Afterward she looked away, her face burning.
He cupped his hands about her face, kissed her eyes and the soft pulse of her temple.
“Can I?” he asked.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He did not undress her. He laid out the quilt from his bed upon the floor, laid her down upon the softness of it and lifted her skirt. She felt his hands upon her, stonecutter’s hands, rough and calloused. His shirt was wet now, like her own. He moved over her, bore down not the full weight of himself, but kept his arms taut, holding himself above her. Then she felt the sudden sharp cut as he broke her. She felt the wooden boards beneath the quilt. Her spine rubbed across the ridges, the skin on each knot singing. She heard the rain outside. A fountain of it pouring into the guttering. Then her name, Lor. The way he said it. An admission. He was spent quickly as if, in this act alone, his boyhood pushed through, the too eager yearning that made swift his desire. He shifted slightly to ease his weight from her. She heard his breath in her ear. She felt his heart beat against her own. Pressed him to her, wanting not to be empty of him.
It was only afterward that they saw each other naked for the first time. He undressed her, her clothes like water fern as he peeled them away. He undressed himself, hid a shyness, covered it with solicitude, as they lay side by side on the bed, one honey skinned, the other pale as milk. Her hand rested against his chest, cupped as if something undiscovered hid in her palm. Her damp face lay tilted against his jaw. He stroked the fan of her hair as they fell asleep in their room of cluttered colors.
Outside the pale light of morning rose in the east. The rain had stopped, gradually, and now there was smoke from an open brazier seeping up into the air. There was the sound of carts splashing over the wet cobbles, and later the thrum and hoot of a rushing motorcar. Swifts woke on the upper eaves and flitted off above the rooftops. The air cooled and moistened, damp with dew. Lor and Yavy slept, breathing softly, the lines of their bodies entwined, until the light woke them.
When he took her again there was a tenderness, her skin like silk, their fingers moving over each other with a lightness. He explored her with a bewildered pleasure at such freedom of time and touch. When he found courage enough to look at her, his eyes were questioning, almost sorrowful, as he took her in, a slight frown that resonated across his brow as if to see her hurt him. He moved slowly. The soft hill curve of her pelvis against his belly. The cloud of her eyes. She was trembling when it was over, lay spent and curled in lonely comprehension. Felt the cold of the wind through the open window on her damp skin, as if the husk of her old self had been discarded to reveal a new layer, startled and touched. It took time to bring words back between them. To return from touch to sound. As if in those moments before they had loved each other like a mutual suicide, all despair stripped from them, moving toward a place of light, that ended all past pain. They lay baffled by the simplicity of a biology that had bound them.
“You are my romni,” he said at length. “My wife.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Your wife.”
And it was then that she, Lor, her name unfinished and barely audible, understood that to him at least she was the sort of someone who could light up a room.
This Day
AUSTRIA, 1944
A day when Jakob can feel the heat from outside brushing in beneath his cupboard door and the scent of cornflowers on the breeze. Markus gives him a small parcel. It is wrapped in a smooth sheet of cowhide and bound tightly with a leather lace.
“For you,” he says. “It is a gift.”
Jakob unbinds it and looks down at the contents splayed upon the sheet. There is a knife, a blade that folds in against a smooth wooden handle that has been varnished and inlaid with a line of silver either side. There is a piece of flint, a small drinking flask, a fork, an arrowhead, a long oval sharpening stone, and a round compass cased in brass.
“For the forests?” Jakob asks.
“Yes, for the forests.”
“To survive?”
“Yes, for you to survive.”
Markus rests a hand upon Jakob’s head, keeps it there. “There is a man who goes by the name of Moreali,” he says. “He crosses people over at the border. I have sent word, he knows you are coming and he will help you, Jakob.”
Jakob feels the weight of Markus’s hand on his head. Wants to feel it there forever.
“Help me where, Markus? This is my home.”
“Always.”
“I tell you, I have no other.”
