— Even if it’s only in a whisper, Grandmother, and only between the two of us, I don’t mind saying, and lord knows it’s without the slightest arrogance, that it was destiny, destiny in person Or perhaps I should say, a remnant of destiny, a shadow thrown by those famous myths that took place here. From that day on, until my release in early winter, I clung more and more fiercely, right through that window that you’re looking at, Grandmother, to this wonderful island; I studied its sounds, its smells, its shades of light by day and by night, at first in that long, blue summer, whose unexcelled clarity kept getting deeper and deeper, and afterward on into autumn, when the authorities finally gave me the right glasses, which enabled me to refine my observations and take in little details that I hadn’t noticed before, like the hills of the Chaios Range over there, or the outline of the more distant mountains. And all that time I fell back in my thoughts on those first forty-eight hours of freedom, which now seemed to have a mysterious magic… on the memory of that wonderful jump, and of landing in the olive tree, and of hiking like a sleepwalker that night to Knossos, and of the halls of the ancient Labyrinth with their reddish columns and giant urns, and of the mule led in at dawn by the two Greeks I took prisoner, and of my ghost of a hostage all trussed up in his urn while delivering a spirited lecture on that precivilizatory civilization. I thought of his family too, of that blond young man who broke into sobs while holding the little boy’s hand, and of his young wife whose image kept haunting me, stepping silently out of the darkness to shyly hand me a soft towel in which five pairs of old granny glasses were wrapped… and the more I thought about them, Grandmother, day after day, putting two and two together, the more I was tormented by the odd suspicion that they weren’t Greeks at all, but something else — which filled me, Grandmother, with the most terrible wonder…
— I mean, Grandmother… that they were Jews… some sort of Jews…
— Because it all added up.
— That’s so. But still…
— That’s so. I had never seen a Jew in my life… you had never even wanted to discuss them with me… but still, none of us can help thinking about them all the time…
— Well, part of the time, anyway.
— I don’t know. The thought began to obsess me. I actually felt indignant…
— At the thought that I might have been tricked out of fighting by Jews…
— No, none of them wore hats.
— No, no, they didn’t even have those little braids behind their ears. Don’t you think I’m familiar with all those photographs from the encyclopedia too? Anything like that would have put me on guard… No, Grandmother, these were ordinary people, that was the whole point. They were perfectly ordinary. But if you’ve finished drinking your tea, let’s head on for the next station… we don’t want to get caught by the dark…
— No, Grandmother, I’m not skipping any of it, and neither are you. You’ll never have another chance to be in such a wonderful place. In the darkness that is about to descend in Germany, on all of us, this sweet light flowing to the sea will always be a precious memory, and you’ll at least be able to comfort yourself with the thought that for more than three whole years it was ours…
— No, it’s not far, I promise… one or two hundred meters, that’s all, and it’s an easy, pleasant climb. It’s crucial not to miss the view east.
— Yes, for the sake of my story, only for it. If you had come a few months ago, I wouldn’t have bothered to bring you up here. I would have given you some goggles, put you in the sidecar of my motorcycle, and crisscrossed the island with you, making sure to show you every inlet and mountain, every monastery and temple. But you put off coming here too long, and now this island is slipping through our fingers. Soon we’ll have only the flag flying from the military government building to call our own… and so please, Grandmother, hold onto the loop on my belt and let me pull you gently upward…
— Easy does it…
— In a minute… I promise you…
— Everything. I won’t keep a thing from you.
— True
— No. It’s important. Listen. I began to put two and two together… all kinds of things that you felt too, or else why would my story have made you think of Jewish ideas and scholars…
— Exactly. It was the same with me. In the middle of one night I woke up from my sleep and said, but they must have been Jews… which depressed me terribly…
— Maybe depressed isn’t the right word. Maybe upset or disappointed would be better. I couldn’t believe it… here too? Even on a wonderful, special island like this, between the sun and the sea, among all the prehistoric antiquities? Did they have to get here before us too? And just how did they get here anyway?
— Because, Grandmother, it was elementary logic that if two Greeks rose early on the first day of the fighting to load a mule with bags of sugar and flour and spices and canned goods, they were doing it to prepare a hideout. And why would two Greeks prepare a hideout unless they were Jews who knew, not only that we would win the battle, but exactly what they could expect once it was won…
— What they could not expect, Grandmother, was tender loving care.
— Yes, rumors of the clean sweep that had begun in Eastern Europe had reached us here too. And then I thought, Grandmother, of how terrified they were when they first saw me, and of how quickly they chose to collaborate, and of how oddly eager the father was to offer himself as a hostage, and of how he stood there in that urn enthusiastically lecturing me about his fearless, guiltless ancient culture, getting history and prehistory all mixed up with each other… to say nothing of his confession that he wasn’t born in Crete but in some small, barbaric town in Asia whose name he didn’t want to reveal… and maybe, Grandmother, it was that secret, which he insisted on keeping to himself, that killed him in the end…
— In a minute… I’ll get to that too… there are still more surprises for you…
— Well, Grandmother, the thought kept tormenting me that it was Jews who had gotten me into trouble, and that if anyone ever found out about it, I’d be in even worse trouble. And so I made up my mind that I wouldn’t leave this island without finding out the truth and doing something about it if necessary… and it was just then that Major Bruno Schmelling and his police force arrived in late November to bring our amateur army up to snuff — the first step toward which was moving the prison from that ridiculous museum to a larger, more private building that had lots of cellar space, such as that winery down there, no, there, more to your right, at the far end of that square…