Jakob’s Colors

by Lindsay Hawdon

  In front of them the view stretched endlessly, the land flaming with the coming of fall, ash colored, amber and the palest of yellows, disappearing into the distant horizon after months of summer heat and fire. They walked that whole day, the shadows shortening, then lengthening as the sun reached the crest of the sky and began its descent again. They walked, full of a fragile hope that he would be there, for it was all that there was, beneath the polished dusk light, on into the blind distance.

  Before

  AUSTRIA, 1943

  Yavy sat on the bed, listening. The light outside was navy blue. Only in the east was the sky paling where the sun rose. In the valley the mist had not yet lifted. It lingered above the lawn and over the flat fabric of the lake, pale as milk.

  He could hear the creaking of the walls, the shifting of ancient stone in the six stories above him. The paint had long since peeled. The plaster had softened. The stone walls had mottled with a creamy rose-red lichen and crumbled in places. Old nails had buckled in the warped floorboards, stabbed their sharp heads into the heel of his feet. Last night he had pried them up from the shrunken wood. They had come out screaming, as if they had absorbed the cries of those who’d once stayed there.

  Above him, the rest of the building loomed like an empty tomb, a gaping hole that seemed to yawn and groan. The grand stairway stretched upward from the cold-marbled hall, a chandelier vibrating from a rusty chain whenever a distant truck rattled past. At night the water thumped through the pipes like an old man’s bronchial cough. Yavy found comfort in these sounds. Like the rocking of a wagon, they sent him to sleep.

  The room he occupied was on the ground floor and was sparsely furnished with the discarded: chairs and tables and beds that had been abandoned by the hastily departing. It smelled of shavings from the planed slabs of old pine mixes stacked in the far corner and of the kerosene that was once used to oil down the wood.

  Despite the warmer months, at night the stone seemed to leak out years of buried winters, and the temperature would become chilling. He and the others heated bricks over the fire, then took them to bed, pressing the warmth of them against their shivering bodies.

  At night he dreamt of his children falling from the sky, or drifting downward into some great depth, his hand reaching out, translucent against a wall of water, unable to grasp them as they sank. He dreamt of Malutki’s tiny thumb and smelled the scent of them all sleeping beside him. When he woke, the space where they were not was cold. During the day he thought of Lor, searching for memories of her in corners of the garden, in the shifting shapes of passing clouds that bruised the lawn with their blue-green shadows. Her name he could hardly bear to utter. It rested alongside his own. He could not hear one without thinking of the other. Yavy—Lor. Lor—Yavy.

  He looked out through the window. The mist had seeped across the lawn, vanishing the tree trunks, so that the leaves seemed to hang eerily over the garden, burning as the summer came to an end. The whole world seemed burned to him these days. Everything was rust colored. But on the lake the water level was high, lapping over the ornate paving and up against the crumbling balustrades. There must have been a rainstorm up in the hills, he thought. Sometimes the hidden valleys muffled the sound of crashing thunder.

  How much longer must they stay? he was asked daily. They were waiting for word from the other side. For men in camouflaged clothing who like him would creep out into the night, to lift the barbed wall of the border, for them to crawl from danger to safety. When they had this, it would be time to move the crowd of seventy children who lay still asleep in the early hours, on the floor of the old ballroom, once used as the Institution’s dining hall. Halos of heads, lined head-to-toe: dark, fair, red, auburn, straight and curly locked. The marble slabs had long since been lifted from their foundations so that the children lay on chalky earth, as wan as their skin, smelling schoolrooms from their past, vapored memories of chalk-dusted letters scrawled across a blackboard. It saddened Yavy how quiet they all were—this crowd of gypsy children who had come to know the kind of silence that could save a life.

  They had arrived in their straggling groups over the space of a week: one as large as twenty, one as small as five. Tottered in through a broken gate in the walled garden around the back of the vast house and wandered up to the ground-floor windows, where they had found their martiya—their angels of the night, whose signs they had followed across hills and snow passes. Found him carving wood with a knife beside a well of clear water.

