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- Herausgeber: Salt
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Books to look out for in the first half of 2026 —Lucy Popescu, Camden New Journal The Tribe is the epic tale of a family and its history and a family in history. The Carraches are a powerful Sephardic dynasty in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. After the Greek annexation of the city, they settle in France until, in 1940, the Nazi Occupation sends some into hiding, some into flight and others into camps. In the early 1960s, the survivors and their children confront the family's past, with long hidden secrets uncovered and deep-seated conflicts exposed, even as the Eichmann trial forces the world at large to confront the full enormity of the Holocaust. The Tribe crosses cultures and continents in its exploration of family, race, nation and empire. As the central characters journey from adolescence through early adulthood to late middle age, they experience first loves, political and sexual awakenings, artistic triumphs, religious pressures, marital struggles, dynastic rivalries, brutal persecution, resilience and liberation, before, helped by their children, they finally achieve a degree of reconciliation both with one another and the city of their birth.
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For Ann Pennington, Jenny Topper and Timberlake Wertenbaker
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‘And the Lord shall scatter you among the peoples, and ye shall be left few in number among the nations, whither the Lord shall lead you away.’
Deuteronomy 4:27
CONTENTS
ONE
1
JACOB
SALONICA, JUNE 1911
The city was festooned in honour of the Sultan. Every window frame and doorway was wreathed in flowers; every balcony was draped in a blood-red Ottoman flag. Twenty-six ceremonial arches had been erected along the processional route, one of them the gift of the Carrache family. A military band played martial airs in the recently renamed Liberty Square. The fountain in the centre flowed with cherry juice, much to the delight of Jacob’s youngest children, Ruben and Bella, and the dismay of their mother, who had issued grave warnings of dysentery and cholera.
The Sultan had entered the harbour the previous day but remained on board his flagship, Hayrettin Barbaros, where he received the Governor and provincial representatives, before resting after the two-day voyage from Constantinople, which had been the longest of his life. His loyal subjects had had little chance to rest, as carpenters hammered and sawed through the night, fixing uneven stands and rickety railings; sweeps spread sand to smooth the imperial carriage’s path over cobbled streets; and officials bawled commands at underlings during last-minute inspections. Any lull was broken by the snap and sputter of firecrackers, further alarming the jittery gendarmes, although the most incendiary rabble-rousers, the four leaders of the Socialist Federation, had been imprisoned or exiled prior to the visit. 4
At last, the steamer carrying the Sultan and his entourage pulled away from the flagship and made for the shore. With a raucous whistle, it chugged through the sloops and skiffs that clustered round it like beggars soliciting alms. It was barely fifty years since the first steamship arrived in Salonica. Jacob had been a babe in arms and his father later told him of the panic on the quayside, with frantic calls for fishing boats to sail to the rescue of the seemingly stricken vessel. It was a sign of the city’s transformation that the plumes of vapour were now a familiar sight. The crowds on the waterfront were marking the Sultan’s arrival not with shrieks of terror but whoops of welcome, although he was too far away to hear.
Jacob gazed at the ship and pictured the scene through the Sultan’s eyes. The city was smaller than Constantinople but more cosmopolitan, poised midway between East and West, its skyline adorned with minarets and bell towers. Although the synagogues were less conspicuous, the Jewish influence was no less pronounced. Salonica might belong to the Turks and be claimed by the Greeks and Bulgarians, but Jews made up the majority of its population. And it was Jacob and his coreligionists who had reshaped it in the past thirty years from a sleepy backwater to an economic hub, building the hotels and department stores that bordered the square, building the warehouses that fronted the quay, building pipelines and plants that brought water and electricity into private homes. But even more than electricity, they had brought enlightenment.
The steamer docked to thunderous applause. After a lengthy delay, the Sultan stepped ashore and ascended a specially erected podium. He stood ramrod straight and saluted as the band struck up the updated imperial anthem. Short and stout, with pursy cheeks, a walrus moustache and a medal-encrusted tunic, he exuded a faintly disgruntled air, either at finding himself in this unknown and, to him, remote outpost of his empire or, simply, at having been plucked from opulent obscurity two years earlier and thrust on the throne after the bloodless coup that deposed his brother. A very different monarch from the despotic Abdul Hamid, he had immediately 5ratified the new constitution, guaranteeing parliamentary rule and the rights of all his subjects.
While wary of the firebrands from the Committee of Union and Progress who had orchestrated the coup (and, indeed, of firebrands in general), Jacob had broadly supported their aims and applauded their spokesman, Enver Bey, who’d stood in this very square and declared that no longer were there Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Romanians, Jews or Muslims: from now on, all were Ottomans, equal under the same blue sky. Setting caste aside, Jacob had linked arms with Ishak, an elderly waiter at the Club des Intimes, and hummed a few bars of the Marseillaise.
He emerged from his reverie as the final jaunty chords of the anthem faded and the Mufti approached the podium to perform the sacrifice. Tall and turbaned, sporting a full beard and an emerald kaftan, he looked so much more regal than the Sultan that Jacob could imagine Ruben, a youthful devotee of The Arabian Nights, confusing them. Four acolytes followed, dragging two rams, their horns painted green and fleeces dyed red, orange and purple, some of which stained the men’s white jubbahs, as if the prescient beasts had sought to escape their fate. The Mufti slit the first throat with admirable adroitness, while an acolyte held up a bowl to collect the blood. The second ram, its last steps on earth as tottery as its first, lurched backwards, its desperate bleats accentuating Jacob’s horror of a practice long since expunged from his own rites. The Mufti, glaring at the beast as if its recalcitrance were an insult to the hundreds of soldiers lining the square, each of whom had pledged to lay down his life for the Sultan, grabbed one of its horns and hacked at its throat. Making supplication to Allah, he sprinkled the blood on the ground.
The Sultan, accompanied by the Grand Vizier, inspected the rows of assembled dignitaries. Jacob, attending as president of both the Jewish Community Council and the Salonica Chamber of Commerce, felt a twinge of adolescent bashfulness as the Sultan walked past, no trace of curiosity in his hooded gaze. He watched 6as the Sultan stepped into his carriage to drive to the Konak, where he would reside during the visit. The processional route was flanked by children from the city’s various schools – Jewish, Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian – with only the Turkish pupils granted the honour of parading in front of the Sultan at the Konak. The original plan for a broad-based parade had been abandoned, ostensibly to avoid congestion on the narrow streets of the Muslim quarter. Yet Jacob had it on good authority that the true concern was inflaming tensions over the order of precedence among the other ethnic groups.
