Jakob’s Colors (10 page)

I
n that room, that white room with its exact square of blinding light, the girl was tied down. Her bones were so slight beneath the thick leather straps, the metal buckles weighed against her flesh, leaving imprints. Her shrieks, her sobs of confusion at being trapped in this way, had brought the swiftness of running feet over cold stone floors; two men, two women in crisp white coats who smothered her with their immense weight; firm gloved hands, a mix of hot breath on her face; garlic scented, sweet, sour, sleep stale, and the stench of ammonia, that stung her eyes and burned the back of her throat.

Thirteen years old, her small legs and arms restrained against the hard board beneath her, leaving gray bruises upon the knot of her wrists and ankles. Her screams rang wildly. But once expelled they seemed to dissolve against the dense walls, as if the ancient stone were swallowing them up, silencing her like the thousand others who'd been silenced before.

She kicked out, thrashed her legs, punched, spat. Became the underside of all things smooth, raw and rough and full of edges. Something cold and metallic was forced into her mouth, pushed between her teeth. She retched, tasted her own bile, her own blood. Her tongue lay
fat against her teeth. A needle was jabbed into the flesh of her arm. A cold stream of liquid pulsed into her, chemical and cloying.

Then there was a moment when the fight went from her. Fled, like her screams. She waited, was as a boot, laid open and unlaced, anticipating the kick of intrusion. The light glared off the metal instruments that lay upon white tables. A foot shifted its weight, a black-laced shoe, polished, immaculate. She studied the shadow of evening stubble upon the cheek of the man whose face was closest. Saw the color of his eye, the green hazel tinge, the small stain of reddish brown in the center of his left iris as if someone had dabbed at it with a fine-tipped brush. He was looking at the distant wall, seemed distracted, as if his mind were not where his body now resided but had taken him off to some more trivial reflection.

Then it began. The spasm of her limbs. The uncontrollable jolting of her legs. The wrenching of her spine that twisted and made ugly her genteel past. Her feet kicked out on the hard bed. Saliva filled her mouth, ran down her chin. Her eyes rolled back and then too quickly the world went from white to black. The last thing the girl remembered was the sound of her own breathing, the sharp fight for air, as if she were drowning, and above her head, the view of a tea-stained map of the world:
La Carte du Monde
, where the brown of the deserts met the green of the hills.

When the girl awoke, the man, the doctor with the small brown stain in his eye, was there, filling in notes at the end of her bed with his small hands. He looked down at her, above the rim of his glasses, which were perched at the very end of his long nose. He was a slight man, who seemed to suppress the natural agility with which his body wished to move. As if he had been brought up with the belief that to move quickly was to move wrongly, that it implied a brashness of character or, worse, a nervous disposition, the too-eager admission of something untoward. He seemed to quell his natural speed with a studied flow of languorous motion. The girl watched him now, her vision flitting between blurred distortion and moments of too-bright clarity.

“You are back with us, Glorious,” Dr. Itzhak said. “You are back with us.”

These the words she became accustomed to hearing in those moments when she first came to, as the hours bled into days, the days into weeks. Dr. Itzhak would linger after her eyes had opened, after she accustomed herself to the light, and when she was fully awake, he talked to her of places she had not heard of.

“In Kigali,” he said, as he changed the saline drip in her arm, rhythmically, as if he were keeping time to his own words. “When you ask for directions they stoop down by the roadside and draw maps in the dust.”

Lor hid the tremor of her hands from him, afraid of what he would do if he saw them. She could feel the needle being withdrawn, the jolt as it left the vein. Then there was only the familiar tightness of the scabs on her wrists and the weight of the sheets upon her.

“You have to memorize them. I do not have a good memory, but in Kigali I always remember the maps that they draw in the dust.”

He told her these things to gain her confidence. She saw his stolen glances to check that she was listening. And she did listen, to every word, fearful of the consequences if she did not. But it was too late for confidences. For where in one moment he might be gentle, warm even, she had experienced how he could flit from kind to seemingly brutal in an unexplained instant. How with the shift of his head he could instruct a new ordeal, move her to some other room where they administered their methods of restoration and salvation. A new needle punctured her skin and she sucked in her breath.

“Everything will turn out all right, Glorious my dear,” Dr. Itzhak said. “Fear not. We will soon untrouble you.” His voice was clipped, betrayed his captious nature, his tone nasal and pinched.

