I smile. I nod.

  “He will,” I tell Fotis.

  “Good,” he says. “Efcharisto.”

  I work up to the date of my delivery, then when I feel the signs the baby is coming, I go back to the apartment and Cassia calls the midwife who comes and since the only small hospital we once had in Chania has been destroyed, the birth happens there in the apartment, on the limani, near the water.

  Perhaps that’s as it should be.

  Cassia’s there with me and the midwife, and Kyriaki, too, as Tasos watches Ikaros in our apartment next door.

  When it’s done, the midwife cleans the baby and wraps him in a small blanket.

  She hands him to me and I look down and into his new eyes.

  Then Tasos comes from next door, and hands Ikaros back to Kyriaki, and sits next to me and I hand him the baby.

  He looks down into his young eyes, too.

  Then he looks back up and at mine.

  “What’s his name?” he asks.

  “Demetrios,” I tell him.

  36 SEPTEMBER 6, 1945

  I thought I’d never hear Hannes Koch’s name again, but then I see his face on a newspaper I pick up and read, and that’s how I find out what’s happened to him since I last saw him on the beach at Rodakino; he was taken to Egypt first, then Canada, so he could be questioned without any German troops trying to come and rescue him, then Wales, before he was finally brought back to Athens and killed by firing squad in Syntagma Square by the Communists. I think I’ll feel something when I hear this, but I’m surprised I don’t. I don’t feel anything at all when I see his face or read about his fate. I think of Tasos, and how to keep him safe in all this, in this next war that is now here and will surely come again to this island, and I want to go to Irakleio with him, to meet the teacher I’ve written to and help him find an apartment to rent in the city, but it would be too difficult with Demetrios. So Cassia says she’ll go, instead, and help him find a place and get settled. I stand there with them at the fountain in the middle of the city and give him as much money as I can to find his new place and he tries to refuse, because he’s been working at the docks, but I insist, and he finally takes it then hugs and kisses me and takes Demetrios and kisses him gently on the forehead, too, before turning with Cassia and walking to the bus station just south of the Old Town. The bus has begun to run again from Chania to Rethymno, then on to Irakleio, and I think about the road it will take, and only a few short months ago all the things that happened on that road.

  All the things that I did.

  All the things that they did to us.

  I shake my head.

  It’s no use going backward, we can only go forward, and that’s what this is, that’s who Tasos is, and Demetrios, and Ikaros, too; they’re the future, and they’re our future, exactly what I once was, as well, but am no longer, I realize. But perhaps it’s as it should be, so I stand there at the fountain until they’re gone and out of sight, with Tasos turning to wave one last time.

  Time passes.

  Time passes, and so do we, along with it, whether we want to or not.

  I sigh and walk home.

  1948

  37 APRIL 27, 1948

  A year after the war ends, and even in the midst of a civil war, the university at Irakleio opens again and Tasos enrolls as an architecture student and graduates with honors. When he comes home, we have a party for him, but before the others arrive, he tells me he needs to speak with me. I nod and we sit together in our living room, with little Demetrios on his lap, and he tells me he loves Cassia, she loves him, and they want to marry each other. This takes me by surprise, at first. Then, after I think about it, I realize it doesn’t. I think of all the time they spent together, in the apartment next to the one that’s now ours, when I first went to the mountains. I think of all we’ve been through together, all of us, and is there anything that brings us closer than shared experience? When we experience things beyond what we’re made to be able to endure, is there anyone that we become closer to than those who have endured it with us?

  I suppose there isn’t.

  “I’m so happy for you,” I tell him.

  “I know you might think she’s too old,” he begins.

  “Too old?” I smile at him. “How could I think that? She’s the same age as I am.”

  “But the age difference…”

  “It’s ten years, Tasos. It’s the blink of an eye.”

  “Is it?”

  “It is, trust me.”

  “I love her very much.”

  I look back at him.

  Then I nod, still smiling, and stand and walk over to bend down and kiss him on the forehead.

  “So do I,” I tell him.

