The Island (44 page)
Authors: Victoria Hislop
Kyritsis, listening intently to Maria, resolved to keep his feelings under control. To do otherwise would be wrong, a transgression of his position.
‘We’ve had some very encouraging results from the drug testing,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Some of the patients are really showing an improvement.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Dimitri Limonias is one of them, and I was talking to him yesterday. He says he can already feel a change.’
‘Much of that could be psychological,’ said Kyritsis. ‘Being put on any kind of treatment tends to give patients a huge boost. Dr Lapakis is compiling a list of people from whom we will select the next group. Ultimately, we hope almost everyone on Spinalonga will be given the new drugs.’
He wanted to say that he hoped she would be on that list. He wanted to say that all his years of research and testing would be worthwhile if she was saved. He wanted to say that he loved her. None of those words came.
Much as he would have loved to linger in Maria’s pretty home, he had to leave. It was hard to face yet another seven days before seeing her again, but he would not tolerate bad time-keeping in himself or others and knew that they would be waiting for him up at the hospital. Wednesdays were like a shaft of sunlight in the darkness of a strenuous, overworked week for Dr Lapakis and Dr Manakis, and this made Kyritsis’s assiduous punctuality even more important. The extra workload that had been created for these two doctors in administering the drug therapy was taking them over the edge of endurance. Not only did they have to treat the patients who were in lepra reaction, but they also now had people who were suffering from the side-effects of the drugs. On many nights now, Lapakis was not leaving the island until ten o’clock, sometimes returning again at seven in the morning. Soon Kyritsis would have to consider increasing the frequency of his visits to Spinalonga to twice or even three times a week.
Within a couple of weeks, Dr Lapakis had shortlisted his next group of candidates for treatment. Maria was one of them. One Wednesday in mid-March, when the wild flowers were beginning to spread across the slopes on the north side of Spinalonga and the tight buds on the almond trees were bursting into blossom, Kyritsis went to find Maria in her house. It was six o’clock and she was surprised to hear a knock on the door at that time. She was even more amazed to see the doctor standing there, when she knew he was usually hurrying to meet her father in order to begin his long journey back to Iraklion.
‘Dr Kyritsis. Come in . . . What can I get for you?’
The evening light glowed burnt amber through the gauze curtains. It was as though the village outside was going up in flames, and for all Kyritsis cared at this moment, this could have been the case. To Maria’s surprise, he took both her hands.
‘You’re going to start treatment next week,’ he said, looking directly into her eyes and, with absolute certainly, he added, ‘one day you’re going to leave this island.’
There were so many words he had rehearsed, but when the moment came he declared his love with a soundless gesture. For Maria, the cool fingers that grasped hers and lightly pressed them were more intimate, more articulate, than any arrangement of words about love. The life-giving sensation of flesh on flesh almost overwhelmed her.
In all those hours of discussion when she and Kyritsis had sat together talking of abstract things, she had been aware that even in the chinks where silence crept in she felt complete and content. It was just like the feeling she got when she found a lost key or a purse. After the frantic search and then the discovery, there was a sense of peace and wholeness. That was what being with Dr Kyritsis was like.
She could not help comparing him with Manoli, whose flamboyant talk and flirtatious behaviour flowed out of him unchecked, like water from a burst pipe. On their very first meeting at the Vandoulakis home, he had grabbed her by the hands and kissed them as though he was passionately in love. Yes, that was just it: she knew with absolute certainty that Manoli had not been passionately in love with her, but with the
idea
of being passionately in love. And here was Kyritsis, who gave every indication of not recognising his own feelings. He had been much too busy and preoccupied with his work even to acknowledge the signs or the symptoms.
idea
of being passionately in love. And here was Kyritsis, who gave every indication of not recognising his own feelings. He had been much too busy and preoccupied with his work even to acknowledge the signs or the symptoms.
Maria looked up. Their eyes and hands were now locked together. His was a look that overflowed with kindness and compassion. Neither of them knew how long they stood like this, though it was enough time for one era of their lives to end and another to begin.
‘I will see you next week,’ Kyritsis said finally. ‘By then I hope Dr Lapakis will have given you a date for starting treatment. Goodbye, Maria.’
As he left her house, Maria watched Kyritsis’s slight frame until it disappeared round the corner and out of sight. She felt she had known him for ever. It was in fact more than half her life ago that she had first set eyes on him, when he came to visit Spinalonga in the days before the German occupation. Though he had made little impression then, she now found it hard to remember what it had felt like
not
to love him. What had lived in that great space that Kyritsis now occupied?
not
to love him. What had lived in that great space that Kyritsis now occupied?
Though no recognisable words of love had been spoken between Maria and the doctor, there was still plenty to tell Fotini. When she arrived the following Monday, it was patently obvious to her that something had happened to her oldest friend. Theirs was a friendship that could pick up a subtle sign of mood change; the merest hint of unhappiness or ill-health was always betrayed in hair that seemed dull, skin that was sallow or eyes that lacked their usual sparkle. Women noticed these things in each other, just as they noticed a gleam in the eye or a lingering smile. Today Maria was radiant.
‘You look as though you have been cured,’ Fotini joked, putting her bag down on the table. ‘Come on, tell me. What’s happened?’
‘Dr Kyritsis—’ Maria began.
‘As if I couldn’t have guessed,’ teased Fotini. ‘Go on . . .’
‘I don’t know what to tell you, really. He didn’t even say anything.’
‘But did he
do
anything?’ urged Fotini, with the fervour of a friend eager for detail.
do
anything?’ urged Fotini, with the fervour of a friend eager for detail.
‘He held my hands, that’s all, but it meant something. I’m sure of it.’
