The Island (21 page)

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Authors: Victoria Hislop

BOOK: The Island
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The
panegyria
, saints’ days, were still celebrated. Icons would be taken from their safe places and carried in procession by the priests, the town band following them with an almost unholy cacophony of brass and drums. Lavish feasting and the sound of fireworks may have been missing, but when the relics had been safely returned to the church, people still danced wildly and sang their haunting songs with even more passion than in times of peace. Fury and frustration at the continuing occupation would be washed away with the best wines, but as dawn broke and sobriety returned, everything was as it had been before. It was then that those whose faith was less than rock solid began to question why God had not answered their prayers.
 
The Germans were no doubt bemused by these displays of the sacred and the curiously profane but knew better than to ban them. They did, however, do what they could to interfere, demanding to question the priest just as he was about to begin a service or to search houses as the dancing got into full swing.
 
On Spinalonga, candles were lit daily for those suffering on the mainland. The islanders were well aware that the Cretans were living in fear of German cruelty, and prayed for a swift end to the occupation.
 
Dr Lapakis, who believed in the power of medicine rather than divine intervention, began to grow disillusioned. He knew that research and testing had been more or less abandoned. He had sent letters to Kyritsis in Iraklion, but since they had gone unanswered for many months, he came to the conclusion that his colleague must be dealing with more pressing issues and resigned himself to a long wait before he saw him again. Lapakis increased the number of visits he made to Spinalonga from three to six days a week. Some of the lepers needed constant attention, and Athina Manakis could not cope alone. One such patient was Eleni.
 
Giorgis would never forget the day he came to the island and saw, instead of the slender silhouette of his wife, the squatter figure of Elpida, her friend. His heartbeat had quickened. What had happened to Eleni? It was the first time she had not been there to greet him. Elpida spoke first.
 
‘Don’t worry, Giorgis,’ she said, trying to inject reassurance into her voice. ‘Eleni is fine.’
 
‘Where is she then?’ There was an unmistakable note of panic in his tone.
 
‘She has to spend a few days in the hospital. Dr Lapakis is keeping her under observation for a while until her throat improves.’
 
‘And
will
it improve?’ he asked.
 
‘I hope so,’ said Elpida. ‘I’m sure the doctors are doing everything they can.’
 
Her statement was noncommittal. Elpida knew no more about the chances of Eleni’s survival than Giorgis himself.
 
Giorgis left the packages he was delivering and quickly returned to Plaka. It was a Saturday, and Maria noticed that her father was back much earlier than usual.
 
‘That was a short visit,’ she said. ‘How is Mother? Did you bring a letter?’
 
‘I’m afraid there’s no letter,’ he replied. ‘She hasn’t had time to write this week.’
 
This much was entirely true, but he left the house quickly before Maria could ask any more questions.
 
‘I’ll be back by four,’ he said. ‘I need to go and mend my nets.’
 
Maria could tell something was wrong, and the feeling lingered with her all day.
 
For the next four months Eleni lay in the hospital, too ill to struggle through the tunnel to meet Giorgis. Each day when he brought Lapakis to Spinalonga he looked in vain, expecting her to be waiting under the pine trees for him. Every evening Lapakis would report to him, at first with a diluted version of the truth.
 
‘Her body is still fighting the disease,’ he would say, or ‘I think her temperature has gone down slightly today.’
 
But the doctor soon realised that he was building false hopes, and that the more these were reinforced the harder it would be when the final days came, as he knew, in the pit of his stomach, they would. It was not as though he was lying when he said that Eleni’s body was fighting. It was engaged in a raging battle, with every tissue fighting the bacteria that struggled to dominate. Lepra fever had two possible outcomes: deterioration or improvement. The lesions on Eleni’s legs, back, neck and face had now multiplied, and she lay racked with pain, finding no comfort whichever way she turned. Her body was a mass of ulcers which Lapakis did everything he could to treat, holding on to the basic principle that if they were kept clean and disinfected he might be able to minimise the virulently multiplying bacteria.
 
It was during this phase that Elpida took Dimitri to see Eleni. He was now living at the Kontomaris house, an arrangement they had all hoped would be temporary but that was now looking as though it might be permanent.
 
‘Hello, Dimitri,’ Eleni said weakly. Then, turning her head towards Elpida, she managed just two more words: ‘Thank you.’
 
Her voice was very quiet but Elpida knew what her words had acknowledged: that the thirteen-year-old boy was now in her capable hands. This at least might give her some peace of mind.
 
Eleni had been moved into a small room where she could be alone, away from the stares of the other patients and neither disturbed by them nor a disturbance to them in the dead of night, when the agony worsened and her sheets became saturated with fever and her groans continuous. Athina Manakis tended to her in those dark hours, spooning watery soup between her lips and sponging down her fiery brow. The quantities of soup were ever-diminishing, however, and one night she ceased to be able to swallow at all. Not even water could slip down her throat.
 
It was when Lapakis found his patient gasping for breath the next morning and incapable of replying to any of his usual questions that he realised Eleni had entered a new and perhaps final stage.
 
‘Kyria Petrakis, I need to look at your throat,’ he said gently. With the new sores around her lips, he knew that even getting her to open her mouth wide enough to look inside would be uncomfortable. The examination only confirmed his fears. He glanced up at Dr Manakis, who was standing on the other side of the bed.
 
‘We’ll be back in one moment,’ he said, taking Eleni’s hand as he spoke.
 
The two doctors left the room, closing the door quietly behind them. Dr Lapakis spoke quietly and hurriedly.
 