  Later, after the others come for the party and Cassia’s there along with Kyriaki and Ikaros, who plays with his younger cousin on the floor, Cassia takes me aside so it’s only the two of us.

  “Are you angry?” she asks.

  “No,” I smile, my lips trying to convince her of my heart, as much as my words.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Love is love, Cassia, and I’m so glad you’ve found it. I’m so glad he has, too.”

  “I am, also.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Slowly, I suppose. Then all at once.”

  “When you were here together?”

  “No,” she shakes her head. “He was just a boy then.”

  “When he went to Irakleio?”

  “Then, and just before.”

  I understand now.

  I understand why he ignored the girls that would come to see him at the docks, and I understand why Cassia volunteered to take him to the city to help him find his own apartment, and how she’d leave some weekends, and not tell us where she was going.

  We stand there together.

  We watch Ikaros as he tries to pick Demetrios up, then Tasos goes and helps him and he sits on the couch with both of his nephews, Demetrios on his lap, and Ikaros next to him.

  “Have you told him?” Cassia asks me, looking at Demetrios.

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “And decided not to?”

  “I was going to try to send a letter, but I didn’t know what company he was assigned to, or even where in Asia he’d been deployed. Then the war was over. Now I wouldn’t know how to find him, even if I wanted to.”

  “You think it’s better this way,” she says, and it’s not a question.

  I think back to our last conversation, some of the last words between us, and how he wondered if there was only one person in the world meant for each of us and all I can think about is: what if he’s found his person? I found mine, a long time ago, and what if he’s now found his, then a child shows up on his doorstep?

  It would end all that for him.

  I know how men feel about sons.

  I also know the situation it could cause him—that we both could cause him—and I want him to have the happiness and chance at happiness that I had, so I made up my mind when Demetrios first came that I’d raise him here on my own and wouldn’t try to track down his father.

  Is it the right decision?

  I don’t know.

  It’s mine.

  I see Tasos glance at us and smile, and he looks like a boy again even though he isn’t anymore, and I think of the olive trees. I think of trimming and pruning them and painting water and slaked lime on trunks, me and Ikaros standing on the ladders to get to the highest branches because he wasn’t tall enough. I think about the sun, and what it felt like, and what I felt like then, and how now the trees sit wild and untended.

  I shake my head.

  The party ends and Kyriaki and Cassia leave, and I go to my bedroom, and Tasos goes to his. I lay in my bed thinking about everything that’s happened until sleep comes, though not much, and I rise earlier than I normally do, an hour or two before there will be the hint of the sun or light. I quietly dress, to not disturb him. I leave the apartment with Demetrios. The harbor is quiet and I walk next to it, carrying my son, as I look across and see the silhouette of the mosque and think about all the lives that have been here and all the times this city has seen, all the ancient things that are quickly becoming modern, and I can’t think about it for too long because the ache comes again so I don’t, and carry on. I turn at the fountain to go down Zampeliou Street towards the bakery in the Old Town, and when I go a couple more paces, that’s when I see him. Tasos wasn’t sleeping after all, but already here, standing on a ladder and taking measurements for the new roof I promised in exchange for his education, all those years ago.

  1955

  38 APRIL 13, 1955

  Tasos and Cassia don’t have a traditional wedding. Instead, they go to the church a few weeks after they tell me of their intention and ask the priest to perform a private ceremony with no one else present except me, Kyriaki, Ikaros, and Demetrios. I know part of it is they’re eager to get on with their lives; another part, of course, is we have no family left, and very few friends, so who would we invite? A city, as we’ve come to learn, is not a village. Once they’re married, Tasos moves into Cassia’s apartment, but they don’t stay there very long. He tells me there aren’t many opportunities for him to work in Chania, so they decide to move to Athens. I help them pack. I help them clean out the apartment and take all the furniture they leave behind, then go with them down to the harbor along with Kyriaki and our children and we hug them and kiss them and cry and then watch as they sail away.

  I go back home.

  Next to us, new neighbors are already moving in, a young couple from a village near Sitia on the far eastern end of the island and I smile to them and say kalispera when I see them on the stairs and they smile and say kalispera, too.

