They would not go in and interrupt the class. Katerina knew there would be another opportunity for Maria to meet Dimitri.
‘There seems to be a large number of children,’ commented Maria. ‘Where do they all come from? Are their parents here too?’
‘On the whole they don’t have parents here. They’re children who contracted leprosy on the mainland and were sent here. People try not to have children at all when they come to Spinalonga. If a baby is born healthy it’s taken away from the parents and adopted on the mainland. We’ve had one or two such tragic cases recently.’
‘That’s desperately sad. But who looks after these children, the ones who are sent here?’ asked Maria.
‘Most of them are adopted. Nikos and I had one such child until he was old enough to move out and live on his own. The others live together in a house run by the community, but they’re all well cared for.’
The two women continued on up the main street. High up above them on the hill towered the hospital, the biggest building of all.
‘I’ll take you up there later on,’ said Katerina.
‘You can see that building from the mainland,’ said Maria. ‘But it looks even bigger close to.’
‘It was extended quite recently, so it’s larger than it used to be.’
They walked round to the north side of the island, where human habitation ran out and eagles soared in the sky above. Here Spinalonga took the full blast of the wind from the north-east and the sea crashed on the rocks far below them, sending its spray high into the air. The texture of the water changed here, from the usual calmness of the channel that divided Spinalonga from Plaka to the galloping white horses of the open sea. Hundreds of miles away lay the Greek mainland and, in between, dozens of small islands, but from this vantage point there was nothing. Just air and sky and birds of prey. Maria was not the first to look over the edge and wonder, just for a moment, what it would be like to hurl herself off. Would she hit the sea first or be dashed against the serrated edges of the rocks?
It began to drizzle now and the path was becoming slippery.
‘Come on,’ Katerina said. ‘Let’s go back. Your boxes will have been brought up by now. I’ll show you your new home and help you unpack if you like.’
As they descended the path, Maria noticed dozens of separate, carefully cultivated areas of land where, against the odds created by the elements, people were growing vegetable crops. Onions, garlic, potatoes and carrots were all sprouting on this windswept hillside and their neat weed-free rows were an indication of how much effort and attention went into the process of nursing them out of this rocky landscape. Each allotment was a reassuring sign of hope and showed that life was tolerable on this island.
They passed a tiny chapel that looked across the huge expanse of sea and finally reached the walled cemetery.
‘Your mother was buried here,’ Katerina said to Maria. ‘It’s where everyone ends up on Spinalonga.’
Katerina had not meant her words to sound so blunt, but in any case Maria did not react. She was keeping her emotions in check. It was someone else who was walking around the island. The real Maria was far away, lost in thought.
The graves were all unmarked, for the simple reason that they were shared. There were too many deaths here to allow anyone the luxury of solitude in the afterlife. Unlike most graveyards, which were situated around the church so that all who worshipped were constantly reminded that they would die, this one was secluded, secret. No one on Spinalonga really needed a memento mori. They all knew too well that their days were numbered.
Just before they came full circle they passed a house that was the grandest Maria had seen on the island. It had a large balcony and a porticoed front door. Katerina paused to point it out.
‘Officially that’s the home of the island leader, but when Nikos took over he didn’t want to push the previous leader and his wife out of their home, so they stayed where they were and so did Nikos. The husband died many years ago now, but Elpida Kontomaris is still there.’
Maria recognised the name immediately. Elpida Kontomaris had been her mother’s best friend. The harsh fact was that her mother seemed to have been outlived by nearly all around her.
‘She’s a good woman,’ added Katerina.
‘I know,’ said Maria.
‘How do you know?’
‘My mother used to write about her. She was her best friend.’
‘But did you know that she and her late husband adopted Dimitri when your mother died?’
‘No, I didn’t. When she died I didn’t really want to know about the details of life here any more; there was no need.’
There had been a long period after Eleni’s death when even Maria had resented the amount of time that her father spent going to the colony; she had no interest in it once her mother had gone. Now, of course, she felt some remorse.
From almost all points on her walk the village of Plaka had remained in sight, and Maria knew that she would have to start disciplining herself not to glance over there. What good would it do to be able to see what activities people were engaged in across the water? From now on nothing over there had anything to do with her, and the quicker she got used to that, the better.
By now they had returned to the small cluster of houses where they had begun. Katerina led Maria towards a rust-coloured front door and took a key from her pocket. It seemed as dark inside as out, but with the flick of a switch the room was cheered up just a little. There was a dampness about it, as though it had been uninhabited for some time. The fact was that the previous incumbent had languished in the hospital for several months and never recovered, but given the sometimes dramatic recovery that could take place after even the most virulent lepra fever, it was island practice to retain people’s homes until there was no further possible hope.
