The Island (47 page)
Authors: Victoria Hislop
At the tail end of a long and arduous day, Kyritsis and Lapakis sat down to review some test results. Something had become very obvious.
‘You know we’ll soon have a good case for letting these patients go, don’t you?’ said Kyritsis with a rare smile.
‘I do,’ replied Lapakis. ‘But we’ll need government approval first and they may be reluctant to give it so soon.’
‘I’ll request their release from here on condition that they continue to have treatment for a few months afterwards and check-ups for another year after that.’
‘Agreed. Once we’ve got government authority, we’ll tell the patients, but not before.’
Weeks passed before a letter came. It stated that the patients would have to test negative for a whole year before they could be let off the island. Kyritsis was disappointed by the delay this would entail, but even so the goal he was aiming for now seemed within reach. Over the next few months the tests remained clear, and it looked as though the first dozen could be gone by Christmas.
‘Can we tell them yet?’ asked Lapakis one morning. ‘Some of them keep asking when and it’s hard to keep fobbing them off.’
‘Yes, I think it’s time. I believe there’s no danger now of a relapse in any of these cases.’
The first few patients greeted the announcement of their clean bill of health with tears of joy. Though they promised to keep the news to themselves for a few days, neither Lapakis nor Kyritsis imagined for a moment that they could possibly do so.
At four o’clock Dimitri arrived and sat waiting his turn. The patient before him, the woman who worked in the bakery, emerged tear-stained, dabbing at her scarred cheeks with a large white handkerchief. She must have been given some bad news, thought Dimitri. At two minutes past four, Kyritsis put his head round the door and called him in.
‘Sit down, Dimitri,’ said the doctor. ‘We have some news for you.’
Lapakis leant forward, his face beaming.
‘We have been given permission to release you from the colony.’
Dimitri knew what he was supposed to feel, but it was as though the numbness that used to afflict his hands had returned and this time taken his tongue. He remembered little of life before Spinalonga. It was his home and the colonists were his family. His real family had long since stopped communicating with him and he would have no idea how to find them now. His face had become very disfigured on one side, which was not a problem here, but in the outside world it would single him out for attention. What would he do if he left, and who would teach in the school?
A hundred questions and doubts whirled around in his mind and a few minutes went by before he could speak.
‘I would rather remain here while I have a function,’ he said to Kyritsis, ‘than leave all of this behind and go into the unknown.’
He was not alone in his reluctance to leave. Others also feared that the visible legacy of the disease would always remain with them and mark them out, and they needed reassurance that they might be able to reintegrate. It was like being a guinea pig all over again.
In spite of the misgivings of these few, it was a momentous occasion in the island’s history. For more than fifty years lepers had come but never gone, and there was thanksgiving in the church and celebration in the
kafenion
. Theodoros Makridakis and Panos Sklavounis, the Athenian who had set up the thriving cinema, were the first to leave. A small party gathered by the entrance to the tunnel to bid them farewell, and both of them fought back tears, with little success. What weight of mixed feelings burdened them as they shook hands with the men and women who had been their friends and companions for so many years. Neither of them knew what life over that strip of water held for them as they boarded Giorgis’s waiting boat to pass from the known into the unknown. They would travel together as far as Iraklion, where Makridakis would try to pick up the threads of his former life, and Sklavounis would take the boat to Athens, knowing already that his former career as an actor could not be resumed. Not the way he looked now. Both men would keep a tight hold on the medical papers which declared them ‘Clean’; there would be several occasions over the following few weeks when they would be obliged to show them in order to verify that they were officially free of the disease.
kafenion
. Theodoros Makridakis and Panos Sklavounis, the Athenian who had set up the thriving cinema, were the first to leave. A small party gathered by the entrance to the tunnel to bid them farewell, and both of them fought back tears, with little success. What weight of mixed feelings burdened them as they shook hands with the men and women who had been their friends and companions for so many years. Neither of them knew what life over that strip of water held for them as they boarded Giorgis’s waiting boat to pass from the known into the unknown. They would travel together as far as Iraklion, where Makridakis would try to pick up the threads of his former life, and Sklavounis would take the boat to Athens, knowing already that his former career as an actor could not be resumed. Not the way he looked now. Both men would keep a tight hold on the medical papers which declared them ‘Clean’; there would be several occasions over the following few weeks when they would be obliged to show them in order to verify that they were officially free of the disease.
Months later, Giorgis brought letters to Spinalonga from the two men. Both described the great hardship of trying to fit back into society and told how they were treated as outcasts by anyone who identified them as men who had once lived in the leper colony. Theirs were not encouraging tales, and Papadimitriou, who was the recipient, shared them with no one. Others from the first treatment group had also now left. They were all Cretan and had been welcomed by their families and found new work.
The pattern of recovery continued during the following year. The doctors kept meticulous records of everyone’s date of first treatment and how many months the test had shown up as negative.
‘By the end of this year we’ll be out of a job,’ said the sardonic Lapakis.
‘I never thought that unemployment would be my aim in life,’ replied Athina Manakis, ‘but it is now.’
By late spring, save for a few dozen cases who had reacted so badly against the treatment that they had been obliged to stop undergoing it, and some who had not responded at all, it was clear that the summer could bring a widespread clean bill of health. By July there were discussions on Spinalonga between the doctors and Nikos Papadimitriou regarding how all this should be managed.
Giorgis, who had ferried that first batch of cured men and women away from Spinalonga, now counted the days until Maria might be on his boat once again. The inconceivable had now become a reality and yet he feared there might be some hitch, some unforeseen problem that had not yet been envisaged.
He kept both his excitement and his anxieties to himself and many times had to bite his tongue when he overheard the usual tactless banter in the bar.
