Jakob’s Colors

by Lindsay Hawdon

  They tried out their languages on each other. Wore them like clothes, changing the way they moved as they spoke. They both spoke French to each other, a smattering of German, but sometimes she used English. Sometimes he used Romani. They learned a little of each. Spattered one with another. Felt them move inside their mouths, against their tongues, their lips, like something they could taste, then swallow.

  She learned that avri was “outside,” that adre was “in.” She learned that she was miro, that she was quiet. That she was khushti, that she was good. Love was the word for money. Kamav the word for love. Ruv was the wolf they ran from. She was not dinilo, he told her. She was not crazy. She was rakli, a rinkeni rakli, a pretty, bright-eyed, nongypsy girl.

  Slowly, gently, they began a little life. It was a simple life, filled with conversations of stones and layered bricks, of the music that seeped up from the bar, already part of the past and imprinted with the memory of when it had first been listened to; of the strange food that they found in the market: cheese that was veined green and blue like a map of land and water, olives that were so sharp they stripped the moisture from their tongues; bread that they pulled apart and chewed until their jaws ached.

  There was Alfredo, who talked mostly of love and wine, and a few familiar faces at the bar; Elpie, who, undeterred, was halfway through his hat; the two musicians who sang but never spoke; the men Yavy worked with. They found a corner in De Clomp that became their own, beneath a bookshelf stacked with old books, leather bound with warm browns, mahoganies, and greens, where shyly they would look for the other coiled upon a comfy chair.

  For a time they hung out with the balloonists and the mystics and the opera singers who joined them in the lodgings for the season, a trickle of traveling salesmen who arrived one Sunday and left the next, who clambered up the stairs with cases of elaborate costumes or boxes of equipment that cramped the landings so that only the slimmer visitors could squeeze past. Alfredo hollered and complained, then laughed and poured out whisky shots, while Yavy and Lor listened to tales of starlit performances and flights across quilted skies. Until summer bled into autumn and the balloonists and mystics and opera singers returned to a distant place that was their home. Then once again, it was just the two of them.

  Slowly Lor peeled off her past life as if it were something that could be discarded. It remained an imprint, dreamlike and only tangible in sudden moments when she was caught off guard, when a memory surfaced before it could be repressed: stirred by a bend in the road, the crown of someone’s head, the gait of someone’s stride, all reminiscent of another time, another place. Palpable, almost, as if she could reach out and touch the past.

  When you lose something you love, darling, you live another life beside the one you are living. The life that would have been. Her mother had once told her that, staring as she did into some vacant space. “It walks only one step behind you. Like a shadow. That at times, just as when the sun is at its zenith in the sky, it can brush right up against you, overcast and blur out the life you are living altogether.”

  Less and less that happened to Lor now. Only sometimes would she will the past to return. “Are you there?” she would ask. “Are you close?” Only sometimes, when at night her fears seemed insurmountable. She floundered then, sought to grasp the familiar, the chaotic known, but where once there had been only solace in such a seeking, now there was trepidation at what might arise, the half-acknowledged truth that she no longer wanted to disappear. To hold stones in her pockets. Now, in the dim light of a room that was her own, with a boy who had faith enough, it seemed, to be near her, she wanted to grow old and gray.

  For Yavy it seemed he had always lived this way, the ease with which he navigated himself through the day, as if the years before had been erased. There was no reference to them, ever, just a steady reassurance that they were safe, that the life they now lived was known by him. He knew how to move, to act within it.

  Only with the colors did there seem to be some sort of legacy from the past. They began again gradually, like an absentminded habit. He came home from work one day with a small piece of flint, a copper hue sparring out from the very center into a dark-gray rim. He placed it on the dresser, sat down to take off his dusty shoes. Lor took it up in her own hand, ran her finger along the sharp edge, felt the warmth of him still upon it.

