Island of Secrets

by Patricia Wilson

  ‘I’m talking about Petro.’

  ‘Of course, I’m sorry.’

  *

  ‘I’m anxious to hear the rest of your story, Yiayá.’ Angie said, desperate for somebody to put Nick out of her head before the longing and the hurt diced her heart and threw it to the cats.

  ‘Remind me, where we were?’

  ‘The Nazi had almost shot you, then you’d lost Matthia on the mountainside.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I remember it well, Angelika. I found my son, and the goat with a group of women from Amira who were also running away with their children.’

  ‘Your relief must have been enormous, Yiayá.’

  Old Maria nodded, her eyes wide as she seemed to stare into the past. ‘But our troubles were far from over . . .’ she said.

  Chapter 31

  Crete, 1943.

  TOGETHER, WE ALL MADE it to the Plateau of Lassithi, high in the mountains. We were allowed to shelter ourselves in three ruined windmills outside a village.

  While our children played, we four women from Amiras Village sat cross-legged on the ground and discussed how we should accommodate ourselves. Eventually, we decided to share a windmill that was almost complete and had three floors. My boys and I took the middle floor, built around the great wooden cogs that were turned by the sails. The sails themselves were long gone, so the mechanism stood motionless.

  Eva and her son, Stefan, claimed the narrower level above us. Joanna and Stavroula, with their teenage daughters, slept on the wider ground floor. We could have had a windmill each but felt safer together in one.

  We fixed a discarded sail over the doorway. Ten metres away, we used the planks from one of the other mills to build a rickety toilet over a pit. The triangular ‘kak-shack’ as we called it, much to the delight of the youngsters, was a comical roofless construction that gave us privacy.

  Life was difficult, months filled with tension, sickness and hunger. Every day we feared the Nazis would arrive. The windmills were situated atop a ridge on the village perimeter. It became a habit to scan the plateau before we stepped out.

  The rains came in mid-October. We shifted our bedding to avoid drips through the leaking roof. Food consisted of snails, wild mushrooms, and young cactus pads which we peeled and boiled. Acorns, carobs, walnuts and figs were collected for our stores. We stewed nettles, found dandelions, millet, wild parsnip and asparagus.

  Each day was a dire struggle for sustenance. The flesh fell from our bones. My breasts, which weeks earlier were ebullient with the milk of life, now hung like flat pancakes against my bony ribcage, but we were surviving.

  One morning, while gathering carobs, I found myself thinking of Petro. How could I have managed to get our family to this place if I’d had a newborn to deal with as well? I knew that task was beyond anyone’s capabilities. They say God works in mysterious ways, and I believe that’s true. If Petro had been with us, we may all have perished in the end.

  Fleas tortured us. Our fingernails were black, encrusted with dried blood raked from our necks, armpits and groins. The minute tormentors ran riot over the floor and walls and when we slept, they fed, and then sought sanctuary in the nooks and crannies of our bodies. We woke each morning, blood-streaked and disgusted.

  I fretted for Matthia. He became listless and uncommunicative, his belly swollen and his limbs stick-thin. I felt sure he would die and the injustice made me bitter. Wretched, I snarled at my friends and snapped at Stavro.

  Eva and Stavroula decided to return to the apiary. They came back the next day with four full frames of honey and several bee stings. Matthia wasn’t interested, he just wanted to lie on the sheepskins and stare at the ceiling planks.

  Joanna trudged into the village and asked if there was a doctor, although we didn’t have money to pay. She returned with a solid looking woman, sixtyish and dressed in black. Her name was Yiayá Fotiá, Grandmother Fire.

  ‘He has bad blood,’ she said after stroking his dry skin, dragging his eyes open and inspecting his tongue. ‘We must bleed him.’

  I had seen this done to my father. The thought of poor little Matthia going through the process made me sick. Joanna convinced me the old woman knew her job. I did my best to comfort Matthia while my friends made him straddle the centre post of the windmill. They tied his arms and legs on the opposite side of the column so that his body pressed against the wood, which kept him still. I kept talking to him, assuring him he would feel better soon.

  Yiayá Fotiá heated her medicinal cups on the fire and then produced a razorblade. My stomach churned.

  Matthia cried bitterly.

  She sliced into his beautiful white back and then placed the hot glass cups over the wounds. As they started to cool, the vessels sucked onto his skin, drawing his blood from the cuts.

  Matthia wailed loudly.

  When the old woman had six cups on his back, I could take no more.

  ‘Stop!’ I cried, sick to my bones. ‘I don’t want you to do this.’

  Yiayá Fotiá understood my determination.

  ‘He’s your child, Teacher,’ she said. ‘The mother always knows when it’s enough.’

  Mortified, I realised I should have stopped her after the first cut.

  Yiayá Fotiá looked at my hands, now septic in places where the burns were constantly cracking open. ‘I’m going to collect the right herbage for a poultice,’ she said, and within the hour she returned with a large bunch of asko zitsára, hemlock.

  Stavro watched her pound the stalks to pulp. ‘Don’t touch, son, the juice is poisonous,’ I said. It stank of rotting mice.

