Jakob’s Colors

by Lindsay Hawdon

  “Besides,” he finished. “You never eat it all at once. A little by little, day by day, until your stomach grows accustomed to it.”

  “Don’t think him insane,” Alfredo told them. “He is a hero in these parts. Won a medal for that leg. Stumbled across the enemy’s camp during the war, lost his way in the mist, and held up fifteen men at gunpoint. He led every single one of them back to the allies. The air still itches where that leg used to be, isn’t that so, Elpie?”

  “Indeed. That in itself is enough to drive a man insane.”

  The musicians had picked up the tempo. Despite the instruments they had to play with, they were masterfully serenading an old Cole Porter song. The girl turned to hear it. She closed her eyes. Listened to the familiar rhythm of a tune she had not heard for a long time now. The allies of whom they spoke were not her allies. They were her enemies, or rather her country’s enemies.

  “How long will you be staying?” Alfredo was asking.

  The girl opened her eyes.

  “Awhile, perhaps,” the boy told him.

  “I have two rooms. The cheaper or the more expensive? The lighter or the darker?”

  “The cheaper.”

  “And the lighter. You can pay for it when you start work.” The man handed them a key that looked as if it had been forged especially with him in mind. It was heavy and ridiculously large. “The room is at the top of the house.” He smiled. “And should you be in need of anything, I am Alfredo.”

  The girl had begun to shake, to look again nervously at the door. The boy took hold of her arm, thanked Alfredo for the room, bid farewell to the old man, and took her to a door at the side of the bar that led to the lodgings above. They climbed the three battered flights to the top floor, the boy ahead, looking back every so often to check perhaps that she was still there, that she had not turned and run from him. On the tiny landing he fumbled with the heavy key, until eventually the latch clicked and the door opened. He stepped aside for her to enter. She did so, not knowing quite how to stand, what to do with her hands, her feet, once they had stopped moving. He walked to the window, looked down onto the lamplit street, pulled across the curtains, which were worn, thin, and punctured with pinholes of light where young moths had feasted. He turned back to the girl.

  They stood then in the center of the room, suddenly just the two of them. A room that wasn’t filled with the sound of others screaming or the fear of intrusion. It was a room that for the time being was theirs and theirs alone. Four walls that looked out over the red-tiled rooftops and chimneys billowing with wood smoke; a mottled mirror and a narrow loose-sprung bed. They stood together in the center of this room, still for the first time in a long time, and in the silence that surrounded them there was a rawness, a self-consciousness, that had been hidden behind the noise and the chaos of before. The girl was still shivering, her thin arms wrapped around herself, the damp of the past days buried in her bones. The boy fetched the woolen rug that lay over the bed, pulled it around her.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered.

  She shook her head, felt tears in her eyes.

  “You do not know my name,” she said finally.

  “So you be telling me.”

  “It is Lor.”

  “And mine?” he asked.

  She already knew it. “Yavy.”

  “Them tears are bright in your eyes, Lor,” he said. “No matter if they spill over. Don’t be thinking back,” he told her. “I been long used to not thinking back. Tell me what you want of your life. What you dream of in your while-away days.”

  She said nothing and at length he turned and set about making a bed for himself on the floor, coiling himself into a single blanket.

  “You’ll sleep there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It is not too hard?”

  “Not too hard.”

  “It is warm enough?”

  “It is. Now you lie down, an’ you dream of them sunflower fields we’ll be finding one day. And you’ll sleep soundly.”

  She looked at him, the earnestness with which he spoke. Was it really so simple, she wanted to ask. As simple as that? Catch a dream? Hold on to it?

  She lay down upon the bed, felt the springs creaking beneath her, felt the exhaustion of days past. There was the sound of pigeons cooing in the eaves, the thrum of a distant engine. Momentarily it filled her with alarm, but, too weary now, she closed her eyes, let her tears spill from them.