  She looked over at him standing as he was beside the window, his face half-lit, half-shadowed. His left hand slowly undoing his laces. His right held against the pane as he stared out and over the chimneys to the sky beyond, a look in his eye that seemed wistful and full of some sweet longing. Lor turned away, felt this was not something she should bear witness to, and placed the flint in a jar for safekeeping.

  A few nights later he came home holding a strip of thin parchment paper, rose colored and crumpled, that he opened out from its discarded scrunch, smoothing it with a tenderness of touch. He looked at it for a time, as if it held the answer to something, but then talked of other things: of the line upon line of bricks they had dismantled that day, of the strength of an arch that held the weight of three floors upon it.

  Another time he held a piece of stained cut glass; a handful of green-colored leaves; a torn tartan cloth; later still a chipped china tile laced with flowers of celadon. Lor collected them in places, upon the shelves, upon the walls. Gradually the surfaces became cluttered, the walls covered. The light in the room transformed, accentuated, brightened. Even their voices changed within it, muffled and dimmed as if sound were being exchanged for sight.

  Before

  AUSTRIA, 1943

  Their camp lay on the edge of the forest, set amidst a grove of maples. Sporadically the wind blew in short, sharp gusts, balmy and dusting them with leaves of rust and gold. The ground on which they slept was soft with those that had already fallen, the scent of the now buried summer still seeping up through the layered carpet. Around them towering ferns sheltered them as they slept, bowing and swaying in synchronized circles, like some troop of forest guards, while above, wide-winged birds loomed high in the branches of spruce trees, contemplating migration, before taking off into a sky rubbed with thumbs of thin cloud.

  “Where do they go, Ma?” Eliza asked as she watched them. “The ones that die. Why don’t they fall from that sky?”

  “I don’t know,” Lor replied. She had only ever seen one bird fall from the air, dropping onto the ground in front of her with a dull thud. Only one. In all the years she’d walked beneath the crescent of the sky. With the very randomness of death, there must surely be many more that died with a suddenness that caught them in flight?

  “If I was flying when I was alive,” Jakob said. “I would want to be flying when I was dead.”

  Malutki sat on the ground clutching his bare feet, a halo of late sunlight catching his white-blond hair. His shoes lay beside him, the laces tucked into the worn leather sides as she had taught him to do: “A mouse’s home where you must tuck in his whiskers.” Taught him to do as she herself had been taught.

  They had celebrated his third birthday only three days ago with blackberries from a greener field, way behind them now. He had spat them out for their bitterness, staining his lips maroon. She let her hand rest beside his, her finger to his tiny thumb, which was calloused at the knuckle where he sucked it. She tilted her palm toward him, cupped his hand and felt his skin. He was watching with deep intent a line of ants that were moving across the ground in front of him, each laden with a blade of dry scrub grass.

  “They are the strongest creature on the earth, you know? For their size,” she told him, but he didn’t hear her. He continued to stare and draw in the soil.

  Jakob got up to collect the wood she had asked him to get, the kindling first, then the thick dry sticks that would burn quickly, smokelessly. His hair was dark in contrast to Malutki’s, tinted slightly at the tips with the summer sun, his gray eyes gleaming beneath an unruly fringe.

  She could not bear to look at any of them for long. She could
not differentiate her love from the fear of losing them. She wondered if it would ever be possible to feel one without the other again. To feel love without pain.

  Jakob lit the fire from the base, his face tense with concentration. The dry sedge-grass caught alight quickly, coiling a thin line of smoke up through the sticks. He knelt and, bending his head to the fire, blew gently until the flames grew burning the cold and the damp from the wood, crackling and spitting sparks into the air. Lor watched, afraid of the fire’s revealing light, but more afraid of the cold.

  The sun had almost set and was turning the earth orange. In the dusky half-light everything was a contrast of light and shadows.

  “You know it’s only them red bits that are heaven, Ma?” Eliza said, eyes sleepy as she curled herself beside the warmth of the fire.