Sometimes, depending on the wind, she could smell the wisteria that grew beneath the window. Other times she could smell only the dust in the room, which had dampened and dried a thousand times over. Outside it never seemed to rain. Most days sunlight slanted onto the floor. When the wedge of light reached the foot of her bed and she felt the warmth of it on her toes, she knew it was around midday.

The institute lay by the lake that was covered with mist first thing in the morning and last thing at night. In the dark hours an
unnatural silence blanketed the corridors, too silent for the hundred or so inmates who slept behind the bolted doors. She lay awake listening to it. It trembled against her, seemed to vibrate in her head like an actual sound. But if silence was what she fell asleep to, it was screaming to which she awoke. The daylight hours were filled with the sounds of shrieking, distant cries that brought with them the echo of running steps down the bleached corridors, followed by an abrupt and disquieting silence.

She had been placed in a dormitory to begin with, a great barren room with wood-paneled walls and sixteen beds, filled with pallid-faced women who rolled their heads back and forth upon their pillows. There was the sound of grinding teeth, a constant murmur of distress; strange songs hummed or sweetly sung, screams that were stifled.

Come evening a wave of restlessness seemed to wash over the room. There was rocking, the rhythmic knocking of heads upon the walls. Bedpans were shaken, upturned, the stench of stale urine slopping onto the floor. The songs became more a lament, the same lines sung over and over again, hoarse, off-key. Limbs shook. Hair was wrenched from scalps. A hand slapped constantly at a bloody ear. Young girls in white aprons appeared who would wipe down the surfaces with worn damp cloths and hand out cigarette rations that for a brief period of time seemed to calm, as a cloud of mustard-colored smoke filled the room.

Lor learned that sound brought consequences with it. And later that silence brought the same. You are ill, Glorious. Very ill, my dear. There it was in its simplicity, a small clean click of a word—
ill
. A sickness, they told her, growing inside her head like some black burgeoning flower.

Later they put her in a room of her own, with no explanation why. The only object in it was a spherical glass toad that sat on an otherwise empty dressing table, unmoving and wide eyed, seemingly startled when the sun slashed light upon it. She was grateful for its presence amidst the starkness. Secretly befriended it, despite its inanimate stillness. The glass glinted with colors, twisting like a kaleidoscope.

In contrast the walls of this room were so white that in the morning she could hardly open her eyes. They, too, were bare, but for a single picture, that framed map of the world,
La Carte du Monde
, from the 1800s that had been the last thing she'd seen when they'd first put her under. It was worn and stained with age, tea colored and creased at the folds, where she could see it had been opened and folded and opened and folded again; five times in all, making thirty-two rectangles of locked-awayness, a hidden world in folded paper, before someone had laid it out in its entirety, mounted it and framed it behind thick, daily polished glass. Now it hung there, the macrocosm of the world, its glass reflecting back a microcosm of the little lives within it.

This was what Dr. Itzhak chose as his tool to communicate with her. He picked places from the map, some he had been to, others he had not, and told her things about them.

“Some of the villages I went to have no name,” he was saying. “They have no want for one. No one needs to know they are there. Imagine that, Glorious.”

Lor watched as he unraveled the bandages from her wrists. His glasses had slipped, as they always did, back down to the end of his nose. She had watched those who worked in his close proximity, saw how they had come to suspect it to be some sort of psychological test, a device almost to judge a person's character by, for he seemed to arouse in them a strong, sometimes uncontrollable, desire to push the glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose when it became clear that he was not going to. He met their murmured apologies with disdain, and when he walked from the room he moved with a defiance, as if his nose led him, as if scent was the strongest of his senses.

She turned her head away, felt the pull as the gauze detached from the drying scabs. She could smell her own blood, salty, metallic. The memory of its taste filled her mouth. Who was she now? Something that had been disassembled, made sane or insane? She no longer knew which was which, if indeed there was a definition, a line that separated one from the other. It was as if she had been taken apart, piece by painful piece, and reassembled in a clumsy approximation of what
she might have been before the seal of insanity had been stamped upon her.

You are ill, Lor. Very ill
. That small, clean click of a word, only three letters long.

