(Austria – 1944)

There is a rhythm to his steps, slow, staggered, but nevertheless a rhythm, lest he fall and not rise. Small boy. Barely eight years old. The sheepskin coat, that had been given to him in the first village he had run to, when he had all but forgotten kindness, hangs down to his knees – small round caps that he knows can be smashed away from the bone. Knows because he has seen rifle butts held back from the shoulder and then swung against them, cracking the thin skin that hangs like dirty cloth.

Jakob pulls the sheepskin coat around him and smells the scent of the man who gave it to him.

Even aged eight Jakob knows that by now that man, shaven-headed and too old for his years, will no longer need his coat.

Jakob coughs. His breath wheezes. His teeth are loose in his gums. His skin is grey. Jakob – a half-blood gypsy child of Roma and Yenish. He does not recognise his own thumb or the very scent of himself.

‘Run if you can,’ he has been taught. Te den, xa, te maren, de-nash. A whispered plea. ‘Always, if you can,’ and as young as he is he still knows what this means, for not to run stirs a longing that is suffocating, until sleep saves him. And even then he wakes.

So he runs. With shoes of sackcloth, still stained with another’s blood, a stone clutched in one hand, a small wooden box in the other. He runs blindly, full of fear, empty of hope. For hope lies behind him in a green field with a twisted tree that stands gnarled and leafless and shaped like a Y.

Through narrow passes, across the bleakness of snowy slopes, his heart splitting. Through fragrant forests, spruce trees clinging to the top layers of soil. He sleeps during the day, warm under fallen pine needles, and runs at night, the trees collapsing into the darkness behind him.

He gnaws wild garlic, forages for nuts, pulps fennel in the palm of his hands. He knows the kind of berries that he can eat, but three times he has taken a chance and eaten something unknown to him: a mushroom in the grasses, long-stalked, like the ones his mother used to dry and cook; a berry red, sour and unripe, bitter in his mouth; and a leaf – sucked because he is so thirsty.

When he closes his eyes he sees his mother's face.

Zyli wsrod roz, she sings. They lived among the roses. Nie znali burz. And they did not know of any storms.

While he sleeps he dreams strange dreams. In them his sister finds a woollen hat, pulling it tight onto her head, and his brother a fur glove that he wears on his right hand, holding his palm over his mouth so his hot breath can warm his face. Neither will take them off, even when their mother, pale with cold, sits beside them, her teeth chattering, sounding out like a tinny drum. But when Jakob says that he is cold his sister draws the hat from her tiny head, his brother the glove from his tiny hand, and, without a word, hands each to him on outstretched arms that demand he take them. He wakes weeping, blue-lipped with cold and dread.

Dusk falls. He forgets what it is like to stare at the moon. He chews grass. His spit turns green. His head itches, lice-infested and full of sores. He waits until it is dark before leaving the woods, creeping down the side slope of a grassy field and smelling the dew. Below him a lake glistens in the half-moon light, a still sheen, honey-coloured with a promise of tranquillity. He turns away from it, no longer able to trust the land itself.

Te na khuchos perdal cho ushalin, he hears his father’s voice. ‘Jump your own shadow, my boy,’ he whispers.

Back into the woods where the trees lean darkly above him, hiding his silhouette on the ground. Wood-moss softens his tread in places, but when his steps can be heard the wind often blows, drowning out the noise of brittle leaves breaking, so that even then the sound of him disappears and he is as close to invisible as the world dares to make him.