Jakob’s Colors (2 page)

“Don't be afraid,” he had whispered.

And she had shaken her head, felt the tears in her eyes. It was not him she had been afraid of. No, for him she had felt only gratitude,
that strange boy with his tousled hair and funny talk who had brought her there. Her fears were a residue of the place they had run from.

“You do not know my name,” she had said.

“So tell me.”

“It is Lor.”

“And mine?” he asked.

She already knew it. “You are Yavy.”

“Them tears are bright in your eyes, Lor,” he had said. “No matter if they spill over. Don't be thinking back,” he had told her. “I been long used to not thinking back. Tell me what you want of your life. What you dreaming of in your while-away days.”

She stood now in the center of that same room, the sounds of her children, his children, softly sleeping behind her, and only then did she weep. The tears filled and blurred her vision, spilling over. So many she could not dry them with her hands.

“Yavy,” she whispered. “Where are you? Please, Yavy, I need you.”

A
t first Jakob makes himself aware of nothing but the movement of his own limbs; the crease of his cotton shorts, the thud of his own feet, brittle twigs that have fallen a whole long winter before cracking beneath his tread. He squeezes the stone in his hand, holds tight to his box. He runs until the only sounds are forest sounds: the ghost-hoot of an owl, breeze-blown branches, and the creaking of trunks. He leans against the mottled bark to catch his breath. How he longs to be small enough to hide in the crevices.

“The mushroom is the ant's umbrella,” his father used to say. How he longs to be a passing ant.

He takes in the rusted ochre from a mossy bough. He runs on. Steely white from the sap of a chestnut tree.

“Lead white,” his father would have likened it to. “The white of whites, the cruelest—black at its core. Women dying for this white, paint the soft canvas of their cheeks with the sweet poison of iron oxide, float in clouds of lethargy before it stealing their shine. Before they fainting to the floor.”

Jakob sticks to the paths that run from north to south. He knows how to read a path. Knows how to seek out the contrasts of damp and
dry that form when the sun shines directly down. He knows how to read the puddles, to read the wind direction from the sediment that collects at the edges, green tinted and murky, and to read the moss that settles on the northern damper sides of rocks and pebbles. He 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, affected only by the elements. Knows to look which way the branches grow, how they will splay toward the highest sun. And, too, that sweet is south facing, that the nuts and berries he finds will be riper on the southerly side. He knows which flowers follow the sun, which lift their heads to face the golden orb in the sky.

“Run if you can,” he has been taught. “Always if you can, my boy. With them shadows over your left shoulder at sunset. Run south.”

Why south?

“Because south is safe. Closer to the sun.”

South to where, then?

But there is no “to where.” He runs simply to survive. Moves on from forest to field, from field to forest, forages for mushrooms, dandelions, nettles that he pounds with stones and sucks the juice from. He 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. And he knows how to read the clouds, when to seek shelter, when not. Knows the coming of a storm, the vertical towers that will fill the sky, swelling as the warm air rises rapidly, or the lighter wisps that come with the fairer weather, and the change in their hue: darker where there is open water, lighter where there is snow. He knows how to make a night dial, knows how to join the two points in a crescent moon so that they will lead him south. He has grown up directing himself with the wind and the shadows. This is familiar to him. It is the loneliness that is not. He has never, until this time, been so alone.

He is afraid to sleep. His dreams have him crushed beneath mounds of loam and silt, clogging his mouth with clay, his eyes with darkness.
Pe kokala me sutem
. He sleeps on bones.
Bi jakhengo achilem
. Becomes without eyes. He breathes in grit, stifles his screams, and
claws at the warm earth above him. Jakob—a half-blood gypsy child of Roma and Yenish. He scratches the loose soil away, scrapes aside the stones, the splintered roots, soaked with blood, until finally his fingers feel the wind. And then, through a crack in the earth, he catches a glimpse of the blue lapis sky.

He wakes gasping, pulls himself upward, gulping air, choking with memory, as he stumbles to his feet.

“Them shadows moving as the sun commands,” his father had told him. “You are the sun, my boy. You are the sun.”

Rusted ochre from a mossy bough. Steely white from the sap of a chestnut tree. See that. Only that.

“Don't be afraid, Jakob,” his father had said, his voice weak and wavering, his blue-stained fingers faded, a mere memory of the color that most defined him. “
Spourz na kolory
. Tell me what you seeing, Jakob,” he had whispered.

There is only day and night and the survival of each. How, he does not know. Why, he does not dare to question.
Te den, xa, te maren, de-nash
. A whispered plea. There is nothing else but that whispered plea. No longing to live. For he has none. All he has is the instruction to do so. To run is to live. To fight for it. So again he runs on. And on. A ragged density to his breath that wards off tears as the ice of a winter wind freezes the sweat on him.

