One August Night

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘So, five hundred and sixty drachmas a week including laundry and lighting. Any other extras are . . . extra. Payment is due at the end of each week. I know what happens when you men get your wages. You have none left by Sunday morning,’ she laughed. ‘So, you give me what I am owed first, and then you go out on the town!’

  This Kyría Agathi was no fool. The cost had already risen, but Manolis forgave her. He had enough.

  ‘I’ll make sure to do that,’ he reassured her.

  ‘I don’t want to know anything about you except your name,’ she said.

  ‘Manolis,’ he answered plainly, not imagining for a moment that she meant what she said. Within a day or so, the name Vandoulakis might be in the newspapers even here on the other side of the Aegean, and he had no wish to be asked questions by this kind-hearted but no doubt gossipy type.

  ‘Manolis,’ she repeated with a smile. ‘I suppose you did just step off the boat from Crete.’

  Manolis nodded.

  ‘No women in your room. And no animals – I had someone in here with a monkey last year and it stank. So I’m strict about that.’

  ‘What about those?’ Manolis had just spotted a small creature dart across the room. It was now quivering in the corner.

  ‘Oh yes. You are allowed a pet mouse. I make an exception for them.’

  Manolis laughed good-naturedly. He liked this woman. She was quick-witted and clearly happy that he appreciated her joke.

  ‘Well, I’ll just find you some bed linen. Then we’ll be done for now.’

  She returned five minutes later, singing under her breath, with some grey-looking sheets and a second, even rougher-looking woollen blanket, and made up his bed. While she was busy, Manolis gazed down into the alleyway below. It was empty but for some stray dogs.

  As soon as she had done her work, she fiddled with her bunch of keys and handed over the one for Manolis’s room. Then she gave the rather lifeless pillow a final plumping and straightened the blanket now lying across the bed. However uninviting it looked, he could hardly wait to be in it. Fatigue was beginning to overwhelm him.

  ‘Thank you, Kyría Agathi,’ he said politely.

  ‘No doubt I’ll see you in a few days,’ she said, standing by the open door. ‘I sweep your room once a week.’

  Manolis nodded. His landlady left.

  He sat down on the bed, pulled off his boots and then stood up again to remove his clothes. As he took off his trousers, he heard the tinkling of something falling to the floor. He stooped to retrieve Anna’s earring and rested it in his palm for a moment. The photograph was still in his shirt pocket, and only now did he allow himself to take it out and gaze at the face of the woman he had loved.

  With his hand closed around the aquamarines, he slid the photograph under his pillow and climbed, exhausted, into bed.

  Sleep overwhelmed him immediately, but in the airless room, he spent a haunted night. He was constantly pursued but never caught: by Andreas, by Antonis, by his uncle, by Giorgos, and by people from the distant past who still lurked in his subconscious. Wherever he hid, someone found him. He ran and ran, panting and screaming, only just keeping ahead of the chase. He turned into a hunted animal, a creature with matted fur and bloodied paws. He was weighed down by mud and rotting leaves as he tried to find refuge.

  When he eventually woke, sweating and crying, his pillow damp with tears, his sheets with sweat, Kyría Agathi was standing by his bedside. The sun was streaming through an open window.

  ‘I thought someone was attacking you, Kýrie Manolis,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I was sure a murder was happening under my very own roof.’

  Manolis sat up, rubbing his eyes. Where was he? Who was this woman holding out a glass? It took him a moment to emerge from the leafy undergrowth of his dream.

  ‘Even the girls were complaining. And it’s a mighty strange thing when they moan about noise. What a sleep you’ve had.’

  Manolis sat up, took the water from Kyría Agathi and gulped it down. He was aware of her watching him, head tipped to one side.

  ‘It’s four in the afternoon,’ she said, taking the glass from him. ‘You must have needed that rest. I’ll be off now.’

  Kyría Agathi had not looked at her new lodger closely the previous day, but she did now. In all her years of running this establishment, she had not taken in such a good-looking man.

