Jakob’s Colors Read Online Free PDF

decay and sweet fermenting fruit that seeps up from the almost-empty food stalls.
    Laughter sounds as the sun slips out from behind a cloud, sending shafts of pinholed light down through the gray sheets above them, and everyone believes in that moment that “There is a heaven after all,” a sign at last amidst the wreckage of the present day. And it is then that Jakob moves for the first time, shifting in his premorning sleep, with the mention of the word heaven. He rolls onto his back, blinking back the fog of sleep, oblivious at first to his whereabouts. Then he’s alert, upright once more, as if to be caught sleeping were a crime. He buries his box beneath the cabbages, climbs down off his mound, his clothes stiff with congealed mud and grime. He sticks out in the crowd with his shoes of sackcloth; a sad clown of a boy. The loss that he feels lies beneath his skin like a pool below the finest layer of silk. The slightest tear and it flows over and around, the weight of water above him. His hands are jammed into his trouser pockets to save his fingers from the chilling wind. He hovers beside a pile of bruised cucumbers, longing to lick the skins, then moves on to the next stall, where a toothless woman hooks a rat onto a rack already heavy with pink-skinned rabbits, broken necks lolling their heads against their spines.
    He turns, accepts the cup of goat’s milk she hands him, and lingers, drawn toward the warmth of human touch, with a longing, a memory, for something more. Me kamav tu . I love you, and a hand tender across his brow. He longs to lean his head against the woman’s stained apron, but instead he walks away, on past the man in the nextstall, who is shoving two live chickens into a wooden crate so small they can hardly breathe.
    Jakob searches the ground, stooping again and again, picking the butts of heel-trodden cigarettes from the mud. Later he will steadfastly unravel each of them, collecting the tobacco in tiny mounds and rerolling them back into cigarettes; a ratio of ten butts to one new cigarette. He collects the discarded apples, too, the half-rotten ones, will separate the bad from the not so bad, selling them at a fifth of the price of the fresh green and scarlet apples in the stalls.
    Now, though, as he crouches down, his face close enough to smell the earth, his hands stained with rancid fruit, he feels the vibrations beneath his feet, the heavy rumble and grind of something that is machine, not alive, and with this sound the dread sweeps through him, as sudden as hot to cold, dark to light. He drops his knees to the damp ground, curls his spine inwards, small as an egg. Only his head he lifts, and through the legs of wooden stall tables he sees the line of trucks approaching from the gravel road toward the market square, spitting up stones and grit in the deep tread of their wheels, engines hammering through fumed clouds. They fill the gray slate sky, the fractured light that had seeped from heaven. They block out all other noise as if the very world itself were hushed by their arrival. They come to a stop in a well-practiced line, and beneath the sound of engines left running, growling like dogs, fifty soldiers, maybe sixty, he cannot say, climb down into the mud.
    â€œDo you have papers?” Walther is asking, standing behind his stall of discarded junk that in certain lights shines like some metallic jewel. “If you have none, you should go now.”
    But Jakob cannot move. From his place beside the cabbages he is watching the officer who has climbed from the third truck in the line, the eagle and the swastika on his shoulder hand embroidered with white silk and tiny nuggets of aluminum wire. This man whom he has witnessed with his head in his hands. This man, who had built a fire, who had collected the wood himself, teased the flames, and who, when the tears in his eyes had spilled down his cheeks, had not wiped them away.
    Jakob is back in that field, looking up