It is as if the sky has fallen to the earth.
Ceri pe phuv perade
.

He eats only fire.
Jag xalem
.

Drinks only smoke.
Thuv pilem
.

Becomes dust.
Thaj praxo
.

But in the end the hunger of winter forces him from the woods. He hears the toll of a town's heavy bell before he sees the red-tiled roofs of a village that begins where the trees end. He sees a crowd, hears the murmur of voices, a melodic chatter, and finds courage with the sound of it. He creeps out from the shadows and under the cover of leaden clouds finds himself on the thrumming outskirts of a busy market.

He stands by the rusted remains of a truck, the wheels and doors long wrenched from it. A small boy, the same height as he, is siphoning
gasoline from the cap, sucking it up through a pipe into his mouth, choking when the liquid spurts through. It gushes momentarily, then slows to a rhythmic drip that lands in a metal bucket, ticking away time like a clock. Another boy, with hair like sedge grass, sits on the ground beside him, struggling to make shoes out of a rubber tire with a blunt knife, his knees so tight you can see the white of bone through his translucent skin.

An old man passes by, jolts against Jakob. He mumbles something Jakob doesn't understand and walks on, his voice gravelly with phlegm that he coughs up at intervals, retching into his grime-clogged sleeve. Jakob watches the old man undo his fly, turn toward a mud brick building, and address it in conversation as he urinates against the guttering pipe that is punctured with bullet holes. His piss is the color of creosote; he himself the color of decay. Jakob walks on, the stench of aged urine on the wind, comforted, despite that, to be in the company of humanity.

The ground is still wet with recent rainfall, but drying as the sun pushes through the clouds. Jakob makes a footprint on the edge of a puddle and wonders if it will still be there at day's end as a mark of his existence. A cart rattles past on loose wheels. He watches the judder and roll of them. He sees an apple glint in the sun. It sits on the edge of a stall, worm ridden, but red and ripe, and aware suddenly of the clenching pain of hunger in his stomach, he reaches out to take it.

The hand that grabs his wrist is rough and calloused.

“If you take it, they will kill you. It means that much to them,” says a voice hoarsely. Jakob looks up toward the silhouette of the man who stands over him. His face is stubbled, his two green eyes glinting in the roughness of it. Bright but small, deeply set and overshadowed by thick dark eyebrows that give him the appearance of a permanent frown. “You'll take my advice, yes?” the man says. His stubble moves as he talks. He lets go of Jakob's wrist, leaving fingerprints on his skin. “It is simple. You want to eat; you earn it. I saw you come from the woods, yes? You have been in them long?” he asks. Jakob takes in features that are large, bulbous; a nose that curves outward from the bridge, bent and flattened at the tip as if it has felt the full force
of a fist time and time again. His skin is pitted and rough, his hair unwashed, grease scented, and lank upon his scalp with small tufts sprouting from his nostrils and ears. Jakob does not say anything. He is too afraid. The man shrugs.

“As you like. How old are you?”

“Eight,” Jakob manages.

“You are small for eight, yes?” Again he shrugs. “And your name? Again as you like. I am Walther. Walther Bauer. I've no qualms in telling you that. I have lived here all my life, like my father and his father before me. Anyone in these parts could tell you my name if you asked them. So, boy, do you know how to make a fire that doesn't smoke?”

Jakob shakes his head.

“Let me show you. Let me save your little life, such as you may or may not need.”

He leads him back into the forest and stops in a place where the land dips into a dwelling of red rocks. “If you are to live in the forest, my little friend, then this you must learn to do. If you want to live.” Walther kneels and, with his hands, begins to dig. His hands are immense, covered in thick dark hair that coils at the tips. “You need a chimney, you see, but a chimney that will not point up into the sky. Instead, it must go down into the ground. We dig, come.”

Jakob kneels beside him and scrapes back the soil from the hole Walther has already made. The dirt pushes down into his nails and he smells the familiar mushroom scent of trapped earth. His breath catches. He feels for his stone. Squeezes it through the fabric of his pocket. Closes his eyes. Reels slightly with the sudden flash of memory that transports him all too easily back to that place, back to that field again, where the Y-shaped tree stands out against the clear sky.

