When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  There was just the lull of the waves as Leo reached over and removed her sunglasses. He put a hand on her thigh. He lifted her chin in a way that was so slow and tender she thought she might faint. “Jonesey, I love you too. You have to know how important you are to me.”

  She bit her lip. Finally, she nodded.

  “This yacht thing, it’s really scary. I need you to understand it. It’s like…” He touched his neck, the part right below his Adam’s apple, the part she avoided even brushing against because he always flinched. “It’s like this whole year I’ve felt like someone was strangling me. And now, well, I think I’ll be able to breathe again.”

  A tear plopped onto her sketchbook; the source of it was Leo.

  Joey reached over to touch him. And as she stroked his back the way she knew he liked, she had a sinking feeling that the future she’d been counting on had surprised her by shifting askew, and she had no clue how to get it back upright.

  Chapter Twelve

  Joey

  Corfu

  2004

  “But you know,” Bea was saying, knees clasped to chest, “you only have to look so far as the Greek language itself to see how the Greeks place enormous value on femininity.”

  Maisy poured them all more wine. Greek music wafted from inside. To Joey, it was the language of love as she knew it, suffused with emotion, as if the singers were soap opera stars belting out their lines instead of saying them.

  “How is that, Bea?” asked Rand. He’d just returned from a sailing trip to Albania, and he’d turned a color suited to a man discovered on a deserted island with just a palm frond strung around his waist.

  “Well, in Greek, words themselves are either masculine or feminine.”

  “Is that right?” said Scott. “I’m impressed, sweetheart.”

  “So what words are masculine?” asked Rand.

  “Ah-ha! I’ll tell you.” Bea gave a dramatic pause. “Anger. Fear. Pain. All masculine. How’s that for you men?”

  “I don’t know what that proves,” said Rand. “So they arbitrarily assigned genders to these things.”

  “Arbitrary? I don’t think so,” said Joey. She realized she must have read the same article as her mother. “How about the feminine words though? Love. Beauty. Art. Truth.” Bea smiled at her, but a tight smile. Joey felt uneasy for a moment, like she’d inadvertently stolen her mom’s spotlight.

  “Impressive, Jonesey.” Leo whistled and gave her one of those mock bows that made Joey feel like she’d earned a gold star. “Truth. Feminine, you say? That’s very interesting.”

  “What you see is what you get.” Joey laughed. “Right, Mom and Mais?”

  “Well, beauty is a woman’s purview, I’ll give you all that,” said Rand. “I wouldn’t ever try to convince you I’m beautiful.”

  “No, you most definitely are not at the moment, my friend.” Scott pressed a finger into Rand’s skin. “It’s like Lily’s Etch A Sketch.”

  “Thanks, bud,” said Rand, his smile jarring, the white of his teeth against the red of his skin. “Here’s what I don’t get. Why all the negative masculine words? Anger, pain. What did we ever do to piss off the Greeks?”

  “Yeah!” said Scott. “We’re teddy bears, us men.”

  Joey snorted.

  “Because you men don’t deal with your pain and anger, and it doesn’t go away, it just simmers below the surface,” said Maisy. She didn’t pipe up often in these sorts of debates, so when she did interject, it was noted.

  Jefferson the Cat made a growling noise underfoot.

  “No, I’m not giving you my chicken,” said Leo in the cat’s general direction.

  “Sibling rivalry.” Rand laughed. Joey couldn’t look directly at him.

  “How about hate?” asked Leo, in a tone befitting the word he’d tossed into the arena. “Is that feminine or masculine?”

  There was some shifting in chairs and drinks being drunk.

  Leo stood. “Never mind. How about a walk, Jonesey?” She eyed the clouds moving in. “She who wilts in the rain,” he said, reading her mind. “If it rains, we’ll duck into a bar.”

  “Okay.” Joey stood.

  “Don’t forget, JoJo,” said Bea. “Tomorrow is the reunion of Corfiot Holocaust survivors at the synagogue.”

  The reminder filled Joey with an immediate, uncomfortable dread. “I’m not sure I can make it.”

