The Siege Read online

  Theia smiled demurely. “I’ve never been either, but the way my grandmother’s letters describe it, it sounds like paradise. And after what we’ve been through, I think we deserve some relaxation.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. And thanks for the ginger. I’m feeling a lot better.”

  Theia handed Wade a bottle of water and a pill. “Take this ginger pill now and another one tomorrow morning, and you should be fine. Your color is improving already.” Theia’s hand cradled Wade’s cheek. He shivered at her touch.

  “Are you cold?” she worried.

  “No,” he said simply. “Theia, can you speak Greek?”

  “Of course. That’s all my ya-ya spoke at home.”

  “Great, because when I looked at the newspaper on board, it was all Greek to me.”

  “You’re a riot, Wade. How long have you been waiting to use that line?”

  Wade smiled, and his eyes sparkled.

  Theia studied him. She had to admit, this trip would not have been the same without him. She’d never tell Wade, but she was glad he had agreed to accompany her on this journey. He was a handy man to have around. He’d kept her calm during a crisis.

  “Hey, Theia, I never asked. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “All brothers, except for me. I’m the youngest of six, so they’re very protective of me. My parents adore each other. Pregnancy was my mother’s natural state for quite a few years.”

  “Do you ever want to have children?”

  “Of course. That’s expected.”

  “But do you want them?”

  “Yes, don’t you?”

  “Yes. That’s one of the reasons we broke off our engagement. My fiancée didn’t want children. She was more focused on her career.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  Wade paused. “I thought I would. I mean, I would have missed her company, but I have you now. And I—thought I was in love with her, but—”

  “But what?”

  Wade fixed her with his eyes. “I didn’t know what real love was.”

  Wade knew how to behave around women. His two sisters had taught him that much. He knew to compliment women on their clothes and their hair. In fact, he knew a lot about women’s clothes, designers and styles. One of his sisters was a fashion consultant. He also knew enough to say, “No!” when a woman asked if she looked too fat in a particular outfit. But he’d never been tongue-tied around a woman like he was around Theia. He’d never been so turned around he couldn’t think straight. And he’d never been so sure about how he felt about a woman in his whole life.

  He needed to use every moment to his advantage before she set out on her quest to snag a Greek husband who was also Jewish, neither qualities he could claim. As farfetched as Theia’s goals seemed, he was not going to let that happen. Theia was “the one” and he wasn’t going to let her get away.

  Chapter Four

  Theia and Wade walked up the blue flagstone path in the courtyard approaching the entrance of the Etz Hayyim Synagogue. Her limp was hardly noticeable.

  With the open palm of her hand, she touched the warm, whitewashed stone wall framed in ivy. “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s the only surviving, functioning synagogue on Crete. I read that it’s been restored and that it was re-dedicated in October 1999. It has a mikveh and has become a tourist destination.”

  “What’s a mikveh?” asked Wade.

  “A Jewish ritual bath,” answered Theia. “It’s fed by a spring.”

  “I feel like a fish out of water here,” he observed. “I’m not Greek and I’m not Jewish.”

  “That’s silly. You’ll be fine.”

  They crossed the threshold to the synagogue together, walking in out of the sun into a cool place that felt like home.

  An elderly woman sat on a chair inside the sanctuary. As they entered, she struggled as she got up from her seat to approach Theia with tears in her eyes.

  “Is it really you?”

  “Do you know me?” Theia asked, puzzled.

  “It’s just that you look so much like her. Like someone I once knew many years ago. My childhood friend, Eleni. Or maybe I’m seeing a ghost.”

  “Eleni was my ya-ya, my grandmother.”

  “You must be Theia. Your mother called and said you’d be coming.”

  Theia nodded and turned to Wade. “And this is my friend, Wade.”

  The woman nodded to Wade but put her arms around Theia. “I’m Sophia. I’ve been waiting a long time for you.”