  Lor leaned against the fallen tree behind them. It was moss covered and entwined with vines that clung to it.

  “Zyli wsrod roz,” she whispered to herself. “We lived amongst the roses. Nie znali burz. And we did not know of any storms.”

  “Tell us more, Ma,” Jakob asked.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “At those saffron fields, have we filled another vessel?”

  “Yes, we have filled another. We are full of contentment because of it. We can hear Gillum and Valour softly chomping, happy for the oats in the fields that we’ve gathered for them. Happy for the rest and the shelter. As are we. And tomorrow we know which direction we are heading, following the river upward and onward, over the brow of the hill to a valley that knows we are coming and to a field of violets. The Ushalin are far from us now, what with their crisscrossing paths, and their endless wayward missions that take them this way and that, as we pick up our pace and stretch out the distance between us. To be sure they are busy still with their Worshipping Ceremonies, but there is a hesitation before they kneel now, a subduing of their raucous laments. They are less sure than they were before, less justified. They know we are close to the completion of our task. That our vessels are nearly full.”

  Malutki and Eliza were asleep before she had finished, but Jakob turned around to face her.

  “You’ll be there, holding my hand when I die, Ma?” he asked.

  “So much talk of dying?” She was afraid when he spoke of it so, afraid there was some legacy passed on from one generation to the next.

  “Will you?”

  “I hope to die long before you,” she whispered.

  He fell silent for a time. And then, “So I will be there, holding your hand?”

  “You are always there, Jakob,” she told him. “Even when you are not near me, I feel you there. Now hush and sleep.”

  He turned away with his face to the forest. She listened to his breath lengthening. “Jump your shadow, Jakob,” she whispered. “You are the sun.”

  For a long time afterward she lay awake, listening to the sounds of the night-forest; the crack of brittle twigs breaking as they fell, the wing-swish of a passing owl. All of them rang with the threat of discovery. She watched a slug moving up the bark, oblivious to them, glistening as the low light struck its back.

  When the fire began to dim she fed it with more wood, cautious, watchful, always afraid. Sometimes the fear broke through inside her, like a pebble dropped into a pool, the circles slowly expanding until there was nothing else. It drowned out the entire world of blue and green, her children’s faces.

  “Yavy, what are you most afraid of?” she had asked him once.

  “Them dead hours,” he had replied without hesitation.

  “What are they?”

  “When that ticking of a clock sounding out in the stillness of the day, and all that there is, is the room in which you standing, that chair, that table, that tick-tock, tick-tock. When everything is just what it is.”

  “So to move on?”

  “To see a road ahead.” He nodded. “To have a hope, always, ’round that next corner there’s the possibility the country of your dreams waiting there. Sure enough that’s a reason.”

  “Is it never just the sound of the horse’s hooves, never just a wagon, a road?”

  “Yes, that, too, but that road ahead always seems bright, shinning a light right down to where you are sitting.”

  “Always bright?” she had asked.

  “Always,” he told her.

  It was much later when the sound of something moaning cut into her half-sleep. Something between a cry and a groan. It carried on the air, vibrating against the tree trunks around her. She could not tell where it came from. The darkness had swallowed up all direction.

  She stumbled up toward the brow of the hill. Up there the trees no longer blocked out the sky. The stars spilled across the blackness, glistening like quartz. Ahead, on the edge of the hill, she could see the bulk of something lying in the long corn grasses. She stepped forward. Breathed in. Breathed out. And then she saw, with relief, that it was only a cow in labor. It lay on its side, its matted fur a chalky white, the breath steaming from its nostrils in short shallow bursts. Of its newborn calf, only the head and front legs had emerged into the night air.

  On seeing her, the mother bucked, kicked out with her legs, tried to lift herself from the ground. Lor stepped back into the shadows, waited, as she had once done with a bird that had been trapped in a white room. The cow stilled. There was nothing she could do but to return to the camp. She lay listening to the muted groans that carried on into the night, until in the end she fell asleep to the twisted lullaby of it.

