One August Night

by Victoria Hislop

  Manolis knew that proceedings were in progress and vainly scoured the national paper, Kathimerini, for information. Only when the trial ended was his curiosity satisfied.

  LIFE SENTENCE FOR MURDER OF WIFE

  It was buried on page five, with a short paragraph that sketched out the bare facts.

  Manolis was ambivalent about the verdict, but admitted to himself, just as Maria and Giorgos had done, that an eye for an eye would not have brought him relief.

  Several weeks later, he arrived home to find a large brown envelope propped against his door. Agathi had found it too fat to slip underneath. This time, although it was hardly neat, she managed to make out her tenant’s family name. Vandoulakis. What a beautiful Cretan name, she said to herself. Van-dou-la-kis. It had a very pleasing rhythm.

  Manolis tore open the envelope and into his hands fell several dozen flimsy sheets of newsprint. There was also a letter from Antonis. His friend always had plenty to say face to face, but he had struggled with his writing ever since school, so on paper he kept his words to a minimum:

  Dear Manolis,

  I hope things are well in Piraeus. I have left the Vandoulakis estate. It seemed time. I am now working in building construction. There are lots of new houses going up in Agios Nikolaos.

  I kept these reports on the trial for you.

  The reporter has recorded it exactly as it happened. I think it marks an end to this terrible story for both of us.

  Sending you my best regards,

  Antonis

  Antonis did not need to mention in his letter the many veiled references to Manolis during the trial. His friend would surmise that himself from the press cuttings.

  Manolis scanned the letter twice and was puzzled by Antonis’s final comment, ‘for both of us’. He knew that Antonis’s family was closely connected with Anna’s but still it seemed strange.

  He sat on his bed and put the cuttings in chronological order before reading them. Antonis was right about the reporter. He had brought the proceedings to life. Every cough or gasp was there; every time Andreas Vandoulakis shifted in his seat it was noted; every protest from the people crammed into the courtroom – apparently a sizeable crowd – was described. By the time it came to the verdict, Manolis felt he had lived every moment of those days.

  Elli, Kyría Agathi’s niece, knocked on his door while he was reading, but he was so absorbed that he did not hear her insistent tapping. The evidence that she had been there was a little box of baklava left outside. When Manolis opened his door, he stooped down, retrieved it and devoured all eight pieces at once. Reading about the trial had left his energy depleted and the pastries were comforting.

  He went out alone that night. He wanted to drink without conversation, to obliterate thoughts, memory and emotion and to halt the working of his imagination.

  Such an objective proved impossible. His mind kept returning to the man who looked so like him that people mistook them for twins. His cousin now sat in a prison cell and, as sometimes happened with actual twins, Manolis felt an involuntary connection. The trial and the sentence had brought matters to a conclusion in the eyes of the law, but for Manolis, as well as for the rest of his family, and Anna’s too, that final day in court had not marked anything like an end.

  Manolis sat in a bar opposite the busiest part of the harbour that night and slowly dulled his senses with alcohol. He watched boats leaving the port and followed them in his imagination. They were going to the Middle East, to India, to China and every other destination in the world. Perhaps he should simply take a job on one of them and disappear. He sat for a while contemplating the idea, but ultimately rejected it. For the moment there was probably nothing better than the life he was making here. He liked the men he worked with, and his landlady was a good sort.

  He was sitting opposite the area of the port for the Iraklion ferries. The evening boat was just arriving, and he watched as people filed off. He was sure that he spotted a couple from Plaka, and pulled his collar up in case they noticed him.

  Agathi came and went from Manolis’s room while he was working. The morning after she had left the envelope outside his door, she decided it was the day to change his sheets. It was not difficult to find the package. It was hidden under some shirts in the bottom drawer. She drew the curtains wide to let in plenty of light and sat on the bed to read.

