Jakob’s Colors

by Lindsay Hawdon

  “I was there, Mamo,” he wanted to tell her. “I was there. Holding your hand when you died.”

  On the fringes of the pit above him a bee hid in a flower. He waited, waited for his bullet that he had earned because he was now a man. His back against the damp of another, his eyes to the sky, and then suddenly he and this officer, whose skin smelled of cologne, whose breath of licorice, whose name he did not know, looked at each other. Jakob caught the indecision in his eyes. The gun that was pointing at his head quivered slightly. Jakob looked right down the barrel of it, wondered at the dark coil within. But then the officer pulled back his gun, moved on one step, and fired. Jakob felt his father jolt beside him, and from his lips exhaled a last sound. Strangled and faintly absurd, as if when death finally came it was still a surprise. As if his life itself could not let go of living. Jakob felt his father’s blood on his skin, warm, gummed as sweet sap. He lay there smelling cordite, feeling the wind on his face.

  Later rough soil was thrown down, piled upon them, hiding them, forgetting them. Jakob felt stones hit against him. He felt them strike his skin, his ribs, bite into the soft tissue at the side of his head. The faces he knew disappeared, bit by bit, until all that was left was layers of stones—stones on stones on stones.

  And then there was silence. Time shifted, moved from the moment that was the very end, to one that was not. A moment that was indefinable. Without a name. To the rest of the world they now ceased to exist. They were as words uttered over and over until they ceased to mean anything, just a sound swirling around. They were the disappeared. The vanished. The forgotten.

  Pe kokala me sutem. He slept on the bones buried beneath him. Bi jakhengo achilem. Became without eyes in the dark depths. Wished only to sleep and not to wake. To be as those around him. Already he had lived long enough. Already there was nothing left of him. Even the fear had withered, like desert grass. Te merav, he thought to himself. Te merav. May I die now?

  It does not end here, Jakob, he heard her voice replying. Nie konczy sie tutaj. It does not end here. He clutched his box to him. He wept. He waited, barely able to breathe in the pocket of air in the crook of his father’s right arm. He shifted his head in the airless space, crushed beneath mounds of loam and silt. He breathed in grit. He waited until the air was too stale to breathe one more breath, and then finally he pushed his arm up through the cloying earth. He scraped aside the stones, the splintered roots, soaked with blood, until his fingers felt the wind. And then, through a crack in the earth, he caught a glimpse of the blue lapis lazuli sky.

  He lives.

  Why, he does not know.

  Why him, he cannot bear to ask.

  When finally Jakob falls silent, Cherub pushes his finger through the hole in their wall. He does not take his hand away that whole night. Jakob curls himself into an exhausted sleep upon the floor, and in the morning, when he wakes, Cherub’s hand is still there, the small of his index finger pushing through the hole in their partition.

  Before

  AUSTRIA, 1943

  On the floor of the workshop Lor and Yavy had lain in each other’s arms until the sun had risen and streamed in through the windows, lighting up shafts of dust pale citron. The light of it woke their children. Jakob saw his father first in the fog of his own sleep, rubbed his eyes, and sat up in the uncertainty that what he was seeing was something to be believed.

  “Da,” he called. “Da, have we found you?”

  Yavy sat up, let the tears stream his eyes.

  “This day?” Jakob asked. “This day, we have found you?”

  They had rushed to him then, Jakob, Eliza, Malutki, all three of them piling from the floor onto him, breathing in his scent, the leather and the wood of him, the roughness of his stubble on their silken cheeks, taking in the sound of his voice that soothed the steps they’d walked away, erasing all the fear and doubt of the past weeks. There was laughter ringing out like it had not sounded for an age, exalted, faintly frenzied with relief.

  “Da, you are more grubby than me,” Jakob told him. “You smell of them trees along the way, of all those farmed soils we walked on by.”

  “Da, are you smaller, ’cos I am bigger?” Eliza asked him. “My feet are the size of my arm, from wrist to elbow.”

  They had questions, of the square, of Borromini, of the mountains they would climb tomorrow. He answered them where he could. Made up what he couldn’t; Borromini he had left in a field, chomping trampled grasses with a herd of lazy cows; their wagon he left where they had left it, intact beside the bosky banks, full up and brimming with the things they owned.

