Now I know the truth, I can never look at Corfu with innocence again. For me it is no longer a place just of sea and sunshine, for everywhere in the cobbled streets and dark alleyways I hear echoes of the past. Looking out over the sea I can hear the pleasure boats and the laughter of holidaymakers, but I also see shadows of the slow, rotting barges, packed with the sobbing people of the Evraiki, the Jewish ghetto of Corfu, leaving their homeland for the last time.
But I know James will never see this island the way I do. He sees ripe peaches, fragrant lemons, glistening fresh seafood, all the tools of his trade and the secret to his successful restaurant, but never the sorrow at the heart of Corfu.
I look across to the ancient fort, crumbling on its rocky promontory on the edge of Corfu’s old harbour, then shade my eyes and look out across the sea. The mainland is but a shimmering haze in the distance, and that isn’t even Greece – it’s Albania. I try to imagine the journey of despair those people took so near to the end of the war and it makes me shudder. A journey they made in dread to the unknown, with just the slightest shred of hope, a journey that would be the last nearly all of them would ever make.
When I turn back towards the town, I pass rows of cafe tables draped with white cloths, shaded by awnings striped yellow and blue, filled with tourists drinking chilled beers and wine, eating moussaka and spiced meatballs with Greek salad. They know and care nothing of the hundreds who stood here all those years ago beneath the scorching sun that June, clutching their few possessions, fighting back their tears while the Germans issued harsh orders, scorning their pleas for rest and water.
And all around this beautiful island, when the Judas tree bursts into flower each spring, I cannot enjoy its blossom; its lurid fuchsia-pink flowers remind me of betrayal. Now I know the truth behind the lies, the facts behind the facade, I have to strive for truth everywhere. Wherever people seek carefree happiness and idle pleasures, there are shameful hidden stories, and this is just one of them.
A young girl stumbles in the rubble of the bombed houses as she runs through the dusty cobbled streets of Corfu Town, while the sun begins to set behind the tall tenements. Rebekka Nikokiris, thirteen-year-old daughter of Isaac, honourable cobbler, and his wife Perla, devoted mother of three girls, hardworking housewife and seamstress, is very afraid.
She clutches a small package close to her chest. Although the early evening air is still warm, she hides her head beneath her shawl, so no one will see her dark eyes and long lashes. Her boots are too large for her and chafe her ankles. But you are lucky not to be barefoot like most children. That’s what Papa had said when he salvaged the old boots from the pile of uncollected pairs at the back of his shop.
The streets are empty, but she can still hear the soldiers shouting and laughing as they kick lemons across the road in a coarse game of football. The fruit is ripe, falling from the trees that line the squares, free to anyone in Corfu Town who needs a lemon for their avgolomeno lamb or to dress a salad. Some collect basketfuls of fruit to make limoncello, or preserve them for the wet days of the island’s rainy winters, but no true Corfiot has such careless disregard for the abundant golden fruit – no one plays football with the thick-skinned lemons, no one disrespects the people and the produce of Corfu like the greedy, heartless Germans.
Rebekka quickens her pace, anxious to put the cries of the callous soldiers behind her. Mama will fret if she isn’t back soon. She’s always worrying these days. ‘It was all right when the Italians were here,’ she’d complained that morning. ‘They may have been too friendly with our girls, but they didn’t really trouble our people. But now, with the Germans…’ She’d frowned and bit her lip. ‘The humiliation. The roll calls on the Spianada. Every week, they make us go there. Why can they not leave us in peace?’
‘Quiet, Perla, you’ll worry the little ones.’ Rebekka’s father always comforted her mother. He was not like some fathers. He was gentle and kind. ‘As long as we can keep them hidden, they will not be counted.’
Rebekka looks over her shoulder as she nears her father’s shoe shop. No one is following her today, but the other week a well-dressed man appeared with two soldiers as she went through the doorway and shouted at Papa, ‘Where’s your notice?’
