Jakob’s Colors

by Lindsay Hawdon

  “Ma,” Jakob said beside her. “We here?” She took his hand, fought to hold on to who she was now. Her past was a foreign land. She was not who she had set out to be.

  “Yes, we are here,” she told him.

  They struggled up the path to the workhouse. It stood now like some old boat dredged up from the lake, abandoned and barnacle covered, mollusk and shell kissed. The woodpile sat much the same as it had before when she and Yavy left it, worn with wind and rain. But no one, it seemed, in all the years that had passed, had made use of his cut logs. Jakob pushed open the door, stepped inside, pulled Malutki with him. Lor hung back in the doorway with the lake behind her, looking in. Everything was as he had left it. Faded certainly. Diminished. Bleached by the sun. Layered with a film of dust. But his colors still clung stubbornly to every crevice, hung from every nail upon the stone wall. Though the edges of his leaves, his petals, his paper fragments had curled upward with time, though cobwebs had spun across the eaves, across the corners of the walls and the windows, veiling the light like a pall upon a tomb, his colors were still there.

  She stepped inside, trailed her hands along the shelves, along the sills as she had done the first time she had found this space.

  “Is he not here?” she asked herself. “Is he not?”

  Jakob followed, watching her. “These are Da’s?” he asked beside her. He held an object in his hands, a walnut that had blackened and shrunk in the years past.

  “Yes, these are his.”

  He did as she did, caressed each object, dust on his fingertips, on the palm of his hand. They stood in the silence. She allowed time to move onward as she pushed aside the doubt that Yavy was not there. For to live hopelessly was not to live at all. He had taught her that, so she gathered her courage, as she would the pleats of her skirt, and led the way on up to the main house. They kept to the shadows and the outer fringes of the lawn. The doors to the house were open, warped from wind and rain, clinging on by loose hinges. It smelled sourer now. There was still a hint of disinfectant, but more the essence of it, as if it had for so long been washed across the floors and walls that it had become a part of the very foundations.

  Though it lay abandoned, there were signs that people had been there. A scattering of food cans, some empty, some full, a stack of flour, bricks that had been heated in embers and still held some semblance of warmth inside them. They helped themselves to dried cookies, crammed them into their mouths. Lor cut open a can of beans, another of sweet peaches, the juices dribbling down their chins as they mixed mouthfuls. Tentatively they wandered from room to room, the corridors damp and bleach scented, the hallway with its grand, now dilapidated staircase that spun up to the cavity of the house above. In the old ballroom the door creaked when she opened it, the echo of it bouncing back at them from the walls. The black-and-white tiles had been ripped up from the floor. It lay now chalk scented and full of rubble. Covering it were rows and rows of tiny blankets, cut coarsely down to size, discarded now, but each laid out neatly upon the floor as if those who had slept beneath them had still made an attempt to keep a morning ritual of making their own beds. She closed the door behind her as they left, as if she might preserve the tidiness of the room.

  She pumped water from the well, filled a bucket, washed her children in a patch of sunlight. Made herself practical, and hushed the words that resonated inside her head, telling her that he was not here. That either he never had been, for certainly there was no sign of him amidst the abandoned clutter, or that she was too late, that he had already left.

  Eventually, as the light faded, she pulled them back down to the workhouse, where at the very least Yavy’s ghost hung around them, living still in the layers of dust and leaves that had blown across the threshold.

  Watching his mother, Jakob saw a calm, quiet space that made her movements lucid, seamless, one leading on from the other, as if to break the sequence would be her undoing. Slowly she made up their beds, gathered leaves, soothed her children as she had soothed them every night.

  “So our vessels are full,” she told them, as they lay on the floor looking up at her. “Seven vessels, seven colors. You have found a rainbow.”

  “A whole rainbow?” Eliza asked, her voice rising.