  Once I go back inside, I walk out to the balcony.

  I look behind me, at the apartment, then out at the city, at the limani where my husband was killed, and the lighthouse, the kastro, even the great mosque that stands there on the other end of the harbor and has been rebuilt from the damage it sustained during the bombing and I realize this is no longer my city, and this apartment is no longer my home.

  It hits me that quickly.

  So I make my decision.

  Kyriaki tries to persuade me against it, but she can’t, so I pack all my things, which isn’t very much, even with what we’ve gotten from Tasos and Cassia, and return to our village.

  Everything there was destroyed.

  It doesn’t matter, though.

  Things that have been destroyed can be rebuilt, so that’s what I do, and while it used to be a village of many, it will now be a village of two.

  I go to my parents’ house first, the one I grew up in, and I start with a single room, then continue on to all the others, fixing the stone and wood as Demetrios, who every day grows taller and stronger, helps me repair the place he never knew, but now will.

  For the first months, I continue working for Fotis at the bakery.

  Then, as soon as I’ve saved enough money, I buy a few sheep of our own and keep them in the barn I’ve begun to fix, also, and milk them and sheer them and bring the milk and wool to sell in the agora in a stall next to where Fotis’s grandson now sells his bread and Demetrios runs and plays with the other children. He has blond hair and blue eyes which isn’t unheard of for the boys on our island, but it makes him stand out amongst the children with dark hair, dark-colored eyes, and tanned olive skin, which is the same color as mine and most everyone else’s.

  He begins school, too, a couple villages over.

  After I fix our house well enough to live in and fall into a routine with the sheep, along with Demetrios, who helps me with them, I return to the olive trees. I’ll never be able to tend as many as we did before the war, but I do what I can, and bring some of them back by pruning them, coaxing the olives to return, painting their trunks with slaked lime and water to protect from the insects that hatch in the spring, and when Demetrios isn’t in school, he runs through the rows and helps me with them. When he is in school, I tend them alone, and he joins me in the afternoon. It’s one such afternoon when he’s eleven that he finds me there and he doesn’t run, as he normally does, and when I see his face and swollen eye, I ask him what happened. I think he’s not going to tell me, as boys so often do, but he does. He tells me how some of the other kids told him his father was a German and a Nazi, so he got into a fight with them. I tell him he shouldn’t fight, but it’s only a half-hearted attempt, which I think he understands, too, and just nods and goes to get the bucket of lime and helps me paint the trunks of the trees near the far end of the rows where he found me. When the sun begins to set, we return to the house, and I make dinner and we eat together and when we’re done, and still at the table, he asks me who his father really is.

  I haven’t told him the whole truth.

  He knows I was married to Demetrios, who died during the war, and I’ve done nothing to dissuade him from thinking this is both his father, and his namesake. My husband was only one of those things, though, of course, and I think Demetrios can feel that, that he’s different than those around him, though he doesn’t quite know how, but he deserves to, and so I tell him.

  I can’t lie.

  Not to him.

  So I don’t.

  I tell him his father wasn’t German, but British, and we fought against the Germans together and he was family, too, part of the family we created during the war, and when I’m done, he comes to me, hugs me, tells me efcharisto, then goes to his room and doesn’t bring it up again.

  1960

  39 OCTOBER 3, 1960

  I’m haunted by what I did.

  I felt nothing when I saw Koch’s face in the newspaper and read about his fate in front of the firing squad, but I can’t stop thinking about the villages that were burned and villagers killed in reprisal for him being taken. For what we did. For what I did. We didn’t know that’s what would happen, but it still did. Was it worth it? The villages don’t return, and the Greek government erects a monument to their destruction and the slaughter of all villagers, both those that were killed after Koch was taken, and those that were killed, like mine, before.

  And I suppose that’s the answer, isn’t it?

  Evil is evil, and how are we supposed to understand?

  We can’t.

  All we can do is fight against it, and I suppose if nothing else, I’m glad I have.