‘There are at least half a dozen lesions in her throat and the epiglottis is inflamed. I can’t even see the back of the pharynx for swelling. We need to keep her comfortable - I don’t think she has long.’
 
He returned to the room, sat down beside Eleni and took her hand. Her breathlessness seemed to have worsened in the moments they had been away. It was the point he had reached before with so many patients, when he knew that there was nothing more he could do for them, except keep them company for the last hours. The hospital’s elevated position gave it the best views of anywhere in Spinalonga, and as he sat by Eleni’s bedside, listening to her increasingly laboured breathing, he gazed through the huge window which looked out across the water to Plaka. He thought of Giorgis, who would be setting off towards Spinalonga later that day to race with the white horses across the sea.
 
Eleni’s breathing now came in short gasps, and her eyes were wide open, brimming with tears and full of fear. He could see there would be no peace at the end of this life and gripped her hands in both of his as if to try and reassure her. It may have been for two, maybe even three hours that he sat like this before the end finally came. Eleni’s last breath was a futile struggle for another which failed to arrive.
 
The best any doctor could tell a bereaved family was that their loved one had died peacefully. It was an untruth Lapakis had told before and would willingly tell again. He hurried out of the hospital. He wanted to be waiting at the quayside when Giorgis arrived.
 
Some way off shore, the boat lurched up and down in the high, early spring waves. Giorgis was puzzled that Dr Lapakis was already waiting. It was unusual for his passenger to be there first, but there was also something in his manner that made Giorgis nervous.
 
‘Can we stay here a moment?’ Lapakis asked him, conscious that he must break the news here and now and give Giorgis time to compose himself before they were back in Plaka and he had to confront his daughters. He held out his hand to Giorgis to help him off the boat, then folded his arms and stared at the ground, nervously moving a stone about with the tip of his right shoe.
 
Giorgis knew even before the doctor spoke that his hopes were about to be destroyed.
 
They sat down on the low stone wall that had been built around the pine trees and both men looked out across the sea.
 
‘She’s dead,’ Giorgis said quietly. It was not just the lines of distress left on Lapakis’s face by a gruelling day that had given the news away. A man can simply feel it in the air when his wife is no longer there.
 
‘I am so, so sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘There was nothing we could do in the end. She died peacefully.’
 
He had his arm around Giorgis’s shoulder, and the older man, head in hands, now shed such heavy and copious tears that they splashed his dirty shoes and darkened the dust around his feet. They sat like this for more than an hour, and it was nearly seven o’clock, the sky almost dark and the air now crisp and cold, when the tears no longer coursed down his face. He was as dry as a wrung cloth and had reached the moment of grieving when exhaustion and a strange sense of relief descend as those first intense tidal waves of grief pass.
 
‘The girls will be wondering where I am,’ he said. ‘We must get back.’
 
As they bumped up and down across the water in near darkness towards the lights of Plaka, Giorgis confessed to Lapakis that he had kept the seriousness of Eleni’s condition from his daughters.
 
‘You were right to do that,’ Lapakis said comfortingly. ‘Only a month ago I still believed she could win the fight. It’s never wrong to have hope.’
 
It was much later than usual when Giorgis arrived home, and the girls had been growing anxious about him. The moment he walked in the door they knew something was terribly wrong.
 
‘It’s our mother, isn’t it?’ demanded Anna. ‘Something has happened to her!’
 
Giorgis’s face crumpled. He gripped the back of a chair, his features contorted. Maria stepped forward and put her arms round him.
 
‘Sit down, Father,’ she said. ‘Tell us what’s happened . . . please.’
 
Giorgis sat at the table trying to compose himself. A few minutes elapsed before he could speak.
 
‘Your mother . . . is dead.’ He almost choked on the words.
 
‘Dead!’ shrieked Anna. ‘But we didn’t know she was going to
die
!’
 
Anna had never accepted that her mother’s illness could have only one real, inevitable conclusion. Giorgis’s decision to keep the news of her deterioration from them meant that this came as a huge shock to them both. It was as though their mother had died twice and the distress they had felt nearly five years before had to be experienced all over again. Older, but little wiser than she had been as a twelve-year-old, Anna’s first reaction was one of anger that their father had not given them any warning and that this cataclysmic event had come out of the blue.
 
For half a decade, the photograph of Giorgis and Eleni which hung on the wall by the fireplace had provided the image of their mother which Anna and Maria carried around in their heads. Their only memories of her were general ones, of maternal kindness and the aura of happy routine. They had long since forgotten the reality of Eleni and had only this idealised picture of her in traditional dress, a long, richly draped skirt, a narrow apron and a splendid
saltamarka
, an embroidered blouse with sleeves slit to the elbows. With her smiling face and long dark hair, braided and wound round her head, she was the archetype of Cretan beauty, captured for ever in the moment when the camera’s shutters had snapped. The finality of their mother’s death was hard to grasp. They had always cherished the hope that she would return, and as talk of a cure had increased, their hopes had risen. And now this.
 
Anna’s sobs from the upstairs room were audible down the street and as far as the village square. Maria’s tears did not come so easily. She looked at her father and saw a man physically diminished by grief. Eleni’s death not only represented an end to his hopes and expectations, but the end of a friendship. His life had been turned upside down when she was exiled, but now it was changed beyond repair.
 
‘She died peacefully,’ he told Maria that night, as the two of them ate supper. A place had been laid for Anna but she could not be coaxed down the stairs, let alone to eat.

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