Page 57 of The Little Liar
“Where’s the number onyourwrist?”
“I wasn’t in a camp,” Fannie said.
“Why not? Who didyoucollaborate with?”
“Nobody. I—”
“Who did you condemn so you could survive?”
“Stop it!”
“WHO—”
“Leave her alone!” Rebecca screamed. “Isn’t it enough that we lived? Do you want us to be ashamed of that, too?”
The man looked angrily at the others. He cleared his throat and spat into a handkerchief.
“Just stay away from me,” he said.
***
Fannie did not sleep that night, wary of the men snoring loudly on their cots. The next morning, when the sun came up, she left the synagogue and walked down to the sea.
The harbor was littered with hulls of ships destroyed during the war. Many of the cafés were closed. Salonika was not only missing its Jewish community, it was missing the joy of its mornings, the bustling of its markets, the mingling of its many cultures. In the aftermath of war, the city was starving, broken, and its people were fighting among themselves.
Fannie walked along the old promenade, following the cable car tracks. She headed east toward the White Tower, but when she saw it in the distance, she felt a catch in her throat. The Germans had painted it in camouflage colors to avoid targeting by bombers. Instead of white, it was a tangled mess of fading greens and tans. For some reason, this tore at Fannie’s heart.
As she approached the structure, she remembered the time she and the Krispis boys got to climb to the top, courtesy of their grandfather. The sky that day had seemed indescribably vast and the mountains across the water had fresh snow on their peaks. The world felt so alluring, so full of promise.
Now, Fannie wanted nothing to do with the world. She just wanted to sit still. A shop owner emptied a mop bucket onto the cobblestone and set out with a broom, which made a harsh, scraping sound. Where would she go now? What would she do? She had been hiding for so long, freedom felt like its own prison.
Despite promising herself that she would never cry if shemade it back home, Fannie teared up. And at that very moment, when she felt the most alone in her life, she heard footsteps behind her, and a man’s voice say the following words:
“Marry me, Fannie.”
She spun to see Sebastian, his face mature and whiskered, his forehead scraped by wounds and dried blood, as if he’d been in a fight.
“Oh my God,” Fannie said. “Sebastian? Is it really you?”
She threw herself into his embrace, overcome with the sight of anyone from her past who was still alive. She felt his strong, narrow shoulders and the brush of his short hair against her temples.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Sebastian whispered.
Those words, and the way they made Fannie feel, that someone still considered her existence worthy of a search, wrapped her in a sensation that had been dormant since that brush of a kiss with Nico. She and Sebastian sat in the shadow of the White Tower and tumbled into conversation, questions, head shakes, more questions, tears. Sebastian blurted out what he’d been hoping to say for three years. “I’m sorry for pushing you to the train window.” Fannie said she understood, and after hearing what happened in the camps, it was probably for the best. They stayed away from awful details that neither wanted to revisit. At times, they just held hands. When the midday sun had turned the gulf a sapphire blue, Sebastian said, “Let’s walk.”
They walked all over the city, stunned by the changes. Theywent north along the shoreline, pointing at mansions along theLeoforos ton Exochonthat had once belonged to wealthy Jewish families, but had been stolen by the Germans and repurposed by the Greeks. They went west until they reached the old Baron Hirsch quarter, where they had been imprisoned before their deportation, and saw how the entire neighborhood had been torn to the ground.
By the time the evening darkness fell and streetlamps lit the intersections, the two of them had come to the same conclusion: Salonika was no longer theirs. The wordhomehad been blown up letter by letter.
A city of ghosts is no place for a young couple. So when, in the moonlight over the gulf, Sebastian took Fannie’s hands and repeated the request “Marry me,” Fannie nodded and said, “I will.”
At the same time, in an Italian monastery...
A man stepped inside the confession booth. He spoke to the shadowy face.
“Do you have the papers?”
“Yes.”
