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She looked at Spiros to repeat the question in Greek. Afterwards, he listened to the caretaker and nodded before turning to Lili. ‘He remembers a tall, thin man with a moustache. He was her father, your grandfather, and he was English.’
‘He was English?’
The caretaker nodded.
A tall thin man with a moustache, thought Lili. Oh, how she’d love to meet her grandparents. She wouldn’t get her hopes up, though. It had been so many years since the funeral, and she didn’t know whether they were still alive or even know their names. She knew Ray was working behind the scenes to find them, though. She imagined he had requested a copy of her parents’ birth certificates to discover the names of their parents – Lili’s grandparents – in order to build her family tree and start searching for them.
The tour guide had a suggestion. ‘Perhaps your mother was born in England, and then they moved to Israel?’
Lili thought that it was a possibility, and that it might also explain why her mother had been laid to rest in the British Cemetery – but it still left one big unanswered question. Why hadn’t she been repatriated to England or Israel? It wasn’t as though she had died on the island.
‘So, why was she buried here, in Corfu?’ she asked.
‘Ah,’ the caretaker appeared to understand Lili’s question.
Lili waited for an answer, but none was forthcoming. She looked at Spiros, who shrugged his shoulders. Lili turned her attention to the old man. He held his hands up in a gesture that saidI don’t have a clue.
But Lili did. It was all making sense now.Lili thought of her mother’s trip to Zakynthos. Lili believed her mother had been on the trail of her own grandmother and what happened to her after the German invasion. If her trip had been about Alena and the discovery that she’d had an illegitimate child –my own grandmother, thought Lili – was that the secret she’d uncovered that had led to the family rift? There was a reason it didn’t always pay to delve into the past. It might uncover a secret someone was trying to protect.
However, if her grandmother was Alena’s illegitimate child, it still didn’t explain why she had buried her daughter on an Ionian Island she would barely remember, unless …
There was only one explanation. Her grandmother knew all about her past, her illegitimacy, her biological mother Alena, and her once-prominent family who lived on Corfu. That’s why she’d laid her daughter to rest on the island from where her family originated.
Lili took a breath. Of course, all that was conjecture, but she asked, ‘What do you think happened to the children who escaped to Zakynthos?’
That the caretaker knew, or at least had some idea about. So did her tour guide. ‘After the war, many fled to a place of refuge. A place where, although they missed their homeland, Greece, they could start new lives without fear of religious persecution.’
‘Israel.’
The coincidences were mounting up, but it still didn’t mean Alena was her great-grandmother, or the little girl who had escaped the death boats was her grandmother. Until she thought of Joseph.
It couldn’t just be a coincidence that Joseph remembered a young woman called Alena who Lili resembled. Lili recalled what Sarah had told her; she knew little about her father’s experiences as a child caught up in the Nazi invasion of the Ionian Islands, but what she did know was that his parents often visited friends on the island of Corfu.
He must have known Alena. They might have all stayed with the wealthy Greek family who hosted get-togethers for their artist friends from abroad. She guessed they were all there – Alena’s illegitimate child too – when the island was invaded.
The caretaker had mentioned that the children had been smuggled off the island and placed in the care of Greek families. She guessed Joseph and his father had been reunited and then returned to England. She believed Alena’s child had fled with a Greek family from Zakynthos to Israel after the war, and that they had brought her up there.
Was it true – was Alena’s love-child also her grandmother? Lili looked at the caretaker. She was thinking of something Joseph had said, another name Sarah had never heard pass her father’s lips before.Miriam.
