When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

But yes, your letter. You may be surprised to hear this, but I haven’t spoken a word of Greek since I arrived in America. I was twenty when I came here. Now they say forty is the new twenty, eighty is the new forty. They want me to live forever, but it’s all very tiring. At twenty, I felt so old. But I felt, this is my fresh start. Fresh starts can be deceiving though. I suspect you know something about that.

  It gave me a deep pain to force the Greek back to read your letter. I said, just this once, I will do it. I saw your name on the outside: Milos Christakos, plain as day. But even before that, I knew it was you. I thought, what have you waited for? As much as it shames me, I did want to hear from you. Even after everything, yes I did.

  Well, you know what you wrote. You wrote to locate you on the Facebook. That messaging is easier that way. Faster. You asked what has happened in my life. To tell you ta panta. Everything. You underlined that with a double line. Ta panta.

  You wrote that you think of me. That you have always thought of me.

  Is it true, Milos? It made me feel a lot of things I thought I was too tired to feel. And then I couldn’t go to the movie. I just lay in my bed staring up at my ceiling, thinking about one thing you wrote. You asked for my forgiveness. You wrote that you know how much you hurt me, how much your actions destroyed me.

  Well, they did.

  You didn’t mean to destroy me though. And you had help. They were the real destroyers. But can I forgive you? All I can do is give you my warm feelings. I don’t know if I can forgive you, Milos. I want to forgive you. I’ve wanted my whole life to forgive many people and forget many people but ultimately I’ve come to understand that it’s not up to me. This may sound strange, but it’s actually up to a sad old lady who lives inside me. She can’t forgive or forget. I can’t forget either, Milos, but maybe I can soften her to forgive. I will see what influence I can have. She can be a stubborn mule, that old lady.

  Oh Milos, I’m being silly. I am that old lady, of course.

  The truth is, I’ve had a nice, full life. I was married to a good man, but he is long gone now. And I have a daughter. Just the one child. Bea. We have a complicated relationship. Complicated because I love her to the ends of the earth with no feelings of complication, whereas she loves me, it seems, with endless amounts of complication. I have two granddaughters too, and my three girls make up the whole of my world. I will tell you more, but first I am compelled to go back. There are so many things you don’t know. And some things you do know, but you don’t know to the core.

  So I have to start way back at the beginning, Milos, don’t you think?

  Chapter Five

  Sarah

  Corfu

  1942

  Every Sabbath morning, Sarah Batis watched the great big beard of Rabbi Iakov Nechama. As he stood on the bimah, his beard vibrated with the fervor of his prayers, igniting something in her heart. Sarah was at the grand Scuola Greca synagogue on Velissariou, in the women’s partition, on the same bench on which she always sat with her best friend, Rachel.

  Only Rachel was unusually late this morning.

  As Sarah’s gaze panned the crowd, searching for her friend, she noted the back of her own mother a row ahead, in her one nice black dress with rose corsage embroidery, eyes surely boring into her Mahzor Romania, allowing no distractions from her prayers. And then in the men’s section, Sarah could make out her father’s head, with its bushy red mop now torched by gray, and the raspberry curls of her little brother, Benjamin, beside him. Sarah listened to the recitation of the Shema, tapping on the wooden pew as September’s potent sun streamed through the windows, casting hazy beams across the herringbone oak floor.

  Soon the holidays would arrive. The Jewish quarter, the Evraiki, would be suffused with the solemn magic of a new year, and Rabbi Nechama would blow the special shofar made in the mountains of Epirus from a wild black ram.

  As Rabbi Nechama’s prayer reached a tremendous crescendo, Rachel slid beside Sarah, with another girl in tow who looked to be around their age, sixteen.

  “My mother will kill me.” Rachel retrieved a faded black prayer book and flipped it open. “Is she looking?”

  “Not now,” Sarah reassured her, spotting Rachel’s mother, Roza, a few pews away. Anyway, she didn’t know what Rachel was afraid of. Unlike Sarah’s own mother, whose forehead summoned grooves at the most minor of infractions, Roza was lauded for her smile, trotted out at all occasions, even sometimes inappropriately at funerals, which she called celebrations.

