34 JUNE 12, 1944

  He returns two days later.

  I ask the others where he went, but they just shake their heads and say they don’t know. When he finally does come back, though, he finds where I stand with Kyriaki and Ikaros, holding him, bouncing him up and down, and tells me there’s something he needs to show me.

  “What?” I ask him.

  “It’s a surprise,” he smiles.

  And so it will be, because I have no idea what he might be thinking, or have planned.

  I hand Ikaros back to his mother, and go with him.

  We walk from the mountains, taking a path that doesn’t bring us near my village, but around it, so we come to the sea by a different road. Then from there we start to head towards Chania. I ask him if it’s safe, and he tells me all the Germans are officially gone from Chania. Some are still in Irakleio and Rethymno, he says, but the ones that were here left, mostly by boat, heading north and east towards some of the Dodecanese Islands where I can only assume they’ll try to find a way back to Germany that’s not blocked by the Americans.

  We keep walking.

  We come to Chryssi Akti, where I found William more than three years ago now, and I think back to all that’s changed since then, and he must know my thoughts and the darkness in them because he reaches out and takes my hand in his as we walk past the beach then to the place where there are rocks, then sand again, and then rocks once more before we finally reach the kastro and the city. The limani is quiet, almost as if people don’t quite believe the news yet, and then I realize it’s not that at all, it’s just there aren’t many people still left. So many have been killed. So many have been killed and for such pointless reasons, and as we walk around the crescent-shaped harbor and come to the Venetian fountain in the middle of town, William tells me to wait by the fountain as he goes to a taverna and I hear him say kalispera, then nai, nai, and finally efcharisto as he’s handed a basket and I realize how much Greek he’s learned since he’s been here. I smile. I can’t help it, and it feels good, the way my lips turn and the feeling of wanting to laugh again. He comes back and takes my hand and we keep walking. We pass the old Turkish baths, then turn back towards the southern end of the Old Town and go down a small side street before all of a sudden it washes over me, and I realize where we’re going, and where he’s taking me.

  We duck inside a small doorway.

  I look up to see the roof of the building has been completely blown off by the German bombing, I assume, probably when they first came and destroyed so much of the city. There’s still a small hole high in the wall that’s behind us, though, and an improvised white screen that spans the length and height of the stage in front of us in what is left of the theater I used to come to with my family every Friday to watch movies from America.

  I can’t believe he’s remembered.

  There are no more seats in the building so he takes a blanket that’s there and waiting and spreads it on the floor. We bend down, then lay there on it and eat together, the food he got from the taverna, in the basket, and drink as the sun goes down. Then when it does, and it’s dark, he gives a thumbs-up, to somewhere above us, and I hear a whirring sound. There’s a projector that’s still behind the wall, behind the small hole, and as it starts and film is fed through, the white screen is white no longer, and images begin. The old man who’s started it and I don’t recognize comes down and William stands and goes to him and presses something into his hand, then comes back to the blanket and me and sits again and we’re alone now.

  The movie starts.

  “They didn’t have any Barbara Stanwyck, so Clark Gable will have to do,” he whispers.

  And I see the title.

  Gone With the Wind.

  I’ve already seen it, but I don’t tell him, because I know I’ve seen all the films that would be stuck here in the projector room that they weren’t able to send back to Athens because a war broke out, and there was no one to send them back to. The images flood over us, and we let them, as we lay there and his arm is around me and my head is on his chest. We watch all four hours of the movie with previews and credits, without ever moving, then when it’s done, and I can hear the loose end of film flapping against the projector, he stands and goes up to the projector room himself and shuts it off, then comes back.

  He lays down again.

  We’re in the exact same position, his arm around me, my head on his chest, only now there’s no light; only now, there’s no love story in front of us, or images flashing on the screen, no more lives that are both more similar and familiar than the first time I saw them because my life has now also been defined by the same two great things their lives were defined by: love and war.

  I feel his chest rising and falling, then I feel him hold his breath.

  He opens his mouth, but nothing comes.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  He waits another moment, then finally finds the words.

  “That night on the beach,” he says, “outside of Rethymno, in the moonlight.”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “You already asked me that.”

  “I’m asking again.”

  I’m silent.

  He knows.

  He already knows, I’m sure of it, but I realize he wants to be sure, too.

  I can’t say it.

  So he saves me, one more time, and it’s him that says it, very softly, his words barely more than a whisper.

  “You were thinking that you don’t love me, weren’t you.”

  I close my eyes.

  A single tear leaks out.

  “I do love you, William.”

  I stop. I don’t know how to say it.

  “Just not like him,” he finishes for me.

  And I’m silent.

  I’m silent because that’s exactly right.

  I don’t want it to be.

  I want to love William in the same way I loved Demetrios, and continue with our lives in the way that Demetrios and I had done before war and had planned to do after, but we can’t command our bodies, and we certainly can’t command our hearts, either.

  Does he feel the same?