To begin with she had not heard from her father, but then a letter arrived that oddly mentioned nothing of home, his business, of her welfare or his. He chose as his topic of conversation to talk of the walks he was taking, a direct account of each particular one, pointing out the crest of a limestone hill he had climbed, the dip in a mossy valley, a rushing, cowslip-strewn stream, as if in these written accounts he might take her with him, breathe in fresh air, lift her out of whatever it was he felt she needed to be lifted out of. Two weeks later another letter arrived, a different walk, a different description of the things he saw, the journey ventured.

“The woodland anemones are out,” he told her. “The heather, the ferns, tall as a man.” She had not known this of her father, that he would have noticed these things.

“You are unhappy, Glorious,” Dr. Itzhak was saying. “This saddens me, my dear. I had hoped that by now we might have made you happier.”

She chose not to tell him that while it was true she did not feel happiness, she could not feel unhappiness either. It was as if all feelings of distinction had abandoned her. She was numb to them. She turned her head and caught his eye. He was a small man, much smaller than his authority implied. And his eyes watered easily. When his glasses weren't slipping to the end of his nose, he had a habit of removing them and rubbing furiously, his eyelids collapsing in wrinkled folds at the corners. She wondered if he liked to walk. If anemones and tall ferns were things he would notice.

He tried to speak to her in her mother tongue, though she knew her French was better than his English. But he persevered, a show of omniscience that flitted between the two, filling in the gaps when he was lost for a word. His accent was thick. He had told her he was from Mont Saint-Michel, “an ice-cream cone of a town, plunked on the seashore”—describing it to her as if she were a much younger child.
She had never been there. The gray cobbled road to it curved, he'd told her, around and around, like a spiral slide.

“I was in Africa for inoculations,” he continued, the stench of iodine filling the room as he dressed her wounds. “I began in Kigali, the capital, on the city outskirts at the soldiers' stations, and from there went out into the villages. In Rwanda everything is green. Especially when the rains come. There is so much of it that the ground can slide away from where one is standing. Houses can disappear down steep slopes—trees, whole forests. The days begin in sunshine. Bright skies that trick everyone into leaving their washing out on a line. The rains come in the afternoon. Drops as large as thumbnails. They hammer against the skin. People are bruised by the rain there.”

She imagined bruises on her arms, so big and plum colored that they hid her laddered scars.

“They speak French there,” he said, feigning insouciance as slowly he rebandaged her wrists with a crisp white dressing. “You speak French very well, don't you, my dear?”

She nodded. Her family had spent many summers in Antibes. She remembers a house that they had rented there, one that overlooked the sea. What it had felt like to stand on the wide veranda and look out at the ocean that seemed perpetually to be lit in sunlight. There was always music playing in that house: jazz or blues, merry, upbeat songs that defied anyone to feel otherwise. She remembers feeling almost sick with it.

“I have never been as far as Antibes,” Dr. Itzhak was saying. “To Africa, yes. But in my own country I have been as far east as Paris, as far south as Toulouse. I have not even seen the Mediterranean. They say it is azure, the sea there, not blue like the Atlantic, not green like the Pacific.”

Yes, she thought. The sea is azure there; the sand on the ocean floor is white. Because of that it was the only ocean she did not mind swimming out of her depth in.

“It is a calm sea, yes?” the doctor continued. “Not an angry sea?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “It is calm.” But how it could roll in. She was remembering the whale that had been beached up on the shore that
summer after a storm. The waves had seemed higher than the house, had swept in black and frothing beneath the night sky, crashing splinters of white upon the sand. In the days afterward the whole town had fought to save that whale. People came with buckets, with pots and pans, with metal bowls and metal cups, anything that could hold water. They dug deep into the sand, dredged down, bringing the sea up and around the vast mound of blubber. They worked tirelessly, relentlessly, as the sun set and rose in quiet vermilion. They did this for three days and three nights. But the whale hadn't survived. No one was sure of the moment of its actual passing, just that it had passed while they were scooping water around its flanks. Afterward, a sort of sad relief settled over the dredgers, as if mostly they had expected it, as if the battle had been with time, for it to pass and for death to arrive so they might put down their buckets and their spades and go back to the rhythm of their usual lives. No one had moved that whale. In the days and weeks following, people walking the beach had watched it rot away, the flesh darkening gradually from pink to gray to black. From that house she could smell the stench of rotting blubber.