  Roza worked for the Jewish community, keeping up the synagogue and caring for the community’s elder members at the old age home. The girls would often help her change bedpans and sweep the sanctuary or wash its windows. When they were younger, they used to play hide-and-seek across the temple grounds. Once, Sarah had hidden in the aron for the Torahs, and when she’d popped out, expecting Rachel, Roza had stood there instead. Sarah had feared Roza would scold her like her own mother surely would, but Roza had just tut-tutted and said in the future the aron for the Torahs wasn’t a play spot.

  “Who is she?” Sarah motioned to the girl beside Rachel who, like her friend, had straight black hair in plaits, but brown eyes to Rachel’s green. She wore a dress nearly identical to Rachel’s own, with a starched white collar and red plaid pattern.

  “That’s my cousin Stemma,” Rachel whispered. “From Saloniki.”

  Stemma. It was a name for a daughter with many sisters before her. The name had its root in the Greek word stamata, meaning “to stop.” Stop sending us daughters. Sarah already felt sorry for this Stemma, and she didn’t even yet know her.

  “Yia sou, Stemma,” said Sarah. “Welcome to Kerkyra.”

  “Yia sou,” Stemma said, but her eyes didn’t match her lips when she spoke. She stared off at the aron on the synagogue’s east wall.

  “She’s visiting?”

  “No. She’s here for…for a while, I guess.”

  “A while?” Sarah knew everything about Rachel, she’d thought, but not about this phantom cousin Stemma from Saloniki. Saloniki was on mainland Greece and home largely to Sephardic Jews, who had escaped Spain during Inquisition times. Whereas Sarah was a Romaniote Jew, whose ancestors had resided in Greece for millennia. The communities didn’t often intermarry, although Rachel’s parents had, her Romaniote father and Sephardic mother. It’s why Roza’s bourthetto was so delectable; the meal of little fishes in spicy red sauce was a Sephardic specialty.

  “Stemma escaped.” Rachel bit her lip. “She escaped from the Germans, who invaded Saloniki.”

  The Germans.

  The congregants rose for the final prayer, and Sarah rose with them, or her feet did on their own, divorced from her head, because she felt utterly incapacitated by this information.

  “And what about her parents?”

  For what seemed like forever, Rachel didn’t speak. There was just the deep, beautiful voice of Rabbi Nechama, but for the first time maybe in Sarah’s life, his prayer didn’t bolster her.

  “Her mom died a few years ago, and her father was taken,” Rachel finally whispered.

  Sarah glanced over at Stemma, shorter than them, miniature really, when Sarah caught the whole of her. Stemma stood ramrod-straight like a statue, as if she belonged on a pedestal somewhere.

  “Taken? How?”

  “They made him convene at the square and beat him, and he had to do these humiliating exercises at gunpoint—”

  “They beat him?” Sarah’s heart thwacked her chest. “At gunpoint?”

  Rachel nodded slowly. “Stemma has barely spoken since she arrived, but she finally told me the whole story this morning. That’s why we were late. She said the Germans invaded a year and a half ago, and it’s been terrible. First, the Jewish press was banned, and Jews weren’t allowed into cafés.”

  “They were banned from cafés?” It wasn’t like Sarah frequented cafés. Her family didn’t have the money for a frivolous coffee or pastry, but she was friendly with Spyro, the owner of a café on S
cholemvourgou Street, who sometimes slipped her a cheese bourekas when she visited her grandmother at the sanitorium next door.

  “Yes. But then it got worse. They moved the Jews into a ghetto, by the rail tracks. Took their apartments, jewelry, everything. They had to wear yellow Jewish stars sewn to their clothing always. And the Germans destroyed a big Jewish cemetery and took the gravestones for construction materials. And then Stemma’s father was taken, to work. Her sisters’ husbands were taken too. Then one night, the German officer boarding in their house got drunk and told Stemma and her sisters to leave before it was too late. Before they were deported. Stemma’s sisters are all married and didn’t want to leave their husbands. But they sent Stemma here. And she doesn’t know what will become of them.”

  “That’s horrible. Absolutely horrible.” Sarah chewed on her nails. “I wish we could do something.”

  “Me too.”

  “At least we have the Italians, right?” They’d known the Italians for centuries on Corfu, from the Venetian era, and the Italians had re-conquered Corfu a few years prior. Bombs had rained down on the Jewish quarter, and Sarah and her family had fled to bomb shelters. But eventually life had carried on as normal.