  “JoJo, you have to come,” said her mother.

  “You’re going,” said her father. “They’re unveiling a plaque in dedication to everyone who died. You have two grandparents—your only living grandparents—whose families will be on that plaque.”

  “I’ll come too,” said Leo.

  “Sure, Leo,” said Bea. “We’d love it.”

  “Yeah?” Joey asked him, feeling something settle inside her. “That’s really nice.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  * * *

  The next day, on the way to the synagogue, Leo asked Bea about the progress of her show. Then he listened patiently as Bea spent the whole way down Nikiforou Theotoki Street talking about her new pieces devoted to a woman’s menstrual cycle. He kept an inexplicably straight face as they passed the tourist shops selling soaps and dream catchers and sesame peanuts as Bea used the words womb and flow and indigenous cultures and menstrual cup. He made mmm sounds as they traveled north, beneath a canopy of brilliant fuchsia bougainvillea, past the homemade hat store and the barber and the tavern with lime-green tablecloths that served the best aubergines with feta, as all the while Bea described a particularly tricky time she was having mixing the right shade of crimson early-menstrual blood.

  It felt like something of a deliverance when Joey glimpsed the Jewish star insignia on the hunter-green door, the pristine yellow stucco building with its gabled roof that gleamed astride its neighbors in disrepair. Even though the walk from home took five minutes, Joey hadn’t crossed the east part of Velissariou since their first summer when she was ten and had waited for her father outside the synagogue.

  She followed her parents up the staircase that spilled into the main sanctuary. There milled about thirty or so people whom Joey estimated to generate an average age of eighty-five. Here and there were scattered a few younger ones, presumably progeny of the senior generation.

  “It’s pretty in here.” Leo ran a hand over a wooden bench with intricate armrests.

  Joey lingered by the stairs. She fingered the evil eye charm in her pocket that the old lady had given her just outside when she was a kid. She plucked a few orange sugary peanuts off a plate on the bimah.

  “Joey, come look at this,” said her father. Reluctantly, she crossed the room to a white marble plaque. Beside it, stained-glass windows adorned in a Jewish star and hamsa streamed in films of yellows and reds. Joey crunched on the peanuts.

  “This is why we’re here, JoJo. After all these years, they’ve built the memorial statue by the waterfront, and here’s the plaque commemorating the ones who died.”

  “The ones who were murdered, Dad,” said Joey quietly.

  “Right, you see”—her father pointed—“your grandmother’s maiden name, Batis. And then of course, their last name. Bezas.”

  Bea was studying the plaque when a man hovering around the average age of the attendees to this somber reunion tapped Bea’s shoulder.

  Bea turned. “Yes, hello there.”

  “Kalimera,” said the gentleman. Good morning.

  He was tall with kind, crinkly green eyes, wearing a yellow tweed blazer, matching pants, and a brown cap. He motioned to the woman next to him, who looked to be around Bea’s age and wore a floor-length brown dress smattered in pink flowers.

  “My father thought you looked familiar,” said the woman in English. “He thought you looked like someone he used to know.”

  “Oh really?” asked Bea. “Who?”

  “Her name was Sarah Batis.”

  Bea smiled. “Well, how about that, that’s my mother!
Everyone says we have the same eyes.” She shook the man’s hand.

  “So you’re here for the reunion?” asked the woman.

  “Yes,” said Bea. “My parents couldn’t be here, but I wanted to come in their place. To be honest, neither of them spoke of the Holocaust much when I was growing up. But you get the gist when you’re the kid.” She twisted her hands. “Lucky me, who got a pair of survivors as parents. Probably just means I’m doubly fucked-up.”

  The woman’s mouth parted but then closed. The older man let out a stream of Greek.

  Joey and her father strayed back as the trio continued talking.

  “Dad, is G a survivor?” asked Joey.

  “You know the answer to that, JoJo, don’t you?”

  Joey’s eyes settled upon the white wooden ark that held the Torahs. “The Holocaust gives me nightmares, you know that.”