Ruben and Bella were both taking part in the reception: his son grumbling about his cape, the laurel sprig he was required to wave, and the long wait in the clammy heat; his daughter enraptured by the prospect of throwing a rose at the Sultan’s carriage (‘Madame Dupont told us to aim at the wheels, or else it will look like a funeral’). They and their classmates from the lycée occupied a prime spot on the quay. Despite his support for universal education, Jacob had dismissed any suggestion of sending his own children either to an Alliance school or the Talmud Torah, where they would receive an unduly vocational or religious training and acquire undesirable habits from their peers, many of whom would in due course work for him.
Muffling the nagging voice accusing him of double standards (which sounded uncomfortably like that of his eldest daughter, Esther), he scanned the quay, in anticipation of Bella’s inevitable ‘Papa, did you see me?’ But at this distance, picking out one white-clad child from the crowd was as hopeless as picking out a pet goose from a gaggle. He prepared himself for the equally inevitable prevarication.
His fellow dignitaries began to disperse: some heading up Sabri Pasha Street to greet the Sultan a second time at the Konak; others, duty done, to join family and friends. Jacob’s family was scattered across the city. His wife Mathilde was watching the ceremony alongside both of their mothers and their middle daughter, Irène, from a balcony at the Hotel d’Angleterre. Although the Governor, fearing for the Sultan’s safety, had decreed that all balconies remain sealed 7for the duration of the visit, the edict had been widely ignored. Jacob smiled at the notion of anyone mistaking the eminently respectable Carrache women for insurrectionists.
Irène had protested at being stuck with her mother and grandmothers while her brothers and sisters were out with their friends, prompting Mathilde to remark, with uncharacteristic asperity, that she was free to stay at home. ‘It’s not fair,’ Irène had replied, as she did to countless perceived injustices every day. Despite Jacob’s sympathy for his all-too-easily overlooked middle child, he could do little to help. At fifteen, she was too old to throw flowers with Bella, and too young to dispense with adult tutelage. He wished that he might say the same of seventeen-year-old Esther. His parents would never have permitted either of his sisters to go out alone before they were married. But the city’s landscape wasn’t all that had changed in the past thirty years.
Esther had bought tickets for herself and her friend Leah Sagues to view the proceedings from the vantage point of the Club Nouveau. On the face of it, she couldn’t have chosen a more suitable chaperone. Leah was a dedicated, impassioned and highly intelligent teacher at the Alliance girls’ school. They’d met when Esther accompanied Mathilde to distribute clothing to the poorer pupils and had since become inseparable. Mathilde had invited Leah to dine and, on learning that she had no family in the city, renewed the invitation at least once a week. Leah made no secret of her radical sentiments, with which he feared she was infecting Esther. She even challenged him at his own table, and Esther, who would never have been so presumptuous herself, egged her on. Although Leah showed him every sign of respect, above and beyond what was due to a major benefactor of the school, he could never shake the suspicion that she was silently laughing at him.
While four of his children were accounted for, he was ignorant of the whereabouts of his elder son. If anyone should have been celebrating the Sultan’s visit, it was Leon. Three years earlier, in defiance of his father’s express command, the then seventeen-year-old 8had been among a group of Jewish youths who, with their Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian comrades, marched beside rebels from Abdul Hamid’s army to the military headquarters at Monastir and exhorted the soldiers to mutiny. When he returned, flushed with the flame of revolution, Jacob had been so overwhelmed with relief that he neglected to punish him, an act of clemency he had come to regret. For all his qualities – honour, loyalty and compassion chief among them – Leon lacked application. Neither a year at the Sorbonne nor placements at both the tobacco factory and the bank had held his interest. He spent his days hunting and sailing, playing billiards and backgammon. Having declared the visit of the Sultan, for whose accession he had risked his life, to be nothing but ‘bread and circuses’, he was no doubt drowning his disappointment in a taverna.
The last in the cavalcade of carriages rolled along the quay, its occupants, two elderly beys, chattering animatedly, as if to counter the crowd’s indifference. Tired and thirsty, Jacob crossed the square to the Club des Intimes. He handed his fez to the doorman, who informed him that his father and brother were upstairs.
His father had been a founding member of the club, which was modelled on the Jockey Club in Paris, in every respect but for its admittance of Jews. It swiftly became the favoured meeting place of the city’s financial and mercantile elite, a place where business and leisure converged – and, on occasion, clashed. For more than thirty years, his father had ended each working day with a visit to the club, to see friends, drink an aperitif and chew over issues of mutual concern, before heading home to his wife. Even after the stroke, which severely restricted his speech and mobility and forced his belated retirement, he maintained his daily visits. Two porters carried him up to his appointed seat at the library window, where he surveyed the passing scene, read the foreign papers, and acknowledged the greetings of members with whom he could no longer converse.
Jacob entered the library, breathing in the congenial aroma of wood polish, cracked leather and citrus beard oil. He found his father 9sitting with his younger brother Haim, and Baruch ben Yaakov, whose dye house the Carraches had bought at the turn of the century but who continued to think of himself as their associate. Bending to kiss his father’s hand, he acknowledged with a familiar pang of guilt that, despite his sympathy for his impairment, he felt more at ease with this snow-bearded husk of a man than the former forbidding patriarch. After taking a seat and ordering a glass of boza, he related his impressions of the ceremony, exaggerating the discomfort of the protracted wait in deference to his chairbound father. To spice up the account, he cracked a joke about the famously greedy Rabbi Sardo’s stomach rumbling as the slaughtered rams were dragged away. Haim and ben Yaakov laughed (the latter immoderately), but his father, who disapproved of such irreverence, scratched a fingernail on the table.
‘I have to congratulate you on your arch,’ ben Yaakov said, as conversation stalled. ‘One of the most spectacular in the city, if not the most.’
Jacob could not disagree. The arch, one of only two privately financed by Jews, was magnificent. As well as saluting the Sultan in three languages, French, Turkish and Greek, it listed the multifarious Carrache banking, brokerage and manufacturing enterprises, with pride of place given to the tobacco factory, the principal supplier to the Sublime Porte. Ideally located near the Ayasofya mosque, where the Sultan would attend Friday prayers, the arch was crowned by six giant cigarettes, fashioned from light bulbs, which glowed at night, in turn promoting the Carrache and Mordoh Electricity Supply Company.
