Free Jakob’s Colors by Lindsay Hawdon Page B

his face, inhales palmfuls of it. Becomes a triangle once more. Yes, he tells himself—it is a goods train. Just a goods train.
    But at other times throughout the week the army trucks arrive, dropping off one group and picking up another, and then there is no escaping from remembering the fragility of the place in which they hide. They hear them trundling down the track to the house. The wood rattles with the weight and speed. The ground vibrates. They hear voices outside behind the stone yard, and occasionally in the kitchen. At these times they will not move, trying to ascertain whether they are village voices or accent stained. Jakob holds his breath. He presses his palms down hard on the floor to stop his hands from trembling, and after the voices disappear his joints ache.
    Every afternoon Markus’s steps sound in the hallway. Jakob recognizes them by the low shuffle of his feet that never really leave the ground and the ratchet-click of his knees when he bends to open the cupboard door.
    â€œWere they here, Markus? Were they here?” Loslow asks.
    â€œThey came for my leeks,” he will tell them. His leeks, his apples, his beans. “My precious leeks. As if they had sniffed them out like dogs.”
    When he gets to Jakob’s cupboard the boy will see the crimson marks that he wears like a bracelet on his right wrist, or his left, the slight tremor of his hand, a bruise on his face that in the oncoming days will change from mauve, to violet, to dull viridian green.
    â€œThey hurt you, Markus,” Jakob says over and over, a boy again, weeping with the sight of him.
    Markus shrugs. “A firm handshake,” he always answers. “A mere slap. Simply bravado. That is all.” And then, “Jakob, my boy, you are going to be such a handsome man when you grow up,” as if this were his way of building Jakob’s strength. Then he allows Jakob to rush swiftly to the latrine, a bucket placed at the opening of the doorway to the cellar stairs, where he rids himself of twenty-four hours of confinement, and fleetingly catches a small chink of the sky in the hallway window: blue, gray, mauve in the earliest hours, peach in the latest, clear or cloud covered. He spies it through the dirt-smeared glass. Sometimes lingers.
    â€œMove on, Jakob. Move on,” Markus urges him. And reluctantly he does so.
    Markus hands him a hot cup of watery soup on his return, nervous and eager for him to be hidden once more. And Jakob crawls back into his cupboard, catches through the cracks in his door a glimpse of Cherub passing: white cloth, white limbs, thin as thread, and clamps his eyes shut so as not to see more.
    There are small hunks of bread to be had, and an occasional potato that he sucks and gnaws, and always this one cup that Jakob holds to warm his hands first. Clover he thinks, mallow, sometimes nettle. He will take a gulp, when it is still too hot, feeling the sting on his lips and at the back of his throat, the deep throb as it swills into his chest. And this is a pain he looks forward to, such is it an event in the hours and days that pass so slowly. He longs for a lemon. For the citrus sharpness to come after the heat, as his gums bleed.
    â€œYou’ll get to have the girl of your dreams,” Markus says, and Jakob catches the flash of his granite-eyed smile before the doorcloses and once more there is only cupboard darkness. “The world is your clam.”
    â€œOyster. You surely mean the world is his oyster,” Loslow says with a gritty chuckle, as he in turn hobbles back from the latrine, the sound of his bare feet padding on the wooden boards.
    â€œOyster, clam, what does it matter?”
    â€œI am a much more handsome man in this cupboard,” Loslow continues, his voice muffled once again in his confined space. “Without a mirror, I feel like a real looker of an individual indeed. With one, I always found that the reflection staring back at me was such a