  “We have the Italians. Yes.”

  “So the Germans can’t come here.” Sarah balled her fists and willed Rachel to agree, vehemently so.

  But instead her friend looked off vacantly toward the candelabra perched atop the bimah. “Sarah, now I’m afraid the Germans can come anywhere.”

  * * *

  When services concluded, the men congregated around the bimah to drink coffee and ouzo. Sarah waded through the dispersing congregants toward her mother, kissing cousins and aunts and uncles along the way.

  “Mama, I’m going to have lunch at Rachel’s. She invited me earlier in the week.”

  Sarah saw her mother hesitate. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Roza, but her mother disapproved of Roza’s marriage outside of the Romaniote community.

  “You are not permitted to be with that Matathias.” Matathias was Rachel’s older brother, as handsome as his sister was beautiful, and he had never given Sarah a second glance. With her riotous red hair, Sarah certainly didn’t meet the conventional Corfiot beauty standards.

  Sarah groaned and gazed around, to be sure Matathias wasn’t privy to this conversation. He’d probably laugh hysterically at the prospect. Anyway, she had her eye loosely on Solomon, her sweet, serious Romaniote school friend, who’d once pulled her from the barreling path of a donkey cart. His family happened to be the wealthiest Jews in Corfu. They owned half the real estate in town—an unimpeachable prospect for her mother. “There’s absolutely nothing between me and Matathias.”

  “Be sure there isn’t. You have plenty of cousins who are suitable marriage partners. You will marry a Romaniote Jew. That is your destiny.”

  “I know.”

  Her mother reached out to stroke Sarah’s hair. “You are beautiful, Sarah. I want you to have everything good in life.” Sarah allowed herself to savor it. Her mother didn’t often say things like that, or touch her hair tenderly besides.

  “I’m not as beautiful as you,” Sarah said.

  “Hush,” said her mother, but Sarah noticed her mother didn’t dispute it. Her mother was incontrovertibly beautiful. It was a fact of life. She wasn’t that old, only thirty-six, with cheekbones chiseled like a Michelangelo statute, thick, shiny black hair, and blue eyes the turquoise of Garitsa Bay. Sarah’s father always said that, whenever a customer complained about a garment he tailored, he imagined floating in a sea as blue as her mother’s eyes and immediately calmed. Sarah too had eyes that blue, but she suspected her red hair negated their wiles.

  “I’ll see you at home, Mama.” Sarah kissed her cheek and went to find Rachel. Her taste buds were activated for Roza’s bourthetto.

  On her way out, Sarah spotted her brother sitting on the floor in the corner, nose deep in Homer’s Odyssey. Benjamin was only ten, six years her junior, but absolutely brilliant and with a book perpetually in hand. He was teased sometimes in the schoolyard of their Jewish school because of how ruddy his face got, implying a state of perpetual embarrassment, and for his hair, even more vibrant a red than Sarah’s. Just this week, a boy had shoved him into a puddle when Benjamin was just sitting innocently on a rock with his book. Sarah hadn’t witnessed it because girls finished school in the eighth grade. But when Benjamin had told Sarah about it, she’d marched over to the school, chased down that younger bully boy, and lifted him off his feet—yes she had—decreeing that Benjamin Batis shall be left alone. It had felt quite good to put that weaselly little monster in his place.

  “Latria mou.” Benjamin looked up, and his whole face transmuted to a smile. That was how it was between them, their love simple and essential. They slept side by side on a cot, and sometimes their limbs entangled, and Sarah would wake disoriented for a moment, impossible to distinguish where she ended and her brother began.

  “Are we going home now?” he asked.

  “I’m going to Rachel’s for lunch. I’ll see you later.”

  “And then we’ll walk to the sea?” It was a thing they did together, every Sabbath afternoon.

  “We’ll walk to the sea.” Sarah touched the place where his hair met his forehead, sweaty now with the energy he expended reading, that thrill of imagining foreign worlds. He blew her a kiss—a thing he did only to her. He hadn’t yet come to think of it as babyish, even if others observed. Sarah blew him a kiss in return.

