When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  Costas caressed his grandson’s cheek. He ate his bobota so quietly and carefully in a way that made Sarah despise him. Benjamin should have been there instead, eating bobota and relishing every bite.

  “What I heard is that, a few days ago, the Nazis made all the Jews of Corfu gather,” Costas said. “No exceptions. On threat of death, they had to surrender their possessions. Gold, apartments, everything. The Nazis took it all. They put the Jews in the fortress, the old one. Anyone who wouldn’t go willingly was shot on the spot. It was horrific, I understand. Just horrific.”

  “Shot on the spot?” Sarah’s hand migrated to her throat.

  Costas nodded, and his face shaded with disdain. “The next day, the mayor issued a proclamation. He announced to the people of Corfu that at last the Jews are gone and now the island may return to prosperity and the land to its rightful owners.”

  “The Jews are…gone?”

  “Some of them are here on Lefkada now. But it’s just temporary. The Nazis will move them again soon.”

  “What do you mean…here?”

  “On the edge of town, northwest of the port, in an area barricaded by fences. My wife and I brought some food to them and are organizing more provisions. Filotimo, yes? We have to do what we can, don’t you agree, Sarah? We can’t just stand by and watch. These Jews…they are our people too. We are bound by compassion and humanity to help them.”

  Sarah nodded but couldn’t bring herself to speak. When at last Costas and his grandson had finished their bobota and gone, Sarah threw up the crushed olives she’d eaten in the morning. The cheese lady had returned from outside with a pail of warm, fresh milk in hand from their last remaining cow, just in time to watch Sarah get sick. Sarah didn’t correct her misperception that it was a baby and not olives.

  The cheese lady said, “Go home.”

  So Sarah ran down the stone village paths still abjectly foreign, past the lemon trees wafting their horribly pleasing fumes. She arrived home to Milos, grilling fish in the dim, musty kitchen. He hadn’t yet left for the quarry.

  “They’re here! My family’s here.” Sarah grabbed a sack and started gathering fruit to place inside it. “I’m going to hug them so hard. We’ll get them out, won’t we? We have to. We just have to.”

  Milos tried to halt her, but she sidestepped him and kept gathering and babbling. She was a tornado, and Milos seemed to think he could pause her whirling by resting his hands on her shoulders. He could not. Sarah had tried to wait out this war, sitting on her hands. Talking to God. Stupid, useless God. Now it was time for her feet to take action.

  “You can’t go see them, Sarah. It’s far too dangerous. You can’t help them.”

  Sarah felt herself erupt—a volcano of emotion she’d shoved down inside in their year of blissful, ignorant house-playing. “Don’t you ever speak of my family that way. Don’t you ever! They’re here and they’re alive and I’m going to save them. It’s a miracle of miracles.”

  Milos removed his cap and looked out the tiny window onto the garden, where his mother was snipping grape clusters off a vine. He said nothing. That was when Sarah realized Milos already knew her family was on Lefkada.

  “Where are they?” she demanded.

  Milos spoke so quietly and sadly, but it did nothing to soften her toward him. “They are behind fences at the edge of town, by the sea. They are surrounded by Germans, Sarah. I gave them food.”

  “You gave my parents food?”

  He nodded. “Others did too. There are good people on Lefkada.”

  “Oh, really? The mayor of Corfu said they were happy to be rid of the Jews!”

  “Well, here on Lefkada they are giving food and trying to help.”

  “And how were my parents? How was Benjamin?”

  Milos reached toward her again, but Sarah stepped back. “You can’t go there, Sarah. You can’t save them.”

  “Oh yes? Watch me!” She yanked him by his collar with strength that surprised her. Yes, she’d been a strong, stubborn girl once, defending her family and the values she held dear. Milos had fallen in love with that girl, and now she resurfaced. “Take me there now! I demand you to take me there now!”

  “I will not.” Milos wasn’t usually stubborn. He was easy. He told Sarah often that all he wanted in the world was to please her. But now he crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Then I will go out to find them myself!”

  Milos grabbed for her, only reaching the pleats of her dress. But then he stopped because he knew she had won, impossible as it was to prevail against someone willing to risk everything. And she was.

