When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  But as Sarah grappled to stand and walked to the entry of her old apartment building, almost peculiarly intact amid all the destruction, she feared she was perhaps the last Jew alive on the island.

  It took Sarah ten minutes to coax herself up the stairs. She turned the knob—locked. The air was sweet and a bit like sewage, not the charcoal scent of kitchen fire that used to greet Sarah at the entry, pointing to her mother over the stove, stirring something lovely in their great black pot. Sarah knocked softly, and an old, sour lady answered the door with a liver-spotted face and gray tendrils escaping her black kerchief. A lady who was not Sarah’s mother. “Yes?” The girth of her successfully blocked the doorframe.

  “This…this is my home,” Sarah managed to say.

  “This is my home now, Jew!” The lady flashed gums so red they were burgundy.

  “But…but I used to live here. With my family.”

  “Oh yes? Prove it.” The lady crossed her arms over her chest.

  “We have a family chart on the wall.” Sarah strained to remember other things. “And my parents’ wedding document. A ketubah.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And if I did know what you were talking about, I would suspect those things were gone.”

  “Gone?” Sarah shuddered.

  “Burned, probably.” She shrugged. “Hold here.”

  The lady disappeared inside, giving Sarah a peek of the home that used to be hers, with their art, their cheap, stupid art, on the walls! The painting of pink roses that her mother adored—and then it was eclipsed as the lady returned.

  She thrust a wooden cage into Sarah’s startled hands. “He is your rabbit, eh? You are lucky we fed him. Be gone now, or I will shove you in the ovens just like the rest of them.”

  Sarah flinched at the spite. Ovens? She didn’t yet know of ovens. She came eye-to-eye with Penelope, the apple of her brother’s eye. The door slammed shut as she whispered, “It’s a girl rabbit, not a boy.”

  Somehow Sarah stumbled down the stairs. With Benjamin’s bunny rabbit in hand, she wandered through the ruins of her town to the synagogue. They called it Scuola Greca. They were Romaniotes—the first Jews outside Judea. They’d been so proud of that once. It was always important to know they were Jews, Romaniotes. They’d cherished those labels, and then they were murdered for them.

  Sarah walked inside the temple, past the well from which she used to collect water, and saw the back part in rubble. She heard the murmur of voices overhead, presumably in the sanctuary. She stepped down to the wing that once housed Rabbi Nechama’s office, no longer identifiable if she hadn’t known where he’d once sat and learned. She remembered what Costas had said about him, how he’d been made to hand a bath towel to the German commandant, and she swallowed hard and coughed into the sleeve of her folksy Lefkada dress. She walked to the edge of the rabbi’s old office space to peer across a wall reduced to nothing. She’d expected to see her old Talmud Torah school, which had abutted the synagogue—but that too was gone.

  She had to get out of there. If she didn’t see another person soon, a Jew, she was going to leap out of her body.

  Sarah felt her feet quicken, now running up the stairs. She burst into the sanctuary, initially heartened at the sight of life. Jews. Her heart quivered as she spotted a familiar profile kneeling on the floor, polishing a pew, but it wasn’t until Sarah had hastened across the room that she realized who it was.

  Roza—Rachel’s mother.

  A sob arose in Sarah’s throat. “Roza?”

  The woman looked up with absent eyes. She had aged immeasurably since Sarah had last seen her, not even three years prior. She wore a prison uniform—dingy white with black stripes—and her face, once perpetually alight, bore such visible pain that Sarah flinched.

  “Sarah,” Roza said slowly. “Sarah Batis?”

  “Yes. Oh, Roza.” Sarah couldn’t help it. She set Penelope in her cage on the floor and dove down and threw herself into Roza’s arms. She clutched Roza’s shoulders, now as tiny as kumquats. “Roza, what happened?”

  Roza clenched her rag to her chest, enduring the hug. Reluctantly, Sarah released her grip. “They’re gone, Sarah. They’re all gone.”

  It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. Roza’s face didn’t flicker as she recited them. “My Menachem. My Matathias. My Rachel. My brother’s girl, Stemma. Gone.”