  “Yes, the whole of it. The Ushalin still chase, with their hawkish march, the drumming of their boots across the land, the roar of their war cries echoing back and forth, but they are halfhearted, move with doubt. Yes, they are still bellicose and puffed up with the vision of a future they feel is their warrant, without cause or justification, that is theirs for the taking by the very brute force of ambition. But day by day, step by step, the bleak horizon of their future is disintegrating before their eyes. They can no longer hold on to the belief of it. No longer see the clear path to their exulted ending.

  “Quietly, you set out your colors upon the Walls of Monochrome, the Boundary between light and dark, sight and blindness. One by one you lay them out: indigo, malachite, violet, blue, saffron yellow, crimson red, a deep Cremona. And you wait. There is nothing but that to do. You have done the rest. Completed the task. Now all that there is, is to watch, for the Ushalin will come. In their thousands, like a great cloud hammering over the hills down into the valley to the lake. And you will watch as the courage drains from them when they see the bright lights upon the Boundary Wall. You will watch as they halt, as their horses rear upward, and you will hear the hollering from their God, the raucous bark that cuts up from his rotund and protruding belly.

  “They will appear as a manifestation of all things loud and dark, but they will be desperate. They will be afraid. And try as they might, they will not look away. They cannot look away. The very ruthlessness of their inquisitive nature will be their downfall. And the light will sear their eyes. They will be blinded to their own dark. They will turn back to face their ashen land and find it streaked with every color, quivering and luminous before them. They will turn this way and that, lost in a confusion, the likes of which they have never felt before. And then, when their mighty God, roaring with contempt, unabated and still without remorse, is sucked back into those black waves, when his clenched fists have disappeared beneath the surface and there is no longer sight or sound of him, the Ushalin will turn back to face you. Will fall to their knees. Thankful for the new light in their eyes. And they will sing. Sing with exultation. And you will have no need to fear any longer.”

  Only Jakob was still awake when she reached the end of the story. Only he knew of the exultation and the reasons to no longer be afraid. At length he stood and quietly walked around the room, picked up first a round, lake-smoothed piece of glass and placed it inside a small wooden box with a crescent-shaped clasp that he had found hidden beneath the stack of logs at the side of the workhouse. One by one he picked up his father’s colors, blew the dust from them, placed them, layer upon layer, inside the box. He collected them all, and only then did he lay himself down on his makeshift bed and, clutching his small box to him, fall asleep.

  Lor lay in the darkness, the hope dimming inside her. He is not here, the voice in her head kept repeating. He is not here. Until eventually she, too, gave in to the exhaustion of the last weeks, the last months, succumbed to it wholly, and fell into the deepest of sleeps. There had been nothing else but this venture. Of their lives it was all that was left.

  Much later, she woke in the night, gasping, hardly able to breathe. She stumbled from the workshop, out into the night, the cold of the ground beneath her feet. She stumbled down the path to the lake that lay like a sheen of polished glass, so flat and still was it against the frosted night sky.

  “Yavy.”

  She called his name, felt the full force of longing for him. It rushed at her, a void expanding outward, so that it seemed she herself was skimming the water’s surface, hovering above the dark depths that reached down vertiginous and endless below. She let her tears fall. She sank into the abyss where everything that was known became unknown. He was the only steadfastness in a w
orld that was always changing, from one place to the next; he was the seam of her skin, the stitches that held her together. He was of her bones, of her heart, the only thing she could turn and recognize in the unfamiliar. The compass that she navigated her life by. Without him, who was she? She did not know.

  Before

  AUSTRIA, 1943

  They returned from the river that night, after the first attempt to cross, all seventy children and the three of them, Drachen, Moreali, and Yavy. An attempt which ended because of the patrol planes that were circling the skies above, in search, not of them, but of something other. But as Yavy had crouched in the woods, looking out at the rushing river and the barbed wire fence beyond, he was sure he caught on the wind the faint calling of his name, out from across the still waters of the lake that shone to the distant right of them. He felt he could not move, could not take a single step farther from the Institution, crouched there as he was amongst withering ferns and thorny bracken. So it was with great relief that when Moreali said they should abandon flight that night and turn and go back, Yavy did so with an eagerness of heart. And behind him, the silent crowd of seventy children followed in his steps, trusting him, as they had first done so.