  “So where are we heading, Da?” Jakob asked. “What will it be like, this place ’cross them snowy mountains?”

  “This place is my birth land. We calling it Switzerland. We’ll be heading on up into those mountains and down into them yonder passes. Will wait there patient, in a life full of easy living, ’til it’s time to head down to that salted ocean, to ride a boat ’cross them choppy waters to your mother’s land. A place you knowing as England,” Yavy told them. “You say it clear to yourself. You call out the name of that England.”

  Jakob did so. Felt the sound of it on his tongue.

  “Ma, what’s it like, the England?” Eliza asked her, and they watched their mother’s face as she reached down deep into her past, quizzical with images she had long suppressed.

  “In England,” she told them, “there is the greenest grass. It is famous for its grass, and there are meadows that are awash with wildflowers and woodland paths full of bluebells and anemones.”

  “What are anemones?” Eliza asked.

  “They are windflowers,” she told her. “They open only when the wind blows.”

  “What else is there in the England?” Jakob asked.

  “There are sandy beaches full of colored parasols and swarms of humanity. And there are shingle beaches where you’ll not find a single soul, where tall white cliffs drop down into a milky ocean, and smooth round pebbles rattle onto the shore, so loud your own voices are drowned beneath the sound of them. We’ll make flower chains and elderflower cordial. I’ll buy you Raleigh bicycles, Vimto, Marmite, and Bird’s Custard to try.”

  “What is custard?” they asked. “What is Vimto?”

  “It is a drink full of bubbles that sing inside your nose. We’ll buy a radio and dance to ritzy songs. We’ll buy a painted wagon and a Welsh cob horse, whose hooves look like boots for the snow. We will ride down country lanes strewn with cowslips, sleep in woodland glades and green fields. Feel the English rain and the English wind in our hair.”

  “How is that rain?” they asked. “How is that wind?”

  “Like apples,” she told them. “Fresh and sharp.”

  Later, when Eliza and Malutki had fallen asleep with these pictures in their heads, half-smiles of anticipation on their lips, Yavy took something from his pocket and handed it to Jakob. “Have this,” he said. Jakob looked down. A tiny stone of bright lapis lazuli lay in his palm. “From beyond the seas,” his father said, stroking Jakob’s bangs from his eyes with fingers that were faintly stained, that still held a memory of blue about them. “A keepsake. For all that we are,” he told him.

  “For all that we are,” Jakob repeated.

  And then, much later, when Jakob’s own soft snores sounded out into a honey dusk, syrupy with shadows, and so still, it was as if the world itself were holding its breath with the portent of the night to come, when they would creep from one country to another, from war to peace, Lor and Yavy lay facing each other, side by side, hip to hip, breathing green shoots of breath onto the other.

  “Is pain the price we pay for love?” she whispered to him.

  “Yes,” he replied simply. “Pain is the price.”

  She was silent for a long time. “It is worth it,” she said at length.

  And later.

  “’Long that road,” he told her as a tenderness passed between them, her skin like silk, their fingers moving over each other. “Round
that bend. Build a mound of shoes a month of Sundays. Dismantled to be built again. Call on that horse and wagon, toward the setting sun. Call on that horse and wagon, toward the rising sun. Eyes on that bend. Heart beating with expectation.” He held her, kissed her lips, her clouded eyes, all despair stripped from them as they moved toward a place of light that ended all past pain.

  “And that thing we never living without,” he whispered. “That thing we call Apasavello. The Belief. In life, in the hope of it.”

  This Day

  AUSTRIA, 1944

  It is in the second month that the soldiers from the barn finally come to take them. There is the sound of trucks arriving, the sound of stones spitting up from the dirt track that leads from the road to the farm, the slamming of doors, metal on metal. Jakob feels the smash of them in his chest, like a stack of red bricks cracking. He hears footsteps. The cupboard door opens, the light in his eyes. He goes to scream, but the sound stops in the wreck of his chest, and he exhales precious air.