  “Perhaps we’re only meant to love one person,” he finally says, his voice even softer, and distant, and there are tears on his cheek now, also.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “How could I be angry?” he says, louder now, and with a sad laugh. “Truth is truth, Maria, and love is of course love. Neither can be what they aren’t, or forced, only found.”

  I’m not sure what that means.

  I do love him, I love being with him.

  But it’s not the same.

  Will it be with anyone else?

  I don’t know.

  I don’t think so, but the truth is, I don’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again.

  “If only we could command our souls, right?” he says, and I feel him smile as he brushes tears from his cheek, first, then mine.

  “We can try. We can only try.”

  “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  “What way?”

  “That we don’t control our hearts and souls, only the world does, and other forces beyond what we know and understand.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I do love you, William. I want you to know that.”

  “I love you, too, Maria.”

  “And I’m glad you came. I’m so glad that I found you.”

  “I’m glad, too. I’m so very glad, for both.”

  And then we lay there.

  I hold him as I look at the projector screen in front of us and I think of all the times I came here with my family, my family who is no longer with me, then I look up at the roof of the theater that’s no longer there, also, torn from the building by this war that has taken so much from us, and I look at the moon.

  It’s big, bright, whole.

  Sometime while staring at it, and feeling him next to me, I fall asleep, a deep and peaceful sleep, and when I wake, just before dawn, as I usually do, I look next to me and see that once again he’s no longer there. I sit alone for a moment, then stand, before brushing one last tear away, then I leave the ruined theater.

  I don’t look for him in the city. I know he’s not there.

  So instead, I leave Chania, taking the familiar path west to the place where there’s sand, then rocks, then sand again, at the beach where I found him and I stop there and look out at the sea. I reach down and pick up some of the sand, that’s once again our sand, and let it run through my fingers.

  I think of Demetrios’s words once more.

  When I’m gone, don’t look for me in the sunsets, look for me in the sea.

  I’ve looked.

  I’ll keep looking.

  I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing and there is so much of me that’s now filled with doubt and lost hope, and I just don’t know. All I know is how I feel, right now, in this moment, and that’s what we should perhaps be honest about most of all.

  I sigh, then keep walking.

  I go past the path that leads to our village and on to the one which brings me to the mountains, and when I get back, Cassia is there, and Tasos, and Kyriaki, and baby Ikaros, and they tell me the British have all gone. I already know, of course. They tell me Peter and Evelyn said that was the message received in their last visit from the SOE, that the Germans were in retreat and leaving Crete, and going back to their country, but the war was not yet finished so they were going to Egypt, first, and from there would be sent to Asia where there was still fighting against the Japanese. I swallow as I look back at them and they know I left with William, but didn’t return with him, so Cassia hugs me, and so does Tasos, and Kyriaki, and even little Ikaros seems to know what’s happening and wraps one of his little arms around my neck and I smile as we stay like that for a moment, the only people we have left.

  Then I go past them and into the tent I shared with William.

  I look around as it already feels more empty, and I’m just about to go to the cot to lay down, to take a nap, to think about all that’s happened in the last hours, days, months, years, and that’s when I see it.

  We have a small chest in the corner.

  It’s where we keep our clothes, and the old German uniforms we wore outside Knossos and the Villa Ariadne, and I walk closer and see what it is that’s there.

  It’s the ring he always wears.

  The one from his mother, from his family.

  He’s left it. He’s left it for me.

  I look down at it then pick it up, turning it over and running my fingers back and forth across the surface, the crest, feeling all the history and emotion and love that’s still there with it, and all of him that’s still with it, too, and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it not on his hand, because now it’s in mine.

  1945

  35 MARCH 13, 1945

  After all the British leave, we go east with Antonis and the rest of the Greeks from Rethymno to their city, with the intention to keep fighting, but we find the Germans have left there, too. There are still some in Irakleio, we hear, but they’ve gathered near the limani and kastro and soon they’ll be gone, also, in their planes and boats, and then our entire island will be ours once more.

  That doesn’t mean the fighting stops, though.

  True to who we are, nearly as soon as the Germans leave, Greece divides itself into factions, left and right, Communists and Nationalists, and civil war brews, then erupts. I will have no part of it, though. Athens is liberated from the Germans in October, and I’ve fought on our island and done my part as my father and my mother would have wanted, and their mother and father, too, and on and on, back and back, but I want no part of this new battle, the one where countrymen will kill countrymen.

  I don’t think they would either.

  I also discover that I’m pregnant.

  As women, we’re so conditioned to think that if children don’t come after a certain amount of time, then the fault lies with us, and our bodies, and so I thought that, too, for so long, and made no effort to prevent such a thing from happening with William.

  But then, very shortly after he leaves, I find that it has.