‘Hanging on the door,’ Papa had answered, ‘right there in that frame.’ He’d pointed to the printed, signed poster, proclaiming his premises were ‘Jewish’.
‘You can’t hang it inside. It can’t be seen there. You have to put it out the front. You know it is forbidden for Germans to go into a Jewish shop and buy from you.’ They’d stood there till he had rehung the notice in the approved place, then they’d marched away.
Rebekka had cowered in a corner of the shop until they left. ‘That was our mayor,’ her father had said in disgust. ‘Mayor Kollas. He is responsible for this. He collaborates with them. See, his signature is on the notice. And it is even printed here, in Corfu.’ He’d hammered his fist on the workbench; once piled with shoes to be soled and boots to be nailed, it was now bare, just like her Mama’s sewing table.
When Rebekka opens the door to her home, she can hear soft murmurs from the family rooms above the shop. These days there is always muttering and tears. Before, the narrow alleyways and shops of the Evraiki had echoed with the tapping of the cobbler’s hammer, the trundle of the tailor’s sewing machines and the ever-cheerful cries of children’s laughter. Their businesses may have been poor, but they served their people and were appreciated by the Corfiots, who accepted them and their religion.
Rebekka runs up the stairs, brandishing her precious package and calling, ‘Mama, Kostas still had some chestnuts for us, maybe you can make your special stuffed cabbage tonight.’ But as she enters the family kitchen where they have always gathered and eaten together, she is not greeted with grateful smiles. Her mother is slumped at the well-scrubbed table, her head in her hands. Matilde and Anna, Rebekka’s little sisters, cling to Mama’s apron, their fingers in their mouths. They are thin and pale-skinned from months of hiding from the German headcount inside the house.
Papa is frowning. ‘It has come at last,’ he says in a quiet voice filled with sorrow. ‘From tomorrow we will not be able to leave the house, and I fear soon we will have to leave Corfu for good.’
Mama dries her tears on her apron and fetches plates of tomatoes and bread for their supper. Then she glances at her husband and, in a low steady voice, says, ‘Isaac, I think now is the time for you to call on Doctor Batas. He will be expecting you.’
Rebekka does not understand. First, her father’s announcement about staying in the house, now her mother is telling him to visit the doctor. Is he unwell? Or are her sisters ailing? They are both thin, but no thinner than many of the children in the town since the war began, and their heads have not been shaved like those of the homeless orphans that roam the streets. They have not ailed like the little ones her mother bore then lost before them; in spite of their hunger they look as if they will thrive. She wants to ask what might be wrong, but her mother hands her a knife and tells her to slice the tomatoes for the young ones.
Papa crams a corner of bread in his mouth, chews quickly, then kisses all three daughters on the head before kissing his wife on her cheek. ‘Be good for your mother, all of you,’ he says. ‘I will not be long.’ And he runs down the stairs and out into the street, locking the shop door below on his way out.
Rebekka looks at her mother and is about to ask a question, but Mama cautions her with a look and says, ‘It has been such a tiring day. I want all of you in bed early tonight.’
It was the start of the summer season, soon after the late spring storms had finally blown away, when the first visitors began arriving. As the days grew hotter, lemons were falling from the trees every day. There were lemons in the garden of the restored villa where Ben was letting us stay, until paying guests arrived, and more ripe fruit was scattered in the grounds of the properties we were helping to manage. Large, pitted, yellow lemons with thick skins littering the hard earth – we couldn’t bear to leave them to wither and rot.
‘The guests will never use all these,’ I said, throwing the ripe fruit into a bucket late one afternoon. ‘We can take as many as we want.’
‘But what will we do with them all?’ Amber asked, peering at the pile of unmarked fruit. ‘We can’t drink that many gin and tonics, however hard we try.’