  The dawn brought silence and a change in the wind direction that carried with it the stench of something foul. She woke with the warmth of sunlight filtering through the sparse canopy onto her face. She listened. A low persistent hum came from over the brow of the hill, a white noise, barely decipherable.

  She climbed the slope to the crest where the sound was louder. The air pulsed with it. She saw the flies first, a seething cloud, the oilcloth glint of their wings blacking out the sky and the view beyond. Beneath them she saw the bulk of the mother cow, still where she had left it the night before. She moved closer, flies in her hair, in her eyes, hovering around the corners of her mouth. She leaned over its hefty form, saw the mass of insect legs crawling one on top of the other.

  The cow was still alive while the flies fed off it. The calf was not. Its head and front legs still protruded from its mother as they had done the previous night. What was left of the birthing sac squirmed with flies, feeding off the blood that had seeped across the grass and darkened and dried like tar in the sun. Already the birds had pecked out its eyes. Only two dark hollows remained.

  How was it possible, Lor thought, in this world of horrors, for nature to match it with one of her own? There did not seem room for the two to exist alongside each other.

  The cow was barely breathing. Its fur looked damp and matted. The air rasped from its chest, heaving up and down in sporadic shudders. Its brown, long-lashed eyes looked up at her, wide and unblinking as if it were slightly surprised by the predicament it now found itself in.

  She knelt down beside it, put her hands around the calf’s neck. She pulled, pushed her hands into the soft flesh that held it, tried to open up a space whereupon it might slip freely from its mother. The corn stems swayed. The wind buffeted, changed direction, wafting the stench of death over her. She retched. Moved back. The calf would not shift.

  The cow would die slowly, she knew that. If she left it, the calf would gradually rot inside it. In the end she chased the flies from its face, then gathered up the edges of her skirt, and pressed it over the cow’s mouth and nose, pushing her full weight down upon them. The cow’s head jerked upward. Only once. A hoof scraped across the ground, left a mark upon the earth. It lay there, its eyes wide, staring into her own, blinking momentarily, until finally the breath was stifled from it and it lay still.

  “Dear God,” she said aloud. “Dear God.”

  Always bright, Yavy? Always. I cannot see it.

  “Always,” she heard him
saying. “No matter what is happening around you, always that road ahead.”

  And it was then that she saw Jakob behind her, standing not ten feet away, silently watching. She stared at him, her eyes filling. But he shook his head.

  “It’s all right, Ma,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  “Is it?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She turned once to look at the carcass of the calf and the cow, with its black tongue lolling from its mouth, its brown eyes still staring, still pleading for she knew not what now.

  Then she turned and walked toward her son.

  “Sit with me,” she said, pulling him away from the scene. She pulled 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 instructed. He did as she said. “Do you see darkness?”

  “No.”

  “Do you feel cold?”

  “No.”

  She squeezed him harder.

  “Do you feel alone?”

  “No.”

  “This is what I think death is. Not a place you should be afraid of.”

  Then, Lor taking his hand in hers and pulling him to his feet, they walked back to the camp together, where he set about putting out the still-smoldering fire, kicking dust over the charred pile.

  They left their home there, left behind the memory of the dead calf and cow, and took with them the dragonflies mating and the birds that flitted from the stumps and did not drop from the sky. They crossed the woods, kicking pine needles up with their steps, climbing on through mossy meadows scattered with pools of alpine bearberry and late blooms of edelweiss, then on up the hilly slopes. The ground became rockier, lichen covered and scattered with hoofprints the size of cooking pots that formed a trail they could follow.

  Lor kept to a pace and the children matched it. When they grew tired they draped their shirts over the thorns of gorse bushes, made shade in which to lie down and rest their aching legs. She let them sleep during the warmest part of the day, woke them before they woke themselves. Then once again they set off.