  Without a village to return to, we all go back to Chania and Cassia’s apartment, and when we get there, we see the lock’s been ripped from the door and there had been German soldiers living inside. And just as quickly as they came, after Cassia and Tasos left, they also departed again and there is still food that’s begun to rot, and we find there are weapons, too—a pistol and two rifles, carefully stored in a closet—such was the haste with which they departed. We spend three days cleaning it, all together, then Kyriaki uses some of the savings left by her father in the bank that’s reopened to rent another apartment in the building next to Cassia’s, still in the Old Town, and on the limani, and I search for a job myself, to be able to rent another apartment for me and Tasos. I find one selling bread for Fotis the baker in the agora, who knew me from when I used to stand next to him and sell our olives and wool, and when Cassia and I used to come into his shop. He’s lost a leg. It happened in the initial invasion, he tells me, when Germans dropped bombs on our city and he was in his bakery early in the morning, ran outside and saw the planes coming over the sea, and when he went back in, to grab his rifle, that’s when the bakery was hit and the roof caved in. A large piece of wood landed on his leg and trapped him there for two days. When he was finally freed, the leg was so badly mangled and infected it had to be amputated, he tells me, and he can no longer stand for any amount of time to sell the bread he makes, or wheel it to the agora. His son who would normally have done it died fighting with the resistance, he tells me, somewhere near Kissamos, in the first year of the war against the Germans.

  So, he needs help.

  He’ll stay in the bakery, and he hires me to go to the agora.

  After two weeks, I save enough to rent an apartment in Cassia’s building, and even on the same floor, so we’re not far from each other and can help each other, support each other, cook dinner together, watch Ikaros for Kyriaki when she needs to go to the agora or run an errand, and all other things that families used to do before the Germans came.

  And this is us.

  This is our family now.

  My belly begins to grow and then show, and men and women I pass in the street give me looks because my husband isn’t with me. If any ask, though, I tell them my husband was killed during the war, which is of course not a lie. And the reason they ask is because Greeks in the villages and cities have begun retaliating against women who took up with Germans during the occupation. We hear stories of women in Irakleio being pulled from their homes and having their heads shaved in the middle of the street, or near the Morosini Fountain, where all can see and witness their shame. A group of young men try the same thing in Chania, one day, and they grab a woman by the hair who’s shopping in the agora and pull her towards the middle of the market. One of them forces her to her knees, as the other rips her dress, and the third takes a knife and is about to cut her hair when I walk from where I’m selling bread, take the pistol I carry at my hip, underneath my jacket, and hold it pointed at the one with the knife.

  They tell me I’m making a mistake.

  I tell them that of course it’s them who are making a mistake, and jealousy is no substitute for truth, and I can see they know who I am and have heard of my reputation so they know I have no problem taking lives that deserve to be taken. They eventually lower the knife, and all shuffle away. I know I’ll see them again, and when I do, a few days later, instead of there being a problem, they nod to me with respect and the one who held the knife and I threatened even comes and buys two loaves of bread and tells me he loves strong, beautiful women. I tell him he’s a liar and I’ve already seen what he thinks of women, but he doesn’t give up. He comes every day to buy a loaf of bread, until eventually one day he stops, and a few weeks later I see him walking near the limani with a girl half my age who looks as if she’s just arrived in the city from one of the villages.

  I shake my head. There’s nothing I can do.

  Tasos finds a job, too.

  He’s grown another two inches and the muscles in his chest and arms have started to expand, as well, then they do even more after he starts working at the docks helping to load and unload the boats that now come. He insists on using his wages to pay for part of the rent of the apartment. The dockmaster originally recruits him not because of his size, but because he heard there was a boy who spoke English and he needed that now the British had returned, and the Americans, too. Once the Germans left, there were more Greeks coming, from the mainland, and American and British, also, going between Athens and their armies in Egypt, where our government was, as well, and they’d stop for supplies, or to purchase firearms and ammunition that the Germans left behind, and a great many other things. Tasos would eagerly meet them and ask who they were and where they were going, and would load and unload anything they might have, or need, and show them around Chania. The only people he refused to help were the ones he suspected of being Communists. I worry about him. I worry he’s going to run off and join the fighting that’s begun again, but he doesn’t. Instead, when I ask him what he wants to do, hoping he’ll give some answer I can pursue and distract him from thoughts of more war, I’m surprised when he tells me he wants to be an architect. Just like his older brother. The school in Irakleio that Demetrios wanted to go to isn’t yet open again, but I’m able to track down one of the professors who taught there and contact him and he agrees to take Tasos on as a private student. Part of me thinks he’ll be resistant to leaving Chania, but even though there are several girls here I know are interested in him, and take their lunches down by the docks on purpose so they can see him as he works, he hasn’t shown an interest in any of them. So there’s nothing keeping him in Chania in that respect. I ask Fotis if there’s more I can do to make more money, and when he asks what the money’s for, I tell him, and he tries to just give it to me. I refuse to take it. Then he tells me it’s not charity, but an investment, and when I ask in what, he says his only condition is that when Tasos graduates, after the school eventually opens again, that he return to Chania and fix the roof that was destroyed by the Germans, and has still not been repaired.