‘We could make lemonade,’ I said, dusting the soil off one of the fruits and smelling the fresh scent of the peel. ‘It’s not difficult. And we could make sorbet and water ice as well. Just what we’ll need when the weather gets hotter.’
So we grated the tangy zest, squeezed juice and boiled sugar syrup to sweeten the lemons until we had jugs of cold lemonade in the fridge and iced boxes stored in the freezer. It became Amber’s principal task in the kitchen, as I was always experimenting with another new recipe, or preparing an unusual fish from the market which I hadn’t cooked before. We collected lemons whenever we could, so there was a cool drink waiting for us when we returned to the villa after a day of checking holiday homes for breakages and lost property and briefing new arrivals on car and boat hire.
‘I do hope we have our own lemon tree when we eventually find our house,’ Amber said one evening, moving the bottles of beer and wine in the fridge to make room for more freshly made lemonade.
‘Of course we will,’ I reassured her. ‘Have you ever seen a garden in Greece without at least one citrus tree? They’re everywhere. I went through the town the other day and the lemon and orange trees there were full of ripe fruit, free for the picking. I could have helped myself to bagfuls, right there on the street.’
‘But would you, though?’ Amber said, with a small frown. ‘I always feel we aren’t allowed to, as we aren’t locals.’
‘Don’t be silly. Anyone can pick up fruit on the street. They just fall and rot otherwise.’
‘James, it’s different when we collect lemons from the villas. They sort of belong to us then, don’t they? Out in the street, I wouldn’t feel entitled. I think they belong to people who were born here.’
‘Oh, they wouldn’t care,’ I said, kissing her cheek. ‘Anyway, you can get away with anything with your charm and cheeky smile. They all love you to bits.’
‘No, they don’t. Spiro’s old mother gave me a very funny look when I was getting bread in the shop yesterday.’ Amber pulled a face, biting her lip the way she always did when she was worried.
‘Maybe she thought your skirt was too short again. You know what these old women are like.’ The younger women were friendly, and many wore shorts and T-shirts to work in the local shops or go about their cleaning jobs, but I could picture how the older generation stared with their knowing black eyes in their wrinkled prune-like faces, as they sat, hands folded in laps, on their chairs stationed in the doorways of the family shops and tavernas, monitoring all who came and went. I was never sure what they were thinking, but when their eyes followed Amber in her denim shorts or tiny sundresses, I could tell it wasn’t good. The old men were all right. I knew what they were thinking as they watched me walk past, holding hands with my lovely wife, while they sat with their cronies, drinking ouzo in the shade. But the old women, the women in their black dresses and their black stockings, made me feel uneasy. I felt sure they were judging.
‘Maybe now I’m an old married woman I should dress like all the other old bags,’ Amber said. ‘Make them realise I’m perfectly respectable.’ She picked up a tea towel, folded it into a triangle, then spread it over her hair and tied it round the back of her head. ‘What do you think? Does it suit me?’
I burst out laughing. ‘Covering your hair isn’t going to make any difference when the rest of you is half naked.’
She looked down at herself. We had changed in a hurry when we came back from a long hot day of checking guests into their accommodation, and Amber had stripped off the sensible blouse and skirt she wore to work and was dressed only in bra and pants, starkly white against her dark skin. She laughed at my remark and turned round, still holding the tea towel over her head, then wiggled in mock catwalk fashion through the doorway.
I threw a wet sponge at her back, then chased her upstairs.
We had talked about a change in lifestyle before, but I think it would be true to say it really began in November 2005. That’s when we realised we didn’t have to wait any longer to have a more satisfying way of life.