  “Well, your grandmother’s not a survivor in the sense that she went through it. But her whole family died in the war. They all got sent to Auschwitz.”

  “And G escaped?”

  “Right.”

  “How?”

  “You know, Joey, I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t think even your mother knows the answer to that question. G has never liked talking about it.”

  “Does Grandfather talk about what happened to him? About…” She didn’t want to say the word. Auschwitz.

  “He has to me. You could ask them, you know.”

  “You should ask them,” said Leo. “It’s your history.” Joey had almost forgotten he was there.

  “Maybe,” said Joey, although she knew she would not.

  “I think it’s important to know our ancestors,” said Leo.

  “Why?” asked Joey.

  Leo scrunched his nose. “I think who they are is a little of who we are. And if we want to be like them, then we know a little bit of how to get there. And if we want to be different, well, we get the clues for how to change course.”

  “But we’re not living with the Nazis in charge now!” Joey was surprised to find this anger, or whatever it was, boiling to her surface. “Knowing about all the evil my grandparents experienced doesn’t help me. It just makes me so…”

  Joey turned away, unable to pinpoint the feeling, and took in the airy space with light-blue walls and yet a pervading eeriness. Everyone was so old. Everything was so sad. There were fewer than a hundred Jews left in Corfu to pray here. Before the war, there had been two thousand. But over sixty thousand Greek Jews, including seventeen hundred Corfiot Jews, were murdered in the Holocaust. Those were the statistics her father had mentioned on the walk over, when she was eager to give her ears something other than menstruation to latch onto.

  Suddenly Joey was inside that old nightmare that barraged her in the night, snatched from the synagogue where her grandparents had once prayed. It was night where she’d flown to, back in the barracks, to the soundtrack of boot steps closing in. “I’m gonna wait outside.”

  Her father said, “But Joey, we’re going to say kaddish for the victims soon, and then—”

  “I’ll be back. I just need air.” Joey felt a thing rise up in her chest, a beast virulent and familiar. She barreled past a few old people on the steps and heaved herself through the exit. The heavy heat of late July folded her in.

  Leo joined her outside a few moments later. Joey sank down to the sidewalk.

  “I’m proud of you, Jonesey,” said Leo.

  Joey kept her eyes trained down at her feet. “Oh yeah? For what? Coming here? You have a low bar for pride, if that’s the case. I was essentially forced.” She dug her sandal into a moss-covered stone.

  “For being a good daughter.” The shadow of Leo hovered over her. “For being a good person. I think you’re a really good person, Jonesey.”

  “Why? I don’t even want to know my own grandparents’ Holocaust stories. I can barely stand to visit the synagogue they used to go to.”

  “You know, Jonesey, for being as crazy smart as you are, you’re missing something that’s pretty obvious to me.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked softly. “What?”

  “You’re only avoiding that stuff because you love your grandparents so much. Your brain doesn’t want to accommodate all their pain. I hereby diagnose you with an excess of love, Jonesey.”

  “Oh.” Joey was quiet. She didn’t have a word for the feeling she felt. It was like she was an X-ray, and Leo could see into her.

  He leaned down and squeezed her hand. “I think you’re the best person I know, Jonesey.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sarah

  Corfu

  1943

  Nothing ever happened in winter, and Sarah endured that nothing in a tangle of longing. Milos had said he’d return after Easter, and Easter had come to Corfu with trumpets blared by marching parades and clay pots thrown from balconies amid raucous applause.

  After Easter, Sarah took to the sea every day. Milos had promised that, when he returned, he would wrap a scarf in the branches of the olive tree under which they used to sit. But slowly the snowcapped mountains of neighboring Albania melted to green, and sunlight stretched the days, and still no scarf.

  Then the island rolled out its carpet of flowers in bloom, and Sarah’s favorite holiday, Pesach, came and went. Thirty members of her extended family gathered for the Seder, to read in Hebrew from the Haggadah. Sarah’s mother made her famous panada beef broth soup with matzah pieces—and yet no scarf in sight.