A second scratch of the table signalled his father’s displeasure at ben Yaakov’s remark. Jacob struggled to contain his frustration. The Carraches had lived in Salonica for almost two centuries; they owned large tracts of the city and employed more than a thousand of its inhabitants; yet his father objected to any display of wealth or status lest it stoke resentment. He harboured a constant fear that they would be expelled as brutally as their ancestors had been from 10Spain. Jacob was not naïve. He was well aware of the Tsarist pogroms. When two thousand Russian Jews fled here in 1891, he found work for many in his factory and built homes for their families nearby. Three years later, he watched, in even greater consternation, as France, the centre of the civilised world, was consumed by antisemitism over Major Dreyfus’s alleged treason. But justice prevailed; the authorities admitted their error. Dreyfus was reinstated and Jacob assured that the country had recovered from its derangement.
His father and brother knew his sentiments without his needing to reiterate them. Instead, he outlined the latest arrangements for Ruben’s tefillin celebration, ben Yaakov commending every detail as if angling for an invitation, which he failed to secure. Oozing wounded pride, he took his leave and, with their father’s tacit blessing, the brothers made their way to the dining room for lunch. Their father no longer ate anywhere but at his own table, Haim feeding him with boundless patience, while their mother carped either that the heaped forkfuls would choke him or that he was spilling food. Haim was her youngest child by almost a decade and, far from rejoicing at the birth of a Benjamin, she had resigned herself to it as to a disease from which she had thought she was cured. In spite – or because – of her hostility, Haim’s abiding wish was to be of service to his parents and, at thirty, he still lived at home. To Jacob’s children, ‘Le pauvre oncle’ was so often attached to his name that it was almost an honorific. Mathilde, an inveterate matchmaker, had introduced him to a string of eligible girls, all of whom he rejected. Jacob, who hated any kind of ambiguity, longed for Haim to regulate his life.
The chef had chosen to celebrate the Sultan’s visit with a traditional Turkish menu. Both brothers started with tripe soup; Jacob following it with quince stuffed with minced lamb and pine nuts, and Haim opting for fried anchovies in a cinnamon-and-pomegranate sauce. For dessert, Jacob ordered almond-and-rosewater halva, while the more adventurous Haim settled on sweet chicken pudding. After accompanying him back to their father, Jacob withdrew to the library, where he leafed through the latest issue of Le Charivari, 11which, thanks to the new fast train service, was on sale in Salonica only three days after appearing in Paris. Though not always abreast of its satire, he admired the comic sketches and took a boyish delight in the caricatures.
A studied harrumph roused him from his doze. Trusting that Mathilde’s assurance that he didn’t snore was no mere conjugal kindness, he sat up.
‘Are you reading that, Monsieur?’ asked an unfamiliar man, pointing to the journal lying like a reproach on his knees.
‘Not at all,’ he replied, briskly smoothing the pages. ‘Be my guest.’
‘Thank you.’
‘A bumper issue, I think you’ll find,’ he added, lest the man suppose it soporific.
He headed outside but, having granted his coachman leave in the belief that the streets would be thronged, he found them no busier than usual. Nevertheless, he was glad of the long walk home, to digest both his meal and the day’s events. The quayside had a deflated, end-of-party air: flags and banners drooped on the walls; fruit rinds and pastry wrappings littered the pavements; wheel tracks crisscrossed the sanded cobbles, splattered with horse dung and strewn with the wilted roses tossed at the Sultan’s carriage. He ambled past the tobacco factory, nodding to the people he met – in his own sphere, he too was a sultan – until he reached the White Tower. The trampled sand marked the procession’s sharp turn up Union Boulevard, the former Hamidye Avenue, whose renaming came less naturally to him than that of Liberty Square.
His children accused him of living in the past, but his youthful memories remained vivid. For the first decade of his life, this had been the city’s eastern boundary, protected by massive, timeworn walls. Every summer, he and his brother and sisters would drive through the heavily guarded gates to picnic in the meadows and, on one thrilling occasion, he and his cousin Nissim accompanied their fathers to the tobacco harvest in Kilkis, with an escort of armed outriders to ward off bandits. But every expedition, however 12splendid, had been blighted by the corpses strung up outside the gates. He never accustomed himself to the sight and, no matter how carefully he calculated when to close his eyes on the journey home, he always opened them too soon, knowing that the image of their bloated faces, lolling tongues and livid skin would haunt him long into the night.
The walls that had encircled the city for centuries were torn down in the 1870s, once the threat of invasion was finally deemed to have passed. Seizing their opportunity, the Carraches bought up swathes of the surrounding countryside, later selling residential plots to merchants and industrialists who, unlike their predecessors, wished to distance themselves from the source of their wealth. In time, Jacob joined them. While his father and uncles remained in the Jewish quarter, he built a house for his growing family, alongside a garden that ran down to the sea. In a further break with his roots, he welcomed the presence of Greek and Turkish neighbours as a sign of the city’s coming of age. He even forced a smile when Esther, doubtless prompted by Leah, argued that the Campania district was as parochial as any other. The only difference was that its presiding deity was not Yahweh or God or Allah but Mammon.
The grandest house in the neighbourhood belonged to Jacob’s friend, Charles Allatini. In 1909, he loaned it to the government to accommodate the deposed Sultan, much to the excitement of Irène, Ruben and Bella, who basked in reflected glory. Every afternoon for weeks, they gathered at the railings, eager to spot the erstwhile potentate, until they were warned off by a guard.
‘He put a curse on us,’ Ruben said.
‘How do you know?’ Esther asked scornfully. ‘You can’t speak Turkish.’
‘He bared his teeth. They were long and pointy like a tiger’s. Then he spat three times on the ground.’
‘Four,’ Bella corrected.
They lapped up the accounts of Abdul Hamid’s activities in the Journal de Salonique. Ruben was most taken with his demand for 13a hammam in place of an ‘insanitary Western bathroom’, accusing his parents of wanting him to die of plague when they refused to install one. Bella was intrigued by his retinue of twenty servants, compared to their mere six.
‘What’s a eunuch?’ she asked Mathilde, in reference to four of them.
‘A man in charge of the treasure.’
‘So is Papa a eunuch?’
‘Don’t be absurd!’
‘Why?’ she asked in a hurt voice. ‘Isn’t there treasure in his bank?’
Irène, meanwhile, was exercised by the Sultan’s three wives.
‘That’s nothing,’ Ruben said. ‘Monsieur Dumain told us that Suleiman the Magnificent had four hundred.’
‘And King Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines,’ Leon added.
‘What’s a concubine?’ Bella asked.
‘A laundress,’ Mathilde said. ‘Now, no more questions.’
The Allatini house may have been the grandest in the Campania, but there was no question which was the most distinctive. Having been dazzled by the style moderne buildings during his visit to the 1900 Paris Exposition, Jacob had commissioned a prize-winning young architect to design the house (so much for living in the past!). He had waited four years for him to complete his existing projects and spent far more than he’d admitted even to Mathilde, but it had been worth every piastre. As he walked down the drive and glimpsed the blue and white stonework with the floral medallions, the cantilevered balconies with the wrought-iron grilles, and the gabled portico with the cornucopia pediment, he brimmed with proprietary pride.
The interior was no less striking. The circular entrance hall boasted a variegated mosaic floor with a seashell motif, and four star-patterned stained-glass windows that lent it a quasi-devotional air. The curved marble staircase led to the three upper storeys, supported by columns so slender that impressionable guests feared their imminent collapse. His mother declared that the view made 14her dizzy, while his mother-in-law visited for several years before she could be coaxed upstairs. His father’s protests at the extravagance intensified after Jacob permitted the Journal de Salonique to photograph the house for a feature entitled ‘The visionaries transforming the face of the city’, which credited architect and patron in equal measure.
‘It’s an open invitation to assassins and thieves,’ his mother said.
‘And to the new government to tear up the capitulations and compel us to pay tax,’ his father added.
Eager to enjoy a final moment of calm before dinner, Jacob wandered through the garden. He savoured the sultry scent of jasmine and frangipani laced with the powdery sweetness of tuberose. He gazed with satisfaction at the ripening apricots, mulberries and figs. He made his way down the pebbled path and scanned the molten-gold sea, streaked with purple in the twilight.
He had every reason to be contented with his lot. At fifty, he was in his prime, with a loving wife and five healthy children. The Carrache businesses were thriving: in the past year, they had doubled their share of the burgeoning Russian tobacco market and set up a brokerage house in New York. The Albanian ports had reopened after the recent revolt, and goods left to gather dust at the docks were at last being shipped … Before he knew it, he had reached into his pocket and clasped the protective cloves that Mathilde had sewn into the lining. He felt a fleeting irritation at both her credulity and his compliance, which was swiftly subsumed in a surge of tenderness.
Hearing footsteps, he retreated to the shadows and watched as Leon unlocked the door to the ground-floor apartment. He had made it over to him on his last birthday, in the hope, as yet unrealised, that an element of independence would foster his sense of responsibility. His vantage point gave him no clue as to his son’s mood, purpose or even sobriety. Mathilde maintained that every twenty-year-old was a mystery to his parents, in which case he himself must have been the exception. In awe of his father, he had striven above all else to gain his approval. It had been his good fortune to come of 15age alongside the railways and steamships, and he had taken full advantage of the opportunities they presented. With no similar advancements in view, he feared that, far from wanting to build on his success, Leon felt daunted by it.
Mathilde’s remedy for Leon’s malaise was marriage. She was apt to prescribe it for every uncommitted bachelor, but, in this case, Jacob agreed. He had been twenty-three at the time of his marriage to his first wife Irène, although, unlike Leon, he’d dedicated the years since leaving school to mastering his profession. There was no currency richer than reputation and none so easily devalued. While they might overlook Leon’s youthful indiscretions for the sake of an alliance with the Carraches, no notable family would countenance a wastrel.
One misgiving spawned another. At seventeen, Esther was the same age as Irène when she married. With girls enjoying a degree of latitude inconceivable to previous generations, he had trusted that Leah would serve as a moderating influence. Unsuitable ideas, however, were as harmful as unsuitable attachments. No one could accuse a staunch advocate of girls’ education of trying to silence them. All he asked was that they kept their opinions to themselves. Esther made herself ridiculous by pronouncing on matters far beyond her experience. The condition of the poor in the city might well be deplorable, but how would it be improved by offering them pipe dreams and pamphlets? If she genuinely wished to help, she should join her stepmother’s sewing circle or assist with the weekly pitta distribution: supplying them with bread, rather than half-baked ideas.
As a twenty-four-year-old spinster who affirmed her independence, Leah set a dangerous example to Esther, who, for months, had been cajoling him to send her to train as a teacher in Paris. But what did she know of the realities of such a life: the candlelit reading in garret rooms that would destroy her eyes; the unresponsive pupils, indifferent parents and fractious colleagues that would destroy her morale; the gruelling obligations that would plunder her youth 16until, when she at last came to her senses, any prospective husband would have taken fright?
He had neglected his paternal duty. Finding a match for Esther was an even more pressing task than finding one for Leon. Nevertheless, he must proceed with care. She was wilful and volatile and he dreaded provoking a permanent rift. She had been outraged when her sixteen-year-old cousin Ida married their uncle Salvator, and not just because of Salvator’s overfamiliarity towards his other nieces. The very notion of such a youthful bride offended her. Irène had died giving birth to her and, although she had been ripe for childbearing, Esther blamed her death on the strain of undergoing five pregnancies – three of which miscarried – by the age of twenty-two. He knew that she viewed his remarriage the following year as evidence of his callousness, whereas the truth was that, heartbroken, he had sought a mother for his infant son and daughter, and his parents-in-law had proposed that Mathilde should take her older sister’s place.
They were so alike in looks, voice and disposition that his second marriage seemed almost an extension of the first. Some nights, the scent and touch of Mathilde’s flesh were as redolent of Irène’s as if she had assumed her body as well as her bed. Having feared that their union was a betrayal of both women’s singularity, he had come to see it as a way to keep Irène’s spirit alive. Far from resenting his enduring affection for her sister, Mathilde had suggested that they name their first daughter after her, and when he’d once called out ‘Irène’ while making love, he was able to ascribe it to the baby’s wail, rather than his dead wife’s memory.
Sustained introspection unnerved him, so he headed to the house. He walked round to the portico, narrowly avoiding a lizard soaking up the last ray of sunlight on the steps. With a glance at the now dimmed cornucopia, he touched a finger to the mezuzah, brought it to his lips and entered the hall.
2
LEON
SALONICA, JUNE 1911
The Greek ceremonial arch was no more. According to the Journal de Salonique, it had collapsed during Monday night’s storm. If so, the turbulence must have been localised, since there’d barely been a rustle in the Campania.
Leon stretched, yawned, put down the paper, nudged the breakfast tray along the bed and wiped a crumb of feta from his pillow. The Journal was edited by Sadi Levy, one of his father’s closest friends, so its relentless positivity came as no surprise. The Sultan’s visit was accounted a success. He had received officials, delivered speeches, inspected the troops and distributed 4,500 lira to the poor after Friday prayers. Yet no sooner had his train left Pristina station for the second leg of the imperial tour than tensions between Greeks and Bulgarians within the city had reignited, ending with chunks of lath and plaster strewn along Union Boulevard. But in the judgement of the Journal and to the relief of its readers, who could rest secure in the goodwill of their fellow citizens, the sole culprit was Nature. No doubt in Saturday’s edition, the Journal would attribute the boulders, which had blocked the track as the Sultan’s train steamed northwards, to an avalanche.
Papa accused him of bad faith for failing to honour the Sultan after agitating for his accession. The charge was predictable but 18unjust. How could a man who eschewed politics understand disenchantment? Three years earlier, while still at school, he had been inspired by the vision of universal brotherhood proclaimed by the Committee of Union and Progress. He and his two best friends, Aron Sides and Ettore Defano, had joined the outlawed society. With no concessions made to their youth, they were directed to meet their contacts in Beschinar Gardens at dead of night, where they were blindfolded, bundled into a cart and hidden beneath an oilcloth. After juddering through the streets, they were whisked into a house, in what from the mingled sounds and scents he took to be the Muslim quarter, and led down a flight of slippery steps, which would have been hazardous even with unimpeded vision. Their blindfolds removed, they found themselves in a grim basement, opposite two unsmiling men, with several others lurking in the shadows. When Ettore glanced round, he was ordered to face the front as brusquely as if he were on parade.
Leon’s immediate concern was to stop himself shivering, which, given the muggy room, he could no longer blame on the cold. One of the men read out the Committee’s aims, which, with the Torah in their left hand and a revolver in their right, they each swore to obey. It was hard to credit that, two hours before, he had been lying in bed, albeit fully clothed, and now he was pledging to kill not only proven traitors but anyone whom the Committee decreed, even his father or brother. While more disturbed by the prospect than Ettore, who regularly professed his willingness to shoot his brutal father, he was eager to demonstrate his commitment.
It was put to the test a few weeks later when, with protests sweeping through Macedonia, the three young men were instructed to join the scores of Salonicans marching to Monastir to incite the army to revolt. Flouting Papa’s injunction, Leon crept out of the house in the early hours, taking nothing but his game gun and a small sack of provisions. At the Arch of Galerius, he met up with Aron and Ettore and a motley band of volunteers. They set off in ragged formation, halting only for the Turks’ dawn prayers. Leon, 19who regarded his own scriptures as ancestral history, watched with awe as they bent, knelt and prostrated themselves on the ground.
While better equipped and shod than most of the men (some of whom, he noted with shame, were barefoot), Leon was hungry, thirsty and stiff after the day-long trek. They camped overnight in a meadow and, with no well in sight, filled their water bottles from a brackish river. Leon’s sweat-stained shirt clung to his back and he longed to wash, but he feared the mockery of his less fastidious companions. The Turks recited their evening prayers and the Greeks, not to be outdone, loudly invoked the Virgin Mary. Leon and his friends lay on the bare ground, which was warm and dry, but, with mosquitoes and ants swarming over them, foxes and possibly jackals howling nearby, and men evidently inured to the harsh conditions snoring all around, they struggled to sleep.
Aching and bleary-eyed, Leon was roused by a marshal at daybreak. Word of their mission had spread and, as they tramped through hamlets and villages, priests waited at crossroads to bless them, old women brought them balls of yoghurt, mekitsi, apricots and peaches, and young men toiling in the fields ran out to join them, turning their ploughshares and sickles into swords and spears with biblical fervour. As they approached Vodena, six Albanian bandits drew up on horseback, rifles slung over their shoulders and cartridge belts looped around their waists. To Leon’s amazement, far from confronting them, they came to swell their ranks and, although he took care not to look them in the eyes, he was elated to find his childhood ogres become his comrades.
On the fifth afternoon, when the Monastir clock tower appeared on the horizon, Leon’s fantasy of himself as a latter-day Davy Crockett gave way to fears of what awaited them. They were fewer than two hundred men facing the might of the Ottoman Third Army. What if the soldiers stood by the Sultan to whom they had sworn an oath as sacred as the one he had sworn to the CUP? Would they slaughter the insurgents on the spot or subject them to protracted torture? As he weighed up the horrors, news reached them that, 20shortly before their arrival, both the citizens and the garrison had renounced their allegiance to the Sultan. Nevertheless, they entered the town like conquerors. Girls – including Jewish girls, reputed to be even more modest than their Salonican counterparts – lined the streets to kiss them. Innkeepers offered them food and soldiers offered them billets. But, as the company dispersed, Leon and his friends found more congenial lodgings with Ettore’s uncle, a mill owner who, though as law-abiding as Papa, welcomed the three young men, before seeing them off by train the following day.
Thus ended Leon’s military adventure: the sole adventure of his life to date. Although his wounds amounted to no more than mosquito bites and blisters, and his terror of torture made him feel a fraud, he found himself hailed as a hero by both his schoolfellows and his younger brother and sisters (always excepting Esther, his only full sibling yet his fiercest critic). The adults were less impressed. Papa, who rarely raised a hand to his children, announced his intention to beat him in front of the entire family, relenting only when Leon declared, with strained bravado, that, having defied the Sultan’s bullets, he could withstand his father’s cane. Moreover, subsequent events vindicated his stance, when a weakened Abdul Hamid agreed to restore the suspended constitution, triggering a wave of euphoria across the Empire.
Within a year, however, egged on by traditionalist clerics, the Sultan attempted to reimpose the caliphate, in accordance with strict Islamic law. The CUP launched an effective counterstrike and Abdul Hamid was deposed and exiled, not to a remote island in the South Atlantic but across the Aegean to Salonica. Installed in the Allatini house, he had yet to step outside its gates, even to attend the mosque. It was unclear whether this stemmed from disillusion with Allah, who had allowed his deposition, or fear of an assassin’s blade.
Disillusion was something Leon understood. While stung by Papa’s jibe that he had milk in his moustache, he acknowledged that, at twenty, he lacked experience. The transformation of the CUP after the Sultan’s failed fightback had been a painful lesson. 21The new government passed a series of laws that were as repressive as those of the previous regime: banning unauthorised gatherings; expanding the police’s powers of arrest; tightening censorship and curtailing press freedom. While those around him acquiesced in the measures, Leon felt as betrayed as if he’d discovered that Papa kept a mistress. Why strive for anything when everything remained the same?
Bumps and bangs resounded through the house in preparation for the evening’s festivities. He burrowed down in bed, but the sheets, so cosy an hour earlier, now felt as constricting as a shroud. The day stretched emptily before him, and he half wished he were a tobacco cutter starting his shift at the factory. He knew better than to say so (especially in Esther’s hearing), but there were reasons to envy the poor. They didn’t agonise over the meaning of life; for them it was simply making a living. There was something noble – indeed, pure – about an existence bounded by the bare essentials of food, clothing and shelter.
His, on the other hand, was shaped by his family’s expectations. At first he had endeavoured to meet them. On leaving school, he had spent six months at the factory, observing its operations, only to conclude that it operated better without him. His grandfather, who had lost the ability to speak but not to command, decided that he would be more suited to a position in the bank. That was the domain of Grand-Oncle Lazar and Cousin Nissim, who appointed him cashier of the Marseille branch, a title that belied his inconsequence. Every minor transaction had to be authorised in Salonica, and he did little more than send telegrams and validate documents, with a signature that grew more and more ornate until one day a bill of sale was returned as counterfeit.
After three months he resigned and returned home, waiting for his father to find him a more purposeful role. Esther, who credited him with meagre intelligence but limitless cunning, accused him of making himself unemployable. ‘You’re a hedonist, a sybarite, an epicurean,’ she scoffed. ‘Do you intend to devote yourself entirely to pleasure?’ 22
‘Here’s hoping!’
For months, his aimlessness appeared to warrant Esther’s sneers, but then he met Xenia. ‘Xee-nee-ah.’ He savoured each syllable, sending a rush of blood, like molten lava, through his veins. Who would have thought that a chance visit to an out-of-the-way taverna would change his life? He’d spent the evening with Aron at the Pathé Frères’s new electric theatre, but the programme had lasted less than an hour. Reluctant to head home so early – and inspired by the cinematographic explorers – they ventured into the port area and spotted the weathered Praxidike sign. Descending into a dingy cellar, they were hit by the sweet and spicy fragrance of a row of hookahs and the acrid tang of the all-male clientele. A glance revealed that they’d stumbled on a group of mangas in their distinctive one-sleeved jackets, striped trousers, woollen hats and pointed shoes. Strings of worry beads snaked around their left arms and daggers gleamed in their belts.
Never had Leon been so conscious of his tailored clothes. A hasty retreat might have saved his skin but would have injured his pride. So, with a feigned smile, he led Aron to a side table and ordered drinks from the barman, who was scarcely less hostile than his customers. A rebetiko trio was playing at the far end of the room, and he listened to the plaintive strumming of the bouzouki, the resonant wheeze of the accordion and the rattle of the tambourine. After several minutes, the musicians were joined by a short, dark woman with a slight stoop, in a red tunic and white pantaloons. Her features were hard to make out in the gloom, but her voice was strong and clear, alternately crackling like blazing firewood and caressing like a velvet mitten. Despite his rudimentary Greek, Leon grasped the essence of the song, which told of a village girl fated to give her heart to a man whom she knew would betray her. By the final chord, his own fate had been sealed.
After two more songs, Aron was ready to leave. Eager to untangle his emotions, Leon agreed, only to return on the following three evenings. He sat alone, ignoring the glares from men who would have 23slit his throat without a qualm, and wondered whether that hint of danger formed part of his attraction to the chanteuse. Her set varied little, but judging by the whoops that greeted each opening phrase, the audience welcomed the familiarity. She sang of one mother seeing her son off to war and another vowing to win back the children she’d been forced to surrender; of an innocent man dancing his way to the gallows; and of the joys of hashish. Above all, she sang of love: of first love and true love; of abandoned love and abused love; of foolish love and faithless love. What was more, Leon learnt from the bouzouki player that she had written several of the songs herself. It grieved him to think of the pain she must have endured.
Once or twice in each show, she stepped off the cramped stage and crossed the floor towards the flustered, flattered audience. Having ignored Leon on his first three visits, she singled him out on the fourth, fixing him with a gaze at once amused, provocative and surprisingly vulnerable. She slid behind him, twined a lock of his hair around her finger and tugged it, to the mirth of a group of watchful mangas. Next, she snatched a tambourine and, like a lioness toying with her prey, shook it as she circled him. Unsure whether she were mocking or wooing him, he applauded wildly as she returned to the stage, where she sang three more songs, without so much as a peek in his direction. At the end of her performance, she drank a shot of ouzo and moved back to his table, pulling out a chair as if it were hers by right.
‘Shouldn’t you be in bed, young man?’ she asked pertly.
‘Is that an invitation?’ he replied, seeking to match her tone.
‘So you speak Greek?’
‘Not well enough for everything I’d like to say to you.’
‘And Turkish?’
‘Much better.’
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, in what would become their common tongue. ‘Look at them!’ Her gesture encompassed the room. ‘Their cheeks all swarthy and scarred. While yours are pink,’ she added, turning them red. ‘Your hair’s like silk.’
24‘You grabbed it.’
‘Not a line on your face! Has life left no mark on you?’
He strove to conceal his confusion. ‘I was attacked by a gang of Bulgarians on the way to school.’
‘In other words, no,’ she said, with a smile.
Leon longed to lavish her with compliments, but her beauty wasn’t easy to define. Everything about her – her eyes, her hair, her complexion – was dark. She was sharp-jawed, with heavy brows and a narrow forehead, each of which might have been deemed a defect but combined to give her an extraordinary allure. Hers was the heart-stopping beauty of a storm at sea – the pitch-black waves burnished by bolts of lightning – and it was a sea in which he would have happily drowned. They talked until the early hours. Then, when the taverna closed, to the teasing glances of her fellow musicians and the studied indifference of the mangas, she invited him home.
Leon had never made love outside a brothel and, as Xenia steered him through a warren of streets in the Christian quarter, he trembled at the new responsibility. To both his shame and relief, she mistook his nervousness for innocence and, clasping his wrist, assured him that there was nothing to fear. Reaching the house, she kissed him full on the lips before ushering him up the spindly stairs.
‘It’s snug,’ he said, as she lit a candle, illuminating the sparsely furnished room with its wooden dresser, overflowing trunk and single bed beneath a gaudy icon of the Virgin Mary.
‘You mean boxy,’ she replied. ‘But it’s mine. I’m beholden to no one.’
He trusted she wouldn’t object when he showered her with jewels.
Given that she was several years older and, if her songs were any indication, far more experienced, he expected her to guide his hand, but, to his delight, she deferred to him. He slowly undressed her, struggling with the buttons on her pantaloons and discovering, to his surprise, that she wore no drawers. He was transfixed by her naked body: her breasts as full as a nursing mother’s; her slender waist, wide hips and wispy pubic hair. He realised that the women 25in the brothels had shaved and longed to erase their memory. For the first time in his adult life, his pleasure was shared.
Since that initial encounter, they had rarely spent a day apart. Leon told his family that he was with friends and his friends that he was under a strict curfew. For her part, Xenia was subject to no constraints but Nature: her ‘the Furies have called’ expressing his own sense of exclusion more accurately than Esther’s ‘Eve’s curse’. He became such a familiar figure at the taverna that certain of the mangas acknowledged his greetings even before he bought them drinks. He watched every performance and, although she had barely altered her repertoire in the four months that he’d known her, he marvelled at her ability to keep the sentiments fresh. He no longer felt threatened when she chatted, laughed and even flirted with the customers, since he knew that they would end the evening together. He no longer questioned why so accomplished and desirable a woman should have fallen for him. It was one of life’s mysteries … or, rather, one of its miracles.
‘Will you write a song for me?’ he asked shyly one afternoon, as she worked on a new composition.
‘I already have,’ she said, her voice tightening.
‘What? When? I’ve not heard it.’
‘It’s your favourite: the girl who promises to keep faith with a man she knows will desert her.’
‘But you sang it on my first visit to the Praxidike. You wrote it before we met.’
‘True.’
Desolation swept over him. He ached to assure her of his lifelong devotion, but generations of Carraches contrived to stop his mouth. Instead, he took her in his arms, pressing her to his chest, so as not to dampen her cheeks.
The memory of his tears revived them, and he hastily wiped his eyes as Ruben burst into his room and flung himself down on a chair.
‘Why are you still in bed? It’s gone ten thirty.’
26‘Why aren’t you at school?’ Leon asked, struggling to regain his composure.
‘I’m excused. Rabbi Pardon-Me is coming to run through the prayers for tonight.’
‘Don’t you know them yet?’
‘Of course. The Shema and the Kaddish Shalem. I can recite them now if you like.’
‘And ruin the surprise? No thanks.’
Ruben jumped off the chair and prowled around the room, rummaging through Leon’s cufflink drawer and sniffing a bottle of cologne with an exaggerated grimace.
‘Can I help you with something?’ Leon asked.
‘Yes, actually. Now that I’m becoming a man, will you let me live down here with you? It’s not fair to leave me alone with those three girls.’
‘I doubt that Papa would agree. He thinks I’m a bad influence.’
‘Then I can reform you. I know you sneak home at four … five … six o’clock in the morning. Everyone wonders where you’ve been.’
‘Let them!’ Leon said. ‘I don’t want to dishearten you, but in my experience the manhood is strictly symbolic. Not much more than the right to lay tefillin. Though tonight, it will be Papa and Grand-Oncle Lazar who do it for you. Then tomorrow, we’ll escort you to the synagogue to read your Torah portion and make your speech. I trust you’re well prepared.’
‘As much as I’ll ever be. It’s about how the sacrifice of Isaac was the first tefillin ceremony.’
‘Was he thirteen? I don’t remember that.’
‘No one knows exactly. But, like you said, it’s symbolic. He was just as dutiful as Abraham. He asked one question about the lamb for the burnt offering. Then, when he found out it was him, he didn’t plead or argue or try to escape. He accepted the cords that his father laid on him. Which, as I say at the end, is an example to us all. I can already hear the purrs of approval.’
‘So young yet so cynical!’
27‘Along with the clink of the gold and silver when I walk through the congregation, holding out my bag.’
‘I hate to disillusion you, but you don’t get to keep it. You have to present it to Rabbi Pardo.’
‘I know that,’ Ruben said, with a grin.
Like every boy who performed the rite, he had no doubt been told of some sleight of hand with which to dupe the rabbi. Leon himself had made a false lining for his bag, but, at the last minute, his nerve had failed and he handed it over intact. He had never heard of anyone, however brazen, who’d managed to secure a single coin.
‘When did you last open these?’ Ruben asked, blowing non-existent dust off one of the gold tefillin cases their grandfather had given Leon.
‘I’m a bad Jew.’
‘So’s Papa. So’s everyone we know. Rabbi Pardon-Me says laying tefillin is an obligation.’
‘There are other obligations: prayer; studying Torah (don’t say anything!); charity. You can’t fault Papa or anyone in the family on that score.’
‘But do you believe in God?’
Leon groaned. ‘It’s too early in the morning.’
‘I’m not sure that I do … believe in God, I mean. What kind of God would order Abraham to kill his son?’
‘It was a test. He saved him.’
‘It was still cruel. Just like rescuing the Jews from Egypt and leaving them to wander in the wilderness for forty years.’
‘That’s ancient history.’
‘What about letting us settle in Spain and doing nothing when we were driven into exile? That wasn’t so long ago – at least not to hear people speak. How can I believe in a God who allowed that?’
‘You’d do better to ask Rabbi Pardo,’ Leon said, both moved and disconcerted by Ruben’s newfound earnestness.
‘I’m asking you! Nothing makes any sense. All the women in 28our family are far more devout than the men, yet it’s the men who go to the synagogue.’
‘But that’s not only about God; it’s about tradition and community. It’s about worshipping where our forefathers have done for the past 250 years. To honour that, I can spare an hour every Sabbath.’
‘Not every Sabbath! And an hour is as much as it is. You and Papa join in the prayers and leave before the rabbi’s sermon.’
‘It’s a neat compromise.’
‘Why must everything be a compromise? Why can nothing be pure?’ He picked up Leon’s two ivory hairbrushes, banging them together in anguish.
‘Take care! There’ll be pure hell to pay if you break them,’ Leon said, attempting to lighten the atmosphere.
A knock at the door made him start. ‘Come in! What is it?’ he asked, slipping into Ladino as Rachel, the new maid, hovered at the threshold.
‘Have you finished with your breakfast tray, Señor Leon?’ she asked. ‘Only Maryam says— Oh!’ she stuttered on spotting Ruben.
‘Have you met my brother?’ Leon said, winking at him.
‘Yes, yes, of course. But only upstairs. I wasn’t expecting … I’ll come back.’
‘There’s nothing to be scared of. Come in!’ She edged into the room. ‘Yes, you can take away the tray. Then please come back and draw me a bath.’
‘In the bathroom?’
Ruben snickered.
‘No, the kitchen,’ Leon said, gritting his teeth. ‘Yes, of course.’
She picked up the tray as if it were a bedpan. ‘What’s that?’ she screamed, dropping it and spilling coffee and sugar on the coverlet.
‘What’s what?’
‘That thing … that yellow, crawly thing!’ She retreated to the door.
‘It’s just a centipede. It must have come in through the French windows.’
29Ruben ran up and stamped on it. ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ he shouted, digging his shoe into the remains.
‘Oh, I feel … I’ll fetch Maryam.’
‘She’s even worse than the others,’ Leon said, as she fled the room. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if Maman gets them straight from the asylum.’
‘You’d think she’d find someone who spoke basic French.’
‘Then she wouldn’t be a maid.’
With language divisions among Jews as marked as religious divisions in the wider city, the Carraches spoke French among themselves and their peers and Ladino to servants and subordinates.
‘Still, she’s quite pretty.’
‘She can’t be more than ten or eleven,’ Leon said, scenting danger.
‘She doesn’t know how old she is. I asked. And Esther says she’s small because she’s never had enough food or sunlight.’
‘Rubbish! That’s Esther all over. The other day she said that the children in Vardar were left to play in the streets because their homes were so poky. In which case, they’d get more sunlight than us. She can’t have it both ways.’
‘That’s never stopped her trying.’ They exchanged a smile. ‘Besides, I heard Maryam telling Maman that they’d have to watch out because Rachel was an early bloomer.’
‘Well, that’s not your problem,’ Leon said pointedly.
‘Isn’t it? You’d think – that is if you think it through – that becoming a man means you’re ready to have a woman.’
Leon saw where the conversation was headed and longed for the refuge of his bath.
‘How old were you when you first made love?’ Ruben asked.
‘Nineteen.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Then why ask?’
‘If I were hungry, you’d give me something to eat, wouldn’t you?’
‘Looks like I’ll have to draw my own bath. You seem to have scared the girl away.’
30‘Well, I am hungry. Just not in my gut.’
‘Take it from me. Feeding that sort of hunger only makes it worse. If you’re desperate, you can always whip up your own snacks.’ He jerked his hand up and down.
‘You’re disgusting!’
‘All the more reason to keep out of my way. Rabbi Pardo will be here soon. Now scram, or I’ll be late for Aron! We’re playing billiards this afternoon, but I’ll be back in good time for your party.’
Leon bustled him out and entered the bathroom. For all his flippancy, he felt for Ruben as he recalled his own tefillin ceremony. The rite of passage, just when his body had begun to assert itself, might have been expressly designed to mock his inability to satisfy it. Until he met Xenia, the ordinary run of women had been as mysterious to him as an order of nuns. He knew more about Catherine de Medici and Marie Antoinette than about his friends’ sisters or his sisters’ friends. Papa maintained that his generation enjoyed unprecedented freedom. In the face of fierce opposition, the Lycée and the Alliance had instituted a joint programme of social events for alumni. In the clubhouse on Parallel Street, young men and women waltzed to the strains of Strauss and Offenbach, chaperoned only by their consciences. But even with his partners pressed tightly to his chest, Leon felt as though he were dancing with dolls. Xenia had changed that. After their first intoxicating intimacies, he had set out to discover every detail of her life. He was jealous of her entire past (not merely the men), entreating as exhaustive an account as if she’d kept a diary from birth. She insisted that anything of consequence was in her songs, adding only that she was the eldest child of a fisherman who drowned when she was ten, after which her destitute mother turned her out to fend for herself. For once, Leon was glad that his mother had died young, bequeathing him a comparable tragedy.
On their three-month anniversary, he bought Xenia a sapphire ring. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said, covering his face with kisses, each one of which was more precious to him than the jewel. ‘Such extravagance will come between us.’
31‘Nothing will ever come between us.’
‘Oh my love,’ she replied, so sadly that he wept.
He soaked in the bath, but the warmth brought little solace. He wondered if it would be simpler … wiser … fairer to them both to end the relationship. He could ask Papa to find him a bride: exchanging passion for domesticity; parcelling out his love between a wife and children. In time, he would take his place as director of the company, elder of the synagogue, member of the Community Council, stalwart of the Club des Intimes. He pictured a life of consummate respectability, uncertain whether he was looking to embrace it or to escape. Was Papa happy? In his private moments, did he pick up a favourite volume of Casanova’s Memoirs and lament lost opportunities, or was his leather-bound library just for show?
Washed, shaved and dressed, he left to meet Aron at the Café Colombo. Friends from boyhood, they had caught their first fish, hunted their first woodcock and smoked their first cigarette together. Along with Ettore, they’d formed an inseparable trio, whom Aron’s mother dubbed The Three Musketeers. The departure of their Aramis for Rome, closely followed by Leon’s encounter with Xenia, put an end to their youthful antics. He’d initially hidden the affair from Aron, afraid to cheapen it by equating Xenia with the women they’d known – and, on one occasion, shared – in the past. He’d finally relented, rhapsodising over her beauty, charm and talent, but he’d still not fulfilled his promise to introduce them. He valued Aron’s judgement, and the thought that he might not approve of her dismayed him.
After a quick lunch, they headed to the Association for their game.
‘Come on, Carrache, concentrate!’ Aron said, after he missed a second straight shot.
‘Apologies! I don’t know why, but I’m worn out.’
‘Really?’ Aron replied, with a ribald laugh. ‘Still, you know where to send for reinforcements.’
32