Amber and I, like so many of our generation, at least those of us who had benefited from a private education, had always felt that our lives had been mapped out for us and that with our undoubted privilege had come an obligation to those who provided it. From before the time we said our first word we were registered for nursery and had our names put down for prep schools. Later, we had private music classes, swimming lessons and extra maths tuition, then in the long summer holidays we went to junior sailing clubs in St Mawes, Bosham or the Isle of Wight. At Christmas, our hesitant voices warbled at Messiah from Scratch at the Royal Albert Hall, and we learnt to ride and play tennis. Like our contemporaries, we were educated to succeed within strict parameters, with clearly defined goals and, in the case of both of us, with traditional career paths expected of us. Amber’s family were all involved with the Law, so it was only natural that she and her siblings – all adopted as infants – should aim to be barristers too.
I started out reading History and Economics, with the expectation that I would follow my grandfather and father into the family accountancy business. ‘We Youngs have been well respected in Chichester since well before the war,’ my father always said. ‘You can’t go wrong if you join the firm. People are always going to need good accountants and with that behind you, anything’s possible.’ So it was a bit of shock to him when I announced, halfway through my degree, that I wanted to go into advertising – and not even the suited account director side. To be fair, he’d always thought that if I didn’t join the family firm I would choose law, or maybe business, banking at worst, but he’d never imagined something as unstable and unconventional as advertising.
I’d attended a student union debate on what is more creative, advertising or art, and from that moment I’d been hooked. Dad thought I’d never make it, but I got into a top London agency despite the hundreds of other hopefuls and I was really quite successful. I loved the buzz of pitching for new business and throwing ideas around with my creative team partner Rob – a short angry Scot who’d fought his way into the agency from art college. He fought me too, but only when I wanted food for lunch and not just pints of lager in the local pub. Because that is my other passion. Food. I’d always loved food, and now I love sourcing it, preparing it and tasting it. I badgered my parents to let me do a cordon bleu course as a reward for my excellent GCSE results; I spent my gap year as a chalet boy in Val d’Isère and I applied to do MasterChef just before I started my degree. I’m pretty sure I could have gone all the way too, but my parents put financial pressure on me to concentrate on my studies, so with great regret I let that opportunity slip past me.
But Amber, my lovely Amber, knew all about my secret dreams, and she had her dreams too – of a life where she would never again have to work through the night and never have to travel on stifling Tube trains during the summer or shiver on freezing station platforms in winter. She dreamt of having the luxury of time to catch up on films and theatre, of evenings when we could enjoy leisurely dinners and one day having time to write. And then came that particular November, when for the second year running, winter began in earnest quite early.
It wasn’t so bad for me – I could travel later than the majority of commuters and I only had to cope with thirty minutes of Tube trains crowded with damp winter coats, the rumbling of the carriages masking the rattle of coughs and the constant blowing of noses. I could hide behind my newspaper or book, or, being over six feet tall, hold my head above the crowd, hanging onto the rail and hoping the germs fell rather than rose in the fetid atmosphere. And whenever I had to work late on an urgent pitch, I would avoid the evening rush by staying long into the night then slumping in a taxi well after the crush had gone home.
But Amber was always lumbered with a heavy briefcase full of documents to drag out to another case in Guildford or Chelmsford, or wherever her clerk sent her next. She left before dawn in the dark winter months and was never home before me, having returned to chambers after a long journey back into London to collect her next brief. She hardly ever complained, but I’d noticed her caramel skin turning greyer, the hollows under her eyes deepening. She’d started coughing too, a sure sign that she would be stricken with a debilitating infection for weeks.
Yes, I remember exactly how it happened. It was that November, at the end of 2005. I was chopping carrots and celery for a bolognese sauce and sipping Merlot when she returned that particular evening. Slicing and stirring are soothing after a day of arguing and that day had been particularly fractious following the rejection of a campaign for a mayonnaise brand. Rob and I had been handed the brief at the last minute, and after two solid days of working into the night, we’d thought we’d cracked it. So had our creative director, but the client had been stony-faced when we presented that morning and Rob had not returned from the pub at lunchtime. I joined him for a couple of drinks, but getting home early and cooking was my best therapy. I went to the Italian deli near the office in Soho for more of their peppery olive oil and treated myself to some of their fat green nocellara olives, slick with oil and sweet as butter.