  “I will take you there, but only if you stay back. We will give them this food, but that’s all. You will see. There’s nothing else we can do.”

  Her love for him washed over her again, but she couldn’t follow it down the dark alley this time. Nor could she muster any promises. “Take me.”

  Milos led the way out of his house, past the empty spot upon which their piano had once stood, which his parents had sold in exchange for two liters of contraband oil. Sarah’s entire soul tingled in anticipation of her impending reunion with her family. She followed Milos out the front garden, down the trail covered in dry grass. Past normal people spewing normal chatter as if her family were not prisoners nearby. They walked very far, to the edge of town and then west along the sea a bit. What Sarah saw first was a boy in uniform, a swastika on the band around his arm, just like German soldiers who now frequented her shop. She registered his eyes—surprisingly boring, the color of mud. She had expected palpable evil, but what greeted her was a baby in the body of a soldier. This boy, just a little older than her with plain eyes, wouldn’t harm her family. She began to walk to him.

  Milos hissed in a low, harsh voice, “Sarah, you will not. I beg of you, no.”

  But she was just going to talk reasonably with this boy soldier. She was going to say she would give him everything she had. She had nothing, of course. But she did have some savings from the bakery. She would give that to him, and he would give her back her family. Her eyes were on the lookout for her family. Where was her family?

  The boy soldier had watched her approach, but now he was diverted by something. A priest had walked up to the barbed-wire fence. Sarah recognized him, in fact: Pope Dimitris Thomatzidis, with his long black robe, giant, bushy beard, and tall black hat. He was a refugee from Samsun in coastal Turkey and a customer of the cheese lady’s shop. Once, before the German occupation, Sarah had accidentally omitted sugar from a batch of bougatsas, and she remembered how kind he’d been, praising the custard pie, even asking for another slice, when the following customer had made a warranted fuss about it. Sarah had winced when she’d tasted it, but the pope had already gone.

  Maybe the pope could help now. Maybe the Nazis would listen to him. Sarah nodded at him in recognition and tried to formulate a plan of attack. Her head grew wild with charts and thoughts, none of them coalescing. The pope nodded back. Then through the fence, he handed a cigarette to a man in his forties. A man whom Sarah gleaned was a Jewish prisoner.

  But then she noticed a little boy sitting on the ground. Benjamin! He was playing with nothing. He was playing with dirt. He was not off dancing or reading. Beside him Sarah saw her parents. Her father in his brown tweed coat. It was so hot for a coat! Why was he wearing a coat? She started to trot that way. Milos reached for her.

  “Leave me,” she hissed. She walked faster, but Milos hung on to her arm. He was not letting her go, and all she wanted to do was go to her family. She hadn’t seen them in over a year. A year!

  She called out, “Mama.” Benjamin looked up. His face broke into a giant smile. He nudged her mother’s arm. Sarah was nearly there. She was nearly to them.

  This was the moment that could have gone a thousand different ways. In the years since, Sarah had cataloged those ways—her fingers touched Benjamin’s through the fence; Baba kissed her cheek through the fence; Mama said, It’s okay, darling. We love you. We forgi
ve you. So many permutations. So many chances. Maybe all of that happened, and then still Milos pulled her away. Or maybe all of that happened, and then the boy soldier took her. He understood she was Jewish, that she belonged to these prisoners, and he put her behind the fence with them. To die with them, but never to wonder what she read in their silent eyes.

  Instead, none of this happened because the boy soldier saw Pope Thomatzidis approach the fence and hand the cigarette through the slats to the Jew. The boy soldier whistled, and as Sarah said, “Mama,” as she ran to her family, a gunshot pierced the day’s blue-green idyll. Then shouts—commands—that she didn’t comprehend. She watched in mute horror as the Jew who had accepted the cigarette keeled to the ground, his head something bloody and terrible.

  The boy soldier advanced toward a Jewish couple behind the fence, who had simply been standing in the vicinity of the fallen man. Sarah’s screams froze inside as her eyes locked on the woman in a black-collared dress, a little girl’s hand curled into her own. Her husband in a beautiful coat like the ones Sarah’s father made.