  Manolis was aware of her gaze. He was well used to the stares of women.

  ‘Thank you for the drink, Kyría Agathi,’ he said. It was beyond him to smile.

  ‘A pleasure,’ she replied. ‘And don’t worry about the “Kyría”.’

  As soon as she had left the room, Manolis got up. He tried to forget his nightmares and hoped that the next time he slept, Anna would appear. He needed to see her.

  He washed and dressed and then went out into the street. The day had more or less gone and birds were gathering on nearby buildings, some of them preparing to fly south for the winter.

  He strolled for a few kilometres along the waterfront. Loading and unloading at the docks had finished for the day, and the shipbuilding and repair yards were silent. Everyone had stopped working, but there were still plenty of people standing about, discussing what they would be doing the following day. The tables outside the kafeneía were filling up. The whole of the promenade was lined with places to eat and drink and there were already very few spare tables. Thousands of workers stopped at once and all had the same idea. After a hard day’s work, hunger and thirst had to be sated.

  Manolis crossed the road and found an empty table. He had not eaten for more than two days, and now he was as hungry as a wolf. The waiter put down bread and water and Manolis ordered. There were three cooked meat dishes ready, pork, lamb and chicken, and he asked for them all, along with a cold beer. His head bent over the plates, he shovelled food into his mouth and mopped the juices with his bread, drained a second bottle of beer, paid and left. He had made no eye contact with anyone, not even with the waiter.

  As Manolis was eating his first meal on the mainland, Andreas was being transferred from the police station in Agios Nikolaos to a prison cell in Neapoli. There was no question about his guilt. Only about his motivation.

  In the kafeneía and tavernas of Lassithi, nobody talked of anything but the Vandoulakis murder. The family’s name was known to everyone in the east of Crete, and rumours quickly circulated that the heir to the great family estate had shot his wife in a jealous rage. Everyone who worked for the Vandoulakis family, from domestic servants to estate managers and workers, was instructed by Alexandros neither to speak with family or friends about what had happened, nor to exchange views with each other. It was a pointless edict. Anna’s housekeeper, Kyría Vasilakis, swearing a friend to secrecy, mentioned that she had seen Manolis come and go from the house on several occasions. From that moment, gossip and speculation became fact. Manolis had been the cause. And soon his disappearance was as much talked of as the murder itself.

  Antonis was one of the few who did not speak ill of Manolis. Even though he now knew that his best friend was probably the catalyst for this terrible tragedy, his feelings were confused. He did not blame Manolis for what had happened, but he did find his loathing of Andreas stronger than ever.

  Anna had been lost to him for years now, and love had long ago given way to dislike. Nevertheless, he was obliged to attend her funeral. The whole of Plaka was there, and given his family’s proximity to the Petrakis family, he had no choice.

  It was a gruelling few hours, standing in the church watching the women of the village weep, the open coffin with Anna’s still body at the centre. He did not want to look but found himself unable to prevent himself staring at her waxen face.

  This was no ordinary funeral. Such levels of horror and grief were rarely experienced. Some older inhabitants of Plaka remembered a vendetta half a century back where a couple and their child had been murdered, but there had been nothing like that since then.

  ‘How could
so much tragedy strike a single family?’ they all muttered behind their hands. The return of Maria from Spinalonga one moment, the murder of her sister the next. To most, the two events seemed entirely unrelated. How could such things happen? People were dismayed.

  Anna had been mostly absent from Plaka since her marriage a decade earlier, but everyone remembered her as a child and an adolescent. Her father was still a beloved member of the village, all had fond memories of his wife, Eleni, and Maria had always been admired for her kind demeanour.

  The absence of the Vandoulakis family at the burial of a woman who bore their name was no surprise, but many felt that they should have sent a representative. ‘One of their own murdered her,’ they said indignantly. Others understood their absence and could imagine the fathomless depth of that family’s shame. ‘How could they be here? They would have been shunned even if they had come.’