  She immediately noted the name of the accused, Andreas Vandoulakis, and the victim, Anna Vandoulakis, and double-checked the name on the outside of the envelope. Taking off her shoes, she stretched out and made herself comfortable, propping a pillow up against the wooden bedhead. She read slowly, running her eyes across each line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. There was no hurry, because she knew Manolis’s movements well, and it would be a long while before he got home. It took her more than an hour to reach the final day of the trial.

  She rested the pages on her chest for a moment. She could feel the furious beating of her heart. Then she swung her legs off the bed and started rummaging in the drawer. She was looking for a photograph that she was already familiar with.

  Only now did she understand which of the men in it was her lodger. She had been wrong before. The one with the wedding ring was not Manolis. It was his cousin.

  Everything made sense to her now. The earring. The nightmares. Poor Manolis. Poor, poor Manolis to have lost the woman he loved. How dreadful it must have been. She was shocked to realise that this young man seemed to have had everything torn away from him.

  All the landlady had to offer him was kindness, and she resolved to lavish it on him even more than before. She casually mentioned to her niece that Manolis had a broken heart, which made Elli’s fondness for him, and her resolve to cheer him with sweet things, grow even greater. Elli knew that pastries were not a nutritional necessity of life, but they were a magic potion for moods.

  The moment Manolis returned to his room that day, he knew that his sheets were fresh: it was the waft of the sweet laundry soap, the smell of which reminded him of Anna. The next day as he left his room, he almost tripped on the midday meal Kyría Agathi had left outside his door. A can filled with rice and green beans and a lump of fresh bread wrapped in a napkin were waiting for him. She must have got up very early to prepare it, and the absence of anything outside other doors suggested that no other lodger was being similarly treated.

  In the following days, he saw more of Agathi’s niece than he did of the landlady herself. Elli began to appear in the hallway when she heard him coming home after work and they talked briefly. She was always pink-cheeked, and Manolis was polite and kind and asked her about her day.

  The girl often had a little package of sweets tied up with ribbon ready to present to him. He took it graciously and always handed back his tin container, asking if she would pass his thanks to her aunt for the meal. Elli would blush even more deeply as Manolis said goodbye and made his way upstairs. As usual, from inside the landlady’s own apartment, he could hear the sound of popular music blaring out from a gramophone, and the distorted sound of singing coming through his floorboards.

  Everything in Piraeus was booming and expanding. The growth of the shipping industry seemed to have no limit; repairs followed and money flowed into the area. One night in April, a new bouzoúkia was opening. The team had worked well this week, and it also happened to be Miltos’s saint’s day, so they decided to meet up.

  A new venue was always a great draw, and Manolis had promised to arrive early to get a good table. The place soon filled up, and all his friends joined him. Musicians filed on to the low stage: eight men with bouzoúkis and a drummer. Before the music began, the paréa toasted each other and wished Miltos a happy saint’s day:

  ‘Stin yeia sou! Xrónia Pollá!’

  A well-known singer came on almost as soon as they arrived, and everyone sang along. There was not a syllable of his songs that was not imprinted on their hearts. Most of them were rebétiko style, the music of poverty and exile. The men sang with swelling
hearts and tsunamis of feeling, the singer unleashing deep emotion even in the toughest of them. Nostalgia, longing, loss, desire. All of these swirled in a great collective lamentation.

  Very late into the evening, the final act came on the stage. It was a woman with a voice of such strength that it filled the room and halted conversation. Manolis’s chair had its back to the stage, but he immediately turned to look.

  The singer was dressed very colourfully. She was wearing a blouse that Manolis recognised. He blinked in disbelief. It was his landlady, Kyría Agathi. The only difference in how she looked at this moment compared with when he had seen her earlier in the day was the addition of a pair of jangly hoop earrings that swung from her ears.

  Agathi had watched Manolis for a while from behind the curtain, so she was not surprised to find him sitting almost under her nose. She gave him a flirtatious wave and he raised a glass to her as she continued to sing.

  Manolis was very happy see her and called out with appreciation.

  ‘Yeia sou, Agathi. Ela! Ela!’

