“Them Italians singing from the scaffoldings,” he told her, his eyes bright against the cement dust that filmed his face and hair. “An’ everyone who hears them is grinning. Been surrounded by smiles all day. Ain’t that something?”
“Yes, that is something,” she agreed.
“Don’t be afraid no more. This is a good place. No one will find us here. An’ tomorrow you can brave them streets, buy what you need, for we have that now. We have money for that now, see.”
He talked more about his day, about the cracks in the stone that it was his job to detect, how if he tapped at a fault the sound was different, a note that was flat and off-key. Because, he explained, you couldn’t start work if there was a crack in the first stone, because while it might begin with one, it could move from that to the next, and slowly in time there would be a scar running right through the building, and all that hard work that people had put into it could come crashing down with the slightest shower or the most timid of passing mice.
He tried to help her clear up, but she wanted to be of use, to do something for him after he’d worked the long day.
“Let me,” she insisted.
She knew how to do very little, was humiliated by this. She could feel him watching as loudly she cleared away their plates, filled up the sink and sunk her fingers into the scalding water. She had nothing to wash with, so used only her hands to scrub and clean, her fingers burning, aware that all the while he was taking her in, with a forgiveness of everything, it seemed. As if he did not care whether she was capable or incapable, sane or insane.
That night he slept again at the foot of the bed, and she could not sleep with knowing he was there. She sat up at one point, looked at his face set softly in sleep, at the outline of it upon the pillow; the curve of his nose, the slight flicker of his lashes, the blissful and stark repose of his sleeping mouth. She sat for a long while just watching him, aware that she was intruding upon something that shouldn’t perhaps be witnessed by a wakeful rational soul.
The next morning, he had again already gone before she woke. Only his earnings from the day before lay on the table waiting, like a challenge for her to go out and spend. She got up, slipped on the blue cotton dress and looked at herself in the mirror. She wondered how it was possible that the vision of familiarity before her could be in a setting so utterly unfamiliar from anything she had ever known. How was it one could live a life and then live another?
She went to the window, stared down at the street. She was afraid. Certainly afraid to go out into it, yet caught, impelled by a need for practical accomplishments and, too, a sense of intrigue, a quiet desire to venture out beneath this changed sky. For too long she had stayed in the confines of a room. Now she was afraid to leave it, yet more afraid to stay, for what might become of her if she did?
In the end the longing for the outside, the scent of fresh air, gave her courage enough to open the door to their room, to climb down the stairs, her hand trailing along the walls, mold splattered like veined blue cheese, and out onto the cobbled street upon which she and Yavy had arrived only two nights ago.
For the first time in her life she found herself on a street alone. Momentarily she stood with her back to the door of the lodgings, her hand upon the brass handle. She looked upward. A clear sky. Sparrows flitting between the eaves. Her hand twisted back and forth, warming the metal, as if she might leave a part of herself safely behind so that the rest of her might move onward. Finally she dropped her hand to her side. Took one step, then another, and began to walk on down the street. The air smelled of sun-warmed bricks and the dried, salted meats that hung from giant hooks as she passed the butcher’s at the end of their street. A pig’s head sat on the trestle table, its mouth gaping and stuffed with a glazed green apple, the orbs of its eyes glinting as if they might still hold some semblance of life within them. The rest of it hung from the metal rack, sliced and stretched to expose its insides. The flies sat lazily in the air around it, then caught themselves on hanging fly coils, their legs scratching the air until they died of exhaustion.
Already the market stalls were rowdy, crowded with incomprehensible shouts and raucous tussles so animated they verged on aggressive. There were shelves of preserves, jars of pickles and chutneys. And flowers, battalions of them, strung up and swinging in the breeze or bursting from metal buckets: peonies, lady reds, and orchids; scents of crushed lavender wafting in bands and mingling with the stench of sewage.