The room was sparsely furnished: one dark table, two chairs and a ‘sofa’ against the wall which was made of concrete and covered with a heavy woven cloth. Little other evidence of the previous inhabitant remained, except a glass vase containing a handful of dusty plastic flowers and an empty plate rack on the wall. A shepherd’s hut in the mountains would have been more hospitable.
‘I’ll stay and help you unpack,’ said Katerina bossily.
Maria was determined to hide her feelings about this hovel and could only do so if she was left her on her own. She would need to be firm.
‘That’s very kind of you, but I don’t want to impose any more on your time.’
‘Very well,’ said Katerina. ‘But I’ll pop back later this afternoon to see if there is anything I can do. You know where I am if you need me.’
With that she was gone. Maria was glad to be alone with her own thoughts. Katerina had been well-meaning but she detected a hint of fussiness and had begun to find her twittering voice faintly irritating. The last thing Maria wanted was for anyone to tell her how to arrange her house. She would turn this miserable place into a home and she would do so herself.
The first thing she did was to pick up the vase of pathetic plastic roses and empty it into the bin. It was then that despondency overtook her. Here she was in a room that smelt of decay and the damp possessions of a dead man. She had held herself in check until this moment but now she broke down. All those hours of self-control and false good cheer for her father, for the Papadimitrious and for herself had been a strain, and the awfulness of what had happened now engulfed her. It was such a very short journey that had marked the end of her life in Plaka and yet the greatest distance she had ever travelled. She felt so far from home and everything that was familiar. She missed her father and her friends and lamented more than ever that her bright future with Manoli had been snatched away. In this dark room she wished she was dead. For a moment it did occur to her that perhaps she was dead, since hell could not be a gloomier or less welcoming place than this.
She went upstairs to the bedroom. A hard bed and a straw mattress covered with stained ticking were all the room contained, except
for a small wooden icon of the Virgin clumsily nailed to the rough wall. Maria lay down, her knees pulled in towards her chest, and sobbed. How long she remained so she was not sure, since she eventually fell into fitful, night-marish sleep.
Somewhere in the profound darkness of her deep underwater dream, she heard the distant sound of booming drums and felt herself being pulled to the surface. Now she could hear that the steady percussive beat was not a drum at all but the insistent sound of someone knocking on her door downstairs. Her eyes opened and for several moments her body seemed unwilling to move. All her limbs had stiffened in the cold and it was with every ounce of her will that she raised herself off the bed and stood upright. This sleep had been so profound that her left cheek bore the clear impression of two mattress buttons and nothing would have woken her except for what she now realised was the sound of someone almost battering down the door.
She descended the narrow staircase and as she drew back the latch and opened the door, still in a state of semi-consciousness, she saw two women standing there in the twilight. One of them was Katerina; the other was an older woman.
‘Maria! Are you all right?’ cried Katerina. ‘We were so worried about you. We have been knocking on the door for nearly an hour. I thought you might have . . . might have . . . done yourself some harm.’
The final words she blurted out were almost involuntary, but there was a strong basis for them. In the past there had been a few newcomers who had tried to kill themselves, some of them successfully.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Really I am - but thank you for worrying about me. I must have fallen asleep . . . Come in out of the rain.’>
Maria opened the door wide and stepped aside to let the two women in.
‘I must introduce you. This is Elpida Kontomaris.’
‘Kyria Kontomaris. I know your name so well. You were my mother’s great friend.’
The women held on to each other’s hands.
‘I can see so much of your mother in you,’ said Elpida. ‘You don’t look so very different from the photographs she had of you, though that was all long ago. I loved your mother, she was one of the best friends I ever had.’
Katerina surveyed the room. It looked exactly as it had done many hours ago. Maria’s boxes stood unopened and it was obvious that she had not even attempted to unpack them. It was still a dead man’s house. All Elpida Kontomaris saw was a bewildered young woman in a bare, cold room at just the time of day when most people were eating a warm meal and anticipating the familiar comfort of their own bed.
‘Look, why don’t you come and stay with me tonight?’ she asked kindly. ‘I have a spare room, so it will be no trouble.’
Maria gave an involuntary shudder. Chilled by her situation and the dampness of the room, she had no hesitation in accepting. She remembered passing Elpida’s house earlier that day and with her womanly eye for detail recalled the elaborate lace curtains that had covered the windows. Yes, that was where she would like to be tonight.
For the next few nights she slept in Elpida Kontomaris’s house and during the day would return to the place which was to become her own home. She worked hard to transform it, whitewashing her walls and recoating the old front door with a bright, fresh green that reminded her of the beginning of spring rather than the tail-end of autumn. She unpacked her books, her photographs, and a selection of small pictures which she hung on the wall, and ironed her embroidered cotton cloths, spreading them on the table and on the comfortable chairs that Elpida had decided she no longer needed. She put up a shelf and arranged her jars of dried herbs on it, and made the previously filthy kitchen a hostile place for germs by scrubbing it until it gleamed.