  Instead of being buried in the grand Vandoulakis plot in the Neapoli cemetery, Anna remained in Plaka. The village’s nekrotafeío was in sight of the sea and of Spinalonga. Giorgos contained his grief with dignity that day, but in the subsequent forty days when he went to Anna’s grave, he would look across to Spinalonga and weep bitterly. It could have been some consolation that his wife and daughter were within sight of each other, but it was not.

  In the weeks following the funeral, Maria was by her father’s side every moment of the day, and often, like him, she looked across at the island. Her thoughts were very different from his, however. She caught herself wishing she was back there. In those latter months on Spinalonga, life had been so much sweeter than it was now.

  Chapter Six

  FAR AWAY, BEYOND Spinalonga and the Gulf of Mirabello and hundreds of kilometres north across the Aegean, Manolis was also thinking of a happier life that had so unexpectedly and brutally been cut short.

  The man who had always faced adversity with good cheer found himself entirely without resources to deal with the emotions that swept over him day after day after day. He had lost both parents as a young child, and then a fiancée to a leper colony, but these events had scarcely dented him. Life had always been an adventure, with obstacles and challenges, and each one he overcame had simply magnified his confidence. Then came Anna. The seismic aftershocks of her loss followed one after another and never seemed to lessen.

  Agathi had no complaints about Manolis. He paid his rent on time and removed his boots when he came in the front door. He was clean and well mannered, and when their paths crossed, he gave her a broad smile that made the back of her neck feel slightly hot. One morning she decided to change his sheets and give his room a cursory dust. While she was doing so, she could not resist a speedy inventory of his possessions as she put away one of his shirts in the drawer. ‘Tidying up’, she called it. At first it seemed that all he owned were a few clothes and a heavy roll of drachmas stuffed into a sock, but then, at the back of the bottom drawer, she came across two photographs.

  The first, she surmised, was of his parents. The second was more challenging. She scrutinised the image of two men, a woman and a baby. The man on the left could be Manolis, even though his hair was much shorter than her lodger’s, but the man on the right looked even more like him. He wore a wedding ring, which she had noticed her lodger did not. She could only conclude that the two men were twins. The baby could have been either boy or girl. The real focus of the picture was the woman. She looked like a Hollywood movie star. She was sensationally beautiful, with pearls around her neck, ornate drop earrings, and a large diamond on her finger. Her hair was glamorously pinned up as if to accentuate not just her long, slender neck, but her jewellery too. It was a photograph that might have appeared on the cover of a magazine.

  What a divine trio, Agathi thought to herself. Like royalty . . . and now one of them is living here.

  It was all very mysterious, and she held the picture in her hand for a moment before burying it back in the drawer beneath a vest. Perhaps she would coax the information out of him one day.

  She continued with her dusting, picking up a saucer on which lay a cut-throat razor and a button that must have fallen off. If she noticed that one of his shirts was gaping, she would happily sew it back on for him. Beneath the razor, something sparkled, so she pushed the blade aside with her finger. It was an earring with pretty blue stones.

  Delving into the drawer once again, she pulled out the photograph and held up the earring to confirm that it matched.

  Ah, she thought. Something sad happened here. Maybe even something bad.

  Agathi was a woman who studied the flitzáni, the coffee grounds, to read the past and foretell the future, and she prided herself on her accuracy. She did not need supernatural powers, however, to imagine something from such signs. The image showed a happy moment that had passed. This, after all, was what most photographs portrayed. The presence of a single earring among Manolis’s belongings told another story.

  The landlady loved the mysteries presented by the scant possessions of her lodgers. A roll of notes in a spare pair of socks was standard. Everyone who found their way to her had a similar amount, otherwise they would be staying somewhere else, either more or less luxurious. Very few came with much more than they stood in, making the things they owned all the more precious and significant. She was sure she could work out if someone was on the run, had stolen or even killed. An earring was a more complex clue, but she sensed that lost love was at the centre of it, and she did not need to wash a tear-stained pillow more than once to detect something tragic.