  She blew him a kiss, and his friends all teased him, demanding an explanation for this familiarity.

  When a girl came round selling flowers, Manolis purchased several and showered Agathi with scarlet blooms. She tossed a few back to the table to express her own appreciation. Round after round of drinks went down in this night of surprise, gaiety and joy.

  Agathi was tireless, and sang on and on, by far the most popular singer of the evening. Many of the songs had been made popular by the famous Sofia Vembo, and the audience loved her as if she was the diva herself.

  ‘Ela yélase gliká, pes mou lóyia eroticá,’ she sang. ‘Come, laugh sweetly, tell me words of love . . .’

  Manolis and his friends were on their feet by the end of her performance. When she had finished her last song, she came over to his table, and he welcomed her before introducing her to his paréa.

  ‘Eh, palikári mou, you never suspected, did you?’ Kyría Agathi said, clinking her glass against his as she nestled between him and Stavros.

  ‘Not for a minute, Kyría Agathi. I have heard plenty of music coming up through your ceiling, but I didn’t realise it was you. I thought it was your collection of Vembo!’

  ‘Well, it was me,’ she said coyly.

  Manolis had no idea that Agathi had been an up-and-coming star in Piraeus before the occupation, when her career was interrupted by the wholesale destruction of the area. With her voice still impressive, she was making more appearances again these days, even though younger singers and a new style of music had made her less fashionable.

  Stavros suddenly grasped her arm.

  ‘You look just like a singer called Roussa!’ he exclaimed, as a memory suddenly came to him. ‘You were Roussa?’

  Kyría Agathi beamed with pleasure. Roussa meant red.

  ‘That was my stage name! You remember it?’ she said. ‘In those days we were told to have one. Mostly because we were young and it wasn’t respectable to be on stage. If we had a fake name, it was less likely our parents would find out what we were up to.’

  Stavros was dumbfounded. Once or twice, years ago, he and his friends had taken a trip to Athens from their village near Thessaloniki, and had found themselves in the music dens of Piraeus. He remembered the red-headed Roussa well. Along with the rest of his group, they had all lusted after her. He was astonished to find himself sitting side by side with her now. And Agathi glowed with the pleasure of finding someone who recalled who she used to be.

  It was light when they finally left. Kyría Agathi linked arms with Manolis and Stavros and they made their way back to the pension.

  ‘You were wonderful,’ Manolis enthused.

  ‘A diva!’ murmured Stavros in her ear.

  ‘Should have seen the look on your face, Manolis,’ smiled Agathi.

  ‘But . . . you had never said anything!’ he responded, squeezing her arm.

  It was only three or four hours before they all had to be back at the shipyard, and Manolis went straight up to his room to sleep. It did not surprise him when he saw Stavros emerge from Kyría Agathi’s apartment the following morning, and on several subsequent days. It made him smile. Two people, at least, had found some kind of happiness.

  After that first performance, Kyría Agathi was booked to make a weekly appearance in the bouzoúkia. Every time he passed her apartment, Manolis could hear her practising. It was not just music that filled the hallway, but happiness too.

  A few days later, he knocked on the door so that he could return the metal container that had been filled with spanakórizo, rice and spinach for his lunch. The singing stopped immediately and the door opened.

  ‘Manolis!’ Agathi said gaily. ‘Come in! Let me make you some coffee.’

  Manolis had never been inside his landlady’s apartment before, and it was exactly as he had imagined it. It was predominantly pink, with arrangements of feathers, flounced curtains and floral prints, and it reminded him of a starlet’s dressing room. There was even a mirror with bright bulbs all around it. An alcove with floor-to-ceiling shelving was filled with rows of china figures, and he wandered across to take a closer look. They were mostly porcelain figures of elegant grandes dames in European dress from previous centuries, mixed in with a few figures from Disney. Manolis recognised Snow White, complete with her seven dwarves, Alice in Wonderland and Tinkerbell. He smiled. This cheerful display of royalty, fantasy and dreams seemed to fit the collector perfectly.