That first dark day of despondency and despair was left behind, and though she dwelt for many weeks on what she had lost, she began to see a future. She thought much of what life with Manoli would have been like and began to question how he would have reacted in difficult times. Although she missed his levity and his ability to make a joke in any situation, she could not imagine how he would ever have tolerated adversity if it had come their way. Maria had only tasted champagne once, at her sister’s wedding. After the first sip, which was full of fizz, the bubbles had disappeared, and she reflected on whether marriage to Manoli would have been rather like that. She would never know now and gradually she gave him less and less thought, almost disappointed in herself that her love seemed to evaporate by the day. He was not part of the world that she now occupied.
She told Elpida about her life from the day her mother had left: how she had looked after her father, about her sister’s marriage into a good family, and about her own courtship and engagement to Manoli. She talked to Elpida as though she was her own mother, and the older woman warmed to her, this girl she had already known from her mother’s descriptions all those years before.
Having overslept and missed it on the first afternoon, Maria went later that week for her appointment with Lapakis. He noted her symptoms and drew the location of her lesions on a diagrammatic outline of the body, comparing his observations with the information that Dr Kyritsis had sent him and noting that there was now an additional lesion on her back. This alarmed him. Maria was in good general health at present, but if anything happened to change this, his original hopes that she had a good chance of survival might come to nothing.
Three days later Maria went to meet her father. She knew that he would have set off punctually at ten to nine to bring Lapakis across, and by five minutes to she could just about make out his boat. She could see that there were three men aboard. This was unusual. For a fleeting moment she wondered if it was Manoli, breaking all the rules to come and visit her. As soon as she could distinguish the figure in the boat, however, she saw that it was Kyritsis. For a moment her heart leapt, for she associated the slight, silver-haired doctor with the chance of a cure.
As they bumped gently into the buoy, Giorgis threw the rope to Maria, who tied it expertly to a post as she had done a thousand times before. Though he had been anxious about his daughter, he was careful to conceal it.
‘Maria . . . I am so pleased to see you . . . Look who is here. It’s Dr Kyritsis.’
‘So I can see, Father,’ Maria said good-naturedly.
‘How are you, Maria?’ enquired Kyritsis, stepping nimbly from the boat.
‘I feel absolutely one hundred per cent well, Dr Kyritsis. I have never felt anything else,’ she replied.
He paused to look at her. This young woman seemed so out of place here. So perfect and so incongruous.
Nikos Papadimitriou had come to the quayside to meet the two doctors, and while Maria stayed to talk to her father, the three men disappeared through the tunnel. It was fourteen years since Nikolaos Kyritsis had last visited, and the transformation of the island astonished him. Repairs to the old buildings had been started even then, but the result had exceeded his expectations. When they reached the hospital, he was even more amazed. The original building was just as it had been, but a huge extension, equal in size to the whole of the old building, had been put up. Kyritsis remembered the plans on Lapakis’s office wall all those years ago and saw immediately that he had fulfilled his ambition.
‘It’s astonishing!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s all here. Just as you wanted it.’
‘Only after plenty of blood, sweat and tears, I can assure you - and most of those from this man here,’ he said, nodding his head towards Papadimitriou.
The leader left them now and Lapakis showed Kyritsis proudly around his new hospital. The rooms in the new wing were lofty, with windows that reached from floor to ceiling. In the winter, the sturdy shutters and thick walls shielded patients from battering rains and howling gales, and in the summer the windows were thrown open to receive the soothing breeze that spiralled up from the sea below. There were only two or three beds to each room and the wards had been designated for either men or women. Everywhere was spotlessly clean, and Kyritsis noticed that each room had its own shower and washing cubicle. Most of the beds wer
e occupied but the atmosphere in the hospital was generally still and quiet. Only a few patients tossed and turned, and one moaned softly with pain.
‘Finally I’ve got a hospital where patients can be treated as they should be,’ said Lapakis as they returned to his office. ‘And moreover a place where they can have some self-respect.’
‘It’s very impressive, Christos,’ said Kyritsis. ‘You must have worked so hard to achieve all this. It looks exceptionally clean and comfortable - and quite different from how I remember it.’
‘Yes, but good conditions aren’t all they want. More than anything they want to get better and leave this place. My God, how they want to leave it.’ Lapakis spoke wearily.
Most of the islanders knew that drug treatments were being worked on, but little seemed to have come their way. Some were sure that within their lifetime a cure would be found, though for many whose limbs and faces were deformed by the disease it was no more than a dream. A few had volunteered to have minor operations to improve the effects of paralysis on their feet or to have major lesions removed, but more than that they did not really expect.