The Island (7 page)
Authors: Victoria Hislop
‘That’s where your grandmother and her sister grew up. Maria was my best friend; she was just over a year younger than Anna. Their father, Giorgis, was a fisherman, like most of the local men, and Eleni, his wife, was a teacher. In fact she was really much more than a teacher - she more or less ran the local elementary school. It was just down the road in Elounda, the town you must have come through to reach us here. She loved children - not just her own daughters, but
all
the children who were in her classes. I think Anna found that difficult. She was a possessive child and hated sharing anything, especially her mother’s affection. But Eleni was generous in every way and had enough time for all her children, whether they were her own flesh and blood or simply her pupils.
all
the children who were in her classes. I think Anna found that difficult. She was a possessive child and hated sharing anything, especially her mother’s affection. But Eleni was generous in every way and had enough time for all her children, whether they were her own flesh and blood or simply her pupils.
‘I used to pretend that I was another of Giorgis and Eleni’s daughters. I was always at their house; I had two brothers so you can imagine how my own home differed from theirs. My mother, Savina, didn’t seem to mind. She and Eleni had been friends since childhood and had shared everything from an early age, so I don’t think she worried about losing me. In fact, I believe she always harboured a fantasy that either Maria or Anna would end up marrying one of my brothers.
‘When I was little I probably spent more time at the Petrakis place than I did at my own, but the tables turned later on and Anna and Maria more or less lived with us.
‘Our playground at that time, and for our whole childhood, was the beach. It was ever-changing and we never tired of it. We would swim each day from late May to early October and would have restless nights from the unbearable grittiness of the sand that had hidden in between our toes and then worked its way out on to our sheets. In the evenings we fished for our own picarel, tiny fish, and in the morning we’d go and see what the fishermen had brought in. The winters bring higher tides and there was usually something washed up for us to inspect: jellyfish, eels, octopus, and a few times the sight of a turtle lying motionless on the shore. Whatever the season, we would go back to Anna and Maria’s as it was getting dark and the fragrant smell of warm pastry often greeted us when we arrived - Eleni would make us fresh cheese pies and I’d usually be nibbling on one as I trudged up the hill to my own house when it was time for bed—’
‘It does sound an idyllic way to grow up,’ interrupted Alexis, beguiled by Fotini’s descriptions of this perfect and almost fairy-tale childhood. What she really wanted to find out, though, was how it all came to an end. ‘How did Eleni catch leprosy?’ she asked abruptly. ‘Were lepers allowed off the island?’
‘No, of course they weren’t. That was why the island was feared so much. Back at the beginning of the century, the government had declared that all lepers in Crete should be confined on Spinalonga. The moment that doctors were certain of the diagnosis, people had to leave their families for good and go there. It was known as “The Place of the Living Dead” and there was no better description.
‘In those days people did everything they could to conceal symptoms, mostly because the consequences of being diagnosed were so horrific. It was hardly surprising that Eleni was vulnerable to leprosy. She never gave a second thought to the risk of catching infections from her pupils - she couldn’t teach them without having them sitting close, and if a child fell in the dusty schoolyard she would be the first to scoop them up. And it turned out that one of her pupils did have leprosy.’ Fotini paused.
‘So you think the parents knew their child was infected?’ asked Alexis incredulously.
‘Almost certainly,’ replied Fotini. ‘They knew they would never see the child again if anyone found out. There was only one responsible action Eleni could take once she knew she was infected - and she took it. She gave instructions that every child in the school should be checked so that the sufferer could be identified, and, sure enough, there was a nine-year-old boy, called Dimitri, whose wretched parents had to endure the horror of having their son taken away from them. But the alternative was a great deal worse. Think of the contact that children have with each other when they play! They’re not like adults, who keep their distance. They scuffle and wrestle and fall in heaps on top of each other. We know now that the disease is generally only spread through persistent close contact, but what people were afraid of in those days was that the school in Elounda would become a leper colony in its own right if they didn’t pull out the infected child as soon as they possibly could.’
‘That must have been a very difficult thing for Eleni to do - particularly if she had that kind of relationship with her pupils,’ said Alexis thoughtfully.
‘Yes, it was awful. Awful for everyone concerned,’ replied Fotini.
Alexis’s lips had dried and she hardly trusted herself to speak in case no sound came. To help the moment pass, she moved her empty cup towards Fotini, who filled it once more and pushed it back across the table. As she carefully stirred sugar into the dark swirling liquid, Alexis felt herself being pulled into Eleni’s vortex of grief and suffering.
What had it felt like? To sail away from your home and be effectively imprisoned within sight of your family, everything that was precious to you stripped away? She thought not only of the woman who had been her great-grandmother, but also of the boy, both of them innocent of any crime and yet condemned.
Fotini reached out and put her hand on Alexis’s. Perhaps she had been in too much of a hurry to tell the story, without really knowing this young woman well enough. It was no fairytale, however, and she could not simply choose which chapters to tell and which ones to omit. If she trod too carefully now, the real story might never be told. She watched the clouds pass across Alexis’s face. Unlike the pale wisps that hung in the blue sky that morning, these were sombre and brooding. Until now, Fotini suspected, the only darkness in Alexis’s life had been the vague shadow of her mother’s hidden past. It had been nothing more than a question mark, nothing that had kept her awake at night. She had not seen disease, let alone death. Now she had to learn about them both.
‘Let’s go for a walk, Alexis.’ Fotini stood up. ‘We’ll get Gerasimo to take us out to the island later - everything will make more sense when we’re over there.’
A walk was exactly what Alexis needed. These fragments of her mother’s history and a surfeit of caffeine had made her head spin, and as they descended the wooden steps on to the shingly beach below, Alexis gulped in the salty air.