  “Mr. Yakov,” they had pleaded. “Mr. Yakov, we are here.”

  And now it wasn’t that they never smiled—they did, and played. The girls braided one another’s hair with flowers from the garden as the boys played ball with pebbles from the lakeshore, and occasionally they sang songs from nursery classes and lullabies from bedtime slumbers. But always with the quiet guilt of the living. For every laugh, every expression of joy, seemed to trample over those whose laugh would sound no more.

  Yavy could not stay with them long. He could not bear to know their faces if the outcome were to end blacker than this. He felt the weight of this responsibility in his hands. The skin there crept with a numbness.

  He wandered down the corridor from his room, found Drachen in the kitchen, slumped in the worn leather chair by the fire, a frown cut between his eyebrows shaped like the number seven. He was nomadic even inside. Sleep didn’t come easily to him. He snatched it when he could. He lifted his head and by the heaviness of his movements Yakov could tell he had only recently administered the morphine he took day and night. He sat, the wound in his side still infected beneath the dressing, the bullet lodged somewhere deep beneath his ribs. You could smell it from the far side of a room, sweet as a fermenting pear.

  Below, in the cellar beneath the basement, a windowless warren of arched stone that ran half the length of the building, they could hear Moreali singing. It was their hideaway should they be found, but it was an awful place. The damp there seemed to seep up through the concrete floor and rot upon the surface. Moreali loved it for the acoustics. He lit candles and closed his eyes when he sang, transporting himself from the rabbit warren of a world around him.

  “Go,” they had said, in the first few days of knowing him, when his relentless humming had threatened to turn them all insane. “Go, sing. It is enough. Find somewhere where you can do it.” So he had. And now the songs of Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, morning after morning, came floating up through the beams and the plaster, transporting them all into pockets of his home country: the Piazza Mazzini, a tiny square hidden in the twisted streets of Castel Focognano where a fountain flowed from a bent stone tulip; a hotel in San Casciano in Val di Pesa where he’d sung from an ivy-clad balcony on the first floor; Harry’s Bar in Venice, where he had stood upon a red carpet laid across the cobbles to transform the ordinary into the ornate, at a time when bingo parlors were one of the most profitable businesses in town, when porcelain-skinned prostitutes read the poems of Fóscolo, and the nights were full of ghosts that flitted past the end of the narrow streets.

  “I still love and loathe that he does this,” Drachen was saying as the sound drifted through the air vents. “This morning I give him until noon. I have awoken bitterly. I’m likely to be a brute of a man.”

  With Drachen there was little mystery, unlike Moreali, who except when he was singing was quiet and contained in voice. Yavy was grateful for this, however mournful Drachen’s company could sometimes become. The older man said what he thought. Held very little within himself, and so long as one learned how quickly his moods passed, his company was quite tender.

  Drachen sighed an almighty sigh and then slurped loudly from a cup of tepid coffee, made from the grains that they reused over and over again, until in the end there was just a remnant of a taste, more a memory.

  “What’s with your sighing, Drachen?” Yavy asked him.

  “I was thinking that I was missing the sanctity of a place I could call home. I wait for this day. For a day when I can retur
n there. And then I realized I could not picture this home I wait for. That perhaps it no longer exists. There is a longing always for a destination. A destination where this all ends. But there is no end, is there? This is now my home, as much as any other. I have lived with fear for so long, I can barely remember another way to live. Perhaps this is as it is meant. Perhaps this is living.”

  “Perhaps,” Yavy said. “Perhaps not.”

  “That is the optimism of youth talking. To be young is to hope. I fear my hope is waning. At my age, I have a choice—I can choose to hope, or choose not to. You have no such choice.”

  “That morphine makes you morbid.”

