Read Online Jakob’s Colors by Lindsay Hawdon - Free Book Online

shadows, shapes where there are no shapes. Even the crack of his own feet over brittle twigs punctures him with the conviction that he is caught, and every moment that passes he imagines iron-boned hands grabbing him.
    But night after night they do not find him. He succeeds at least in this single task. And then finally, from sheer exhaustion, he finds a dwelling in the ground, a crack of rock and soil. He falls into it, stumbles down and lays his head on the still sun-warmed rocks, the gold dust of lichen sticking to his cheek. Forest slugs slither over him, moist like his sister’s kisses. He licks the salt from his stone. He sucks the cold out of it and imagines it is water.
    â€œMamo?” he hears his own voice pleading, claustrophobic with longing. “Mamo?” And the answer. Always silence.
    â€œWhat do you see?” she had once asked as he closed his eyes and tilted his face to the sun. “It does not have to be darkness. It does not have to be cold.” She was talking of death as she held him in her arms.
    For two nights and a day he lies in the dampness of the dwelling, clutching his box, his stone, hiding in the darkness and the fog of his own sleep, racked with dreams of nostalgia, waking always with the pain of recognition that the nightmare is the life he is now living. Ceri pe phuv perade . As if the sky has fallen to the earth. Jag xalem . He eats fire. Thuv pilem . Drinks smoke. Thaj praxo . Becomes dust.
    But on the second morning a voice wakes him.
    â€œAre you alive?” a man asks softly, and when he looks up a pale lilac-veined hand is reaching out for his. Jakob shrinks back. His voice is lost in the earth. His hands hold clumps of it. In that moment he feels that he has lived long enough, that he should like to stay as he is, curled up against the dewy morning cold, in a ball of damp leaves, waiting till the blood dries up inside him. There is nothing left. Even the fear has withered, like desert grass.
    May I die now? he thinks to himself.
    â€œDon’t be afraid,” the man says. “You must not be afraid.” He pulls Jakob up, the grip on his arm so firm Jakob is unable to resist. He looks up to a face that seems unused to smiling, a face made gentle with years of melancholy. He is a gray old man under the silver stubble of his shaven head. As if the colors have left with his smiles. “You are all right,” the man says, seeing the tremor in Jakob’s limbs. “Everything will be all right. I promise you that.”
    Too weak to resist, Jakob lets himself be led out of the dark woods, the dirty light of dawn creeping through the breeze-blown leaves, a sky of chrome blue in the east that seems too blue for their lives. They move across a field, keeping to the shadows and a dip in the eastern hedges. They stumble down a slope to the broken-tiled roof of a small, low farmhouse, the land long since taken from it on a day when soldiers had arrived and claimed it as their own. The old man tells him that they had eaten all the livestock, feasting off the herd of long-lashedcows. They had taken eggs, still warm, from beneath the feathers of roosting hens, stripped unripe vegetables from the ground, ravaged time as carelessly they ripped open the earth. They now used the farm and the pillaged village beyond it as a stopover from one valley to the next.
    The German border lay a day’s journey north from here. The Swiss a day’s journey south. And there were rumors of a work camp a day’s journey farther west, where slivers of people, ghost remnants, hollow eyed and hollow hearted, dug earth behind high barbed wire fences. The farmhouse and the nearby village lie between all three of these, the old man explains. Passing trucks, filled with passing soldiers use the barn as a place of refuge. Soldiers sleep there, on makeshift beds to break their daylong journeys. Their trucks made by convicts. Bolts and cogs, wheel clamps, suspension cables,