopped in the center of the track, by the last house before the wilderness began, as if it knew that onward was not somewhere to venture. It stood there, ears pricked, smelling their scents on the wind, until they disappeared into the darkness.

  “We nearly there?” Eliza asked.

  “Are you tired?”

  “No, not tired.”

  “Can you walk until you are?”

  “Yes, Mamo.”

  They walked farther, climbed the hill up into the forest ahead, then steered off the road and followed a fire gap through the trees. Lor took Malutki from Jakob, who could carry him no longer, felt the strain of him on her back. Ahead she could see the stars through the trees.

  Get to where the fire gaps cross, she told herself. Walk until you reach there.

  “Ma, it is easy to die?” Jakob asked her from behind. She turned and looked at him.

  “Not so easy.”

  “That baby was dead?”

  “Yes, it was dead.”

  “What do you suppose it’s like to die?”

  “I don’t know, my love. We don’t, until we do so.”

  “Doesn’t have to be the worst thing,” he told her.

  “No. It doesn’t have to be the worst thing.”

  They walked on. With Jakob it seemed that always there was this pushing forward, this quest to seek out what was right. She had witnessed it in him from the very beginning. The unrelenting effort to see light where sometimes there was none.

  “So I am on Gillum, and you on Valour,” he said, beside her now. “With Malutki and Eliza behind.”

  “Yes,” she told him. “We have stepped up our pace now, left the Forest of the Light-Footed behind us, left the madness of the wind there and the silent bears with their hot breath and yellow eyes that gleam in the darkness. We know what it is we have to do now. We know which paths we must follow. Which ones we must ignore.”

  “So our task being set, Ma?” Jakob asks.

  “Yes. Our task is set. We have our seven vessels that hang strapped to our saddles. We have our indigo, our night caught in a glass jar. We have our malachite, cut from the azurite we found in the copper caves. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I tell you. ‘We are almost safe.’ The Ushalin are fearful of us now, for they know the power of what we have. They know that if they catch us, all we need do is hold a vessel up close against their sightless eyes, burn the gray of them to tinder. Scorch it and blind the blindness from them. And they know, too, that one color adds to another, that by the time we fill our seventh vas, and we will fill it, it will be the very end, because for the first time they will see the world as it is meant to be seen. They will see the green of the land, the blue of the sky, and after that they know that their God will roar. He will holler and shout and tip back his mighty head and thump his mighty fists and command them to kneel before him. And they know that this time they will not be able to do this, for the great sun in the sky, the yellow of which they have never seen before, will hold them captivated, will hold them mesmerized with wonder and that as they stand beneath its giant orb in new worship, their blind God will drown beneath the ink-black waves that roll in from the Ushalin Sea, that he will cough and choke and flail his arms, all to no avail, for the Ushalin will not rush forth to save him. They will stand back and witness his demise, and eventually he will sink down and disappear beneath the thick waves. And those flowers that withered beneath their once wan sun, and those leaves that dried up, will blossom and the Ushalin people will not, ever again, be able to heap ash over their land.

  “So we move onward, heading for those saffron fields, fields so vast they cover the whole land. When we reach them all we will see from the tips of our shoes to the farthest horizon will be the color blue, a steely brightness against the light.”

  “I remember them, Ma,” said Jakob. “I remember them so clearly. ‘We best be delicate in our gathering,’ Da told us. ‘We best be exact, pick each stamen like we are dancing, hands steady, eyes clear.’ We weren’t rushing, were we, Ma? We didn’t rush when we picked them saffron stamens, even though we were racing ’gainst that setting sun?”

  “No, we did not rush. Your hands were steady. Your eyes were clear.”

  In a way, she thought, that was what they had now become. A story that they carried around with them like their tattered suitcase, telling it and retelling it over and over, in an effort to find some semblance of sense in their lives. Sometimes it felt to Lor that she could no longer differentiate between the story she was telling and the life they were now living. Both seemed as real or unreal as the other.

  At length they reached a place where two fire gaps met, and there, in the cross of vertical and horizontal, sank down beneath a blanket of fallen pine needles, the light of fireflies flitting in the air around them. Jakob curled his body around Malutki, Eliza hers around his. Lor placed the rug over them, heaped leaves upon it, and by the time she herself lay down, coiling around them like a wall, they were asleep.