So I was in a good mood that night, despite the disappointment of the working day, waiting for my lovely wife to come home. I’d opened the wine to breathe, set the table with candles, sliced fresh ciabatta bread and poured some of my favourite oil into a little bowl for dipping. Then, while I cooked, I hummed and listened for the distant sounds of Amber’s arrival.
Our flat was on the top floor of a tall Edwardian house in West Hampstead. We’d cursed the long flights of stairs when we moved in, hauling IKEA flat packs and boxes of books up to our eyrie, but our compensation was the sunset over the surrounding rooftops and sunbathing on summer weekends, lying on the flat roof of this attic conversion. On hot sun-baked days, we both lay there naked, burning in the heat. Amber’s burnished limbs deepened from light mocha to caramel, while I obstinately sweltered my way from buttermilk to strawberry milkshake, never even getting close to a dark shade of bronze.
Amber would kiss the sweat away from my forehead, but she refused to make love on the roof in daylight, however much I tried to persuade her. ‘No one can possibly see,’ I would say, yet she insisted she felt watched and that would be her cue to leave the baking roof and return with cold water or ice cubes to throw at my roasted skin. But there was one memorable summer’s night, when the flat roof held its heat, the air was soft and warm, and we made love under a velvet sky of stars.
And now it was no longer summer and I could tell, when I heard the flat door slammed and Amber began dragging herself up the stairs, that she was exhausted from her day. There was a series of thumps as she dropped her heavy briefcase and kicked off her boots. Halfway up the stairs, she called out, ‘I can cope with rain, but not snow. It’s too early. I can’t take another freezing winter with cars in drifts and trains on ice.’
Her black curls were sparkling with melted snowflakes. Her cheeks were bitten with the cold, not rosy with health. ‘It took me forever to get back to chambers. I thought I was going to be stranded in Guildford all night long.’
I handed her a glass of wine, which she usually gulped straight away, but as she took it she drooped against the doorframe, groaning with tiredness. ‘Train after train was cancelled and then it started snowing. I can’t bear it.’
I gave her hummus with crudités and pistachios and she began shelling the nuts and dipping carrots, while I sliced tomatoes and onions to make a salad. As I tore basil leaves and poured olive oil, I said, ‘I’ve spiced up the sauce, but you can have carbonara if you’d rather.’
‘No, it’s fine…’ She was dabbing at the dip with a carrot stick. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘you know how we’ve often talked about not doing this for ever…’
I stopped stirring and looked at her. ‘One day, yes, but you’re only just getting started. You’ve worked so hard to get this far.’
She looked up at me. Me, standing there with a wooden spoon in my hand, her little flower-sprigged apron over my jeans. ‘I really don’t think I want to do it anymore,’ she said. ‘I can’t face another wet, cold winter of early starts, cancelled trains and long journeys. We’ve talked about it before, haven’t we, so maybe now’s the time?’
It was true. We had talked, often. We called it our ‘master plan’ and in drunken moments we talked about where we would go, what we would see and how we would live a simple life that didn’t involve London, commuting or long tiring hours, dark mornings and cold late nights. We envied friends who had continued travelling after gap years almost as much as we admired others who’d bought sensible little houses in the suburbs to breed babies and grow vegetables.
On the rare evenings we were both at home and didn’t have early morning starts, we curled around each other on our sofa, drinking wine and dreamt of careers that would suit country towns. I’d be a private chef cooking for weekenders and filling hampers for opera lovers, Amber would offer legal advice or work part-time for a local solicitor. We’d have time for a garden, maybe a dog to accompany us on walks in the woods and eventually, there would be children. We’d be a proper married couple at last, not like flatmates who passed each other on the stairs now and then and slept in the same bed.
