“I want to die. Take me too!” Sarah turned her face to the ceiling, to say it to God, and she prayed he would smite down from the sky and remove her from this wretched earth.

Sarah sensed Roza lifting her arm, pulling on it, with a strength that felt peculiar, even in the sea of her grief. “You will come home with me, Sarah mou. I have more beds than bodies now.”

*  *  *

Sarah found that, when she swept the synagogue floor, her mind sometimes—fleetingly—could focus only on sweeping the synagogue floor. And so she came to the synagogue, day after day, to help with the restoration efforts. But one winter day, January, February, who knew, she was sweeping and got a feeling that struck her often, like her legs were going to buckle.

Sarah sat on the pew. It was still a beautiful synagogue. Looking at beautiful things made Sarah’s eyes hurt. She didn’t register a man approaching until he sat beside her. He was familiar—he’d been coming to the synagogue every day for maybe a month and just sitting on a pew, but not speaking. Sarah hadn’t thought it strange; nothing seemed strange or not strange anymore. The man was older—thirty, maybe.

“Can I sit?” he asked in Italian, which explained why Sarah hadn’t known him before the war. He surely belonged to the island’s Italian Jewish community, whose synagogue now sat in ruins.

“You are already sitting,” Sarah responded in Italian, which she knew nearly as well as Greek. It had been years since she’d spoken it though. She shifted away from the man.

“I just meant, do you mind if I do?”

“You can do whatever you want. The Nazis aren’t here to outlaw it.”

A long silence. It was raining outside, drumming onto the windowpanes. Penelope thumped her feet in her cage on the floor, where Sarah set her each morning. Thumping meant she was unhappy with something; that was what Benjamin had once said. Since Sarah had acceded to her ownership, Penelope was incessant in her thumping.

“You lost your family?” asked the man, whom Sarah had nearly forgotten was still there.

Like she had misplaced them. “Yes, they are dead. They are dead. They are dead.” She could have kept going, but her mouth ran out of steam.

“My wife and baby daughter died too.” He scratched his ear, and Sarah saw his arm with those horrific numbers.

“I’m very sorry.” Her eyes bored into the pew. Finally, she got up with her broom.

“And now I am getting out of here to America.”

“Well, then, good luck.” The man reached out to put a hand on hers. Sarah’s hand stung with the touch. She ripped it away.

“Why don’t you marry me and come with me to America?”