  Back at the Institution he settled them once again in the ballroom, told them not to worry, that the day would come, tomorrow, or the next, when they would leave this place for white mountains. And then, tentatively, for he was afraid of what he would not find, he crept across the lawn, hugging the shadows of the privet hedges, down to the workshop.

  All was silent as he moved up the path toward it. All was dark. He pushed open the door, let a faint gray light streak across the floor, as scents of dry rot stirred in the air. He peered through the dark, strained to make out what, if anything, lay within those four walls.

  And then—there they were. Asleep in the place where he had prayed she would know where to find him. He sank to the ground, onto his knees, watching them in the half-light of dawn, watching them with disbelief that they were there at all.

  Lor stirred in her sleep. Yavy could not bear to wake her. He waited. The light warmed, brightened.

  Her eyes opened. Her lashes flickered. There was a moment’s hesitation as she took him in, studied his face, his hands, down to the worn leather of his shoes. A tear slipped from her eye, ran down across the bridge of her nose. A sob resonated from inside her. Her hand reached out for his. He took it. And then she was sitting up, her arms about him, the lines of their bodies entwined. He felt the heat of her. Not a space left between them as they wept and mixed their tears.

  “Me kamav tu,” he told her, crushing her head against his own. He heard her heart, looked down at her grazed and blistered feet.

  “Yes, yes,” she replied. “I love you. I love you.”

  This Day

  AUSTRIA, 1944

  And so Jakob gets stronger, fitter. His limbs do not cramp as much as they used. His stomach does not ache. He remembers the feel of grass beneath his feet, the feel of rain on his face, sunlight in his eyes. Longs for them, and in those moments the lethargy of loss is replaced by the vitality of youth. Fleetingly, his thoughts come fast and furious.

  “You see,” Markus tells him. “You see how miraculous we are. We can bear the unbearable. Survive the unsurvivable. You can find hope anywhere, Jakob. When I was a boy I used to find it in the snap of a slingshot. For hours my school friends and I would aim and fire at skimming stones. I dreamt of doing so all through the boredom of the classroom. Ran out with it at the sound of the bell. Even now it offers for me the very essence of happiness when I hold a catapult, to bring it up between my nose and eye, a steady hand firing out the smallest and roundest of pebbles. The sound of it in my ears as it spins through the air. The smack as it hits the center of the target.”

  It is as if a euphoria has taken them over. A vision of what might be. Jakob is carried upon the wave crest of their optimism. Their stories are full of a world with small bright things.

  “It is so,” Loslow adds, a rush of words suddenly. “We must not live under the law of limits. I once knew a man who used to hoard everything and anything. He lived at the end of my road. His garden was stacked high with old prams, ovens, burned-out farmyard machinery, great metal hunks of junk, rusting and wasting in his uncut grass. And the thing was, he was old, so old his back was bent. He walked with a stick, and barely at that. No one ever knew how he got the stuff there, how he dragged it into his yard. He could hardly even get through his own front door. You could see the trash piled up against the windows, dirty rat-filled rooms. The woman next door complained you could hear them screeching at night. He even shat in paper bags and stored them in piles outside. The place stank. Then the war started and suddenly everybody flocked to that garden, stealing his garbage as if it were jewels. They even took his bags of shit and used them as manure for their vegetable gardens. And he just watched, pink eyed and silent. And when his garden was empty, when they’d taken everything and anything, stripped his house and garden bare, he collected leaves, rusted dead leaves that crumbled with his touch. And he collected them with delight, his face a picture of pure happiness.” Loslow falls silent. “I used to think this man was crazy,” he says finally. “But that’s not so, is it? He was just trying to make sense of a crazy world. Finding order in the chaos.”