He is there once more, watching it from the hidden depths of the forest. He is crouched down low behind a dense blackness of bracken, his knees upon a soft blanket of moss that holds only a memory of rainfall. His breath comes in shallow bursts, as if to remind him of what has just passed. He knows he should run, knows he should run far and fast. But he cannot bear to leave. Cannot bear to go where the scent of them will not reach him. He peers through the gaps in the
bracken, out across the field that is lit with sporadic moonlight, flickering out from behind passing clouds and blue with the long shadows of clumped grasses. He can see the tree, bone white in the moonlight, stark against the velvet sky. But around it there is no movement, no shift or sleight of hand. Not even a wing beat, or scurried dance from a smaller creature. Just an eerie stillness, a silence, as if all else has fled with what has passed.

“Enough,” says Walther when the hole reaches the length of his arm. His voice breaks Jakob from his reverie. The tree disappears. The field disappears. There is only the wood in which he now kneels. There is only Walther. “So, you know how to light a fire?” the older man asks.

Jakob nods. Walther hands him a rag and a scattering of flint pieces from the breast pocket of his worn gray suit. One hard, one shimmering with quartz. Jakob has been taught to pick out his fire flint carefully.

“Mostly you'll be wanting a star in your stone,” his father had told him from as far back as he can remember. “To see it shine. Second to that, an edge. If not, pick the hardest you can find. If not that, the grayest. And if a stone is wet, you best be discarding it.”

Jakob collects paper birch bark that peels off the trunk that has outgrown it easily, a small pile of tinder, picked from higher, drier ground. Then he strikes the two of them together, igniting sparks against the stripped bark. He makes a flame first, then another as the wood catches and lights.

“So you can,” says Walther, impressed. “So you can,” and he shows him then how to cover the smoke, how to trap it and direct it down into the tunnel that they have dug, their chimney beneath the ground.

Jakob is warm for the first time in weeks. The flames lick up under the cover of the canopy, white at their core. They dance smokelessly.

“You have lice,” Walther says. “Best get rid of them.”

He tells him to undress, to hold his clothes over the fire and Jakob does as he is told, layer by layer, holding the fabric as close to the heat as he can bear. The lice drop from it, singeing in the flames. He redresses, the cloth no longer scratching. Next Walther cuts his hair, cuts it short
and coarsely with the blade of his knife. “They will drive you mad with their itching. Better to put an end to it,” he tells him.

Afterward they sit a while, easily silent in each other's company.

“So,” says Walther eventually, and he holds up the apple that Jakob had reached to take. “You have earned your apple.”

He throws it across to him. Hands him his knife. Jakob looks up. Wants to lean against the warmth of the older man, but instead takes the knife, uses it to cut thin slivers that his loose teeth can chew. The sour sweetness spurts up into the ridge of his mouth, stinging his ulcerated gums.

“You can sleep at the market for now. Work, eat. I will show you how it can be done.”

I
n the early morning De Clomp was lit with shafts of sunlight that warmed gold squares on the oak floorboards. Malutki and Eliza sat upon these squares, rolling marbles across the floor. Jakob sat with his snails that he'd taken from their box, setting them down to move across the shadows. It was too early for the bar to have opened, and Alfredo assured them they would be safe, that they would have the place to themselves, empty tables and empty chairs and an echo of their own voices. Alfredo had given them bread and slices of cheese to eat, with glasses of milk that had arrived on a cart at first light, sloshing in metal jugs that clanked bell-like against each other.

Jakob lifted up a snail, looked at the underside of it. “Drying up in the sunlight, Ma,” he said.

Lor was barely listening. To the right of where they were sitting was the place she had once regarded as “her place,” or “his place,” sometimes “their place.” Either way, it was where she and Yavy had once known to look for the other. In the far corner, beneath a bookshelf stacked and cramped with old books, leather covered with hearty browns, mahoganies, and greens. It was so familiar, even after all these years. She could remember clearly how it had been to enter
De Clomp and see him there, slumped and reading or pushing away the contents of his plate, a last small mouthful resting in its center, which he would unconsciously leave. Unlike the Romans, she used to think, who vomited in bowls so they could consume more, but deliberately left a morsel to inform their host that they were full. For Yavy it was something deeper than that. A need to know that, should he need it, there was food enough for him to eat. That he would not starve.

“De Clomp. The Shoe,” he had said the very first time they had sat in that place, before it had become their own. “If you had to, would you go choosing them shoes over your winter coat?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes. Water first. Food. Then shoes. If that was the choice.”

He had gone on to tell her a story about shoes, a pile of shoes in a village where he had once lived.

“So high it reached the rooftops of them houses,” he had told her. “We piled it for a month of Sundays. Gathered in the village square after church, an' when that bell rang out we took off our shoes, children and adults, flinging them into the center of that square.” He used his hands when he spoke, gesticulated for emphasis. She loved to watch him, listen to him, a bright light in a room.