  Markus is in front of him, his eyes wide with fear.

  “You have to go now, Jakob, my boy. They are going to find you. They have come to look. We cannot wait any longer. Out of the back door. To the forest. And then you run south. South until you get to the border. If you wait in the woods they will find you. The man Moreali, he knows you are coming. He will cross you over to the other side. You hear? Now go.”

  His bony hand reaches for Jakob’s, grips and pulls at it.

  “You were what I held onto when life was full of loss” is the last thing Markus says to him. “Do you know that? Do you?” And that is it. That is the last of him, his gray-eyed gray-hairedness. He is the color of an old pearl. Jakob watches him go, scurrying into the kitchen, where he hears the front door slam open, loose hinges ripping from the wood like ice cracking, and the sound of breaking glass. Heavy boots sound on the stone flags, the tap of a metal sole and a shout, thick with spittle. A table is wrenched across the stone flags. Then there is a gunshot, just the one, but the sound of it reverberates in his ears over and over.

  Until weak limbed, rope thin, and quivering, Jakob crawls out from the warmth of his triangle.

  “Cherub,” he calls. “Loslow.”

  The cupboard doors are open, and there, hunched in the splintered darkness, are his companions, raw and slight, with hollowed jowls, and hair that is barely distinguishable from the jaundiced pallor of their skin. Too much hollowness. Too much bone.

  “Cherub,” Jakob chokes, seeing him for the first time, and the image he has held for months and months, the image of this treasured man—arms splayed out above the handles of his bike, as close to flying as he can get without leaving the ground, head tipped back, a smile too wide for his face to contain—shatters. Of that image, only a shriveled emaciation remains. A sunken hole, all nose and teeth. “Cherub,” Jakob cries. “What you gone and done? What you gone and done, Cherub?”

  For in front of him is not the image of two men who have eaten more over the past weeks so that they might grow strong enough to run alongside him, but rather of two who have gone without. Of two who have put aside half of every meal, day by day, morsel by morsel; the husk of their bread, the pulp of their potato, the hot burning goodness of their soup, so that a small gypsy boy, who lay cramped in a triangle cupboard, who for them had become the very essence of hope, might run toward freedom.

  “Go,” Cherub weeps. “You must go.”

  Jakob reaches for him, grasps his hands. “I cannot. I cannot without you.”

  “We are with you, Jakob. We are very near. Always near.”

  “Run now,” Loslow echoes. “You must run. You must not stop.”

  Jakob sobs.

  “Please,” Cherub whispers. Their hands pressed palm to palm. All the love in their fingertips. “Please, my beloved boy.”

  Te den, xa, te maren, de-nash, Jakob has been taught. A whispered plea. Run if you can. Always, if you can.

  And so, a small wooden box clutched to his chest, a stone of lapis lazuli in his hand, Jakob, a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish, pulls open the back door and runs out, beneath a blue sky, alone.

  Spourz na kolory, he has had whispered to him all his life. See the colors, my boy. Tell me what you see.

  Malachite, azurite, vermilion, mauve. Rusted ochre from a mossy bough. Steely white from the sap of the youngest tree. He runs on. Cremona orange, saffron yellow.

  The sky—Kek ceri pe phuv perade—it has not fallen to the earth. Kek jag xalem. He eats no fire. Kek thuv pilem. Drinks no smoke. Kek thaj praxo. Becomes not dust.

  He knows how to read the wind. He knows how to read the clouds. When to seek shelter, when not. Knows which tree to interpret the land by, knows to seek out the giant that stands wider and higher than all the others, or the tree that stands alone. Knows too that sweet is south facing, that the berries he finds will be riper on the southerly side. Knows which flowers follow the sun, which lift their heads to face the golden orb in the sky. Knows to sleep where the spider webs cling to the nooks and crannies, where the wind won’t find them or him as he slumbers beneath their jewel-frosted weaves on a pillow of moss. He has grown up directing himself with the wind and the shadows. He is not afraid of them.

  “Zyli wsrod roz,” he whispers to himself, his breath hot in his ears, his feet pounding toward the greenest grass, swift and invisible. “They lived among the roses. Nie znali burz. And they did not know of any storms. Nie znali burz. And they did not know of any storms.”