She did not know this life, the exchange of it. She felt all eyes upon her suddenly, that she was something to be jeered at and locked away. She shrank back, disconcerted, stood in the shadows of terra-cotta, beside a wall of cool pink stone. For a time she could not move, afraid to stay, to linger, but more afraid to return to the void of herself in that room.
A man was standing on a table selling exotic live birds: a gold-crested finch, a bleached white dove. There was a green and yellow parrot, bobbing its head in agitation on a pole beside him, and beside that some sort of bird of prey, a kestrel perhaps, a kite?
“Gut zu anderen,” squawked the parrot. “Good to others—Gute euch—good unto you,” and the crowd clapped and rummaged in their purses.
“You can make anyone believe anything if you do it with enough conviction,” her mother had taught her. To act unafraid was to be unafraid. To act good was to be good.
Lor moved alongside the buildings, felt the assurance of putting one foot in front of the other. Better the movement than the static fear. She trekked the streets, walked the length of one, then another, moved from the crowds to the sparsity of the living quarters, the cluttered alleys and crowded squares of the town center to the wider, leafier suburbs, where large houses loomed behind immaculate walled gardens, and birdsong sounded in the still quiet squares. She walked until her feet throbbed. Back then, into the throng, where she felt courage enough now to linger, to seek things out.
“Come, my love,” she heard her mother say. “You are well practiced in this. You know the exchange of this.”
With the little money Yavy had given her she first bought things they needed and things they could afford. Clothes: a second cotton dress (she had only the one), stockings. A pot, a pan, a ceramic dish that she would learn to cook with, a wooden spoon, a knife, a whetstone. She found a teapot that reminded her painfully of an English farmhouse, blue-and-white striped with a smudged marking on the base that she could not decipher. She searched for cups to match. Failed to do that, so bought a mishmash of ones that she liked. Not the done thing, her mother had said, but let’s start a trend, some new fad from America. She wanted Yavy to have wine with his dinner, because in her willingness to imitate adulthood she imagined that was the way it should be, so bought two glasses that she polished until they shone. She found a quilt for his bed on the floor, and one for her own that would brighten the room with the patchwork.
Finally she climbed the stairs back up to their lodgings in the rooftops and stood relieved, pleased with herself, in the center of the room that must now be their home, for there was no other, and listened for the Italians. They were only three streets away, and sure enough, if no carts or motorcars went trundling over the cobbles below she could indeed hear them singing their arias and their songs, reaching for their dramatic crescendos. And she smiled at the thought that he, Yavy, would hear them too.
This Day
AUSTRIA, 1944
Again his dreams have Jakob clawing at the warm earth above him. His mouth is clogged with clay, his eyes with darkness. Pe kokala me sutem. He sleeps on bones. Bi jakhengo achilem. Becomes without eyes. Again he breathes in grit and stifles his screams. Again he scratches the loose soil away until his hands are raw. He scrapes aside the stones, the splintered roots, soaked with blood, until finally his fingers feel the wind. And then, through a crack in the rubble, he catches a glimpse of the blue lapis sky.
“Jakob,” he hears Cherub calling. “Jakob, you are all right?”
He has been weeping. His cheeks ar
e wet. The sound of his sobs lingers in his ears, like the indentation of something. He does not know if it is the worst. Is it, Cherub? he wants to ask. Is it the very worst? He is back in that field, crouched down low behind the blackness of bracken, his knees upon that soft blanket of damp moss. He can hear his breath in his own ears, shallow bursts. He should run, he knows this. He should run far and fast. But he cannot bear to leave. Cannot bear to go where the scent of them will no longer reach him. He sees the tree, bone white in the moonlight, stark and stripped of all its bark. No movement around it, no wing beat or scurried dance, as if all else has fled with what has just passed. All my heart’s there, he whispers into the night. All my life.
“Jakob,” Cherub asks again. “You are all right?”
“Yes, Cherub,” he says eventually. “I am all right.”