  Later she woke in the darkness, afraid of where she was, the familiar tremors in her chest as the space seemed to open around her. She sat up, could not still the trembling in her hands. She listened for his breathing, so soft she could barely hear it. Already the room had become a refuge without past or future, a place where it seemed they could be still for a while.

  It was only later that she realized she must have slept, curling herself at the very end of her bed, faintly aware of the light flickering into the room cast by a broken moon. And again of Yavy, the slow drawn-out breath of his deep slumber.

  In the morning when she woke, though, he was not there. She felt the space where he was not, was bewildered by the solid sense of it. She breathed in and tried to ward off the sudden flare of fear that she knew could take hold, then rush away, like a string unraveling on a kite. A small note, written coarsely in charcoal from the fire grate, told her he had gone out in search of food.

  She walked the room, found comfort in that. Studied the crevices, the carved nooks and crannies, a hinge that caught and creaked, the dark stain on a worn square of floorboard that had once been a birthmark on an old tree. She ran her fingers over the brass door handle, smooth as bone, the cupboard knobs that popped off easily in her hands, a patch on the wall that was shaped like a question mark. She sat on the three-legged stool, the only place they could sit other than the bed, and stared out of the window at the view which felt like something one could own.

  It was not being by herself that frightened her. She had lived a good deal in herself. Locked away with her own thoughts as she sought to unravel the world around her. She did not easily understand it. Mostly other people bewildered her. It was the intrusion of them that she feared, the force with which they could impose themselves upon her.

  Below, carts were being pushed toward De Clomp, laden high with wooden barrels of beer. Three men in worn demob suits unloaded them, rolling them down the street. They rumbled over the cobbles like a muffled storm. Lor listened to barrel after barrel being dropped down through the cellar hatch, and to the conversation that flowed beneath the sound of everything, provincial, domestic, comforting in its ordinariness. She could hear Alfredo barking instructions, wondered when it was that he had his first drink of the day and how many it took for that drunken fog, the sort that she knew couldn’t be hidden, to descend over him.

  She was aware that dimly, already only dimly, she was looking out for the familiar faces of Dr. Itzhak, the nurse with the grease-scented skin, those she dreaded seeing. But there was a safety within the four walls she and Yavy now occupied, nestled in the rooftops with the chimneypots and the passing salt white clouds.

  To the rest of the world he and she did not now exist as the people they had once been. And of who they were now, there was no official knowledge: no documents, no references. They were the disappeared. The vanished. The forgotten.

  She pulled out the letter that her father had written her. It was all that there was of her past. She opened out the folded pages, held them up to her face, inhaled, seeking some remnant scent of home. But there was none, simply the must of wood and those words of his—Grass so green, valleys of leaf and willow. And a wind, apple and salt scented.

  Yavy was not long. She heard his quick, light steps running up the stairs. Put away her letter. Put away her past. He brought with him milk, bread, cheese, seemed animated with all that was down on the streets below, his face lit up and pink with fresh air. He told her about the stores he had passed, “crammed with things I not knowi
ng the name of,” and about the crowds that they could disappear into, be as invisible as they chose.

  “Don’t be afraid no more,” he said. “We’ll be safe here awhile. No one’ll find us.”

  Then he pulled from the pocket of his oversized coat a small book, navy blue and leather bound with gold embroidered along the spine, small enough to hold in the palm of one hand.

  “Don’t know what it’s reading. It’s written in your language,” he told her. “But I thought you’d like it to run your eyes over.”

  She picked it up, ran her hand down the length of the spine, opened the brittle pages and smelled the musty scent of a book that had not been read in a long while. Sure enough, it was written in English, a book of old folk stories, some she knew from childhood, others she had never heard of before. There were small drawings, done by a steady hand in pen and ink, some so hazy with age they were barely a suggestion of an image, as if when she turned the page they might fade further and in time disappear altogether.

  “You like it?” he asked, and for the first time she heard a nervousness in his voice.

  “I like it,” she assured him.

  “Very much?”