  “That morphine makes me speak my mind.” Drachen sighed again. “God damn it. Yakov, how can the grass outside be so dry?” His words were slightly slurred, the vowels drawn out. “When it feels like the lake is coming into the house? It is so extreme this place, too cold at night, too hot in the day. I can smell damp everywhere. I found a dead fish on the lawn yesterday. We are sinking into the lake and yet the vegetables are rotting with thirst. When will it be time? How much longer must we stay?”

  Yavy did not know the answer. He, Drachen, and Moreali drew rough maps across the surface of the wooden table with chalk from the ballroom, then laid down stones for where they knew soldiers kept watch, calculated the distances between each, argued who was right and who was wrong.

  Drachen’s bullet wound had come from one such crossing, a few months back, when one night he had been helping three Polish Jews to cross the river. He’d waited for the whistle from the other side. But he’d been caught between the barriers when the searchlight had streaked over the river and lit them up.

  That they would go at night was the only thing they all agreed upon.

  “How much longer?” Drachen asked again.

  “Not long,” Yavy assured him. Not long, he assured himself. “They’ll come soon enough.” But by they he meant Lor, Jakob, Eliza, Malutki. For it was they he waited for; they with whom he needed to cross that line from dark to light. He was sure they would come soon; that they would find him. He was sure she would know where to look. And until then, he believed that if they were no longer alive he would feel it. He tipped back his head and stared up at the tea-colored ceiling. The mist was lifting, tearing at the seams.

  Long Before

  AUSTRIA, 1932

  “Do you hold places in your head?” Lor asked Yavy as they walked home one day from the stoneyard through the evening shadows. “Lives, perhaps, is a better word?” She had several. Lives in which to venture and linger a little while. She did not know if it was relative to the individual. Whether the fragile had fewer, the strong more. Or perhaps it was the frail who needed to hide more frequently? “Do you?” she asked him.

  “I hold places in my head, yes,” he told her.

  “Do you wish to live in them?”

  “Often.”

  “Now?”

  “Not now,” he said, and lifted his head to look at her. Briefly she felt the back of his hand against her own.

  “Yes, not now,” she agreed, but moved away, awkward with it. “Might we again?” she asked quietly.

  “We will again. Truly. Sadly. When we are in need of them.”

  They were on the street where De Clomp stood and already they could hear the music from the corner several hundred yards away, the upbeat tempo, the blare of a swinging saxophone, the quick and nimble fingers gliding back and forth upon the keys of the old and much-played Manualo piano. They stood, not knowing quite what to say.

  “They’ll be dancing inside,” he said.

  “Can you dance?”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes, I can dance.”

  He grinned.

  “You are surprised?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am too quiet?”

  “Yes.”

  They reached the door to their building, where the loudness within could be felt vibrating against the wood as Yavy pushed himself against it.

  “Let me wash the dust from me first,” he said. “Alfredo will holler if I come in looking this way.”

  At first, while she waited, she hovered outside the entrance, allowed herself to glimpse through the smoky windows the sinewy bodies within. They were playing Duke Ellington, and for a moment she let herself remember the parties of her past, so many parties, where she had watched the adults from some darkened corner of the garden, spinning and tapping their heels, arms linking arms, hands clasping hands, ruby and diamond clad, a stolen caress that the caresser hoped would not be seen. So much skin against skin as, decorated and luminous, they spun each other around and around. And from that place beside shrub or tree, forgotten beneath the frivolity, Lor had mimicked them, had danced as the night drew on, awkwardly with her own shadow.

  She pulled open the door to De Clomp. There were several people dancing, others already leaving empty tables and empty chairs, gradually shifting them aside to make space for movement. There seemed to be no shyness in the room. The music had outstripped it, made it irrelevant beneath the rhythm. Alfredo shouted across the musty interior when he saw her. She was grateful for the sight of his familiar face, took up a stool at the bar near him and beside Elpie, who was without his hat. The old man patted her leg and grinned with the pleasure of seeing her.

  “So, you are here for the bewitching hour,” Alfredo said. He studied her face intently for some time.