“And when every one of us was shoeless an' that bell sounding out again,” he said, “as quickly as we discarded them, we found them, clambering through that pyramid of shoes for our single pair, seeking out our friends' instead, our mothers' or our brothers', throwing it to them, again seeking out our own. An' at the end of it all, when that mound of shoes was no more, if all of us had found our pair, then we'd won the game. If not, we had lost.”

She smiled with the memory. When it came, war had not been such a shock to him as it had to her. He had lived with the fight for survival long before it.

Behind the bar Alfredo was clinking glasses and bottles together. From time to time he looked across at Lor, his face questioning, but never asking. She could study his face in the morning light. Certainly it had aged since the last time she had seen him, but aged merrily. His
was a giant of a face; the splayed expanse of his nose, the round shelf of his chin. The local children laid coins across it, and made him chew tough hunks of meat, awed that the coins stayed balanced. Of Italian descent, his parents had fled Italy in the diaspora of the 1860s, fleeing poverty and a cholera epidemic that had wiped out fifty-five thousand Italians living in the south. Like his father, and his father before him, Alfredo was a tower of a man, a bulk of bone and flesh. His size was something he'd had to plead forgiveness for all his life, and the clumsiness that came with it, forever knocking against the world around him. He had ventured outside his hometown only once and that was to see the bear pit in Bern, where he'd stared down into the dry-eyed silence of two cramped beasts and felt akin to their bulk in a way he had never felt with any other human being before. Up above, the electric lines had spanned from house to house, lighting up the bears' dumb suffering beneath, and he'd longed to take them back with him to the dark of his own sky. At night with his wife, he slept shallowly, afraid that he might roll and squash her small frame. He had never found a wedding ring to fit his fourth finger. The muscle bulged there like a walrus.

“I have something special for you,” he said, seeing Lor looking at him. He disappeared out into the back and returned with something hidden in his giant hand. “For you and the children.” In his palm lay a lemon that he placed upon the bar as if it were made of glass. It was rough, the outer skin shriveled somewhat, but the yellow of it stood out against the night-brown of the wood surface, like a small star.

“We couldn't,” Lor said. “You must have it.”

Alfredo shook his head. “They grow them here. Most are taken, but a few . . .” and his eyes shone. “Here,” he said, bringing out a knife and cutting her a waxy slice, an inch thick. “Eat it all, skin and everything. It will change something. It will begin something.”

She did as he said, crunched into the pith, the citrus sharpness making her eyes water. She had not tasted anything like it for months.

“You're crying, Ma?” Jakob asked, his eyes forever watchful.

“No. It's the lemon. It is sharp.”

“I can try it?”

“You can. Or we can dilute it with water.”

But he wanted to taste it as she had tasted it, and his eyes filled like her own and he laughed because of that, and she thought how long it had been since she'd seen him laugh and how she'd forgotten how beautiful he was.

“I love you,” she told him.

“Yes,” he replied simply. He sucked the sourness down to the skin. Ate the skin, then licked his fingers.

“What did it change?” Alfredo asked him.

“Made me like a bell, my whole self ringing,” Jakob replied.

Alfredo watched them as he continued to polish his rows of glasses.

“I will do all I can to hide you,” he said at length.

“I know.” She reached for his hand. “But he is not here.”

“No.”

“I thought . . .”

“I know.”

“Have you heard anything?”

Alfredo shook his head. “I will ask around.”

Lor smiled sadly. “We need to sleep and eat well. That is all. Is that possible?”

“Yes, that's possible. I can feed you.”

She watched him, aching for the normality of polished glass, and wondered if her life had ever been that way.

“Don't be afraid no more,” Yavy had told her. “We'll be safe here awhile. No one will be finding us.”

Then he had pulled from the pocket of his oversized coat a small book, navy blue and leather bound with gold embroidered along the spine, small enough to hold in the palm of one hand.

“I don't know what it reads. It's in your language,” he told her. “But I thought you'd like it to run your eyes over.”

She had picked it up, had traced her hand down the length of the spine, opened the brittle pages, and smelled the musty scent of a book that had not been read in a long while. It was a book of old English folk stories.

“You like it?” he had asked, and for the first time she had heard a nervousness in his voice.

“I like it,” she had assured him.

“Very much?”

“Yes, very much. Thank you for it,” she had said, and when she looked his face was lit up with pleasure, as if she had given him something, not received it.

“Do you think I would feel it if he were dead?” she asked Alfredo now, quietly.

He did not answer. Lor looked away. Outside the sun had risen over the rooftops and was flooding in through the windows of De Clomp. They should not stay down in the bar for much longer. Already there was a scattering of people out on the streets.

“I will find him,” she said.