Jakob’s Colors Read Online Free PDF Page A

his rows of glasses.
    â€œI will do all I can to hide you,” he said at length.
    â€œI know.” She reached for his hand. “But he is not here.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI thought . . .”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œHave 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?”
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œYou like it?” he had asked, and for the first time she had heard a nervousness in his voice.
    â€œI like it,” she had assured him.
    â€œVery much?”
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œDo 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.
    â€œI will find him,” she said.

This Day
AUSTRIA , 1944
    J akob is curled up on sacks of cabbage that stink and ferment beneath the warmth of his sleeping self. Still unwashed, still covered with another’s blood, his breath is shallow and scratching in his chest from so many nights of cold air. He sleeps deeply, after a day’s toil, as the market packs up around him, a clatter of wooden boards and metal frames, dismantled with the precision of habit. He sleeps so deeply that he does not stir, not a single limb or sleepy shudder, and so he does not experience the gradual shift from sound to silence as the sellers leave, the disappearing trundle of cartwheels, the ebb of voices heading for a place they can call home. He does not experience the shift from company to solitude, the cooling of a sunlit day to a honey-colored dusk. The shadows lengthen, hang like sleeping phantoms. The light fades. The night wraps around him, camouflaging him on his soft makeshift bed. He hugs his box to him. The stone in his pocket presses into his skin, imprinting a mauve bruise of time passing.
    He sleeps dreamlessly, and then, as the sun slips back up over the hilltops and the dawn shadows creep finger-like over him, there is motion once again. People return to start another market day; the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the steamy blow from velvet nostrils,the unpacking of carts, the opening of shutters, the clatter of metal and wood, the clank and grind and the tap, tap, tap of a hammer, all transforming the empty space back into the market of the previous day, back into the maze of cluttered stores; silver trinkets, teapots, incense, and jewelry that drip like water drops from wooden brackets as scents of sandalwood, sun-warmed leather from the trappings of old saddles, and the blue smoke of cigarettes fill the air—all of it overladen, to hide the fact that this is a wartime market, striving to live as it did before, despite the lack of fresh produce, despite the overriding stench of