  It was not long afterward that she heard the plane overhead, the thrum of it in the distance like some gargantuan insec
t. And then the advancing whistle that seemed to suck the air out from the trees as it passed above them. Lor looked up, caught the black cross beneath the wing of the Messerschmitt. It was so low she could see the oil stains on its yellow nose cone and pick out the rivets on the underside of its wing. The tops of the trees swayed and bent their heads toward the noise. She listened to the sound of the engines ebbing, disappearing into the sky, drawn up into the silence of it, until they were barely perceptible at all. The children shifted in their sleep but did not wake.

  “Yavy,” she whispered. Restless with the hope of him. “Yavy, where are you?”

  Before

  AUSTRIA, 1943

  They had arrived unseen. The soldiers. They had mingled with the crowd of gypsies that was gathered in the square to hear Marli Louard give a speech about unity and to pray together for, of all things, “Peace.” These people, who had already faced the gradual chiseling away of their lives. Already their names had been registered, their prints taken, fingers stained with black dye that would remind them for days afterward that they were now listed, numbered Zigeuner—the untouchables.

  “Is that what we are, Da?” Jakob had asked.

  “It’s all that we ever were,” Yavy had replied. “Give no matter to it.”

  Already they were made to wear a black triangle on a band around their arm, categorized as “asocials,” alongside prostitutes, vagrants, murderers, and thieves. Already they were prohibited from entering parks and public baths, their children forbidden from attending public schools. Yavy’s children knew this. What they did not know was that already camps were being built at Maxglan, Salzburg, Burgenland, Lety, and Hodonín. That there were gas chambers at Chelmo. That five thousand Roma from Lodz were being moved there. That already they had tested this gas on two hundred and fifty Romani children and that it had killed every one of them.

  In the square, gathered as they were, there were men around them who did simply as the man next to them might have done. They scratched their noses, pulled down the cuffs of their sleeves, shifted their weight from one foot to another, stared upward and listened enraptured to the words of solidarity that resonated loudly from Marli Louard. It was a dishevelled looking crowd, people of all ages, young and old, listening with a bright hope in their eyes. So at first no one noticed the quiet gathering up of certain individuals. It was only when a child’s scream broke through the mumbled chants of prayers that heads turned, bobbed up above the crowd to see where and why such noisy tears were being shed. And when the mother’s scream echoed her child’s, and the recognition that all was not well spread through the crowd, the swell of a commotion began, the sudden understanding that the man beside them was not as they were—a man head bowed in prayer—but someone to be feared, someone who with the sudden pull of a trigger had the power over who lived and who did not.

  It was the crowds themselves, though, that separated Yavy from Lor, the swelling mayhem that carried her and their children one way, and he another, as if they were floating above high blue-black waves, slowly being torn apart on different currents. He fought, grabbed, and clawed with his hands to move against the tide of people coming toward him, and briefly he caught glimpses of them up ahead, but each glimpse always farther away than the last. Lor’s face, her eyes frantically searching for him, as if to lock her gaze to his would defy the physical distance between them.

  Lor, he called. Lor. Hoarsely. His voice breaking.

  And then, when in one moment they were there, bright eyed—Lor’s scarf ruffling in the wind, Malutki’s thumb pressed against his mother’s chin, Jakob, a glimpse of the sun on the crown of his head—in the next, they were gone. Yavy. Yavy. His name called blindly from a distance. Until he could no longer hear even that.

  He went first to the kampania, but the soldiers were everywhere, rounding up his friends, his neighbors of the past six weeks. Already they had taken his horse, his beloved Borromini. Already they had ransacked their wagon, pulled off the door, smashed the windows. He waited until they had gone, then crept out from his hiding place beneath the steps to his wagon, set right a table, held his hand against the brow of a dying horse, hid in the shadows, then made his way back to the square, now a mess of broken chairs. He wandered the streets, asked people he thought he recognized, asked people he did not, but there was no trace of Lor or his children.

  He hid for a time in the woods, on the western side of the camp, watched it daily to see if she would come. He lived off berries, washed in the stream, drank the icy water, but still she did not come.

  In the end he left, for there was nothing else to be done but that. He left behind the chip in the steps that Eliza had made when she wanted to prove to him that she could chop wood as well as he; the handful of pebbles from a clear riverbed that Malutki had risked frozen feet to collect; a quilt that Lor had stitched together—too long at one end, too short at the other. The bike that Jakob had learned to ride on, wheels spinning, his arms outstretched, the closest to flying he could get without his feet leaving the ground. He left behind all of it. Their life dismantled in the time it took to turn from north to south.