  Then she drifted through the crowd, searching for Rachel. She stepped outside to Solomou Square. It abutted their apartment buildings, which all huddled together slightly off kilter, like mini Towers of Pisa. The buildings’ stucco was scorched in places from the bombings a few years prior, when Mussolini’s Italians had invaded Corfu, but now the residue of war was blessedly faint. Outside the Sabbath, the cobblestone alleys making up the Jewish quarter abounded in stalls of fruit, vegetables, cloth, and silver, with streets so narrow that marketgoers hugged the walls when donkeys waddled by. Above the alleys, green shutters flung open from windows edged by flower boxes, with nosy aunts typically poking out and calling down below, where heated haggling and the clucking of hens resounded against the bustle.

  But today the Evraiki was its charming Sabbath-quiet, with the exception of the wild dogs barking and cats mewing from all resting surfaces. As a child, Sarah had taken a liking to a cat and fed it bits of bread until one day it bit her, necessitating a painful shot. After that she didn’t much like anything with teeth, other than humans.

  Gazing northward, past the Evraiki, Sarah could make out a slice of mellow sea and Pontikonisi island beyond it, half a mile from shore. It was referred to as Mouse Island because of the white stone staircase shaped like a mouse’s tail that wove through a tangle of cypress and olive trees, leading to a Byzantine chapel. Sarah had never visited the island, but her father always promised that one day they would take a boat and go.

  Finally, Sarah spotted Rachel and Stemma leaning against a pillar across the square. She skipped over. “Shall we go to lunch?”

  “Oh, Sarah, shoot. Solomon asked me to lunch today. I’m going to take Stemma too. I forgot to tell you.” Rachel pulled a regretful face. She looked even prettier when upset, a fact Sarah suddenly resented. Jealousy was such a wretched emotion, because you wished you didn’t feel it, at the same time you wished for a face that got even prettier when scrunched up—a face you certainly didn’t have.

  “Solomon asked you to lunch? But…you know I like him!”

  Her friend’s perfect half-moon eyebrows shot up as the sun danced in her windswept hair. “I thought that was ages ago. You know I like him.”

  If Sarah were to search herself, then of course she would admit she knew Rachel liked Solomon too. It was why the friends had avoided the topic, waiting for him to do the choosing. Well, he’d chosen, all right. And Sarah was surprised to find that the anger riling in her wasn’t at her apparent
rejection by her friend Solomon, but instead at the fact that Rachel was more beautiful and lucky.

  “I didn’t!” Sarah said. “And you should have told me. I planned to come to your lunch.”

  “Sarah, wait.” Her friend reached for Sarah’s arm, but Sarah shoved it away. She knew she was acting childishly but felt incapable of rewiring herself so quickly, to switch personae to Perfect Sarah, the one who didn’t feel the ugly things she now felt.

  Sarah stalked off, ignoring Rachel’s pleas. She quickened down Velissariou, aware only of the world inside her head. When she reached the sea, she turned left, a way she didn’t often walk, muttering aloud about how much she hated Rachel and then how angry she was at herself. Rachel was a wonderful friend, and Sarah had treated her terribly. Why didn’t she want her to be happy with Solomon, when really, if Sarah dug deep, she didn’t even love Solomon? But she recognized that he was an eligible, nice, cute boy, and Sarah was enduring this crazy mental loop when she caught a glimpse of a fisherman, a boy she’d never seen before.

  He was by the water, hauling teeming nets off his kaiki, wearing a navy cap, a white shirt, and tan trousers pushed up on bronzed calves—and Sarah could not breathe. She ducked behind the trunk of a cypress tree and watched as he joked with a couple older men. A donkey brayed, pulling a cart along the walk, and a few boys whooped at the shore before diving into the swell, but the noises barely blipped on Sarah’s radar.

  He wasn’t Jewish, of course. For one, he was working on the Sabbath, and he had blond hair besides. Red hair was a rarity among Greek Jews, but blond a near impossibility. Sarah watched the boy toss the nets into his long kaiki boat painted sky blue. He stepped on in and put a hand gently on its side. Sarah could tell it was a thing in which he took great pride.

  All of a sudden, the boy’s attention was drawn to the sea. Sarah’s eyes zoomed out so the boy no longer consumed the whole of her vision. A little girl was shrieking and pointing toward Mouse Island. Sarah crept closer to shore, startled to watch the boy whip off his shirt and dive into the sea, making fast, furious strokes. A crowd gathered amid murmurs and points. Sarah’s heartbeat quickened as she searched the horizon. What was going on?