  I’m still haunted, though, just as William said I would be, that day on the beach.

  I wonder: are they haunted, too?

  I wonder: do they have the same sleepless nights I have, hear the same voices, see the same faces and eyes in the darkness?

  I don’t know. I don’t know.

  I begin to see Tasos and Cassia less and less, as well as all those who knew me when I was young and myself. When they first move to Athens, they make a point to come back every year at Pascha to celebrate with us in Chania, standing outside the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the town square, just a stone’s throw from the Venetian fountain. Then after the service, we come back up to the house to eat. I can smell Mana’s cooking when I’m in our kitchen, with her skill in that department something I still haven’t inherited, but I suppose I was given other gifts. After we eat, Tasos helps around the farm with minor repairs and adjustments to what I’ve done myself and tells me how many new buildings are being built in Athens. He tells me how the skyline’s changing, and how it’s him that’s helping it change, and grow, and I smile and nod even though it’s something that makes me sad, rather than happy. I’m still friends with Cassia, but we’re more distant, too. It’s not because she’s married Tasos, but because they’ve moved to the city, and they’ve become the city, and that’s what they think about. The village is slow. The city is fast. They start having children, also, as soon as they’re married and first a girl comes, then another, and another still after that, so with each passing year their visits become shorter and shorter until they stop altogether and simply become letters, then cards, and finally just money. I still go to the agora to sell wool, milk, and olives now, too, and when I walk down from the mountains and take the path near the sea, I’m reminded how much everything’s changed. There are cars now on the road near the beach, and when I get to the city, all the men I pass wear suits in the Western style, not just those who are not from here and years go by without seeing anyone dressed the way we used to dress in the villages and the way I still dress when I’m at home. I sometimes wonder what’s happened to the others, how they feel, how they’re coping. After the war, they built a cemetery at Souda Bay for the British and Commonwealth dead, and when it opened, I went and saw someone had come and moved Owain there, and made a grave for him, the same as they’d done for all the other Allied soldiers that had been buried in villages and beside roads and in the mountains and hills. Did the others I fought with all survive the rest of the war? If so, what are they doing now? I suppose I’ll never know. I go every year and lay a wreath on Owain’s grave.

  When Demetrios is fifteen, his class takes a field trip to Rethymno.

  The teacher asks for chaperones and I volunteer to go with them in one of the buses that leaves from the same station in Chania, just south of the Old Town, where Tasos once left for school in Irakleio, and after walking around the city and the teacher telling them about the architecture, and history, they have free time and most of the kids go off with their friends. Demetrios has a lot of friends, but I’m glad he seems different than them, and doesn’t say malaka every other word like they do. When they head into the city, he doesn’t go, though. I see him hesitate. The other boys all whisper and laugh as they leave, but he stays with a girl I notice has been watching him. They speak nervously to each other, so I go to them and give him some drachmae and suggest he take her for a gelato at one of the tavernas that circle the limani. He smiles and I know this isn’t something he’s going to want his mother around for any more than this, so as they leave together, I go to wander through the city myself. I take the road past the entrance to the Fortezza and there’s no one that lives there anymore and I smile when I see an attendant at the gate collecting admission fees and that it’s now become a museum. I keep walking and go past the Rimondi Fountain where men, women, and children still come to fill bottles and buckets with water to bring back to their houses, and I look at the kafeneio where I saw Friedrich-Wilhelm Muller and where men in suits now spin their kolomboi and I continue walking. I’m almost to their agora, near the Guora Gate, and I see there’s a new bookstore that’s there. I’m just about to go inside when I hear someone call my name and I turn to see Theos. He’s aged, of course, his body filled out and there are lines under his eyes, and he’s grown a beard. I’d still recognize him anywhere, though. There’s a woman who walks with him pushing a stroller and they come over and I hug him and he introduces me to his wife and their young daughter that he tells me they’ve named Melia. After they take her out and show her to me, he asks his wife to carry on with their errands, says he’ll catch up with them in a moment, then we’re alone together on the street.