“You told me you are half an Englishman. Perhaps it is the half that will save you. One can have many homes, Jakob. Remember, day by day. Time changes everything. Makes everything. Undoes everything. You cannot fight it, only learn it, accept it.”
“I am afraid.”
“I know. I know. I am afraid also. Afraid for the loss of you.”
Markus hands him the flower, indigo in color, that they had seen when he took him to look at the sky. It has been pressed and dried. “For your collection” is all he says.
Jakob holds the flower in his hand, smells it. There is a slight hint of its scent, more a memory than a reality. And that is how the past feels like to him now. As a dream, but one he will always wake from.
Even in his cupboard he can recall the stench of the cattle trucks, the memory of animal hide and dung, beneath the stench of human sweat and shit. He is inside them once again, sitting in silence, cramped upon the floor. They have stopped somewhere. He feels his brother’s heel in his ribs, bare toes in the crease behind his knees. He smells the grease of his sister’s hair next to his own. Night is falling. People shift in the airless space, peer through the wooden slats. Jakob can just make out the silhouettes of passing people, shuffling like silent shadows, thin as rope.
“Give me, God, two big wings,” the woman next to them whispers. “That I may fly away.”
When eventually the doors slide open, the sun has already risen, a white light in their eyes, blinding them.
“Out, everybody, out,” the German who had shot the man for his Y-shaped tree shouts, his voice brittle in the stillness of outside. “’Raus, ’Raus, schneller. Join the back of the line. Faster, you filthy shits. Follow the man in front of you.”
Jakob clambers down from the truck, his knees stiff. He wonders at the soldier’s words, where they had first come from, who had first uttered them, who had followed, who had led. Eliza grips his hand. He feels his father’s hand on his head, the heat of it.
“Don’t be afraid, Jakob,” his father says, his voice weak and wavering.
Jakob looks up. The trucks, five of them, drum in front of him, engines running. He looks past them, to the right and to the left.
“A tree with stark branches,” he whispers. “Lead white, charcoal at the base where the bark is still clinging, and behind it the green of the grass.”
His mother is beside him, with Malutki in her arms. Jakob grips Eliza’s hand tighter and they join the line that is shuffling out across the field and up toward the Y-shaped tree. Ahead, an officer stands on a mound, staring down at them. He is a tall man, the eagle and the swastika on his shoulder hand-embroidered with white silk and decorated with aluminum wire. His skin smells of cologne, his breath of licorice. He looks right at Jakob as he passes, and what Jakob most recognizes in his eyes is a sadness that seems as anguished as his own.
Long Before
AUSTRIA, 1932
After that first night together, it was as if something had been awoken inside him, as if with the nearness of her, and the revelation that she felt as he felt, he dared to reveal himself. Yavy walked with a sense of boundlessness, with the careless delight of discovery, idiotic with the rowdy happiness that seemed to accompany first love. It spilled from his stride over into the collecting of his colors, where for the first time he would study them openly in front of her, would not hide the fascination he found in each one.
Until, one day, he brought home a rock. A rock that he carried in a wooden b
arrow, rattling it down the cobbled street, the sound of which she could hear before she could see. He lugged it up the stairs, stopping at each landing to collect his breath. She felt the denseness and the weight of it as he placed it down upon the wooden table. It lay there, commonplace, matte gray, and jagged in places, nothing remotely unusual to catch the eye.
“You know what it is?” he asked Lor. He had that look, that look of light about him. She shook her head, waited patiently for him to tell her. He was hardly breathing, as if these moments before were of significance, to be noted as the very beginning of something. Finally he took up his chisel and hammer, took his time to place the former in the very center of the rock before he smashed down upon it with the latter, jarring his arms with the impact, hitting once, twice, three times before he knocked against the tender grain that split the stone in two. Only then did Lor see the color at its center, sea blue and brilliant, glistening with pyrite. Yavy placed one half of it upon the windowsill where the afternoon sun rays fell across the cut plane.
“You see?” he said eventually, his voice low. “Three colors in this one stone?” He traced his finger over the place where the stone was at its darkest. “This, they calling rang-i-ob. Means the color of water.”
