Jakob’s Colors

by Lindsay Hawdon

  Such delights to be had in water. The sliding on ice. The slip of moss-hugged rocks. All streams lead to the rivers, all rivers to the sea. As they stood with their feet in the roiling waters they touched a future ocean, the snake coil that cuts through the land, that would eventually ebb out into the sweet saline blue.

  Can you swim? they asked one another. Can you?

  Can skim a stone a count o’ five, a count o’ eight, they told one another.

  Can catch the largest fish in my hands. A fish wider than a boat.

  They talked big and mighty. Told tall tales, where to hear was to believe, and to speak out was to make real. Yavy hushed them. Be silent, he told them. Silent as the dark.

  In the woods, Moreali waited for the whistle from the other side to signal their course ahead. Drachen guided them from the banks behind, shrunk down, his bullet wound pressing painfully into his side as he lay upon the ground. Yavy heard his low owl-hoot, instructing them to move swiftly, not to hesitate, not to flounder.

  But the dogs moved closer. Then a light beam across the surface of the river, cracking the darkness. The children hid behind big boulders. They lay flat upon the ice, their woolen clothes sticking to the dryness of it. They said nothing. Hushed their white lies and their gleeful boasts.

  Moreali and Drachen could do nothing but watch the horror unfolding before their very eyes, one hiding on the banks of the river behind the rocks and crannies and the other shrunk back into the woods.

  The dogs did not need sound or sight. They caught the children as they reached the water, rounded them up as their tiny feet felt the cold and small mouths gaped open in shock. A dog’s bark, then its bite. Finding a child, sinking teeth into the tender flesh with slow, deliberate movement, as if there was time enough for rumination. The children screamed with astonishment, then with pain, lingering on that line between belief and disbelief before they stepped over into the cold, dark well of knowing. Then all sound was shocked from them with the realization that this was the beginning of the end.

  This Day

  AUSTRIA, 1944

  Jakob is screaming once again in his sleep.

  “Jakob,” Cherub shouts. He has never raised his voice before. “Jakob, wake up. Wake up. It has passed.”

  “It has not, Cherub,” the boy tells him, his sobs raw in his chest. “It does not pass. When I run from here, it’ll be a life I’ve not ever seen the likes of before, an’ I’d rather be dying than doing without my old life. Miss it so much it stops my heart beating.”

  “That is true. It will not be a life you know of,” said Cherub. “But there are different lives within one life. Lives that are still worth the living.”

  “Even with the aching of the ones you’ve lost? I fear they’ll come haunt you.”

  “Would you rather not have it remembered?”

  Jakob is silent. He has slipped inside himself again.

  “What is it?” Cherub asks him. “Tell me?”

  “I cannot. I cannot,” and he is weeping now, the youngest of boys again, curled up and crying into his hands.

  “Why? Why can you not tell me?”

  “For the fear of it. I fear it is the very worst, Cherub. The very worst.”

  “And what of that?” Cherub asks. “What of the very worst? Tell me. I will be right here. I promise you, I will stay right here with you.”

  Jakob wrenches himself up from his triangle-shaped floor. Puts his palm against the plaster. Feels the warmth of it, the grain. The splinters beneath his feet. He breathes. Breathes in and out. And at length he finds the words. Words to describe those woods and the numbness that had replaced the fear of what was happening around them.

  In those moments, all he could see was the very essence of the world: There were the woodland leaves that rustled, crimson with maple. The brightness of them, torched after the summer, flamed scarlet. A startled web that tore between the breeze blown stems and drifted out of symmetry. A bird that squawked. One that sung. A lone beetle, the color of spilled oil.

  He recognized, too, that the officer who had brought them there, who was gathering sticks for his fire, could see none of this, so lost inside his own thoughts was he. Jakob watched the way he stooped as if the weight of his head might pull him to the ground. He looked as though he wished to lie down, perhaps to curl himself amidst dry leaves. To sleep. To dream himself away.