  “Yes, very much. Thank you for it,” she said eventually, and when she looked his face was lit up with pleasure, as if she had given him something, not received it.

  He told her next that Elpie had given him that job at the stonemasons’ barely three streets from where they lived. They were making bricks, he told her, for a new church that was being built up above the city, with a view that showed the whole lie of the land.

  “You’re smiling.” He grinned.

  “Yes. You are proud,” she said.

  “Of myself?”

  “Yes.”

  He hesitated. “You are right. Going to make us a life. A little life, an’ wrap it tightly around us. That’ll be good?” he asked and he seemed earnest with the question.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’ll be good.”

  Long Before

  AUSTRIA, 1930

  “A mute,” they calling me now in that Institution. But I am no mute. They knowing I can talk. Just done talking to them with their lightning that burns me, come right or wrong thing I say. Seems to make no matter to them. That first time, after I wets myself in my sleep, they strapped me down, strapped my arms an’ legs so tight. Do you know what it’s like to not be free in your own limbs, like you is drowning in some slurry pit? Smelling some nasty smell that makes the back of your throat gag an’ choke. Chemicals floating like clouds around that white room. They say I won’t feel nothing, but they lying. They never had no lightning themselves. Don’t know that it burns deep, like a fire melting a hole in your insides. So I learn to stop that lightning. Say nothing. Stay ice cold inside, an’ that is why they calling me, a “mute.”

  I watch them “patients,” when they first come into this place. Laughing, crying, screaming. But alive an’ bright eyed. Then, after they are carted off, locked behind them big doors, given that lightning, they return all silenced an’ dead eyed.

  But then them doctors deciding this silence of mine something they got to stop, and this time they laying me in a tub of water, freezing cold an’ aching at my bones, and covered with a plank of wood so I can’t get out. Keep me in this freezing water for an age, coaxing out the talk from me. By the time they’re done, my head seeing only a gray fog and I can’t be talking even if I choose to. Left with only confusion. If I talk I get the lightning, and if I don’t, they drown me deep. Seek out some place in between—stay silent, lest they speak to me, and then answer with just as little as I can say. Be small an’ meek, so they don’t notice me with all that racket that hammers through them white walls. Stay low an’ small as a mouse. Just silent enough and just loud enough for them to think I no longer crazy. Like I turned around to find my senses. And day by day, they giving me a little more freedom. No lightning rods. No icing water. No chemicals in my body that do my head something wrong. Give me odd jobs to do here an’ there. See how good I am with my hands. That I know the odds an’ ends of things. And I keep my head down low, stay mighty helpful, so they grow to be needing me more than I needing them.

  And all the while, them Authorities begin their Education of me. To knock that gypsy stupidness out of me, they say. Teach me gentile ways of talking so that people don’t just be seeing a “gypsy scum” soon as I open my mouth. First book they give me is that book of fairy tales that God wrote, and I pick out them letters, putting them together one by one, sounding them out on my tongue. That Bible’s full of beautiful tales and I am famished for them once I get the hang of them words. Love the magic of that boy Jesus, with his fishes that could feed five thousand souls and that boy Moses with his parting of the waves. So my speech gets better and my reading’s good, and for a while I stop knowing who I am, ’cos the voice inside of me sounds a whole lot different from the one I go speaking out loud. Slowly I am changing. A different voice outside. A voice locked inside, sinking deeper. Hidden down so low an’ deep, I can barely find myself. And all the while I tell them nothing of the thoughts inside my head, of how I talk with my ma and pa, how I keep them close. How I’m working out that magic that gonna keep my soori alive. Remembering my pa, kneeling by the firelight, beside that mound o’ white crosses that he pulled over to the fire pit, dug wide an’ deep. How, one by one, he placing them in those wily hot flames, burning all of them. And all the while my ma sat weeping. Weeping an’ afraid and telling him we all gonna end up in that fiery furnace of hell. But I know no devil man watching over my pa and his fire. ’Cos he knows you can’t be leaving them mounds of wooden crosses to rot in the wind an’ rain. Best to burn them, one by one, each with a prayer an’ a nod of my pa’s head.