‘I absolutely hated today,’ Amber sighed. ‘My feet froze waiting at the station this evening. Then when the train came, it was hot, it was crowded and just about everyone on it was coughing or sneezing. I was squashed into the middle seat between two enormous men. I could hardly breathe.’
‘Just as well,’ I joked. ‘You’d have been breathing in all manner of germs if you had.’
‘It’s not funny.’
I looked at her. She’d put her head in her hands and I couldn’t see her expression.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ I switched off the ring simmering the sauce and bent down to put my arms around her. Then I realised she was crying. ‘Amber, darling, what’s wrong? No one made any nasty remarks today, did they?’ She usually shrugged off the casual racism she frequently encountered, but sometimes when she was particularly tired and couldn’t get a seat on the train, she said it was a burden she shouldn’t have to bear and came home feeling bruised by sullen looks and harsh remarks.
Her reply was muffled by her sobs, but eventually I heard her. ‘No, they didn’t. Not this time. Anyway, it’s not that. I’m just tired. I’m so tired. I can’t live like this anymore. I just want it all to stop and leave me alone.’
‘See how you feel in the morning,’ I said, thinking as I did so that I sounded just like my own mother, then went on to sound even more like her. ‘A good meal and a good night’s sleep and you’ll feel much better.’
‘I doubt it,’ she sniffed. Then she pushed me away and sat up straight, wiping her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. She rummaged in her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose, then walked across the kitchen to the sink. She splashed her face with cold water, dried it on a tea towel, then turned towards me. Her eyes were still red and her mouth was trembling, but she was trying to smile. ‘Is there any garlic bread?’
I laughed. ‘I can make garlic bread, just for you.’ And then I hugged her.
It’s not fair, Rebekka thinks. Mama knows I always like to tell my little sisters a story at bedtime. I wanted to do it tonight as well. And they like me to sing to them.
Mama’s firm words still rankle with her. ‘Do as I say. Go to your room. We are all going to bed early tonight. There is much to be done tomorrow.’ As soon as Papa returned from his visit to Dr Batas, she was impatient, rushing the last of their supper, hurrying the children upstairs to their bedrooms.
Rebekka lies in her bed, trying to sleep, listening to Mama crooning to Matilde and Anna in the room next door. Mama’s voice grows softer and softer until there is finally silence, and then she hears footsteps on the stairs.
Rebekka sits up in bed. They must be asleep now, she thinks. But I didn’t give them a goodnight kiss. She waits until she hears sounds in the kitchen below her bedroom. Dishes are being stacked, water splashes and her parents talk in hushed voices. Rebekka creeps from her bed to the door. She listens for a moment, then tiptoes out of her room and opens the door to where her sisters are sleeping.
They are lying side by side in the one bed, their curly dark hair fanned on the white pillows. They look so still, their breathing so faint it barely shows. A cup stands on the bedside cabinet. Mama must have given them one last drink before she sang them to sleep.
Rebekka leans forward to kiss each child on the cheek and as her lips touch their pale skin, she thinks how much they look like the expensive china dolls in the only toy shop in Corfu Town. She has gazed at the richly dressed dolls with longing since she was as young as Matilde, knowing that she could never possess such a fine mannequin with real blonde hair and a painted porcelain face. But she has had two little sisters instead. Matilde, now five, and Anna, only three.
Since they were tiny, she has helped Mama bathe them and dress them in clean clothes. As they grew and no longer fed at Mama’s breast, she helped to prepare their meals and feed them soft rice, eggs and mashed fava beans. She has laughed at their clumsy antics and held their tiny hands as they learnt to walk with tottering steps. She has taught them words in songs and stories. These children have been her playthings, her dolls, and she loves them very much, certainly more than the grand but stiff dolls her father might have bought for her had they been a wealthy family.
She strokes their hair, then turns to the door to slip back to her bed. ‘What are you doing there?’ Mama hisses from the stairs. ‘Get back to your room and stay there.’
Rebekka runs to her room, but stands against the door, listening. . . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
