Fall 2020 | Occasus | Issue 10
A Multitude of Shades
Ilya,
You once told me you thought people didn’t see colours from the time they were born. Colours came with experience; even the shades we thought we saw were echoes of the real thing. I remember laughing, thinking you were strange — you, the old neighbour who spoke like you knew us before we even learned your name — and joking that I wished I’d see some green soon, freshly broke after moving Naomi and I into our first house. You’d smiled that smile of yours — all eyes, your mouth barely twitching at the corners — and later that night, after the dinner you and your wife had cooked for us, I listened as you named the colours you saw in Michaela, in Naomi, in our lives and in yours. I miss those nights. I think of them when it rains — the way the sound of the drops on the windows intertwined with Michaela’s voice until her words were less of a recollection than a reenactment, the stories she told coming to life right there in the living room. Nights when the broken glass of Kristallnacht shimmered on the floor and the buildings of the ghettos rose around us, the wind whistling through the few windows that remained unshattered. The sound of the rain replaced with gunfire, the fire burning with history books instead of logs. On nights like those, you named Naomi’s colours — quietly, when she wasn’t listening, like it was a secret you and I held. On those nights, you told me she saw black for the first time. Before, she’d had a papery idea of what horror could be, but with you and Michaela a living tether to a nightmare that we’d studied and promptly pushed aside, things changed. The lost lives that we’d seen only in numbers started to become a reality when you named your parents, your families — Aryeh, Levi, Uri — and told us the things that made them human. How Uri, Michaela’s oldest brother, would stomp his feet three times before entering a room. How Aryeh, the youngest, laughed too loudly in restaurants and made everyone turned to look at you when you went for dinners. The way that Levi, your youngest cousin, smiled and cried and waved as he left Dachau for a march he would never return from. With the recognition of humanity came the recognition of the loss, and Naomi saw black as it really was — unforgivable, unending, empty. Yellow for our wedding day. You walked her down the aisle, hand in hand, the closest thing to a father she’d ever known. Ilya, I’ll admit I don’t remember much of what you looked like in those moments, but the pictures captured you crying. Joy. Not fear, not sadness. You and Michaela had cried for us and patted your wedding rings. Later, when we’d danced, you told me you watched Naomi see yellow for the first time. Max was born, and as Michaela cried and Naomi beamed, you pulled me aside and whispered, “White.” White for purity, for the new, terrifyingly unconditional love we’d never seen before, never felt even for each other. That was the day that I started to recognize Naomi saw colours in the way that you did, there watching Naomi hold Max to her breast as Michaela cooed her congratulations. As Max got older, bigger by the day, I could sometimes watch Naomi watching as he dreamt, a silvery glow around them both. And when the tests came back, I realized that it wasn’t only Naomi who saw in colours. It was you. The cancer came at 3AM on a Tuesday, and it came like a crying child. Quiet at first, then, in a second, overwhelming. We slept, she dreamt, and then Naomi screamed of pain in her chest. By 5AM, the doctors told us there were tumours in her lungs. You were holding my hand. I looked at you and in your eyes was the black of hopelessness, the red of surviving the slaughter of the Second World War only to once again lose those whom you loved. Soon after it was a rainy April. We would sit in our bedroom, the rain splattering against the windows. Naomi would close her eyes and let Michaela take her to a time that was worse than the one we lived in. She showed us the tattoo on her left arm, the sequence of numbers always kept carefully hidden behind long sleeves, and described the fear of watching the ink mix with her blood, of being nothing more than a number. She would tell us about the soldiers and their bayonets, catching babies thrown from windows on the ends in a twisted form of fun, and Naomi would cuddle Max and you would watch her with the blue-black of midnight in your face. But Michaela would finish every story with lavender, the dusky glimpse of hope — not quite happiness, not quite optimism, but a distant cousin. And for a time, we thought that would be enough. June. Naomi told us the moon wasn’t as high as she remembered. That it was lower, closer, more attainable. You put your arms around her and told her, “Child, it only looks closer because you haven’t seen it in a while. It’s not calling for you, not yet.” Your thoughts were a mossy, dirty green. August. Naomi got sicker. Your colours got darker when Michaela lost weight, running herself ragged so we wouldn’t have to. Max learned how to walk, and on the days that it rained, Naomi watched from the window as you and I took him outside to splash in the puddles. Yellow boots, red raincoat. Flashes of white in an increasingly navy world. Black clothes at the funeral. My thoughts were colourless. ~*~ Max is ten, now. He asks about Naomi and I picture her on our wedding day: white dress, yellow thoughts. I tell him about the rainy nights with you and Michaela, but not the stories, not yet. They’ll come when he’s older, when he’s ready. After Naomi’s death, Michaela made me promise to raise him as a child, as a being unconnected to the colour black. And in those first few years, it was the moments white and yellow that I clung to, the dusky orange of sunrise. Black again when Michaela died. Scarlet watching you grieve, black when you joined her. Three days after the funeral, I started noticing the colours again as something not quite belonging to me — when sight became an experience. Max was eight, sitting with his back against your headstone, telling you — you, Ilya, his God, his angel — that he saw blue today. Real blue, he’d said, the blue of waking up and seeing stars in the dark. Three new ones he’d noticed, so close together they might have been holding hands. The blue you’d told him about, the blue of the light you’d seen in the tiny bedroom you’d lived in as a younger man. He saw blue in a picture from one of our rainy nights, you and Naomi and Michaela laughing together. You told me Naomi thought in colours. I see them now, too. The colours that belonged to you, to her, to the other dreamers. Max will see them. All of them, in time. He sits with me as I write. He tells me to make sure you know he’s thinking hard about the colour blue. In time, he will know the truth: the bedroom was a closet. The stars were your fellow Jews. And the blue you told him about was family. I think of white. We miss you. Love, Stephen and Max. |
Carly Pews is a second-year student pursuing an Honors Specialization in English Language and Literature.