  “No.” The names screeched in Sarah’s ears, cycling round and round. “Rachel?” Her sweet, beautiful friend. How could it be?

  Roza smelled like putrid flowers. Sarah fought back nausea. “Your family too, Sarah. Your mother and father—”

  “No.” Sarah covered her ears. “No, please. No, no, no—”

  Hands circled Sarah’s wrists, to free her ears and condemn them. A voice as dry as dust. “Your Benjamin too.”

  “No no no no no no no.” Sarah gasped for breath—breath she didn’t even want.

  “All of them, Sarah mou. Yes. Everyone is gone.”

  “I want to die. Take me too!” Sarah turned her face to the ceiling, to say it to God, and she prayed he would smite down from the sky and remove her from this wretched earth.

  Sarah sensed Roza lifting her arm, pulling on it, with a strength that felt peculiar, even in the sea of her grief. “You will come home with me, Sarah mou. I have more beds than bodies now.”

  * * *

  Sarah found that, when she swept the synagogue floor, her mind sometimes—fleetingly—could focus only on sweeping the synagogue floor. And so she came to the synagogue, day after day, to help with the restoration efforts. But one winter day, January, February, who knew, she was sweeping and got a feeling that struck her often, like her legs were going to buckle.

  Sarah sat on the pew. It was still a beautiful synagogue. Looking at beautiful things made Sarah’s eyes hurt. She didn’t register a man approaching until he sat beside her. He was familiar—he’d been coming to the synagogue every day for maybe a month and just sitting on a pew, but not speaking. Sarah hadn’t thought it strange; nothing seemed strange or not strange anymore. The man was older—thirty, maybe.

  “Can I sit?” he asked in Italian, which explained why Sarah hadn’t known him before the war. He surely belonged to the island’s Italian Jewish community, whose synagogue now sat in ruins.

  “You are already sitting,” Sarah responded in Italian, which she knew nearly as well as Greek. It had been years since she’d spoken it though. She shifted away from the man.

  “I just meant, do you mind if I do?”

  “You can do whatever you want. The Nazis aren’t here to outlaw it.”

  A long silence. It was raining outside, drumming onto the windowpanes. Penelope thumped her feet in her cage on the floor, where Sarah set her each morning. Thumping meant she was unhappy with something; that was what Benjamin had once said. Since Sarah had acceded to her ownership, Penelope was incessant in her thumping.

  “You lost your family?” asked the man, whom Sarah had nearly forgotten was still there.

  Like she had misplaced them. “Yes, they are dead. They are dead. They are dead.” She could have kept going, but her mouth ran out of steam.

  “My wife and baby daughter died too.” He scratched his ear, and Sarah saw his arm with those horrific numbers.

  “I’m very sorry.” Her eyes bored into the pew. Finally, she got up with her broom.

  “And now I am getting out of here to America.”

  “Well, then, good luck.” The man reached out to put a hand on hers. Sarah’s hand stung with the touch. She ripped it away.

  “Why don’t you marry me and come with me to America?”

  She finally looked at him. He looked like all of them. Not eyes with light. Just dark eyes. Dull. No contrast. A shell with a skeleton frame and a fine-shaped head. His dark hair was sparse, and she could see his scalp. It was red in parts. It needed ointment. A caring hand to apply it. You couldn’t see those places by yourself.

  “Marry you?” She managed to lau
gh.

  “You are Jewish, I am Jewish. We can start a new life in America.”

  “You are crazy.” She swept away from this crazy man.

  “Don’t you want to get out of this place?” he called. “Don’t you want to get away from the memories?”

  And the thing was, she did. Very much so.

  “I will think about it,” she finally said.

  He stood. He was not tall and not short, but of medium height. Somehow Sarah liked it, his medium-ness. A tall life was no longer possible, of that she was certain. But meeting this man was like tasting the first bite of some potentially medium life.

  “Please, do,” he said. “My name is Sam, by the way.”

  And Sarah watched crazy Sam walk away.

  The next day, she was sifting through the Mahzor Romania prayer books, to see what might be salvaged, when she heard a familiar voice echo from downstairs.

  “Sarah Batis?” the voice asked. “I am looking for Sarah Batis.”