  Near them, a couple got up to dance, both of them short, as if they were together because of their height. Lor turned her head to watch them. They seemed to blink back at each other with a self-conscious reserve, but with every twist and turn their limbs moved more freely, the beat softening their shyness. Lor watched their newfound confidence, smiled at it.

  “You are all misty eyed and forgetful, I see,” Alfredo observed.

  “She is in love,” Elpie muttered.

  Lor did not reply.

  “You do not know it?” Alfredo asked.

  She looked back at them and nodded. “I know it,” she told them.

  “And he, too. You know he, too, is misty eyed?”

  Yavy appeared then, in the doorway to the bar, his hair and face clean, flushed with the speed with which he’d washed. She watched him seek her out amongst the crowd, saw the tension in his face slacken, as if simply seeing her reassured something inside him.

  “Perhaps not that,” she murmured at length. She felt afraid suddenly. She had seen the wrong turning of love.

  Yavy raised his arm in the air, but then seemed to hesitate as if sensing that some sort of shift had taken place since he had left her. His look was questioning. Across the throng of dancing heads they stared at each other.

  Yavy moved toward her, navigating himself with the slight shift of his shoulder, the soft force of his hand. Lor looked down, saw his shoes before she saw him. They were worn and scuffed, covered still with a film of stone dust, the stitching open at the side of his right heel.

  “You need new shoes,” she muttered, and looked up. He was staring at her with that look of his, defiant, timeless.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You need new laces.”

  “Yes.”

  He waited for her to say something else, but she could not speak. She felt stripped bare, fearful he might, in time, see the void inside her. “Please,” she begged eventually. “Please.”

  He took her hand, pulled her up from the bar stool, held her close enough for her to smell the scent of him, still of outdoors, of wood smoke and something other: grass, soil, both rain drenched and sun dried, lake water both deep and shallow. The scent of him now had become a sort of representation of everything known. She could feel his breath in her ear, the warmth of his cheek that was almost touching hers. They stood like this for one entire song. Stayed with this slow, touching stance that seemed to her not quite dancing, not quite standing still. All she was aware of was the slightness of things between them: his shoes beside her shoes, a strand of his hair that
touched her temple, his thumb against the ridge of her shoulder blade, slowly circling.

  “Me kamav tu,” he whispered. He pushed his lips against her ear, swayed in the awkwardness of something that was to end between them as something else was to begin. “Me kamav tu,” he said again. In the lamplight of late evening they could have belonged anywhere.

  They danced that way for only one song. When it was over Yavy took her hand, pulled her out and around to the door that led to their room. They climbed the stairs, wise with what was to take place, then stepped over the threshold and stood, ill at ease, listening to the muffled vibrations from downstairs. Outside it was raining. It had not rained for weeks. The dry top layer of sediment in the upper gardens and parks of the town was loose, caught easily in the torrents that rushed downward, bringing scents of wet soil on the wind. Their window was open, the thin drapes drifting like some half-visible ghost. Lor rushed to put her head out and hang it under the sky. The cloth on her sleeves and chest darkened and changed form, sticking to the outline of her skin. She drank the rain, as she had seen him do, felt the metal of the sky in her mouth.

  “You are happy?” he asked, watching her from the center of the room.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “You are no longer afraid?”

  She looked back at him. “Of being found?”

  “No, not of that. Of being alive.”

  She pulled herself back inside, stood listening to the rain. She looked down toward the rush of water in the gutters for the answer. Then she turned to face him. “I am as afraid of being alive as not being. Is there one without the other?”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he told her.

  “How not to be?”

  He moved toward her, as if in this he could make it so. And somewhere in the middle of that movement there was a small and silent-enough space for him, Yavy, to draw her close. She felt the line of him against her. The bones of his pelvis, the hard plate of his chest. He did not touch his lips to hers at first, but held them a hair’s breadth from hers. She felt his breath against her face. He moved closer. Kissed her. His lips cold, his breath hot. Her first. Not his.