  Can you see them? Jakob wanted to ask him. Can you? A line of ants was battling with a ball of termite larvae twice their size. “Strongest creatures in the world for their size,” he wanted to say. “An’ the cleverest. They’d collect that larvae for you if you let them. Place it safe in the shade. You could be frying it with a little oil, a little sugar. A whole meal in itself that they could give you.” A mushroom had pushed up through the mulched forest floor, a shaggy ink cap that hung like a frozen fountain. “If you pick this, it turns black an’ within an hour it dissolves without a trace, as if it being some illusion an’ you not ever seen it at all,” he wanted to tell him. Or ask him, ask him if these were things he knew.

  The officer lit the fire at its base, crouched, watched the flames catch and lick at the air. Eventually he sat down, his eyes settling on them, lost to them. His hands were splattered with blood. His cuffs were soiled. His shoes stained.

  “I have a mother,” they heard him mutter to himself. “All men lie to their mothers.” He wept then, brushed the tears away from his face with his sleeve and a roughness that verged on anger.

  Malutki was gripping Jakob’s arm, between his elbow and his wrist. He was gripping it still with the childlike strength that would weaken in the years to come, but that for now could hold the whole weight of himself in the grasp of his tiny fist. Jakob took his hand and waited. It was all that was being asked of him.

  They came for them one by one. Two soldiers, the shadow of morning stubble on their cheeks, their eyes holding something close to contempt, something close to wretchedness, told each child that they would be taken back to their parents, who were digging a big hole beside the tree. There was the silent disappearance of one child, then another. They were too afraid to protest, too lost in bewilderment. After a time, those in the woods heard screams. Followed by the dull thudding of bone against bark. They listened to the gradual lessening of sound to silence. Were mystified.

  When they came for Eliza, Malutki would not let go of her hand. A soldier began to pull the younger boy with them before the officer looked up.

  “One at a time. Take them one at a time only,” he barked, staring up from his crouching position beside the fire, still glazed with tears.

  Eliza looked up at Jakob. Her eyes as gray as his, as light. She lifted her foot from the ground, asked him if the grass felt pain.

  “No,” he told her. “That grass never feels no pain.”

  “Not even when I am standing on it?” she asked.

  “Never when you are standing on it,” he told her.

  “I’ll tell Mamo and Da you’re coming soon after.”

  “Yes,” Jakob said. “You tell them that.”

  And that was the last they saw of her. She walked through the trees, her back straight, toe-to-heel upon the grass. She walked to see her mamo and her da.

  Eventually the officer who had built the fire looked up.

  “You are afraid also?” he asked Jakob eventually. “You know what they are doing?”

  Jakob shook his head. He could see restraint somewhere behind the clenched jaw, the eyes that seemed pink, almost tender.

  “You are right to be afraid,” the officer said.

  Jakob remembered the cow. He did not know why he thought of it now. How its death had seemed peaceful, almost grateful. He remembered his mother’s calm, and the cow’s wide-eyed look. He shook his head. He looked down at Malutki, knew that the two soldiers would come for him next.

  “Te na khuchos perdal cho ushalin.” He heard his father’s voice. “Jump your own shadow, my boy,” he whispered. “O ushalin shala sar o kam mangela.
You are the sun. You are the sun.”

  And suddenly everything else in that glade ceased to be. The tree was gone, the green of the grass, the officer, his tears, his smile that was not a smile. All that was left in that forest was a boy and his younger brother.

  In that moment, Jakob, a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish, thought that life seemed not to be life, death not death. There seemed to be the existence of neither.

  Am I cold? he asked himself. Am I dark? Am I alone?

  No, he answered. Can feel that yellow sun beating down sharp through them leaves, lighting up this space. Light all around us. An’ I am not alone. Am side by side with our little ’un, and we’re beside a man whose ma embroidered his coat with her own cotton and a little loving.

