Page 55 of The Little Liar
A middle-aged man with heavy stubble answered in an undershirt. Sebastian stood up straight.
“Hello, sir,” he said in Ladino. “My name is Sebastian Krispis, son of Lev and Tanna Krispis. This is my house.”
“Ti?”the man replied.
“This is my house,” Sebastian repeated, switching to Greek.
“What are you talking about?” the man said. “It’s mine. I bought it.”
“From who?”
“A German.”
“That German never owned it. He took it.”
“Well, however he got it, he sold it to me. I paid the money. So it’s mine.”
He tilted his head, studying Sebastian’s clothes. “How old are you anyway? You look like a teenager. Go back to your family.”
Sebastian felt his jaw tighten.Go back to your family?He’d had headaches for almost a year, ever since waking up in a Kraków hospital with that bullet beneath his shoulder. The doctors could not remove it, they said, because it was too close to a major artery. A cyst had formed above the wound, a permanent reminder of Udo Graf’s terror.
Go back to your family?Sebastian spent weeks in that hospital bed, then months in a displaced persons camp, where survivors passed around newspapers, desperately searchingfor lost relatives. He asked repeatedly for any news of his grandfather, but when a Greek survivor arrived and claimed that Lazarre had died in the infirmary, Sebastian was denied permission to leave and search for the body. Even here, the Jews were treated like inmates. At times, they were actually forced to share quarters with captured Nazis.
Go back to your family?As months passed, some well-meaning Jewish groups tried to create a cultural life for the refugees, inviting schoolteachers and staging sporting events. Sebastian was asked if he wanted to take part in a musical.A musical?All around were the Wolf’s withered victims, so haunted by trauma they could barely drag themselves through the day. Some, having survived the worst of German starvation, died from taking in too much food too soon. They called it “refeeding syndrome,” a new form of Jewish extermination.
Go back to your family?Once his strength increased, Sebastian moved from camp to camp, scanning the weary faces for the only two people left from his life: Fannie and Nico. He asked to see lists, but the names were endless and the information incomplete. After months of fruitless searching, he gave up and sought help getting back to Greece. He was eventually sent, via train, through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. He stared out the windows at destroyed towns, bombed buildings, farmers walking through razed fields, children playing in the ruins of churches.
Go back to your family?When he arrived in Athens, he was sent to a gymnasium and given biscuits, cigarettes, and ouzo. His fingerprints were taken. Eventually, a truck drove him toSalonika. When he got there, it was nighttime and he had no place to go. He slept, shivering, on a bench near the harbor, and was awakened by the sound of fishing boats bringing in their morning catches. As he rubbed his eyes, he wondered if life in his hometown had gone on like this every morning while he, his father, and his grandfather were being herded like animals into the Auschwitz yard. How could fishing boats keep rolling in so innocently? How could the world eat when all those prisoners were starving? How could things look so terrifyingly normal here, when there was nothing left of normal for Sebastian?
Go back to your family?
“Everyone in my family is dead,” Sebastian said.
The man looked him up and down. “You’re a Jew.”
“Yes.”
The man rubbed his chin. “They took you away? On those trains?”
Sebastian nodded.
“I heard things. Awful things. Were they true?”
“Please, sir,” Sebastian said. “I tell you again. This is my house.”
The man looked sideways, as if thinking. Then he turned back.
“Listen. It’s too bad, whatever happened to you. Maybe the government can help. But this is my house now.” He scratched his chest over his undershirt. “You really need to go.”
Sebastian teared up.
“Where?” he rasped.
The man shrugged. Sebastian wiped his eyes. Then he lungedforward, threw his hands around the man’s neck, and did not let go.
The next day, Fannie was on Egnatia Street.
She was staring at what used to be her father’s apothecary. It was a shoe store now. The Jewish bakery was a laundry. The Jewish tailor’s shop was a solicitor’s office. Although she recognized certain landmarks, everything within them had changed, and everyone moving about them seemed different. She saw no Jewish men with graying beards, or Jewish women wearing shawls. She heard no Ladino being spoken.