But he is near again, that officer, the eagle and the swastika on his shoulder hand embroidered with white silk and tiny nuggets of aluminum wire. He is near with his head in his hands, clasping thick clumps of his own hair. “So you have earned yourself a bullet,” he is saying, over and over, until Jakob cannot bear it anymore. Is it the worst? Is it?
His sister lifts her foot from the ground, asks if the grass feels pain.
The cow shifts its head, jerks it slightly upward. Its leg scuffs at the ground. The flies spiral upward, a black seething mass, the oilcloth glint of their wings blacking out the sky and the view beyond. Is it the worst? Is it?
“Cherub?” he asks out of the darkness.
“Yes,” Cherub answers, without pause, as if all he has been doing is silently waiting for Jakob to speak. “I am here.”
“You have brothers and sisters of your own?”
“I have three brothers. One older, two younger. I am the middle son.”
“You know where they are?”
“No, I do not.”
Jakob sits awhile in the stillness of his own waking. And then. “If I dream of dying, do I know what it is to die?”
Cherub is quiet for a moment. “What is it like?” he asks eventually. “Your dying? Is it dark?”
“Neither light nor dark.”
“Cold?”
“No, not cold.”
“Not so bad then. If I dream I have sucked a lemon, if I can taste the sharpness and the tang of it, who can say that I have not sucked a lemon when I wake?”
“But we know what it is to suck a lemon. In life we knowing that.”
“Yes.”
“An’ we not know what it is to die.”
“No.”
Jakob is quiet awhile. He holds his feet in his hands, and wonders at the size of them. Would they be the same size as his mother’s now? She had such small feet. Would he be able to place his foot heel to heel against hers and see his own toes above her own? Could she wear his shoes, he hers?
“What’s it like, Cherub, your home?” he asks eventually.
“I lived in a small town in the mountains. We would fish in the summer, snow-trek in the winter.”
“I’ve never been in an avalanche.”
“Neither have I. But I have heard them. They sound like thunder, only there is no lightning to light the sky before they come, so they come without warning, out of nothing, and the sound of them continues on long enough for you to doubt that you are hearing anything at all.”
“Can you survive an avalanche?”
“Yes, you can. For as long as you find a pocket of air, the coldest air.”
“Yes, for as long as. And it is light in this pocket?”
“I think it would be light.”
“Yes. I think that snow would be white enough to hide that dark.”
Jakob imagines it, this tiny space that is not cloying with soil or rubble, but full of the lightest snow.
“Come here,” she had said to him and he had done so.
She had brought him down onto the grass in front of her, and wrapped her arms tightly around him. “Tilt your face toward the sun and close your eyes,” she had instructed and he had done so. “Do you see darkness?”
“No.”
“Do you feel cold?”
“No.” She squeezed him harder.
“Do you feel alone?”
“No.”
“This is what death is. Not a place you should be afraid of.” That is what she had taught him.
Jakob and Cherub remain silent until they hear the familiar shifting of Loslow waking, the theatrical drama of yawns that accompanies the stretching of limbs, the knee bones that click as they straighten.
“Loslow, tell Jakob about your cities. Loslow is a man of cities. He has lived in more of them than any man,” Cherub tells him.
“Yes, for my sins.” Loslow yawns again. “The countryside is more of an enigma to me. I am afraid of insects, of birds, of feathered wings. One cannot escape them. It is not something easily admitted, but I am indeed a city man in my very heart of hearts. I have lived in several. In Leningrad, where the whole flow of the river freezes over in winter. The fish are caught in the ice there, a bubble frozen above their gills. You can drive a truck across the thickness of it. The whole city gleams with a layer of frost. The stone shines.”
“And Vienna?” Jakob asks, half wanting to know, half not. “You ever lived in Vienna?”
“Ah, Vienna I know best of all. Vienna is where I was born. You can hear music on every street corner, in every square. It is a city of angels.”
