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

lavender that his mother rubbed in her hair. He has never known four walls. Never bricks and mortar. He closes his eyes. Breathes in splinters. Breathes out his past.
    It is then that he hears a shifting of fabric behind the highest wall of his cupboard. That and then farther away, more muffled, a sudden cough that gives rise to a spasmodic eruption of phlegm-filled chokes. Jakob does not move. Engulfed once more, fear, like floodwater, filling his triangle.
    â€œJakob,” the voice closest says, softly spoken. “That is your name?” Jakob stays silent, dares not answer. “It is all right. You will see it is all right?” the voice says, intruding into his only space. Jakob curls up, longing for silence and darkness. These are the only places of life for him now. He feels he can exist only inside them.
    A long night draws on, full of moon shadows that slide past the gap beneath his cupboard door, lengthening, then shortening with the arctic light of dawn. He sleeps, sleeps deeply for the first time in a long time, and strangely, when he wakes, what he feels first is the warmth of his cupboard, the solace that there is no more running to be done, no more food to be foraged, paths to be followed. He has found a place now that in the very constriction of its size offers a sanctuary from the world outside.
    He feels for his box, pushed down into the lowest corner of his cupboard. The wood is smooth, warm, the metal clasp a crescent of silver beneath his touch. He opens it, finds a flat, lake-smoothed circle of glass, pale as cloud when he holds it up against the crack of light beneath his door. He presses it between his thumb and forefinger. Strokes it back and forth around the curved edges. Holds it to his lips. To his cheek, against the lids of his eyes. He thinks he hears the lakein his ear, as if the pebble had lain for so long on the silty bottom that the sound of it had somehow penetrated through and remained.
    â€œJakob,” the voice next to his says again, slight and shaky, hesitating on the harder consonants as if to expel them from his mouth takes effort. “Jakob, that is your name, yes?”
    Jakob replaces the glass and closes the lid of his box.
    â€œYes,” he whispers, finally able to speak. “That is my name.”
    â€œAnd Cherub is mine.”
    In the end it turns out that there are two others in the adjoining cupboards. The voice closest to his belongs to Cherub, and the voice next to Cherub’s belongs to a man called Loslow. Both of them are Jewish.
    â€œJakob, have you ever tasted Swiss chocolate?” Cherub asks.
    â€œNo,” Jakob whispers, and because he cannot see Cherub’s face he imagines what it might look like, matching the voice to someone he has once known and liked: the tall and wiry twenty-something boy on the rusty black bike who used to bring his family news, wind chased and avian with the flight of his wheels, and whose wide, smiling mouth exuded contentment.
    â€œJakob, it’s the most wonderful taste in all the world. It’s like the creamiest, sweetest milk you’ve ever tried, and then it’s more than that. It’s like café crème, honey, and bitter cocoa all together. That is what Swiss chocolate is like.”
    â€œI most long for cheese.” Loslow speaks then, whose voice in contrast is aristocratically clipped and hoarse, an older man, Jakob imagines, with cheekbones of distinction and polished silver hair that shines like quartz. “The strongest, bluest cheese,” Loslow says. “The kind you can smell through walls.”
    Jakob comes to recognize the tips of Cherub’s fingers through a tiny hole in the partition between their two spaces. It begins with a game that is unspoken, a silent dance between their hands. Jakob has to guess which of Cherub’s fingers is pressing into the hole. He does it by the feel and size of each tip, the roughness of Cherub’s forefinger and thumb, the