  He went cross-country, across field and wood. Went on foot, stole eggs and bread, following the mountain pass and then the stream where he could, the stream that he knew eventually wove from one estuary to the river, eventually to the lake. He left signs along the way, signs to show a path was safe; a white cloth tied to an overhanging branch, an arrow on an ancient trunk. In the hope that she would find him in that place of magenta and teal, of crimson and cobalt blue.

  Long Before

  AUSTRIA, 1932

  The street ran from north to south so that at midday the sun shone down it from above, bleaching the stonework. De Clomp stood in the middle of it, facing west, always busy, always crowded, flushed faces peering through the old cross-barred windows and out onto the cobbles that had been put down one by one, hand by hand, in a week centuries back. The front door stood at street level, yet despite this a rail still jutted out alongside the building, to aid the number of drunks who stumbled out from the smoky interior. Vine leaves wove up the outer stone wall, the branches bowing over the street with the weight of inedible grapes that grew fat and purple in the summer months but that never sweetened.

  By day it was a place to buy coffee and bread, a place to eat delicacies of polenta, risotto, or herb-scented salads as sunlight spilled through the windows falling onto bowls of precious sugar lumps knobbed firm by wet silver spoons. By night it was a jazzy glass-clinking club of bad wine and fast whisky shots, full of dim light and moving shadows.

  As they reached the door the boy saw that the girl was afraid, was as closed as an egg. “It’ll be all right,” he told her. “You listen to me. It’ll be all right.”

  Her eyes darted nervously up to his face. They were young. She just fifteen, he a year older.

  “What if it is not?” she asked, still dressed in his clothes that were too big, rolled at the ankles, at the wrists, worn and still damp from the two days and the three nights that it had taken to get to De Clomp, fragments of chipped paint stuck to their skin, of faded red and green, from the wooden skiff that they had rowed upstream until they could row no more.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said again as he tugged hard at the jarring door.

  The moment they stepped over the threshold, blurry-eyed faces took them in, looked up and down the length of them suspiciously. Two musicians were cramped in the corner, under an archway, which forced the woman to stoop uncomfortably to one side. Her long hair hung loosely across her face as she played on a five-stringed harp, while the man, with a heavy unkempt beard, played on a flute, his thick fingers skipping out the notes. He stood. She sat. The melody was slow and sad.

  The man behind the bar was tall and wide, the features of his face bulbous, swollen with years of holding his drink. Only his hair was thin, haphazardly wispy, windswept despite being indoors. He looked up as they approached.

  “Yes?” he inquired. />
  “I’m looking for a job,” the boy said. “An’ if you have it, we’re in need of a room which I’ll have to be paying for with my laboring for the time being.”

  The man studied the boy’s earnest face, glanced down briefly at the girl’s attire, the damp mud stains that seeped up from around the hem of her pants. She kept looking back at the door. “Don’t look so afraid,” he told her. “This is a place for drunks and dreamers, sometimes for those who need somewhere to hide.”

  “We’re not in need of nowhere to hide,” the boy said brashly.

  “As you like.” The man paused. “The stonemasons three streets from here,” he said eventually. “They are always in need of good hands. Elpie can help you with this.” He nodded to an old man at the end of the bar who was seated on a high stool, smoking a pipe with one hand and in the other holding a wide-rimmed leather hat. Which he was eating. At intervals he tore at the leather with yellow tobacco-stained teeth that ground in slow cow-chew motions, his mouth slowly darkening with tannin. He wore a murky-green corduroy suit, his left leg twisted around the leg of the high wooden stool to balance himself. His right leg was missing, cut off at the thigh so that he had to wear his trouser folded up and pinned beneath his sagging buttock cheek. A pair of wooden crutches leaned against the bar beside him.

  “Elpie lost a bet,” Alfredo said by way of explanation.

  “What was the bet?” the boy asked.

  “That his hen would not lay an egg on Sunday.”

  “Damn hen,” Elpie spoke, his voice graveled. “For four Sundays she’d not laid an egg. On the fifth I make a bet. She lays the damn egg. And so … my hat.” He took another bite from the rim, tearing at it with his yellow teeth.

  “That gonna make you sick?” the boy asked, and the old man shrugged and told him that a bet was a bet, and if he couldn’t keep it he should never have made it in the first place.