Next he traced his finger along the contours of turquoise that splayed outward across the center. “This,” he said, “is rang-i-sabz—the color green. And this,” he said, stroking his finger around the third, that was tinged with streaks of violet, “is surpar. Means red feather. The color of fire, that deepest of flames lying at the very core.”
She watched his face, the way his eyes bored into the stone, as if the secret it held within would hold the answer to whatever it was he was seeking. In these moments, it seemed to Lor that to him this was all that there was, this blue, this clear hue, unspoiled, undefined. It seemed to speak to the very depths of his soul.
“What is it?” she whispered.
He turned the stone around in his hand as if he had not heard her.
“Lapis lazuli,” he said finally. “From the country they calling Afghanistan, from the valley of Sar-e Sang.”
After this he began to hang about the apothecary’s near the stoneyard, studying the jars, the ointments upon the highest shelves. He talked to chemists, doctors even, sought out books on minerals and pigmentation, lugged them home, studied the pages with unflinching concentration, and for hours she lost him to them. And then, when it seemed he had absorbed everything he could on the subject, when he had devoured, read and reread, questioned and requestioned, he began.
Each day, from work, he brought home his tools: hammers, chisels, stumbled in with a large metal tub full of them. To find paint in a lapis stone was delicate, he told her. It was a complexity of minerals, of sodalite and lazurite. In the best grades there was more sulfur, which shimmered violet in the stone, and in the worse grades more calcium carbonate, which dulled it gray. To make paint, all of these impurities had to go. He told her it was like making bread. For three days he lovingly kneaded a dough of finely powdered lapis resin, wax, gum, and linseed oil, his hands moving rhythmically, molding with tender deliberation. Only then did he coax out the blue. He placed the dough in a bowl of wood ash and water and began to squeeze and press for hours at a time until the silver ash slowly transformed. Then he dried it, setting it down upon the warm wooden floor, in the center of light cast through the nine-squared windowpane, and moved it as the sun moved, like a dial, until it had dried into a small powdery mound of lapis blue.
But he was not content with that first batch. Nor the next. Time and time again he set out to extract the brightness of color that he knew lay within the grayness of the stone. Obsessively, over and over, seeking out that perfect pressing until finally, in the low late light of an afternoon, when his hands were stained blue, the dye caught in his nails, in the cracks of his palms, he stepped back.
“What is it?” she asked him. “What is it?” He was pale. A sadness seemed to hang about him. It filled the room, palpable, like something she might touch. Suddenly he seemed terribly young.
“There,” he whispered. “The sea. The sea, as you meant to see it.”
Afterward, everything blue held within it some veneer of lazuli for her, as if it, too, had been molded and ground and soaked from rock and touched with a distant sorcery. Watching, it was as if something had alighted in him, a shy possession of sorts, an act reminiscent of something witnessed a long time ago, too long to be remembered, but engraved somehow inside him. His was a blind guide, ghost-written from the past. A passionate discourse unfolding between him and this distant memory, arcane and mysterious, like some bright star on a clear night, navigating his hand, his heart, to work its magic, to turn the dullest of stones into the most brilliant of hues. All that there was, was this blue boundary that had to be possessed first, then discovered, eventually unveiled.
Gradually their room transformed itself into a laboratory, bottles of liquids and iron salts, labels with names of chemicals she had not heard of before: potassium ferrocyanide, sodium carbonate, ammonia, citric acid, borax, gelatin. Rocks of malachite were strung up over tubs of red vinegar, the copper changing within hours from rust to green. He ground indigo leaves, pulped and dried them to a powder, mixed them with palygorskite and heated them in copal resin to a rich dark zaffre that could color a night sky at that moment of dusk to dark. He fired ochre to the almost-black of midnight. Cooked white lead to the yellow of noon. Cooked it again to the red of dusk. He soaked saffron with egg white, transformed the scarlet stamens to citron golds. Discovered the magic of salt. Mixed it with mauve-tinged azures, violet reds. Boiled roots, and thickened the dye with turpentine and alum. He found vermilion sunsets in mercury sulfide, fired them to an orange cinnabar. He ground berries to a pulp, discovered purple when he mixed the juices with acid, ultramarine when he mixed them with alkaline. He ground up malachite, found cyan and celeste, celadon and olive. Ground up madder, found crimson, ruby, and alizarin. Crushed azurite, inhaled lungfuls of deep blue, as if the air were now visible.
