The Island (37 page)
Authors: Victoria Hislop
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.
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 were 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.
‘Look, we’ve got to be optimistic,’ said Kyritsis. ‘There are some drug treatments under trial at the moment. They don’t work overnight, but do you think some of the patients here would be prepared to try them?’
‘I’m sure they would, Nikolaos. I think there are some who would try anything. Some of the wealthy ones still insist on doses of hypnocarpus oil, in spite of the cost and the agony of having it injected. What do they have to lose if there’s something new to try?’
‘Actually quite a lot at this stage . . .’ replied Kyritsis thoughtfully. ‘It’s all sulphur-based, as you probably know, and unless the patient is in generally good health the side-effects can be disastrous.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, anything from anaemia to hepatitis - and even psychosis. At the Leprosy Congress I’ve just been to in Madrid, there were even reports of suicide being attributed to this new treatment.’
‘Well we’ll have to think very carefully about which, if any, of our patients act as guinea pigs. If they have to be strong in the first place, there are plenty who would not be up to it.’
‘Nothing has to be done straight away. Perhaps we could start by drawing up a list of suitable candidates and I can then discuss the possibility with them. It’s not a short-term project - we probably wouldn’t begin to inject for several months. What do you think?’
‘I think that’s the best way forward. Having a plan at all will seem like progress. Do you remember the last time we compiled a list of names here? It seems so long ago, and most of the people on it are dead now,’ said Lapakis gloomily.
‘But things are different today. We weren’t talking about a real, tangible possibility of a cure in those days; we were simply trying to improve our methods of preventing contagion.’
‘Yes, I know. I just feel I’ve been treading water here, that’s all.’
‘That’s perfectly understandable, but I do believe there’s a future to look forward to for some of these people. Anyway, I shall be back in a week, so shall we have a look at some names then?’
Kyritsis took himself back to the quayside. It was now midday and Giorgis would be there to collect him as arranged. A few heads turned to look at him as he made his way back down the street, past the church, the shops and the
kafenion
. The only strangers these people ever saw were newcomers to the island, and no newcomer ever walked with such purpose in his stride as this man. As the doctor emerged from the tunnel and the choppy late October sea came into view, he saw the little boat bobbing up and down a hundred metres or so off the shore, and a woman standing on the quayside. She was looking out to sea but heard his step behind her and turned. As she did so, her long hair blew up in wisps around her face and two large oval eyes gazed at him with hope.
kafenion
. The only strangers these people ever saw were newcomers to the island, and no newcomer ever walked with such purpose in his stride as this man. As the doctor emerged from the tunnel and the choppy late October sea came into view, he saw the little boat bobbing up and down a hundred metres or so off the shore, and a woman standing on the quayside. She was looking out to sea but heard his step behind her and turned. As she did so, her long hair blew up in wisps around her face and two large oval eyes gazed at him with hope.
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