  Sarah pinched her thigh, aware of the specter of Milos behind her. Do something, she pleaded in mute telepathy. Do something. Her eyes closed at the screams. This time no gunshots, but the sound of something heavy crushing bone. When Sarah peeked her eyes open, at first she couldn’t be sure if she was dead or alive. But her fingers fluttered and her toes curled, sending a message to her brain, that alive was indeed what she was. The couple now sprawled on the ground, and the boy soldier stood over them with his cane. The little girl was screaming Mama, Mama, Mama, in the most chilling shrill that had ever accosted Sarah’s ears. An older girl clapped a hand over her mouth and moved her back.

  Sarah searched wildly for her family, eventually locating them again—her mother with her turquoise eyes like Sarah’s, so eerily still, with no bourekas to make or cucumbers to chop; her father with his ears that stuck out, that froze up as a child when his hat was stolen. And Benjamin—wise, kind Benjamin, who had longed to visit Odysseus’s Lefkada. Oh, but not in this horrific way!

  Again Sarah’s attention was diverted as the boy soldier stalked back from the fence. Each stomp of his boots against dirt strummed the tenuous strings that connected Sarah to her parents and Benjamin. As the boy soldier passed Pope Thomatzidis, he yanked him by his beard and threw him to the ground. Sarah felt herself crumple down too, her ears thrumming with her heartbeat. She blinked open her eyes just in time to watch the boy soldier jump atop the pope’s prone body, yielding a sickening crunch.

  The boy soldier screamed something in German. The only word Sarah gleaned was Juden. Jews. A rumpled man approached from outside the fence. He was the translator, a prisoner, Sarah later understood. In Greek, he said, “You must go. You may not give gifts to the prisoners. Otherwise he will hurt more of them.”

  “She is frightened,” Milos said to him, crouching down beside Sarah. “We will go.”

  But Sarah’s eyes stayed locked on her family. She wished to die right there and then. She didn’t know everything—in later months she’d learn of concentration camps and Auschwitz—but she knew the rumors from Saloniki. She knew that Jews were disappearing. And kneeling there, amid the dead and beaten Jews and the pope, she knew somehow that her family’s fate was already sealed.

  Milos pulled her up, and her limbs betrayed her, clicking back into her core to hold her up. Milos lifted Pope Thomatzidis to his feet and said, “Ella, we will help you.”

  Sarah’s eyes stayed riveted to her family. She watched Benjamin put his hand to his mouth. He blew Sarah a little kiss. He didn’t smile again. Just the kiss. Before Milos led her away, Sarah put a hand to her mouth. She couldn’t feel her hand. She couldn’t feel her lips. She blew her little brother a kiss in return.

  * * *

  The next thing Sarah remembered was waking in their attic room. She was screaming, sobbing. Nightmares when she was awake. Nightmares when she was asleep. She didn’t speak, to Milos or to anyone. Milos told the cheese lady she was expecting a baby. She was very sick. She needed some time off.

  Sarah lay there in the bed where symphonies had once played as she and Milos had wound and bound their bodies with love. Only now, she prayed desperately for the courage to commit suicide. A few times she took a knife and ran the jagged edges against her neck. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  Her family was gone, and even in joining them, she was a coward.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Milos came home from fishing. He sat on the bed, and Sarah inched away to its farthest border. He said he’d heard something he thought she should know. That he’d debated telling her, but he couldn’t keep this from her. The night after they’d seen her family on Lefkada, Greek Resistance had helped a few Jews escape. The Jews were then hidden by local fishermen and had managed to flee to the mainland.

  “Do you know who?” They were her first words in weeks, and they scraped her throat as she spoke. Her heart leaped a little with possibility, and she hated it anew, for the hope she thought she’d beaten out of it.

  “I don’t.” Milos studied his hands. He’d once taken her eyes into his at every opportunity, but her eyes weren’t accessible anymore.

  “Do you think there was a young boy? A couple?”

  His eyes didn’t stray from his hands—hands that used to fill her with pleasure. “I do not think so.”