There was no music, Jakob thinks. There was no music in Vienna for the brief time he had known it. Certainly no angels. There was a square. And there were chairs, upturned chairs, scattered and broken, as if some orchestra had been about to perform, and somehow the music had exploded the ordered layout of the open-aired auditorium. As if the time they lived in was being played out in the chaos of wrecked chairs. Wrecked chairs and the body of Marli Louard, who lay still with his head on the same stand he’d been speaking from, his shirt stained with blood that had darkened from red to eggplant. Jakob had stood alone in this square, alone for a moment only, but a moment long enough to feel an immense emptiness, a void that he felt he would never fill. There was an absence of sounds. No birdsong. No current of voices. Just a spiraling wind that brought with it a single sheet of paper tumbling across the cobbles. It spun upward and over his head.
“Jakob, please,” his mother had called behind him, her face twisted with anxiety. “Come away, Jakob.”
The letter caught against the leg of one of the chairs, flapped against it, the words hidden. Jakob walked toward it.
“He is not here. Come away. Please, he is not here,” his mother had cried again, frantic now. She was afraid. They were all afraid. He took the letter, writing scrawled across it, folded it in his pocket, felt the weight of it there, and then did as his mother asked. Left the scattered chairs and upturned tables, that splintered space, the last place he had seen his father. Taking Eliza’s cold hand, he fled.
“What is it?” she asked him as they ran. “What is it you have found?”
“Just a letter,” he replied. “A letter I found in the wind.”
And later he had pulled the letter from his pocket, unfolded it, tried to decipher the scrawl that swept slanting across the page.
Grass so green, as if all the beginnings of everything were heaped across those rolling hills, those valleys of leaf and willow, of dandelion and anemone.
Jakob read the words over, again and again, as if the answer to everything lay in the slanting scrawl. He longed for those hills, those valleys, that apple salted wind.
“What would we make of our lives if we were to live them over again, knowing what we knew at the very end?” The officer had asked him that, sitting as he was beside his fire. That officer with his embroidered swastika of white silk and aluminum wire. After he had wept. After he had dried his eyes. Jakob did not understand him then, wonders if he understands him now.
Long Before
AUSTRIA, 1932
Lor went to meet Yavy the following day, waited fo
r him outside the house in which they cut the stone, waited in the stillness of late afternoon, in the heat and long shadows, when the light was at its most luminous and there was an edge to every line, a definite ending to one object against another. She stood listening to the chip and grind of the men at work. A faint cloud of chalk dust seemed to hover just above her head, along the entire street, strangely redolent, aromatic almost, as if it carried with it the scent of wild flowers that had woven their way up through the cracked rock, before a blast of dynamite sent it exploding outward into the world to become something else: a bell tower, a church, a cathedral, a field of white gravestones.
“You are here,” he said, when he saw her, his face covered with a fine film, like some quarry ghost come to haunt her. He smelled of grout and pitch.
“Yes. I came to walk with you.”
“I like that you did that.”
“Yes.”
She went again the following day, became familiar with the sound of hammer on stone. Stood by the doorway and watched the last remnants of his day. He was quick, lighter than the others, younger, too. She watched him pound in the clout nails against mortar and slate. Listened for the sound of each hit, for the musical tone within each one, a note she could find on any piano from the stones they would keep, or else the wayward tone that resonated from the damaged stones that they would discard. He pushed in the dowels, caulked seams, hoisted up lifting tackle.
He worked hard but dropped his tools as soon as the bell rang for the end of the day, stayed never a moment longer than that. He looked out for her, rushed to her with an eagerness that almost betrayed him before he reached her, stepping back to put a space between them, walking by her side as they strolled home through the maze of narrow alleyways, witnessing the packing up of stalls, the slamming down of shop shutters, the opening of bar doors, the hum of lazy evening chatter. That shift from day to evening, from work to play, when the light spun almost imperceptibly from gold to blue. Occasionally they veered off balance in their stride, brushed against the other, mortified, and yet, in those moments, aware only of the touch of the other, everything around them diminishing in sight and sound. They steadied. Walked on, let in the space once more.
Jakob’s Colors Page 19