“I don’t care about that!” She wiped her mouth, her knees aching from the pebbles they crouched atop. “What about my family? That’s what I care about! My family!” She shifted to a seat atop her hands to keep them from throttling him.

“Your family will be okay,” he said in an infuriatingly soothing tone.

“We don’t know that. They haven’t responded to a single one of my letters! I want to visit them right away.”

Milos extended his hand. Reluctantly, she let him pull her up. They began to walk home. The sky was shredded in pink, the day erased. It was almost impossible to imagine the Nazis could mar this unblemished perfection of an evening.

“Sure, my love. Let me ask around. We’ll figure out a way for you to visit them.”

But a week later, after Milos’s parents had vowed not to tell anyone Sarah was Jewish, after they had papers in hand declaring her Sara Christakos, she said it to him again: “I need to go to Corfu.”

Milos was on the floor, mending his nets with black twine. “Theodore just went to fish there. He’ll tell us how it is. Let us wait and see.”

It became December with all Milos’s hedging. Again, Costas came into the shop.

“We don’t have baklava,” she told him. “The Nazis have confiscated all sugar, flour, and oil. On pain of death, if we have it.”

“I know.” He nodded. “What do you have?”

“Bobota with raisins.” It was a loaf made with salt, yeast, cornmeal, and whatever other more exotic ingredient Sarah could scrounge. Today, raisins.

“Bobota would be wonderful then.”

As Sarah plated it, she garnered the courage to ask him, “So what is the state of Corfu? Have you heard?”

He frowned and shut his newspaper. “Yes, I’ve heard a terrible thing. They closed the Jewish school.” That was the school Sarah once went to with Benjamin and Rachel. “Jews have to report in for counting each week too. But unfortunately, those aren’t the worst things. The rabbi of Corfu now reports to the German commandant. Each evening, the rabbi must go to the German officers’ quarters. He must stand in the room as the commandant bathes. When the commandant emerges from the water, the rabbi is made to hand him a towel.”

“While he’s naked?” Sarah managed, unable to fathom such a horrid, shaming scene.

“Yes. It pains me to say it, but yes. And on the Sabbath, they make him work and sweep their floors.”

Sarah cried then in silence for kind Rabbi Nechama, he of the booming voice at the Romaniote synagogue who kindled something in her heart when he sang. She’d subsumed her Jewish pride to be with Milos. Now she wept for Rabbi Nechama and the Corfiot Jews. She was a Corfiot Jew. She’d forgotten it, and now she’d remembered.