  And they both looked anywhere but at each other. They’d been children, really, whose only crime was that they’d loved each other when the world had gone insane. If not for Milos, Sarah would have been with her family. Then, if not for him, she would have died with her family.

  And if I could wave a wand and choose a past without you, Milos, would I do it? It is a question that has plagued me for seventy-some years—and I am still no closer to an answer.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  Joey kept reminding herself that they weren’t in Corfu anymore, but the evidence urged otherwise. There was Bea’s easel on the taupe stone patio, with an unfinished rendering of the nude backside of a woman bent over a table. There was the long wooden farm table adorned with ceramic jugs of sunflowers. There was Leo, deep in conversation with her father about barefoot ultra-marathons.

  And there was Bea, emerging from inside holding a water pitcher with lemon wedges. She wore teal separates comprising a midriff-baring bustier tank and a floaty, tea-length skirt.

  Grant whispered, “Bea’s abs can work it. I bet you inherit those abs, babe.”

  Leo broke out of his conversation with Scott to interject, “There is no question that Bea has ageless abs, but she’s wearing a terrible shade of—”

  “Green.” Joey laughed, even though the topic of ageless abs had made her remember her bingeing again. She patted her stomach—puffy, the abs buried deep. She told herself that was okay and tried to believe it. “You’re so predictable, Winn.” She explained to Grant, “Leo used to walk around Corfu with this botany book. He has a narrow concept of valid shades of gr—”

  Joey was interrupted by a startling sound, like a thousand frogs croaking in unison. Bea set down the wooden thing from which she’d created the noise. She bent her knees in the way of a small curtsy. “It’s a didgeridoo.”

  “A what?” asked Joey.

  “A didgeridoo.” Her father went to the barbecue and lifted a burger with his tongs, checking its doneness and apparently, by its drop back onto the grill, deciding it needed more. “Lily must have left it behind.”

  “Where is Lily, anyway?” asked Leo, and his nonchalance didn’t fool Joey. She shot him a look.

  “Our creative Lily is at the seminal cover shoot for her magazine. She was so sad to miss this dinner, Leo, but the shoot couldn’t be shifted. She had a really interesting concept.” Scott crunched his nose, as if to summon Lily’s fashion-speak. “I think it was juxtaposing offbeat musical instruments with flower outfits.”

&nbs
p; “Not flower outfits,” said Bea. “Victorian-era high fashion.”

  “That’s some enterprising girl you have.” Leo glanced at Joey. “Two enterprising girls.”

  “Leo.” Joey flushed. “You don’t have—”

  “Two enterprising girls is right,” said Scott. “But truly, Leo, Joey here, she’s a brilliant lawyer.”

  “Dad, I’m not a lawyer anymore,” said Joey, prickly at the cavalier way her father sometimes treated her art—as if it was a hobby, as if she didn’t have the right to her high level of devotion.

  “Now I’m hoping for some grandchildren,” said Scott, stamping out Joey’s hurt with another sensitive topic. “No pressure, kids, but of my best friends, I’m the last man standing.”

  “Maybe you should have had more kids,” muttered Joey.

  Grant put a hand on her thigh. “We’re working on it.”

  “You are?” said Bea, at the same time Leo said, “Are you guys now?” in a calm, toneless voice, and Scott said, “Bravo!”

  “We are?” said Joey tightly.

  “Well, at some point. We’ve talked about this.”

  “Yeah.” Joey did want kids. That was the thing. And every attendee over fifty at her shower had given her some variation of you’re not getting any younger. But she didn’t want that pressure. She wanted to nurture her art now. She needed to nurture her art first, and she needed everyone to back off.

  Grant said, “You can do both. Art and kids.”

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  “I have to say, I disagree, Grant,” said Bea, and Joey eyed her mother in surprise. “It’s very difficult to care for your kids at the same time you’re creating. A painting requires all of a person. You have to be in a very specific zone.”

  “That’s right,” said Joey slowly.

  “You just don’t want to be called Grandma.” Scott chuckled.

  “I won’t be Grandma,” said Bea. “And none of those cutesy variations like Glamma. Nothing that starts with a G. I’ll be something nice, like Unicorn.”