Then he bound these colors, set them, with gesso, plaster, linseed oil, sap from cherry trees and resin from sweet pines. He melted wax. Dabbed at his creations with paintbrushes made from fine horsehair, and swept colors across reams of white parchment paper, over and over, until he’d sought out some arcane perfection. His pigments were luminous and brilliant. They did not fade in the sun, in the wind or the rain. They lifted skies and made rich the blue-red earth.
Before
AUSTRIA, 1943
Yavy pumped a few spouts of water from the well into a tin bowl and shaved without soap. The blade snagged his skin. The well stood beneath a small alcove under the ice-clad stone arches. He remembered he had watched Lor there once. From afar, as she had looked down into the dark depths. He had watched the curve of her nose, tilted slightly upward, her dark lashes, the tendrils of hair falling haphazardly about her face.
“God help me,” he was sure he heard her say. “God help me.” The first words he’d ever heard her utter, before a shadow appeared through one of the stone arches and she was led away. And that was when he had decided that if not God, then he.
Back in the kitchen Drachen was staring out through the window, one hand playing with a packet of precious Gauloises.
“When I first came here in the winter, I used to dream each night of swimming in the lake waters,” he said. “How deep do you think it is?”
“Deep.”
“I will miss swimming in the shallows once the winter comes again. How will we bear it?”
“Of course we will bear it.” Moreali flicked his hand dismissively as he pushed back a chair from the table. Even sitting he was tall. He didn’t fear his height. He didn’t hide it. He knew the luxury of being able to sit up straight. He stood now, moved his long limbs to stoke the fire, faltering as he did so, like some mismanaged puppet. His singing gave a balance to his frame. When he didn’t sing, he mastered the art of falling down. He tripped and
fell through life, but with a blitheness, always recovering himself with a smile, a sweet acceptance that the living of days was a haphazard exploration and there was to be no escaping the tumbles that came one’s way.
“When winter comes we will embrace it,” he said.
Drachen pulled a cigarette out from the packet of Gauloises, crumpled now, almost empty, and lit it. He inhaled deeply. The smoke seemed to disappear somewhere inside him for the air was clear on his exhale. He opened the stove door, warmed his hands against the dying embers. He smelled of the kerosene he’d doused his hair in, to kill the lice.
Yavy went to the ballroom, stood at the open door and watched the children inside. Most of them were sleeping, lulled into lethargy by the loss that washed over them the moment they woke and did not disappear until sleep found them again. He did not wake them.
The fence they would have to cross beneath that night was eight feet high, crudely alarmed with a line of hanging cans, each filled with a handful of stones. There were two barricades, lit by hurricane lamps, fifty-five yards apart. The first was guarded by Germans, the second by Swiss. Their dogs on long chains barked during the day and howled at night. The guards silenced them with bullets fired into the sky.
People went one way, cigarettes, loose tobacco, and saccharine the other. From the far side someone would whistle, and from the near those waiting would crawl to the wire. Quickly they exchanged their sacks, their stowaways, their refugees. Not a word was spoken, only a handshake, whereupon those helping retreated back again into the woods.
But before the wire, even, there was the river. It gushed or trickled depending on the density of rainfall up in the mountains. Those embarking on escape had a choice: to cross when the river was full, the sound of rushing water hiding the rattle of cans when they crawled beneath the fence, or to wait until the waters were shallow making it easier to cross over emerged rocks to the other side. People had been shot on these crossings, shot in the back, with their eyes looking up at the mountains beyond.
Jakob’s Colors Page 22