  Gently he took his brother’s tiny hand, pulled it close to him and uttered in his ear. “Don’t be afraid, Malutki. I am right beside you,” he began. “We’re riding fast on our horses, holding tight to their manes with that wind whispering sweet nothings in our ears. We turn this way, turn that. Feel that wind in our hair. Off to find them right paths that’ll lead us to them blue fields of yellow gold. Lead us to a place so bright we’ll be blinded by the light there. Zyli wsrod roz, Malutki. We live amongst them roses. Nie znali burz. And we don’t know of any storms.”

  He heaped it on him, all he could think of. And then he held his hand over his brother’s mouth and nose as he had seen his mother do to the cow. He pressed down, held his palm there, airtight and hot, as the small boy’s eyes widened. A faint spark of surprise, the stark inquisitiveness of the living. But that was all. There seemed to be no real fear, just a momentary attempt to breathe, a brief fight to live despite everything. The vein on the bridge of Malutki’s nose pulsed, a fragile blue, fading as Jakob held his hand down and whispered all the while in his ear. “I love you, Malutki, I love you. Me kamav tu. Me kamav tu.”

  What he witnessed in those final moments was the clarity of the world around him. There was the sky, always there was the sky, but the blunt edge of it was against his brother’s face, the indentation of his cheek against the blue, like a photographic negative. As if the world was now inverted. Malutki’s eyes were clear as pools. Alert, questioning. Full of a blameless confusion. His hand held Jakob’s gently. He held it as he always did, as if they were strolling out together into the blue. And yet, throughout, Jakob saw what he always saw when Malutki looked at him. That the love the boy felt for him was certain and unwavering. He mirrored it back. Felt he had never loved him more.

  And then finally, like a river loosing freshwater to a salt sea, all the life that had been, and that could still have been, slipped away to become something other, and Jakob felt the full weight of his brother in his arms, the stillness in his limbs, his unbeating heart. His little brother with his hot rabbit-mitten hands and his soft nightly snores. The vein on his nose had disappeared. The flow had ebbed. Jakob had witnessed the very end of his lessening.

  “Sa so sas man-Hasardem. All my life. All my heart,” he whispered over and over again.

  When the two soldiers returned from the field, their tread sounding through the leaves, they found Malutki dead in his brother’s arms. Jakob looked up, came back to the world around him. The officer was still by his fire, tending it, but in that moment he, too, lifted his head. Slowly he took in the scene before him. At first a look of bemusement flickered across his face. But then something else. He looked directly at Jakob, his eyes full of something that neither could decipher. It was not love, but rather an intimacy of one who knows what it was to kill another. We are the same, you and I, his eyes said.

  “So now you are a man,” he whispered quietly. “You have a secret from your mother.”

  And in that moment Jakob sensed the bewilderment of the past hour leaving the man whose skin smelled of cologne, whose breath of licorice. There was a visible straightening of his spine. A step back into a place of resilience. He was no longer caught in that no man’s land between thought and action. He was invulnerable once more.

  “That one,” the officer said, pointing to Jakob. “That one you can put with his parents.” And then to Jakob. “You live like a man, you can die like one. You have earned yourself a bullet.”

  This Day

  AUSTRIA, 1944

  Jakob came out of the woods alone eventually. Clutched a small wooden box in his hands. A small blue stone in his pocket. Left a small boy beneath the trees, curled into himself, sleeping not to wake. Left a small girl up by the foot of a white tree that was no longer white. She, too, sleeping not to wake. The other children lay heaped around the trunk, still now, unmoving. Quiet as the mice their parents had spent their whole lives asking them to be.

  “Ma,” Jakob called when he saw her. “Ma.”

  She was beside a mound of earth, the scent of it on the breeze, warm and damp, suffused with dew-drenched grass. She turned. Stifled her sobs, pulled him to her.

  “All that we know, Jakob. Remember all that we know.”

  Her tears fell upon his face. They fell like warm rain. He did not wipe them away, caught them in his own eyes, tasted the brine of them on his lips, and thought of the sea snails who wept their violet tears. How he and his father would collect them after the rise of the Dog Star or before the first days of spring, diving down to the depths of a shallow reef, rising through streams of light to catch the colored tears that did not fade, that grew brighter beneath the hot sun, brighter against the gusty wind.

