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and we weren’t thinking too that if our Jews were saved, it was because the Corfu Jews had been taken in their place.”
    Ioannis stood, he sat down. He stood up again.
    “The boat sailed right past the harbour. Archbishop Chrysostomos said a prayer. Mrs. Serenos started to shout, she began to walk away shouting that she’d die in her own home, not in the platia with all her friends looking on. And they shot her. Right there. Right in front of us all. In front of Argyros’s where she used to shop … sometimes she brought a little toy for Avramakis … she lived across the street…. ”
    Athos put his hands over his ears.
    “The others were pushed onto a truck that stayed in the blazing platia the rest of the afternoon, with SS all around, drinking limonadha. We were trying to think what to do, to do something. Then suddenly the truck took off, in the direction of Keri.”
    “What happened to them?”
    “No one knows.”
    “And the people on the boat? Where were they taking them?”
    “My father guesses to the train station at Larissa.”
    “And Karrer?”
    “No one knows where he is, my father heard he escaped by kaiki the same night we came to you. The archbishop stayed with the Jews, he wanted to get in the truck with them but the soldiers wouldn’t let him. He stood all day next to the truck, talking to the poor people inside. …”
    He paused.
    “Maybe Jakob shouldn’t hear any more.”
    Athos looked uncertain.
    “Ioannis, he’s already heard so much.”
    I thought Ioannis was going to weep.
    “If you’re looking for the ghetto of Hania, Crete’s two-thousand-year-old ghetto, look for it a hundred miles off Polegandros, at the bottom of the sea. …”
    As he spoke, the room filled with shouts. The water rose around us, bullets tearing the surface for those who took too long to drown. Then the peaceful blue sheen of the Aegean slipped shut again.
    After a while Ioannis left. I watched as Athos walked with him partway down the hill. When he returned, Athos went to his desk and wrote down what Ioannis had told us.

    Athos would no longer let me go out on the roof at night.
    He had been so careful to maintain order. Regular meals, daily lessons. But now our days were without shape. He still told stories, to try and cheer us, but now they were aimless. How he and Nikos learned about Chinese kites and flew a handmade dragon above Cape Spinari while the children from the village perched on the coast, waiting their turn to feel the tug of the string. How they lost the kite in the waves. … All his stories went wrong halfway through, and reminded us of the sea.
    The only thing that calmed Athos was to draw. The greater his despair, the more obsessively he drew. He took down a battered copy of Blossfeldt’s Elementary Forms and, in pen and ink, copied the photographs of magnified plants that transformed stems into burnished pewter, blossoms into fleshy fish mouths, pods into hairy accordion pleats. Athos collected poppies, lavatera, basil, broom, and spread them on his desk. Then, in watercolours, he made precise renderings. He quoted Wilson: “ ‘Nature’s harmonies cannot be guessed at.’“ He explained as he painted: “Broom grows in the Bible. Hagar left Ishmael in a clump of broom, Elijah lay in broom when he asked to die. Perhaps it was the burning bush; even when the fire goes out, its inner branches continue to burn.” When he was finished, he gathered what was edible and we used it for supper. Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.
    By the end of summer Athos rallied enough to insist that our lessons resume. But the dead surrounded us, an aurora over the blue water.
    At night I choked against Bella’s round face, a doll’s face, immobile, inanimate, her hair floating behind her. These nightmares, in which my parents and my sister drowned with the Jews of Crete, continued for years, continued long