  “Ashen Devlesa, Romale. May you remain with God,” he whispers, over an’ over, a prayer for each of them crosses. Takes him eighteen days to burn all of them, eighteen days an’ two thousand five hundred utterances of them prayers. That is what I remember. After I losing them. Losing all my life. All my heart.

  Long Before

  AUSTRIA, 1932

  The next day, when Lor woke, Yavy was again already gone. Once more she looked to the room to save her, studied it with the belief that there would be safety if she accustomed herself to it. She got up. Cut herself some bread, some butter. She sat on the floor beneath the window, hugged the sunlight that fell through the nine rectangular windowpanes. She opened the book Yavy had brought her, found a crushed insect in the center page, a small mayfly, its carcass perfectly intact as if it had been flattened and dried like some cherished flower. She turned the pages, smelled them, skimmed her eyes randomly from one word to another, traced her fingers over the drawings, and felt her heart stir.

  She walked from the window to the door and back again, peered down onto the cobbles, pressed her face against the glass, left her breath upon it. She walked back to the door. At the sink which clung to the wall in the far left corner she found a stain, a round swill of brown enamel where the scale had built up. She stood staring at it for a while before peeling off her clothes and running a wet cloth up and down the length of herself. Over and over again, like a penance, she washed the lake water and the days of wandering from her skin. Afterward she washed Yavy’s clothes, wringing away mud-clogged grime the color of rust and verdigris. She hung them in the sunlight, strewn across the chair, across the stool, the table. She was left standing only in her undergarments.

  Again she stared down into the street, always looking, searching for what she did not want to see. It was empty but for the odd boy on a bicycle that rattled by, laden front and back with groceries. The hours trickled on as the clothes slowly dried. She was grateful for that, for the rhythmic tick-tocking of time passing. She walked from the door to the window and back again. Stared at the stain on the sink, set about cleaning it, scrubbing back and forth with a ferocity that had her arms burning. When she stopped, little had changed in its appearance. She looked down at the scars on her arms, lur
id still, ran her fingers over them, heard her mother’s voice.

  “No, I won’t swim,” she said. “I shan’t swim a single stroke.”

  Lor sat down. Took up Yavy’s book, lingered over the words, again traced her fingers over them, felt them move from her mind to her mouth, whispered them. When she looked up, the sun had begun its descent. The clothes had dried. She pulled them back on, felt the warmth of the day on them. She looked back at the book. Again her heart stirred.

  It was only when the shadows on the street were no more, and the sun had dropped too far behind the buildings, that Yavy returned from his first day at the stonemasons’. He carried with him a loaf of sourdough and a jar of apple jelly, sweetened with grape juice, and a handful of coins that he had earned that day.

  And then again, “I bought you this,” he told her, and pulled from his pocket what looked like a piece of blue cotton fabric. But when he let it drop open she saw that it was a dress. “Thought it might fit you better than them old clothes of mine,” he said. Then he turned away, put his face against the wall to give her privacy.

  She touched the dress first, laid the palm of her hand over the fabric. Then she stripped off his newly washed pants and the shirt and pulled the dress up and over herself, smoothed down the creases with her hands. He turned back to face her. Stared with that look of his that seemed unhurried, as if there were time enough to take her in as he wished, as if by studying her face he might know of her whole day.

  “Thank you,” she said. She handed him back the small pile of clothes he had lent her. “You’ll be in need of these, I expect.” And then, embarrassed, she turned from him. “There is nothing to cook with and I’m shamed to confess that even if there was, I wouldn’t know how to use any of it. Not any of it at all.”

  He shrugged. “So bread and jam is what I want,” he said.

  They sat opposite each other on the floor in squares of light that changed from rusted yellow to a smoke blue, tore off large hunks and dipped them into the jar of apple jelly. Dusk fell.