  From that day on, Agathi mothered Manolis more than any other tenant. Every lodger who came was a potential child figure for her, but most of them disappointed her in the end, breaking a bed, never offering even a single smile, or leaving without paying their rent. This man was sad, and Agathi sympathised with a broken heart more than anything else in life. Hearts were like china ornaments. Having collected hundreds of porcelain figures, she was an expert. If they smashed, you stuck them together again, but however well you did it, the fine lines of a repair would always be visible.

  Her main interest in the people who rented her rooms was that they were well behaved, did not come home drunk and rowdy at night, and always paid on time, but Manolis had a vulnerability that made her care more. The thin walls of her establishment meant that she was always in tune with his state of mind, hearing when he cried out in his sleep and aware of his sobs when he woke.

  A week or so after his arrival in Piraeus, Manolis slept a different sleep. It was the sleep he had hoped for. He had found a local restaurant frequented mostly by stevedores and had filled his belly for a few drachmas before returning to the pension well fed and with enough ouzo in him to induce a state of semi-unconsciousness. Every time his eyes closed, Anna came to him. She was above him, beneath him, next to him, her face close to his. For half the night, his arms were twisted around his pillow, and when he opened his eyes, he expected to see her lying next to him. He thought he could detect her scent, but it was simply the soap Kyría Agathi used to wash the sheets.

  He squeezed his face hard against the pillow, his body racked with sobs, with loss, with anguish. The fantasy of his dreams had seemed so real. To wake to this reality, to this absence, to this void, when his sleep had been filled with images of love and beauty and joy. It was like being smashed. Broken.

  He found Agathi by his bedside. She had heard his howls from the corridor.

  ‘I thought you’d broken the rule about animals,’ she said gently. ‘Sounded like you had a bear in here.’

  Manolis sat up and took the glass from her hand.

  ‘Dreams, Agathi,’ he said, wiping his tears with the sheet. ‘Dreams.’

  The landlady looked at him with pity. There was nothing that made her sadder than to see a grown man weeping. This one had looked so sure of himself when she found him, and yet she had never seen anyone more defenceless than the man in the bed before her. She suspected some of her lodgers of being the type who broke hearts, whereas th
is one seemed to have been a victim.

  Manolis was aware of Agathi’s attention and sensed that it was motivated by simple kindness. Like a cat by a fire, he enjoyed the warmth. It did not matter to him that she saw him at his weakest moment, crying like a baby over his lost love, and he appreciated that she did not bother him with questions.

  He happily slipped into playing the role of the son she had never borne.

  ‘You’ll feel stronger in time,’ she reassured him. ‘Believe me, you will.’

  He did not believe her, though her words were well meant.

  He began to dread as well as desire his nightly dreams of Anna. Sometimes her appearances had the quality of a vision rather than a dream, making him question whether she really was dead. Not only could he see her as if she stood in front of him, but he could feel her breath on his cheek, her hands on his back. Perhaps if he had gone closer to see her for himself as she lay on that blanket, perhaps if he had touched her cold skin and felt for an absent pulse, he might believe what his subconscious could not accept.

  He knew that he must start looking for work soon, but his energy and will were lacking. He spent his days exploring the streets of the town, walking for several kilometres in both directions along the seafront. One day he stopped at the little port, Tourkolímano, where he sat down to eat. The waiter promised him their freshest fish, but it tasted of nothing at all. He thought of the barbounia, the red mullet he used to eat in Plaka, delivered by Giorgos from his boat directly to the taverna. In Tourkolímano the buildings were on the same small scale as the island’s, but that only made him miss the landscape and intimacy of Crete all the more. He felt like a man in exile.

  He went to a different kafeneío each morning, having no desire to become a regular in any of them. He was still in the mood to keep to himself. Seeing a newspaper lying on the table next to him one day, he started idly flicking through its pages. The front page was dominated by the Cyprus situation and current proposals for independence. It did not interest him, so he started perusing other stories. Several pages in, a headline caught his eye: