Surrender: The Greek Affair Series Book One (2 page)

She had no idea how often she would be on the island, or for how long at any given time. But she wanted this so much, that she just had to have it. So she created two homes - one on the island and one in Athens, (two of her favourite places in the world) and yet the sensible Hope knew she would one day in the near future return to Melbourne, where life was comfortable, sensible and easy.

But if truth be known, Hope had never liked “easy”. She had never had “easy”, and so she had no concept of how it would be.

She signed the contract. She went back to Athens and gathered what she needed to furnish the spacious, one bedroom flat. It looked out to the sea where the water was deep, (created by earthquakes that had moved the seashore) and was a playground for dolphins. The beach was in front of the small flat and was ideal for the beautiful mammals.

A narrow asphalt road separated the sea from the homes on the sea front. The road had no cars, except for local residents and others with special permission. She found out in all the subsequent summers she spent on the island that no one swam there, because it became too deep, too quickly and was very unlike Greek beaches in general. But the view was spectacular, and in the distance one could see the Holy mountain of Athos, where in the summer, the golden and orange sun would set behind it. And in the winter, the sun would dip into the blue and purple horizon of the sea and the sky beside the mountain.

Hope had left the island when she was a child; she only had memories of the immediate home she had grown up in, during those initial stages of her life. It had been a time in her life in which she had remembered every detail, as if it had happened yesterday.

She remembered the sea of red poppies from a bus window. Later in life, when she had been painting, she would create a whole body of work around those poppies, as they were carved into her brain cells. It was as if someone had taken a carving knife and dug the pictures in a vision that she was sure to take to her grave.

The last of the family left the island, went to Athens and then to Australia, and even though she had been a small child, she remembered almost everything that was important. At the age of three her mother had handed her over to her father and she therefore went to live with her paternal grandmother, and Hope would see her father whenever he was in from a voyage. It would become a pattern of her life, up until she was a young adult.

Between aunties, her grandmother and her stepmothers, changing countries, changing homes and many schools, not to mention cultures and languages, she had experienced many challenges

Hope had learned very early in life to adapt, and not to get too attached, because she had worked out that nothing was forever. No one had been there when she needed them most. She learned to be emotionally self-sufficient. She created the skills to protect herself from abandonment. And she did it well.

Hope had fallen hopelessly in love with Greece in a very unrealistic, and somewhat passionate way. It was almost erotic, but she felt that this love had not been reciprocated. Yet, she also understood that love (or more actually, “Eros”), had no security. Nor did it ever offer her stability!

She had learned to cope with instability very early in life. After all, one can’t help one’s love interests. It does not matter how sensible or right something is, one can just love. Eros is the only condition in which it is sufficient to give, without thinking that you have to get back in return. Love is love, no matter how it comes, in whatever shape or size or age. And this island was old and yet young, and mysterious to love and lust after.

Hope had married young, without love, as she had not understood that love was a prerequisite to a marriage. She had believed in her youthful naivety, that this was going to give her the family she had always craved for.

But to have stability in any relationship there has to be an understanding on both sides that marriage is a partnership, a concept she had had no role model for. The man she had married was still growing up, even though he was substantially older than she had been, and it was doubtful if he would ever mature. After all, he was already in his thirties, when she had only been eighteen. Hope had unrealistic, high expectations from her marriage; a fairytale “live happily ever after” story was what she was after at that time, but had no idea how that could even be achieved. She had no emotional and intellectual tools to accomplish this, nor did she understand how to manipulate life to her advantage.

When she had come to live in Athens, she carried around with her the fallacy that the city was going to change her life. But, what she had not realised at that time, was that wherever she went, she took her damaged self with her.

Hope did not know how to let go of her damaged soul, and to tap into a part of herself that was not traumatised. She could not find that healthy part of her soul, nor her heart. There was always a weight sitting on her chest, the size of a train wreck. She hoped that the island would lighten this weight some, and at times it did, but her heart and soul had been much too brutalised to heal.

Being this damaged made it difficult for her to have friends, even though she always yearned for friendships. Sex would heal the pain temporarily. That was easy to find. But she thought that she wanted more.

She became bored with just sex, even though she craved for it, but she had yet to sleep with a man that moved her to a seismic level. Nearly every Greek summer, no matter where she went, there had been a holiday affair with a man who had been younger than her, as they were the men who had always approached her. She was comfortable with that as she found it easy to escape the young men, come the end of summer. It would be forgotten instantaneously. She had learned to substitute sex for love. They had never even vaguely come together.

She knew how to give her body, but it was always without giving any other part of herself. She would become aware of that defect in her character very soon, via the island.

And the summer would come and that was her ambrosia.

***

She came to the island to forget the world, and to escape her real life. She kept most of the summer to herself. She recharged her emotional and physical batteries, so she could go back to Athens and withstand the corrosive phone calls from her ex-husband, who believed he still had a right to her life, even though he had remarried.

And at one stage, an Athenian man came into her life (whom she had not loved but hung on to), and yet another dysfunctional relationship occurred. It was all she understood; it had become a habit for both of them to be part-time lovers, as they were only together part-time, just during the winter months. In a twisted way, it was all she wanted at the time, even though it was not what she actually needed.

When she arrived on the Island early that summer, she forgot everything and everyone, even her young adult son, who usually spent his time with his father in Melbourne for part of the summer, and would go to a white island the rest of the time till school started again.

This was her island though. Her sanctuary. Her personal paradise! She was alone and happy to be here. She did not have much to do with the locals, except for one or two people. She saw other holidaymakers who had come from other parts of Greece and they became summer friends. And again throughout the following summers. One did not find out much about one’s summer friends, which created a strange kind of anonymity, in which they were all complicit in maintaining. Perhaps this was what summer love was all about too.

She walked to the beach everyday, hit the sand face down and allowed the sun to sooth her soul; to take away the stress and pain she felt in her shoulders and neck, and some of the weight off her heart and soul.

Hope felt warm inside, not only outside, and she allowed the sun and the azure sea to take her on a journey of calmness and serenity, that she could only find on this beach. On this island.

She never hired a beach chair, but would lay her towel down on the hot sand and mould herself into it, making her body part of the beach; allowing its heat to embrace her and warm her soul. The beach would sooth her, and take away the stress and pain. The café on the beach would play melancholy Greek music, creating a welcoming ambience which was so quintessentially Greek, she would stay there all day sometimes, for as much as six to seven hours.

Many of the Greek islands had succumbed to the tourist trade with very loud non-Greek music at the beach bars, and that was not a way to relax and clear one’s head, she thought. With beach chairs placed at such close proximity to one another, you felt like you were in a canned sardine situation, and apart from the buildings and the sea, all the Greek had gone out of those islands.

This Island was not one of those.

In the evening, she would go to the port and eat a seafood meal and end up in a small bar, two doors from her home, for a drink and then home, early by Greek standards.

Hope did not need anything else for almost three months and preferred not to be interrupted at anytime for anything.

She read a lot, took many photographs, did some preliminary drawings, put ideas together for future work, and thought a lot, but tried not to think about the things that had messed up her life. Unbeknown to her, it was she who had allowed these things to happen. There was the odd affair, but she never allowed it to get in the way of her solitude, as she knew it had only ever been about sex.

While on the island, no one bothered her; the men in her life left her alone and the only man she cared about was her son.

Hope’s son was her lifeline when she wanted to face reality, as he was worth every sacrifice she had ever made. But she also felt guilty that she had not made enough sacrifices. Because she had not received any precedent to motherhood, she did not know what a mother was supposed to do, apart from feeding and dressing and making sure the child was out of physical danger. It was hard for her to comprehend the source of the emotional danger.

Chapter Two

Jason was one of many young men doing national service on the island. He was from an island on the west coast of Greece, on the Italian side, where the word for
yiayiά
(grandmother) was
nόna
but the sea was just as blue, the sun shined just as much, and it had the mandatory fortress. Only the summer tourism was more acute and the island was very green. Added to this, the local Greek language had a melodic sound. He found this Aegean island he was on, now starkly different to his island of birth, where he had spent most of his life growing up with his grandparents, who were his mother’s parents.

Jason was happy he was stationed on an island, instead of somewhere on the mainland in some desolate outpost on the border with Turkey or Greece’s northern neighbours. As he was an islander himself, he had the island and the sea in his genes. But doing national service was not the way he would have liked to have been here on this mystical island. He found that the sea was glorious, the people were friendly, and he had made friends in the force. Here he had been given a ranking because of his education and age. He was older then the average national service recruit, (the majority being just out of high school). He had finished university with post-graduate studies. His skills in marshal arts and his education had helped to land him a place in the army that was not mundane. Quite often, life as a national service man can be boring and tedious.

Jason had access to a jeep. He was stationed at headquarters and slept in less crowded conditions. He was able to interact with others who were in the army as a career choice. One of these was Aphrodite, a beautiful woman. He liked women. Not girls. He never questioned that about himself. Jason considered it very natural. Aphrodite was not only a work colleague, but he also spent private (and sometimes even intimate times) with her. He did not question the relationship with her. It was what it was: simple, uncomplicated and most would consider it, a “friends with benefits” affair.

Even though he had a desk job, his duties were many and varied and included a lot of driving on his own, sometimes with other officers in the jeep. It was during his driving from point A to point B on his own that Jason set his eyes on a petite woman with curly hair, sporting a frown.

Hope was sitting on a bench by the sea one late afternoon, just before the sunset began and from what he could gauge, she was drawing on a sketchpad. He stopped the jeep and sat there by the roadside looking at her. He had no idea why he had to look at this woman. What was it about her that made him stop? He sat in the jeep and watched. He watched and watched, and was thinking about how he could approach her, but most of all he wondered why he wanted to approach her, and why he wanted to get to know her in the first place. She had an undefined age; she could be 30 or even 40 and she was mesmerising!

Even though she was sitting and had her legs crossed so she could balance her sketchpad on her knee, Jason could see that she was petite. She had a head of short soft curls, (an auburn colour), and she had a soft tan. He was sure that her real skin colour would be fair, as the tan was a light caramel, in the way fair skins tan. She had great legs he could see, because she wore a short skirt. But what Jason found tugging at his manhood was the way she blew on the curl flopping over her face, and every now and then, she would sweep it back with her hand while she concentrated hard, with an intensity on her forehead, as if she were solving the world’s problems. He realised after a moment or two from looking at her, that the blood from his head was slowly moving downwards to his groin. He pulled out a yellow box of Karelia’s cigarettes with the flip top lid, flipped it and put a cigarette in his mouth. He mumbled to himself while lighting the cigarette.