Free Jakob’s Colors by Lindsay Hawdon

smallness of his fifth.
    At these times there is a sound that Jakob becomes aware of, when he and Cherub are playing and Loslow is silent. A pitter-patter of something back and forth across the floor.
    â€œWhat is that sounding, Cherub?” he eventually asks. “Mice?”
    â€œNo, that is Loslow. He is playing his piano.”
    They wait until the sound of nimble fingers upon the floor stops.
    â€œYou are a pianist, Loslow?” Jakob asks.
    â€œYes. I have owned a piano since I was six years old. I began to play when I was five, and for my next birthday my parents knocked through the wall of their kitchen to fit a grand beech-veneered Weinbach into our home. As a consequence of their sacrifice, I practiced hard. Now I play for the Vienna Philharmonic, twice as a soloist. You must not let a war stop you practicing the one thing you have worked so hard for. My imagination demanded that I brought my piano with me,” Loslow tells him. “Can you bow, Jakob? I don’t suppose you’ve ever had the opportunity.”
    â€œNo, I never need to be bowing.”
    â€œWell, that is something we must see to when we get out of here. To bow well is to make a gentleman of you. And to be a gentleman is one of the most useful tools a man can learn.” He pauses. “Hear this,” he continues. “I saw a thing in my hometown. A bomb had exploded in the main street, beside a breadline of thirty men and women. They’d been waiting in the cold for over three hours for their bread, and in the end they never got any. But the next day, this old man he comes with a violin and he sits on this fire-charred chair, outside where the breadline had been, dressed in his formal black evening clothes, and he plays. He plays terribly, a screeching sad song that is painful to everyone’s ears. But nevertheless, without fail, every day after this he plays as artillery gunfire explodes around him. And every day, after he has played, he bows, as if an audience were applauding him. I love that he does this. He is no longer afraid, you see, and because of that I like to think he is still playing. Do you not think so, Jakob? Do you not think that old man is still playing his tuneless song?”
    But the yes sticks in Jakob’s throat and will not sound. He leans his head against the cupboard darkness, hearing the wooden plankscontract with the coming cold of night, and watches the light beneath his door lengthen and slowly ebb.
    That night he wakes to the sound of sobbing, a retching, haunting sound, full of tears and mucus. It is Loslow. All the clipped aristocracy rubbed from him, in the rawness of distress.
    â€œPlease, no?” he cries. “Don’t hurt him. Please no.”
    And behind that he hears Cherub. “It is okay, my friend,” he is whispering, his voice calm and clear. “It has passed now. It has passed.”
    â€œWhat is this world we live in?” Loslow is asking. “I cannot bear it.”
    To which Cherub replies the same thing, over and over again, like a lament. “It has passed. I am here now. I am right here.”
    Curled in his cupboard, Jakob listens to the endless sobs that rack the night, and the continuous stream of Cherub’s comforting words, on and on until eventually the sobbing stills. Until eventually Loslow goes back to his precious piano, to his past of vinegar and newspaper with which his mother used to polish the ivory keys. Back to the place where he would play and play, until there was only the music.
    For Loslow does not know if he was born with it or not. He’s read Proust and Helmholtz, from the biomusicology manuals he once ordered in abundance. And neither one of them can really explain why he can recognize a perfect middle C on the piano, or the E of a passing bicycle bell. Or how when he plays in D major he hears also a tractor outside droning in E-flat, so that sometimes he struggles to follow his own tune, such is the other