Maria was conscious that hand-holding might sound insignificant to someone who was still part of the great outside world, but even on mainland Crete a certain formality between men and women was still the norm for unmarried people.
‘He said that I would be starting treatment soon and that I might one day leave this island . . . and he said it as though he cared.’
All of this might have seemed feeble evidence of love. Fotini had never even met Kyritsis properly, so who was she to judge? In front of her, though, she had the sight of her greatest friend suffused with happiness. That much was very real.
‘What would people here think if they knew there was something between you and the doctor?’ Fotini was practical. She knew how small-town people talked, and Spinalonga was no different from Plaka, where a relationship between a doctor and his patient would keep the gossips on their doorsteps well into the small hours.
‘No one must be allowed to know. I’m sure that a few people have noticed him coming out of my house on Wednesday mornings, but nobody has said anything. At least not to my face.’
She was right. A handful of people with vicious tongues had tried to spread the word, but Maria was well liked on the island, and malicious talk only tended to stick when someone was already halfway to being unpopular. What concerned Maria more than anything was that people might think she was getting preferential treatment; first place in a queue for injections, for example, or some other kind of perk, however meagre, would be enough to spark jealousy. That would reflect badly on Kyritsis and she was determined to ensure that no criticism attached itself to him. People like Katerina Papadimitriou, who had proved rather interfering, had seen Kyritsis leave her house on many occasions, and for someone who wanted to be in control of everything around her, this was disturbing. The leader’s wife had done all she could to find out from Maria why Kyritsis came, but Maria had been deliberately unforthcoming. She had a right to her privacy. The other source of trouble was Kristina Kroustalakis, the unofficial town-crier, whose attempts to discredit Maria in some way had continued relentlessly for the past year. She went into the
kafenion
every evening and, on the basis of no evidence at all, dropped hints to anyone she met that Maria Petrakis was not to be trusted.
kafenion
every evening and, on the basis of no evidence at all, dropped hints to anyone she met that Maria Petrakis was not to be trusted.
‘She’s carrying on with the specialist, you know,’ she would say in a stage whisper. ‘You mark my words, she’ll be cured and off the island before any of us.’
It kept her going, this mission to stir up anger and discontent. She had tried - and failed - to do the same with Maria’s mother; now she would do her best to destabilise the daughter’s peace of mind. Maria, however, was strong enough to withstand such behaviour and enough in love with the doctor to make her happiness untouchable.
Maria’s course of treatment began that month. Her symptoms had been slow to develop since she arrived on the island, with the anaesthetic patches on her skin spreading only marginally during the past eighteen months. Unlike so many of her fellow islanders, she had not experienced numbness in the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands, which meant she was unlikely to be vulnerable to the sores and ulcers which had cost so many of her fellow lepers the ability to walk and fend for themselves. If a sharp stone found its way into her shoe she soon knew about it, and her lithe hands curled around the handles of the big cooking pots she used at the ‘block’ as readily as they had ever done. This made her one of the lucky ones, but there was, nevertheless, an extraordinary relief in the sense that, finally, something was being done to combat the disease. Though it had not yet devastated her body, it had already done plenty of damage to her life.
The springtime wind, the Sokoros, blew from the south, finding its way between the mountains to the Gulf of Mirabello, where it whipped the sea into a white frenzy. Meanwhile on land the trees, now full of leaves in bud, began to whisper. How much better a sound than the rattle of dry, barren branches. Now that it was nearly May, the sun came out strongly and reliably each day and drenched the landscape in colour. Monochrome sky and rock had vanished and the world now put on its blue, gold, green, yellow and purple. Throughout early summer, birdsong was noisily exuberant, and then came two months when nature stood still in the breathless air and the scent of roses and hibiscus hung heavily on the air. Leaves and flowers had strained to emerge from dormant winter trees and plants and remained perfect through June and July before curling, scorched and dry, in the heat of the sun.
Dr Kyritsis continued to visit Maria at home once a week. They continued to say nothing of their feelings towards each other and there was an element of magic in their silence. It had the perfect fragility of a soap bubble rising into the sky, so visible, so multicoloured, but best left untouched. Maria one day found herself wondering how much her mother and father had ever spoken about love. She guessed correctly that they rarely had; in their happy marriage, there had seemed no need to mention something so certain, so unequivocal.
Throughout these summer months Maria, and now over half the population of Spinalonga, continued with the dapsone treatment. They knew it did not mean an overnight cure - or, as the more sardonic of them called it, ‘reprieve from the gallows’ - but at least it gave them hope, and even those still waiting for their treatment bathed in reflected optimism. Not everyone thrived, however. In July, having started her course only two weeks earlier, Elpida Kontomaris went into lepra reaction. Whether or not it was a consequence of the drug treatment, the doctors could not be sure, but they stopped giving her the injections straight away and did what they could to relieve the agony she was in. Her temperature raged out of control and for ten days did not drop below 105 degrees. Her body was now covered in ulcerated sores and every nerve felt tender; there seemed to be no position in which she was comfortable. Maria insisted on visiting her and, against all the rules of the hospital, Dr Lapakis allowed her into the small ward where the old lady lay, sobbing and sweating by turns.
Through her half-closed eyes, she recognised Maria.
‘Maria,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘they can’t do anything for me.’
‘Your body is fighting the disease. You mustn’t give up hope,’ Maria urged. ‘Especially now! For the first time ever, they are so confident of a cure.’
‘No, listen to me.’ Through a burning, uncontrollable wall of pain, Elpida pleaded with Maria. ‘I’ve been ill for so long. I just want to go now. I want to be with Petros . . . Please tell them to let me go.’
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