‘Why has my mother never told me any of this?’ she asked.
‘She had her reasons, I’m sure,’ said Fotini, knowing that there was so much more left to tell. ‘And perhaps when you get back to England she’ll explain why she was so secretive.’
They strolled the length of the beach and began to ascend the stony path lined with teasels and lavender that led away from the village. The breeze was stronger here and Fotini’s walk slowed. Though she was fit for a woman in her seventies, she didn’t always have her old stamina, and her pace became more careful and more faltering as the path began to steepen.
Occasionally she stopped, once or twice pointing out places on Spinalonga that came into view. Eventually they came to a huge rock worn smooth by wind, rain and its long use as a bench. They sat down and looked out to sea, the wind rustling the scrubby bushes of wild thyme that grew in profusion around them. It was here that Fotini began to relate Sofia’s story.
Over the next few days Fotini told Alexis everything she knew of her family’s history, leaving no pebble unturned - from the small shingle of childhood minutiae to the larger boulders of Crete’s own history. In the time they had together, the two women strolled along the coastal paths, sat for hours over the dinner table and made journeys to local towns and villages in Alexis’s hired car, with Fotini laying the pieces of the Petrakis jigsaw before them. These were days during which Alexis felt herself grow older and wiser, and Fotini, in retelling so much of her past, felt herself young again. The half-century that separated the two women disappeared to vanishing point, and as they strolled arm in arm, they might even have been mistaken for sisters.
Part 2
Chapter Three
1939
EARLY MAY BRINGS Crete its most perfect and heaven-sent days. On one such day, when the trees were heavy with blossom and the very last of the mountain snows had melted into crystal streams, Eleni left the mainland for Spinalonga. In cruel contrast to this blackest of events, the sky was brilliant, a cloudless blue. A crowd had gathered to watch, to weep, to wave a final goodbye. Even if the school had not officially closed for the day out of respect for the departing teacher, the classrooms would have echoed with emptiness. Pupils and teachers alike had deserted. No one would have missed the chance to wave goodbye to their beloved ‘Kyria Petrakis’.
Eleni Petrakis was loved in Plaka and the surrounding villages. She had a magnetism that attracted children and adults alike to her and was admired and respected by them all. The reason was simple. For Eleni, teaching was a vocation, and her enthusiasm touched the children like a torch. ‘If they love it they will learn it’ was her mantra. These were not her own words, but the saying of the teacher with fire in his belly who had been her own doorway into learning twenty years before.
The night before she left her home for ever, Eleni had filled a vase with spring flowers. She put this in the centre of the table and the small spray of pale blooms magically transformed the room. She understood the potency of the simple act, the power of detail. She knew, for example, that recollection of a child’s birthday or favourite colour could be the key to winning the heart and then the mind. Children absorbed information in her classroom largely because they wanted to please her, not because they were forced to learn, and the process was helped by the way she displayed facts and figures, each one written on a card and suspended from the ceiling so it seemed as though a flock of exotic birds hovered permanently overhead.
But it was not just a favourite teacher who would be making her way over the water to Spinalonga that day. They were saying goodbye to a friend as well: nine-year-old Dimitri, whose parents had gone to such lengths for a year or more to conceal the signs of his leprosy. Each month there had been some new attempt to hide his blemishes - his knee-length shorts were replaced by long trousers, open sandals by heavy boots, and in the summer he was banned from swimming in the sea with his friends lest the patches on his back should be noticed. ‘Say you’re afraid of the waves!’ pleaded his mother, which was of course ridiculous. These children had all grown up to enjoy the exhilarating power of the sea and actually looked forward to those days when the Meltemi wind turned the glassy Mediterranean into a wild ocean. Only a sissy was afraid of the breakers. The child had lived with the fear of discovery for many months, always knowing in his heart that this was a temporary state and that sooner or later he would be found out.
Anyone unacquainted with the extraordinary circumstances of this summer morning might well have assumed that the crowd had gathered for a funeral. They were nearly one hundred in number, mostly women and children, and there was a sad stillness about them. They stood in the village square, one great body, silent, waiting, breathing in unison. Close by, in an adjacent side street, Eleni Petrakis opened her front door. She was confronted by the unusual sight of this great mass of people in the normally empty space and her instinct was to retreat inside. This was not an option. Giorgis was waiting for her by the jetty, his boat already loaded up with some of her possessions. She needed few, since Giorgis could bring more to her during the following weeks, and she had no desire to remove anything but bare essentials from the family home. Anna and Maria remained behind the closed door. The last few minutes with them had been the most agonising of Eleni’s life. She felt the strongest desire to hold them, to crush them in her embrace, to feel their hot tears on her skin, to still their shaking bodies. But she could do none of these things. Not without risk. Their faces were contorted with grief and their eyes swollen with crying. There was nothing left to say. Almost nothing left to feel. Their mother was leaving. She would not be coming back early that evening weighed down with books, sallow with exhaustion, but beaming with pleasure to be at home with them. There would be no return.
The girls had behaved precisely as Eleni would have anticipated. Anna, the elder, had always been volatile, and there was never any doubt about what she was feeling. Maria, on the other hand, was a quieter, more patient child who was slower to lose her temper. True to form, Anna had been more openly distressed than her sister in the days leading up to her mother’s departure, and her inability to control her emotions had never been more on display than on this day. She had begged her mother not to go, beseeched her to stay, ranted, raved and torn her hair. By contrast, Maria had wept, silently at first and then with huge racking sobs that could be heard out in the street. The final stage for both of them, however, was the same: they both became subdued, exhausted, spent.
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