  “When my grandmother passed away, we found a shoebox full of pictures. My mother and I read through her letters, and she thought I should deliver the photographs in person. I’m from one of the six families whose children escaped from Chania during the war. I’ve come from America to post my family’s pictures on the Memory Wall that I read about on the Internet.”

  “You look just so much like your grandmother, it’s uncanny. And yet I see a lot of your grandfather in you, too. Your mother told me about Eleni’s passing. I was sorry to hear that. I would have loved to have seen her one more time.” Sophia continued to cry silent tears, then dried her eyes with the back of her gnarly hands as Theia reached out to comfort her. “Later, we’ll post the pictures, but first let’s sit and talk. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  Theia and Wade took seats next to each other, across from the woman.

  “You knew my grandfather, too?”

  “Yes, of course. We all grew up together.”

  “I want to hear all about him.”

  “And you will. But first let me tell you about our synagogue.”

  “The look of this place is different from our synagogue at home,” said Theia, “but it feels familiar, although I’ve never been here before.”

  “That is a very common feeling,” noted Sophia. “Everyone says that. The layout of the interior of our synagogues is more typical of synagogues in Venice, North Africa, and the western islands of Greece. The bimah and the Sepher Torah are on opposite sides of the sanctuary.” She pointed out the locations. The ark faced the eastern wall, the bimah the western one.

  Wade observed the arched doorways, the colorful Turkish carpets on the black and white tiles, the inlaid wooden ceiling, and the wooden benches. “The interior design looks Moroccan, sort of a Moorish motif,” he observed.

  “You have a good eye,” said Sophia. “That’s because we’re Judeo-Spanish.”

  Theia turned to Wade. “Have you ever been in a synagogue before?”

  “Well, no.”

  “The synagogue’s layout is in the Romaniote tradition,” Sophia said.

  “That means Greek,” Theia explained.

  “Originally, there were two synagogues built in the Jewish quarter of Chania, Crete’s second-largest city,” said Sophia. “Etz Hayyim, here, and Beth Shalom, the synagogue used by the Sephardi Jews of Chania. That one was completely bombed into ruins in 1941. Etz Hayyim was abandoned when the Jewish community dissolved in 1944. Many years later, in the mid-1990s, our synagogue, the one that hadn’t been destroyed during the bombardment, was restored. This is the only structure of Jewish significance on the island of Crete. It’s also the only memorial to our last Jewish community.

  “Very few Jewish people were lucky enough to escape the Nazis,” explained Sophia. “By the end of the war, the Jewish community of Chania was virtually eliminated. Today, there are only a dozen Jews left in Crete. We hold weekly Shabbat services attended by tourists and synagogue friends from other cities, often non-Jews, and a rabbi comes from Athens or another island to help with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. Occasionally, someone who can blow the shofar visits the community at the Jewish holidays. We’re pretty crowded on Passover. Sometimes people hold weddings and bar mitzvahs here, since it’s the island’s only remaining synagogue.

  “Almost all of the congregants are non-Jews,” added Sophia. “We don’t often have services. We don’t even have enough congregants to hold a minyan. An international team takes care of the con
gregation work.”

  “I’m sorry to sound so ignorant, but what’s a minyan?” Wade asked.

  “The number of men—a quorum of ten—required for Jewish communal worship,” Theia explained. She turned to Sophia. “How long have you been here?”

  “Since the war,” Sophia said.

  “How did you—?”

  “Survive the war? A few of the families, and children, like me, evaded the roundup right before the deportation. I was taken in and hidden by a Greek Orthodox family. And after the synagogue was restored, I’ve been here waiting. I gathered all the photographs I had saved from the streets after the roundup and mounted them on a remembrance wall in our little museum. I believe I was spared for a purpose, to be the keeper of those memories. I have many beautiful memories of your grandmother and grandfather in my heart. I still miss her. We were as close as sisters.”