  BACKGROUND

  The Porrajmos is the Gypsy Holocaust. It means “the Devouring.” The exact number of Romani lives lost by 1945 is unknown. But figures from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Institute in Washington, DC, puts the number at “between a half and one-and-a-half million.”

  In December 8, 1938 Himmler’s “Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race” marked the beginning of plans to exterminate all Sinti and Roma. In February 1939 a brief by Johannes Behrendt of the Nazi Office of Racial Hygiene stated that “all gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The aim should be the elimination without hesitation of this defective population.”

  A Chronology of Roma Persecution:

  1933: Officials in Burgenland, Austria, call for the withdrawal of all civil rights of Roma.

  1935: Marriages between gypsies and Germans are banned.

  1936: The Roma are no longer given the right to vote.

  1938: “Gypsy Clean-Up Week”—the start of the Porrajmos (the Gypsy Holocaust) where hundreds of Sinti and Roma throughout Germany and Austria are rounded up and incarcerated.

  1940: January—the first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust takes place: 250 Romani children in Buchenwald concentration camp are used as guinea pigs to test the Zyklon-B gas crystals. There are no survivors. August: Internment camps are built throughout Austria.

  1941: 5000 Roma are sent to the Jewish ghetto of Lodz in Poland.

  1942: Himmler orders the deportation of all German Roma to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the same time all 5,000 gypsies in the Lodz ghetto are transported to Chelmo and gassed.

  1943: March—1,700 Romani men, women, and children are gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In July Himmler orders that all Roma are to be killed.

  1944: August 2—Zigeunernacht (Gypsy Night) takes place. 4,000 gypsies are dragged screaming to the gas chamber and killed.

  1945: January 27—Soviet soldiers reach Auschwitz and find one Roma survivor.

  The Killing Tree:

  So as not to waste bullets, other methods were adopted to kill children and babies. Some were drowned. Others were picked up by their feet and swung against the trunk of a tree.

  The mass murder of gypsies was not recognized at the Nuremberg trials, and not a single gypsy was called to witness. To this day only one guard has received a sentence for crimes against them.

  The Nazi genocide of the gypsies was only officially acknowled
ged in 1982 by West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, but even then the few gypsy survivors struggled to navigate the bureaucratic obstacles, and, unlike their Jewish counterparts, gypsies orphaned by Nazis do not qualify for reparations.

  It was not until April 14, 1994, that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial held its first commemoration of gypsy victims.

  In 1926, the Swiss charity Pro Juventute established the Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse [Charity for the Children of the Country Road] with the support of the Swiss Federal Council.

  As its director, Pro Juventute named the Romanist Alfred Siegfried (1890–1972) whose research focused on “Vagantenkindern” [children of vagrants]. He defined his task as follows:

  “Whoever wants to combat vagrancy successfully has to try to explode the union of the traveling peoples, he has to rip apart the family ties. There is no other way. Chances of success are only then favorable, when the children can be totally isolated from the parents.”

  Between 1926 and 1973, social workers would receive a notice from either a citizen or the local police that a group of “itinerants” had arrived in the vicinity. Siegfried’s people would then, accompanied by policemen, drive to the campsite of the Yenish and demand that the children be handed over. Often, resistance was met with force. The children were taken to a home for orphans. Children who escaped were caught again and sent to psychiatric clinics for evaluation. Difficult children ended up in juvenile hall, psychiatric units, or prison. Over 700 gypsy children suffered this fate.

  Yenish is a term for travelers of Swiss origin. They are the third-largest population of nomadic people in Europe. They differ culturally and ethnically from the Roma. Today 35,000 Jenische live in Switzerland. Only about 5,000 of them live the traveler lifestyle.

  The Romani are a diaspora ethnicity of Indian origin who arrived in midwest Asia, then Europe, at least one thousand years ago. They are called in the world by various names such as Romany, Roma, Zigeuner, Cigáni, or Gitano, but in their own language, Romani, they are known collectively as Romane. They live mostly in Europe and the Americas.