  There was also a newish gramophone player with hundreds of records in messy stacks on the floor.

  Elli appeared shyly from her bedroom and blushed the colour of one of her aunt’s silk roses. She was just leaving for her evening shift at work.

  ‘Bye-bye, Theía,’ she said to her aunt, giving Manolis a glance as she passed.

  Manolis sat down and looked about him.

  ‘Will you come to my performance next week?’ Agathi asked, coming back into the room with a glass of water.

  ‘Of course, Kyría mou. You just tell me when.’

  ‘Stavros said he would come too,’ said Agathi, beaming.

  Manolis took a long gulp of his water and then smiled at her.

  A moment later she was back with his coffee and a tiny floral saucer piled impossibly high with rose-petal loukoúmi, Greek delight.

  Once he had drained his coffee, she reached out for the cup.

  ‘May I?’

  It came as no surprise to Manolis that Agathi liked to read coffee grounds.

  She tipped them from the cup into the saucer and scrutinised the grainy sludge left inside the cup. She paused dramatically, just for a moment.

  ‘I can see something dark,’ she said. ‘Something very dark. In your past.’

  Manolis sat there playing along with her and nodding. He suspected that she would have drawn her own conclusions from the small number of possessions he owned, and was almost certain that she had read the press cuttings of the trial. It had not escaped his notice that the envelope was on a different side of the drawer from where he had left it, but it did not bother him at all. He trusted her.

  ‘But it’s the past, Manolis. And I can see brighter things coming. I can see love.’

  Like many people newly enamoured, Agathi wished all those around her to be in the same state.

  She reached out and touched his hand. Her fingers felt soft and papery compared with his own hard skin.

  ‘You will find new love,’ she said with certainty. ‘I’ve had my heart broken so many times, but thanks to you, even an old lady like me has found a wonderful man.’

  She meant well, but Manolis was no more ready for love than a man with a hangover is ready for his next cognac.

  ‘Stavros is a good man,’ he said sincerely. ‘I’m happy for you.’

  ‘Your heart will mend,’ she said as he was leaving. ‘If mine did, then yours will too.’

  ‘I hope so, Agathi,’ Manolis replied. ‘I do hope so.’

  The summer gav
e way to autumn and the late-October temperatures were easy enough to work in. Giannis already had another contract in place and was putting his team under pressure to finish the job. Luckily no days were lost to rain, and after a break for New Year, the work was nearing completion by the end of April.

  On his final walk to Penelope, Manolis passed a yard where boats were under construction. The scale of the operation was immense, with giant cranes positioned around like watchful giraffes and half-completed boats like skeletons of huge animals lying on their backs. Their rows of pale ribs were perfect and symmetrical, just as if God had made them.

  He admired their beauty and imagined the pleasure of being engaged in such a long and satisfying process. On that particular day a new ship was being launched down the long slipway. He envied those who stood watching the culmination of several years of their work as the ship entered the water. It was like a birth.

  ‘Hey, Kýrie!’ one of the workers called out, noticing Manolis’s look of admiration. ‘Want a job?’

  Manolis shook his head, knowing that he was too integral to his own team to contemplate leaving it.

  That night the whole group went out and celebrated the completion of the job. Nine of them clinked their glasses together.

  ‘To the sea!’ Giannis shouted above the music.

  ‘To the sea!’ chorused the rest.

  ‘May she always create work for us!’ Petros cried.

  ‘Man makes a ship and then the sea destroys it,’ said Giannis, smiling at Manolis. ‘And then we remake it. And so it goes on.’

  Manolis looked round at the group. Like all of these men, he had profited from the relationship between time and destruction. Having spent the past months scraping barnacles and repairing the damage wreaked by salt, he knew this cycle intimately. It was under his skin and beneath his fingernails.

  The men had many rounds of drinks and the waiter brought them carafe after carafe of fiery tsikoudiá.

  ‘Stay with us,’ said Giannis, putting his arm around Manolis. ‘There will always be more work than we need.’