  “I was in the room with her when she took her last breath,” said Theia. “I was relieving my mother, who rarely left her side at the end. But I think she waited until my mother was out of the room for permission to go. At the end of the bed there was a man, a young man, very handsome. She reached out to him and she smiled. She was the happiest I’ve seen her in a long time—well, ever, really.”

  “You saw this young man?”

  “Yes,” said Theia. “As plain as you’re sitting here now.”

  Sophia looked through the photographs in Theia’s envelope and pulled out a picture.

  “Did he look like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was Theo, her husband. You were obviously named for him. Theo and Eleni grew up in Chania, played together as children, and fell in love. I’ve never seen a happier couple or two people more in love. From the moment they met, there was no one else for the other. He was her life and she was his. Everyone knew they would get married. It was a tragedy that they could not spend their lives together. That’s what war does. Luckily, your grandmother was spared the horrors of the destruction of our community in 1944. Although she wasn’t so lucky because she lost the love of her life.”

  “I read the letters, but I’d like to hear the story from you. Maybe you could fill in some of the blanks.”

  Sophia sighed. “Of course. But first, let me finish showing you and your friend around our little synagogue, and then we’ll see the wall of life.”

  Sophia tottered in front of them, leading the way.

  “Our present Sepher, written on gazelle skin and housed in a fine olive tik, or wooden case, was provided by the London Scrolls Trust.

  “These nineteen benches were made in Jakarta,” continued Sophia, gesturing to the middle of the sanctuary. “Our Torahs were some of the 1,574 Torahs discovered in an abandoned synagogue near Prague in 1945 and restored to Jewish communities. They had all been stolen from synagogues in Eastern Europe.”

  Theia picked up a prayer book.

  “Services, when we have them, are conducted in Hebrew, Greek, and English, so our prayer books are in English, Greek, and Hebrew,” Sophia explained.

  Theia smiled. She could read from any one of them with ease, and she also spoke Ladino, the form of Judeo-Spanish her ya-ya had often spoken at home.

  Wade picked up the Greek version of the prayer book and glanced at Theia with an impish smile.

  “Don’t even think about opening your smart mouth,” Theia warned in a whisper.

  “What?” Wade asked innocently throwing up his hands in mock affront, barely concealing a lopsided grin. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

  “Oh, but I do. You were going to say, ‘It’s all Greek to me,’ weren’t you?”

  Wade colored and placed the prayer book sheepishly back in its holder.

  “Turns out all the women in your life were wrong. You do have a sense of humor. It’s just a bad one. This is a house of worship. Please try to act accordingly.”

  Wade drew a deep breath at Theia’s verbal lashing. “Be careful, your bossy side is showing.”

  “I’m not bossy.” Theia frowned, punched his arm, and turned away.

  “Sorry,” Wade whispered, taking Theia’s hand and squeezing it.

  Sophia flashed a knowing smile at the sparring couple and proudly showed them around the research library. “I’m just a volunteer. We’re completely self-supporting. In 2010, we had two arsons in one month, which almost destroyed the library and office. We think the motive was anti-Semitism or robbery or both. But thanks to international donations, we were able to make repairs. Since there aren’t many permanent resident Jewish families, we continue to depend on benefactors and visitor donations.”

  “Imagine, Wade. This synagogue has been around since the Middle Ages.” Theia indicated a Tzedakah bowl, and Wade deposited some currency into it.

  “This is like passing the plate in church,” he whispered.

  Theia nodded.

  They moved into an anteroom. On the far wall was a kaleidoscope of pictures—of small children laughing and playing, newborns, newlyweds dressed in their wedding finery and starting their lives together, Bar and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies, portraits of families dressed for the holidays.

  “The story I tell everyone who visits the synagogue is that Theo, your grandfather, had the foresight to arrange for a Jewish organization to place five children, along with your grandmother who was pregnant at the time with their child, in Jewish homes away from Crete. It saved their lives and preserved our congregation. Specifically, six of our children were saved—including your mother—and taken in by families across the world. One of our children went to South Africa, one to Argentina, one to Los Angeles, one to Australia, and two, including your mother, with your grandmother, to Atlanta. Did the two Atlanta families ever get together?”

