Page 59 of Villa of Secrets

Nevertheless, we were spooked, jumping at every rustle that came from the roadside scrub. The night seemed full of strange, scurrying noises and damp, earthy, smells. A barn owl flew straight at us, ghostly, skimming over our heads, its face flat and white with big black eyes, like a child’s drawing.

‘You scared?’ Irini said.

‘Of course not,’ I replied defiantly although my insides trembled. ‘Just being careful, ready to run if anyone comes.’

‘Same here,’ she whispered.

‘Truth is, I’m actually terrified. Wetting my knickers.’

‘I’m wetting your knickers too,’ she quipped and we both giggled nervously.

We arrived at the city walls hoping we could get through the maze of narrow streets unseen.

Faint music and laughter drifted down the road. A door opened, and the sounds of a party escaped into the night. I thought of Danial. Life went on without him. We dived under a bougainvillea that reached the ground. A couple came into the street. The man pressed the woman against the wall and kissed her. They were canoodling for ages, then I realised they were speaking German! I squeezed Irini’s hand. She whimpered.

The woman slapped the German and then stomped back into the party.

‘Warte ab!’ he called, and followed her.

Trembling and afraid, we scrambled from the foliage and hurried onward, leaving a trail of papery bougainvillea bracts, like confetti in our wake. After dodging from doorway to doorway, huddling in narrow recesses, we neared the Jewish quarter.

We only saw one patrolling soldier. He walked across the end of our alleyway just as we approached. Terrified, we flattened ourselves behind a protrusion that supported an overhead arch. There were many flying buttresses in the side streets of Rhodes Old Town.

The soldier stopped. Footsteps came closer. My heart thumped with fear. We peered through a gap in the masonry. He stared up the alley, then drew his pistol and continued towards us. We had nowhere to go! When he was almost upon us, the sound of shattering glass reached us from the main street. The Nazi spun around and ran back the way he’d come.

We scooted out of the passageway and straight up the next one.

Eventually, we reached the Juderia and crouched behind the rubble of a bombed dwelling.

I recollected the night that the Levis’s home collapsed. The air-raid siren, the odd whistling noise, the moment of silence when we waited for the explosion that left our ears ringing. My brothers and I dived under the table, clutching each other. The ground shook so hard we realised it was near. Everyone dreaded a second bomb that would kill us all. We waited, breathless, but it didn’t come.

A British bomb, they said after the all-clear.

The most appalling screams came from the Levis’s demolished home.

‘God take her! God take her!’ my mother muttered between sobs. And eventually He did. Poor Mrs Levi. She died with her husband and four children. They were blown to bits or crushed to death by heavy sandstone blocks. Not a stick of furniture could be seen – only piles of earth, masonry, and beams. Six bodies were recovered and there were probably more buried. Neighbours’ homes were made uninhabitable, and many more had their windows destroyed.

With these thoughts going through my head I dreaded another raid. Also, I wondered if the Germans would be watching the houses that belonged to us.

Everywhere seemed deathly quiet, but then it did just before that bomb fell on the Levis’s home. I strained my ears for the drone of an aircraft, but the only noise came from a couple of cats in an ally, then silence.

I didn’t have a key for our house, Mama had it in her bag, but we had a spare, hidden behind a broken brick in the courtyard wall.

Irini kept watch. I got the loose brick out and fumbled in the space behind it, dislodging snails and a clump of moss before I found the key. The door scraped the cobbles, the noise scaring us both. I used all my strength to lift the door as I closed it, so it hardly made a sound. We stood still, breathing quietly, listening for Nazi footsteps that thankfully never came.

The same key unlocked the front door; in fact it probably opened half the doors in the city. People borrowed each other’s keys if they shut themselves out. The lock rasped and clunked, but the moment it released we scuttled inside.

Because the shutters were closed, the room was pitch-black. I reached for the light switch but bumped into a solid object and nearly fell over. Something was wrong. I stretched out my arms and touched an unfamiliar thing that made me jump before I realised it was glass. It toppled. I tried to grab it, but it smashed on the stone floor. My skin seemed to shrink over my body.

‘Who’s there?’ a man yelled.

Irini moaned.

My first thought was that we’d entered someone else’s house.

‘Sorry! Sorry!’ I called out.

A woman’s voice. ‘Who is it? Petro?’