  One late afternoon in mid-April, Sarah buttoned her pale-blue overcoat and paused at her father’s sewing machine. It was siesta time but he’d already conducted his afternoon snooze, the apartment rumbling with his snores. Now he bent over, adding darts to a shirt with the familiar spools of thread jumbled at his side, stray strands littering the scuffed wooden floor.

  He did most of his work at his shop down below but occasionally brought a project home. He had been teaching Sarah to sew since she was child, and she loved to watch him immersed in a garment, his tongue stuck out in concentration as he formed each stitch, the perfect distance from the ones before and after. Customers raved about the precision of his stitches and came from far and wide for his craftsmanship.

  “Where are you off to, Sarah mou?” he asked.

  “To do Yanni’s ironing.” It was truly her plan, but she’d omitted the indirect route to the sea she’d take to get there.

  “Yanni likes even his underwear ironed, eh?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I am proud of you, chriso mou.”

  “I’ll see you later.” Sarah kissed his scratchy cheek.

  “Your ears will get cold. Put a hat on.”

  “It’s not that cold, Baba. And it will ruin my hair.” She’d wrangled it in place, and it was almost even obeying. A hat would just smush it.

  “Put a hat on, Sarah,” her father said again, without looking up. “We may not have money for much, but for a hat to keep your ears warm, yes we do.”

  Sarah pulled on her brown wool cap, resisting the urge to tell him she’d take it off the moment she cleared the door. When her father was a boy, he’d lost his hat, and to teach him a lesson, his father had refused to purchase him another. It pained Sarah now, the thought of her father’s icy ears, and she found it quite endearing, his perpetual concern over the temperature status of her and Benjamin’s ears.

  She walked to the sea and saw the scarf first in the tree. Her heart soared as she spotted Milos in his cap, chatting with other fishermen by the white bobbing masts of their trawlers. She burst forward to him like a marathon runner, and he tossed aside his nets and ran toward her just as fast. Their chests met like magnets. His arms welcomed her back in.

  “I can’t believe you’re back,” she whispered, over and over, as she gripped his nice shoulders and sucked in his particular scent of fish and sea and man. She caught a glimpse of sky overhead—blue at last. She hadn’t seen blue sky in months. Well, it was spring. Maybe it was the first blue sky
. But it was more than that.

  Milos set her arm’s length in front of him, and Sarah grew shy as he took her in because she knew how fantasies could embellish things, and she was no model, after all. Perhaps now, back with the reality of her, Milos would feel differently. But his translucent green eyes glimmered—those eyes, those eyes—and inside them was something she could read plainly before he spoke it. “Every thought I had this winter was of you, Sarah mou. Whatever it is now, we will be together.”

  They were sentiments that wrapped blankets around her heart, and words she felt too, but she had other words, darker ones, adjacent in her brain. It was the perfect match, she would realize much later: one person who surfs a perpetual wave of sunshine and the other who peeks her head out into this sunshine but then has no choice but to dive back into life’s murky corners.

  “Stemma got a letter from Saloniki yesterday,” Sarah told him, a thing that had been plaguing her ever since Rachel relayed the news. “Her whole family is being deported from the ghetto. The Germans say they are sending them to work in Krakow.”

  “Poland?” Milos’s face was the same infuriating calm of her mother’s when they’d discussed it the night prior. “Well…maybe Poland won’t be so bad.”

  “Maybe,” Sarah whispered. “What if they deport my family to Krakow too?”

  “They won’t,” he said, sure as day. “I will protect you. Anyway, we have the Italians. The Italians are wonderful.” As if on cue, a few Italian soldiers marched by, and Milos saluted them.

  The moment felt almost laughably cinematic. Who could imagine bombs and deportations when now there was only love and sea and beautiful young men meant to protect them, solemnly marching in their backdrop? When you were the protagonist of the story, it had to include a happy ending, didn’t it?

  Milos took Sarah’s hands. “You are the most sensitive, loving person, Sarah, with a million things in your head.”

  “A million,” she agreed, with a tentative laugh.

  He paused, his face suddenly solemn. “Will you marry me, Sarah? Say you’ll marry me!”