  “Yes,” Theia said. “My grandmother was offered a room in the house of a very generous congregant who had agreed to raise one of the boys who traveled with her. After my mother was born, she and my grandmother continued to live in that house because they had nowhere else to go. My grandmother eventually married the head of the household, after his wife passed away, and the two children, my mother and the boy who came with my grandmother, fell in love and married each other.”

  “How wonderful. That’s bashert. So your grandmother and your mother preserved our heritage. It must have been a great cause for celebration.”

  “Well, I wasn’t around, of course, but I’m here now.”

  “So those are the descendants of the six. Our congregation is not lost.” She pointed to the wall. “You see, I receive photos from families from all over the world so people will know that we survived.”

  Theia ceremoniously presented the envelope of pictures she had carried all the way from the United States to Sophia. The synagogue caretaker reopened the envelope. Tears flowed from her eyes again, and she hugged Theia tightly. “You do resemble your grandfather. Look, here, you have the same space between your teeth. And you have his eyes.”

  Theia studied the picture of her grandfather and blushed. It must be hereditary. She pushed her tongue up and rubbed it against the space. She’d grown up hating that space, but her grandfather had the same space between his teeth, so they shared that and their passion for art. That was a comforting thought. And she was the only one in her family with green eyes, like her grandfather’s.

  “You help me hang the photographs,” Sophia suggested.

  “I’d like that.”

  She and Sophia worked silently to hang the pictures of her ya-ya, her real grandfather, her mother and father, and herself with her brothers. Then, of course, there were the aunts and uncles, her mother’s siblings, born to her grandmother and step-grandfather.

  “You have a beautiful family,” said the woman. “A big family.”

  “Almost big enough to repopulate Chania,” Theia answered.

  “You are the descendants of Theo and Eleni Frangos. You can be very proud. And one day you will have your own Greek family.”

  Theia blushed, and Wade frowned.
/>   “I wish I had known him. He was a painter, like me. Have you seen his work?”

  “Oh, Theo was a brilliant artist,” said Sophia. “Had he lived, there is no doubt he would have been one of the greats. You know he studied with Chagall in France?”

  “I read about that in my grandmother’s letters. Until then, I had no idea who he was, or even that he was an artist.”

  “Oh, yes. He was a genius. Everybody thought so. The world has rarely seen a talent such as his. If he hadn’t been taken so young—” The woman paused for emphasis. “Killed. There is no telling what he could have become. His work was uplifting. It captured the beauty in the world. That was the unique way he saw things.”

  “My grandmother never talked about him. Not even to my mother. I never saw a picture of him or heard about him. It was only after she died and we found her letters that we saw pictures of them together in Chania. I didn’t even know she had been married to someone before Papou. I’ve never seen his paintings.”

  “They were, in a word, marvelous. They were all lost in a fire during a bombing in the war.”

  “That’s a shame. Now I shall never see them. I don’t know if I paint like him or if our styles are at all similar.”

  “So you want to be an artist like your grandfather?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your parents must be proud of you.”

  “Proud, yes, but they have expectations,” Theia said. “My ya-ya wanted me to marry a Greek man, a Jewish man, and have many children, just like my mother did.”

  “A noble aspiration, certainly,” said Sophia.

  Wade folded his arms defiantly across his chest.

  “They care more about that, I think, than my aspirations as a painter. The artistic gene skipped a generation. My mother was definitely not a painter. Her children were her works of art.”

  “It’s amazing how much you look like them,” Sophia repeated, pointing on the wall to the wedding portrait of Theia’s grandparents.

  “I wonder why my grandmother never talked about her life on Crete,” Theia said. “It must have been too painful that their life together was cut so short.”