  Sarah didn’t think, just burst across the room toward the aron and leaped inside the ark. She’d once hidden there as a child, among the Torah scrolls, playing hide-and-seek with Rachel. But there were no Torahs anymore, because the Nazis had looted them.

  “Sarah?” she heard. “Sarah, are you here?”

  Sarah peeked through the crevice of the doors of the aron and watched Milos wandering through the pews. Milos, in his sweet tweed cap, searching for a person who no longer existed.

  Sarah held her breath, watching him, wanting him—and yet willing him away.

  When he’d gone, she went to find Sam. She said, “I will marry you.”

  Six months later, she found herself on a boat with him, heading to America.

  Well, that’s all I have for you for now, Milos. It’s a relief to have written it. It’s a relief to have it outside of me. I want you to know something. It’s important I tell you this. I forgive you. I forgive you, Milos. It’s not your fault they died. It’s not your fault I died inside. It’s not your fault we couldn’t be together.

  I loved you then and I love you now. Love doesn’t die, Milos. Love doesn’t even need to be reciprocated. Love just is. It doesn’t get to make a choice. That’s what I know to be true.

  I would like to see you. I would like to put my hand to your face and look into those eyes of yours and laugh and cry. If you are married, it’s okay. I respect it. If we cannot do this in person, perhaps on some video contraption. Perhaps my granddaughters can arrange it. I will talk in Greek. I want to see you right away. Please, Milos. Please.

  It is peculiar, Milos, but after writing this terrible note to you, I feel a little bit happy. I am going to go sit in my garden with my rosebushes. Speak to you soon, Milos mou.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  Joey was still thinking about the eyes when she stepped onto the sand. The eyes were the heart of her portrait. More subtle than anything she’d done before. She couldn’t quite believe she was the creator of this. Maybe the nose needed to come down. Yes, the nose was slightly smaller than she’d sketched it. But she’d gotten the backdrop right. The streakiest navy—unhinged. She hadn’t felt this way about a piece before, so wild, so trusting.

  She’d need the entire night, but she had confidence in her ability to pull it off. She’d asked Edith to stay out of the foyer until it was done. She had to get the eyes right. And fix the nose. The rest just needed shading and coaxing.

  As Demetris always used to say, It’s not you moving the brush!

  Joey saw the eyes first—blue that mirrored the water. She kicked up sand as she walked to her sister.

  * * *

  Lily straddled the waterline—feet in wet sand, butt in the precariously dry part. She had on a red flannel crop top, distressed black bike shorts, and massive opaque black sunglasses.

  “Hey,” said Lily as Joey sat beside her.

  “Hey.” Joey stretched out her feet to meet the wave rolling in. “Is this your beachy outfit?”

  “It’s all washable. How about you? Where are the five people you’re hiding under that muumuu?”

  Joey glanced down at her white eyelet midi dress. It was a little tentlike, maybe, but tentlike was in. “It’s my painting outfit today. I wore an apron over it. And I wear it in real life too.” Water droplets smattered on Joey’s shoulders. She hoped it wouldn’t rain.

  “So looking ugly helps you paint better?”

  “Thanks, Lil. Remind me why I came out here to meet you?”

  “Oh, Joey.” Lily gasped. “I’m really angry at you.”

  Joey piled sand into a little mound. She studied the imprint her fingers made on top. “I only found out a week before you. I thought it was best to wait to tell you after the wedding.”

  “Right. Everyone knows what’s best for me. I didn’t get to choose if I wanted to grow up with my real dad or my real brother. Maybe that would have been best for me. You know, Leo’s really cool, Jo.”

  “He is.” Joey considered reminding her sister that Leo had known about the secret for far longer, but she wanted to protect their very new bond. And Joey understood that she was an easier target right now.

  “I have a nephew too! He’s such a cutie. Arthur. Can you believe that? I’m an aunt.”

  “You talked to Leo?”

  “We went for lunch.”

  “Oh, wow. Okay, that’s—”

  “It’s weird. It’s crazy and weird. I’m a little mad at Leo too, that he didn’t tell me the truth a long time ago. You know?”

  “Yeah.” Joey nodded.