  “Not this. Remember, not this,” his mother pleaded.

  His father had seen them. Had put down the spade that he held in his hands. Jakob felt the grip of him, his arms around his chest, his shoulders, the firmness of his hand upon his head. Felt the two spaces where his brother and sister were not as the three of them clung to each other.

  Afterward they dug their own grave. Those without spades used their bare hands. A crowd of gypsies digging dirt. Even Jakob—a half-blood gypsy child of Roma and Yenish, small boy, barely eight, scraped back the soil, his fingers raw from the stones and roots that they struck. Some who dug fell, and were beaten until they stood. Some never stood. The sun rose in the sky behind the tree, did not stop its ascent. It was the very end of a hot summer. Its residue lay burning on the branches. The horizon lay flat as a pan, blue gold and as distant from them as it could ever be.

  They were told to stop digging. Ordered to climb from the pit. All but ten, who laid themselves down, side by side, stranger to stranger, a husband beside his wife, a wife beside a mother, a mother beside a friend. There was no protest. No fight. Just the stark recognition that all was lost and that what was left to be endured was the very ending of it all.

  Jakob clutched his parents’ hands tightly; his father on his left, his mother on his right. Their hands trembled. Grass grew under their feet. The sun was white in the sky.

  “Nie lekaj sie—Don’t be afraid, Jakob,” his father said, his voice weak and wavering.

  “I am not afraid, Da. Can see a tree with high branches. Lead white its trunk, streaked with ochre, and behind, always the blue of the sky that is full of that lapis lazuli, the sound of a lullaby. Bluer than it’s ever been, Da.”

  “Yes,” his father said. “Bluer than it’s ever been.”

  The soldiers lined up above the pit. One of them threw the stub of his cigarette to the ground. He did not tread out the fire and it singed a pale flower black. The officer with his embroidered swastika stood with his feet at the very edge of the pit. Jakob heard the first gunshot, smelled the cordite in the air. He heard the next. And the next.

  “Bury me standing,” a man whispered near them. “I been on my knees all my life.”

  And then the whack of metal against bone, the smack of a rifle butt breaking the thin skin that hung like dirty cloth. He fell. Dropped down, down until the ground caught him.

  The gunshots continued, a white noise amidst the song from a lark, flitting through the flaming forest.

  The three of them were the last to climb down i
nto the pit, the last to lie side by side. Beneath them some of those already shot were not yet dead. Those who lay upon them ran the back of their hands across their cheeks, held their hands as they breathed their last breath. They lay down on top of strangers. They broke already broken bones, forced blood from already bleeding wounds—blood on skin. Skin on blood. Layer upon layer.

  Once again to Jakob it seemed that life was not life, death not death. For in those final moments it was not the horror or the brutality of death that endured. All that there was in that pit, by the Y-shaped tree that reached for the soaring sky, was the sweet ache of love. For in the final moments of life, it was the last thing anyone would feel. It was the price for it.

  Jakob clutched his box to him, squeezed his mother’s hand, felt her eyes on him.

  “Nie konczy sie tutaj—It does not end here, Jakob,” she whispered.

  She looked across at his father then. Jakob watched her smile, watched her close and open her eyes. Her blue to his gray. She had never looked so alive.

  “You remember the shoes?” she asked him. “The pile of lost shoes, for a month of Sundays?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Did you ever win? Did you find every pair?”

  “Often we won,” he told her. “Often.”

  His mother pressed her head against Jakob’s. A shadow fell over them. Jakob looked up. There he stood above them, the officer with his embroidered swastika and his nuggets of shiny aluminum wire, his face set in calm concentration as he moved along the line, firing a single shot with each step.

  “Zyli wsrod roz,” his mother whispered. “Nie znali burz.” Then suddenly she was silent, ashen skinned. The grip on Jakob’s hand loosened, then broke. He felt the cold where her palm had been. She let go of him. She let go of him for the last time. Left her England and her life in his hand.