  Jakob holds his box to his chest. Yes, he thinks. Scarlet leaves that fade and crumple in the hand. Flowers that bloom, then wither. Bright for a fleeting while. In the end, what is there but these?

  If their days are full of a hope, though, the scales tipped upward, at night it is as if everything they have worked so hard to push away in the light hours comes at them again. As if the past were forcing its way through, and transporting them to the place that was the very ending of it all.

  For Jakob always there is the tree, that lone tree, worthy of an almost-smile and the life of the man who smiled it, the vision of which comes to him in the dark, in the wind and the rain, tapping against the pane of glass outside his cupboard, as if calling to him. Always there are his brother’s eyes, fleetingly hopeful, that look that cut between trust and confusion. The cattle trucks, the rattle and the grind.

  He does not know if it is the very worst. Is it, Cherub? he wants to ask. Is it the very worst? Tears sting his eyes. Spill over. So many he cannot dry them with his hands. Hope where there is no hope. Love where there is none. Color when all is gray.

  The tree upon the brow of the hill, branches outstretched as if in rapture, lit silver by the passing sun. He can blink his eyes and see it there, magnificent against the steel blue sky. To begin with they were taken deep into the forest, into the thickening trees where they blended into the shadows and were not seen from the field. A crowd of children sat upon damp earth, dirt smeared and grazed, sucking their fingers, choking on their own tears, listening to the distant shouts from their parents held back in the field, their voices already full with the knowledge of loss.

  Jakob sat with Eliza and Malutki, their hands in his hands. Grass beneath them. The moon still white in the morning sky. They were in a glade, surrounded by silver bark trunks, small coin-shaped shimmers of dawn light catching where the low sun spilled through the canopy above. The officer was building a fire, gathering the wood himself. He was a tall man with his hand-embroidered swastika of white silk and aluminum wire.

  Jakob did not understand him, this man, whose face had been set in an untroubled calm as he led them from the cattle trucks across the field. He had moved with the authority of one who knew that whatever he said would be obeyed and acted upon. But now he sat crumpled, his face wet with tears that he had shed unashamedly before them. Jakob did not understand why he seemed at intervals to clasp his head in his hands, to tear at his own hair and mutter words that Jakob could not understand. He was both enraged and diminished, wayward to himself. Shouting at shadows, then shrinking in mood and stature, venturing, it seemed, into some scene from his past. In those moments it was as if he had absconded from the
world around him, set himself apart from what was happening up there by the tree on the mound.

  Jakob waited. That was all that was being asked of them. To sit and wait. If nothing else, simply to be there.

  Before

  AUSTRIA, 1943

  For the second time they set out to the river and the tall wire fence. For the second time they lifted the barbed wire border to cross into Switzerland, Yavy’s birthplace. They muffled their footsteps upon soft soil. A crowd now of seventy-three children, then Jakob and Lor. Drachen and Moreali stood guard at their posts, the former on the riverbank, watching from the longer grasses, the latter behind in the woods waiting for the whistles that would sound from the other side.

  The river’s edge was frozen, a foot thick at the fringes but thinning as it spread out into the currents. It would crack and break easily with their weight. The children laid themselves flat and pushed their bodies out toward the meltwater. Those out front floundered to find smooth stones and rocks, slippery with river reed and moss. The older children held the hands of the younger, tried to balance themselves one against the other. To the west they could hear the dogs, barks echoing off the surrounding rocks.

  Strangely though, in those moments they became children again. Certainly they were afraid, but they could not help the delight of tiptoeing from stone to stone, the thrill of the ice, the sight of the glowworms on the bosky bank amidst the ferns, shining in the dark, damp crevices. How was it that they were held more captivated by these things than the sound of barking dogs behind them, closing in, becoming louder above the rush of water? Perhaps because all they had known of dogs were wet noses that could be pressed into the crook of their arms, soft tongues that would lick pink cheeks, bringing a child to its knees. Dogs were their allies, their friends. They did not fear their bark.