  Lily frowned. “By the way, you didn’t invite me with a plus-one to your wedding. That’s pretty messed up.”

  “Huh?” Joey searched in her purse for her sunglasses. “You don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “But maids of honor get plus-ones. It’s, like, etiquette.”

  “You can have a plus-one, Lil. What, you want to take Leo? I’m gonna invite him. There’s no reason now to keep him away.”

  “No, I don’t want to take Leo. I invited my father.”

  Joey’s hands froze around her aviators. “You invited…Rand?”

  “Leo gave me his number. I called him. Leo already told him what happened so I asked if he’d come down to meet me. And technically he’s not even a plus-one because apparently you guys originally invited him. His reason for declining doesn’t really apply anymore.”

  A wave that looked like it was going to break farther off ended up barreling to their waists. Joey leaped up. Lily just reclined fully in the sand as the water swept up to her head.

  A little red-haired girl ran over to them. She tapped Lily’s arm. “I know you!”

  “Oh.” Lily sat up, drenched hair matted with sand. “Do you want my autograph? Or a photo together?” She turned to Joey. “It’s really sweet. Moms and daughters read my blog together as their first dabbles in feminism. Lots of teachable moments.”

  “I know you fwom the movies!”

  “She thinks you’re the Little Mermaid,” said a woman juggling a baby and a litany of plastic beach toys.

  “Oh.” Lily smiled brightly at the girl. “But I am the Little Mermaid!” She lay back down again and arranged her hair to stream behind her. The little girl clapped her hands. “Look at this stuff,” Lily belted.

  The girl darted off mid-song.

  Joey smiled. “Fickle audience.”

  Lily slowly sat up. “She was cute.”

  “That’s how old you were when Leo found out about everything, Lil.”

  “Oh.” They watched the girl hop up and down in a dance whose rhythm was evident only to her. “Was I that cute?”

  “You were even cuter. You were so cute and innocent, and Leo just didn’t want to ruin your life.”

  Lily shut her eyes. “I didn’t mean what I said, Joey. It’s Mom’s fault and Dad’s fault and Rand’s fault. None of this is your or Leo’s fault.”

  “Thanks for saying that.
And Lil? Rand can be your plus-one.”

  Thunder rumbled in the distance. “Thanks,” said Lily. “I told Dad I invited him.”

  “You called Dad?”

  “No, he called me five million times.”

  “He called me too. I haven’t answered yet.”

  “Well, I did. I told him I wasn’t coming home. I told him I moved in with you.”

  Joey smiled and inwardly cringed.

  “He said Mom left.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. He said they need space to figure things out. That he understood why I’d want to meet Rand.”

  “Wow. Okay.” Joey watched a column of rain far out over the sea.

  “Joey.” Lily rested her wet, sandy head on Joey’s shoulder. “Do you think Dad loves me less than you? You know, because you’re really his?”

  Joey swallowed hard. “No. I really, really don’t, Lil.”

  “But…I don’t have his blood. I’m the daughter of the man…the man his wife was having an affair with.”

  “Dad loves you so much. He always has. And he’s known from the start that you weren’t his.” Joey felt her sister shake. “It’s okay to cry, Lil.”

  For a few minutes, her sister wept quietly on her shoulder.

  “Joey,” said Lily after a while.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do we hate Dad?”

  “Oh, Lil. I think we want to hate Dad. But no. We don’t hate him.”

  “Do we hate Mom then? We must hate Mom! I hate her! I really do!”

  Joey pressed her hand against her sister’s cheek. It was wet and soft. Joey wanted skin that soft again. “Take it from your big sister. I’ve only had a week of it, but it’s a lot of work to hate.”

  “I hate them,” shouted Lily. “I haaaaaaate them!”

  Her little admirer ran up to them from the shore. “My mom says you’re not s’posed to hate.” Her eyes bobbed between them. “Got it?” She darted back to her shovel.

  Joey giggled. “PSA, Lil. You’re not s’posed to hate. A message from your three-year-old self.”

  Lily shoved her sunglasses up over her hair, unveiling splotchy red cheeks. “Did you resent me a little, Jo? After you found out the secret?”