‘Well I for one shan’t be putting up the bunting to welcome them back,’ said one fisherman.
‘Oh, come on,’ responded another. ‘Have a bit of sympathy with them.’
Those who had always been more openly resentful of the leper colony remembered with some shame the night when plans to raid the island had nearly got out of hand.
In Lapakis’s office early one evening, the island leader and the three doctors were discussing how the event should be marked.
‘I want the world to know that we’re leaving because we’re cured,’ said Papadimitriou. ‘If people leave in twos and threes and steal off into the night it gives out the wrong message to everyone on the mainland. Why are they sneaking away? they’ll ask. I want everyone to know the truth.’
‘But how do you suggest we do that?’ asked Kyritsis quietly.
‘I think we should all leave together. I want a celebration. I want a feast of thanksgiving on the mainland. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.’
‘We have those who aren’t cured to think about too,’ said Manakis. ‘There’s nothing for them to celebrate.’
‘The patients who are facing longer-term treatment,’ said Kyritsis diplomatically, ‘will also be leaving the island, we hope.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Papadimitriou.
‘I am currently awaiting authority for them to be transferred to a hospital in Athens,’ he answered. ‘They will receive better care there, and in any case the government won’t fund Spinalonga once there are too few people here.’
‘In that case,’ said Lapakis, ‘can I suggest that we allow the sick to leave the island before the cured. I think it would be easier for them that way.’
They were all in agreement. Papadimitriou would have his public display of this new freedom, and those who were yet to be cured would be tactfully transferred to the Hospital of Santa Barbara in Athens. All that remained now was to make the arrangements. This was to take several weeks, but a date was soon set. It was to be 25 August, the feast of Agios Titos, the patron saint of all Crete. The only one among them who harboured any misgivings about the fact that Spinalonga’s days as a leper colony were now numbered was Kyritsis. He might never see Maria again.
Chapter Twenty-two
1957
AS THEY WOULD have done in any normal year, the residents of Plaka made preparations for the saint’s day feast. This year would be different, however. They would be sharing the celebrations with the inhabitants of Spinalonga, their close neighbours who had existed only in their imaginations for so many years. For some it would mean welcoming home almost forgotten friends; for others it would mean confronting their own deep prejudices and trying to suppress them. They were to sit down at a table and share food with their hitherto unseen neighbours.
Giorgis was one of very few people who had known the reality of the colony. Many others on the mainland had for years enjoyed the financial benefits of having such an institution across the water, supplying them with much of what they consumed, and for them the prospect of the colony’s closure meant a loss of business. Others admitted to themselves that they felt a certain relief at the thought of Spinalonga’s demise. The sheer volume of sick men and women over the water had always worried them, and in spite of the knowledge that this disease was less contagious than many others, they still feared it as they would bubonic plague. These people kept their minds closed to the fact that leprosy could now be cured.
There were some who keenly anticipated the arrival of their guests for this historic night. Fotini’s mother, Savina Angelopoulos, still cherished the memory of her friend Eleni whose loss she had grieved for many years, and to see Maria free again would be pure joy. It would mean only one tragedy, not two. Apart from Giorgis, Fotini rejoiced more than anyone. She was to be reunited with her best friend. No longer would they need to meet in the semi-darkness of Maria’s house on Spinalonga. Now they would be able to sit on the bright restaurant terrace chewing over the events of the day while the sun went down and the moon came up.
In the steamy heat of this August afternoon, in the taverna kitchen, Stephanos was cooking up great metal dishes of goat stew, swordfish and rice pilaff, and the
zakaroplastion
, the patisserie, was baking trays of honeysweet
baklava
and
katefi
. This would be the feast to end all feasts in its lavish offerings of food.
zakaroplastion
, the patisserie, was baking trays of honeysweet
baklava
and
katefi
. This would be the feast to end all feasts in its lavish offerings of food.
Vangelis Lidaki relished such an event. He enjoyed the emotional temperature created by a day so out of the ordinary, and also knew what it must mean to Giorgis, one of his most regular if least talkative customers. It occurred to him too that some of the inhabitants of Spinalonga might become new citizens of Plaka, swelling the population and increasing his own business. Success for Lidaki was judged by the number of empty beer and raki bottles that rattled around in his old crates at the end of each day, and he hoped that the volume of these might swell.
Feelings among the lepers were as mixed as the feelings of the people about to receive them. Some of the members of the colony dared not admit even to themselves that their departure filled them with as much dread as had their arrival. The island had given them undreamt-of security and many dreaded losing that. Some of the islanders, even though there was not a mark, not a blemish, to indicate that they had been leprous, were full of trepidation that they would never be able to live a normal life. Dimitri was not the only one of the younger islanders to have no memory of anywhere other than Spinalonga. It had been their world, with everything outside it no more real than pictures in a book. Even the village they looked at across the water each day seemed little more than a mirage.
Maria had no problem remembering life on the mainland, although it seemed that the past she looked back on was someone else’s, not her own. What would become of a woman who had lived the best part of her twenties as a leper and who would be considered an old maid back on the mainland? All she could really see as she looked across the continually churning, undulating waters was the uncertainty of it all.
Some people on Spinalonga had spent the month before departure carefully packing each and every possession to take with them. There were several who had received a warm response from their families when they had written to tell them the good news of their release and who expected a kind welcome. They knew they would have somewhere to unpack their clothes, their china, their pots, their precious rugs. Others ignored what was about to happen, carrying on the routine of daily life until the very last minute as though it was never going to change. It was a hotter than ever August, with a fierce Meltemi that blew the roses flat and sent shirts flying from washing lines like giant white gulls. In the afternoons, everything but the wind was subdued. It continued to bang doors and rattle windows while people slept in shuttered rooms to escape the heat of the sun.
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