  ‘There’s a clump by the cemetery at home, Mama,’ he said. ‘They have the same purple spots on the stems. Once, we were going to make pea shooters, but the priest came out of the graveyard and said to leave the plant alone.’

  The thought of him putting hemlock in his mouth made me shudder. ‘Just as well he stopped you,’ I told him. ‘When they condemned Socrates to death, they forced him to drink hemlock juice so that he died by his own hand.’

  Stavro glanced from me to Matthia who lay face down and miserable on a sheepskin. I sensed Stavro’s concern and, after a moment, he performed for his poor, sick brother. Writhing on the floor like a dog with fleas, he watched Matthia’s face.

  ‘Was Socrates in agony, Mama? Did his belly burst open, squirting his shitty guts all over the ceiling? Arh, arh! And did his eyes catapult out of his head and roll around the floor? While they were there, did he look up all the old women’s skirts?’ He placed his fingers on his eyes and then flung them out wide.

  Matthia managed a smile.

  ‘Stavro, you’re too gruesome, son. Poor old Socrates simply fell asleep without any pain, or any of your fine dramatics. And watch your mouth or you’ll feel my hand across the backs of your legs.’

  ‘You’ll have to catch me first, Mama. Bet ya can’t catch me!’

  Stavro sidestepped around me and the Yiayá Fotiá.

  Matthia managed a giggle.

  ‘You need to control that one,’ Yiayá Fotiá said as she plastered the stinking gunk onto my hands. ‘He’ll give you trouble if you don’t rein him in soon.’

  Behind her, Stavro put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers.

  Matthia laughed.

  ‘Don’t go too far, Stavro,’ I said, giving him the ‘stop it now’ look, yet I rejoiced in my heart. Stavro was a very special child.

  ‘I have nothing with which to pay you,’ I told Yiayá Fotiá as she left.

  ‘You may teach my granddaughter to read,’ she said. ‘I’ll send her tomorrow afternoon.’

  *

  That child must have spread the word. Before two weeks were up, I had six students coming for lessons from 4p.m. to 6p.m.. The payments they made amounted to a drum of olive oil, a bag of lentils, a sack of horse fodder to make porridge, one laying hen, a chair with a broken leg, an army greatcoat and half a parachute.

  Our lives improved.

  The village priest
gave me a box of white chalk and I used soot to darken an area of the wall, to use as a blackboard. The priest also sent a bundle of pencils and a bolt of paper that I carefully folded and tore into squares when the children needed to write.

  One morning, while cleaning our floor, I noticed a curl of paper sticking out from under Andreas’s sheepskins, where my boys slept. When I pulled it out, I found childish drawings of a baby and recognised Stavro’s artistry. I called him to my side.

  ‘What’s all this about, son?’ I asked, pointing to the sketches.

  ‘Sorry, Mama. Am I in trouble for stealing the paper?’

  ‘You only needed to ask, Stavro.’

  ‘I didn’t want to upset you, Mama.’

  ‘Why did you feel it would upset me, is it Petro?’

  He nodded, tangling his fingers and looking at the floor. ‘I don’t want to forget him.’ He shook his head and then turned his sad face up to me. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘I’m afraid he is, son. God decided Heaven was the best place for him. And rightly so, Stavro. He would never have survived the terrible journey we made, would he? We only just managed it ourselves.’

  Stavro looked into my eyes and I saw his slight embarrassment.

  ‘Tell me, son,’ I said gently.

  ‘I feel like he’s slipping away out of my head. He was my baby brother, Mama, and I know it’s soppy, but I did, you know, love him.’ He swallowed hard.

  I lowered my eyes for a moment.

  Stavro continued. ‘Stefan told me what happened at home, while we were hiding. They shot lots of people. Our friends. Was Petro with them?’

  With my heart breaking, and the twisting pain of keeping control of my emotions, I whispered that Petro was indeed one of the martyrs of that terrible day.

  ‘Well, I would want people to remember me, you know, if I’d been killed,’ Stavro said, ‘because it seems it’s all that’s left of you, the memory of you in other people’s heads. And I got a bit scared when I realised I was forgetting what baby Petro looked like, so I tried drawing him to keep him alive in my mind. I never want to forget him. Ever.’

  I chewed my lip, unable to speak. Oh, Stavro.

  ‘Are you angry with me, Mama?’

  I shook my head and slipped my arm around his shoulders. We sat in silence for a few minutes before Stavro spoke again.

  ‘Anyway, it worked,’ he said.

  ‘What worked, son?’

  ‘As soon as I started to draw him, I remembered things.’

  ‘Really? Like what?’ I said, smiling, wondering what he recollected.

  He gazed at nothing, distant but calm. ‘Do you remember how Petro would make fists and do that boxing? He had a wicked look in his eyes, like he was staring at somebody he wanted to punch. It always made me laugh, I watched him for ages. And that birthmark, the dark red bird on the back of his head. It seemed as if it was flying over his brains. And I remembered that sometimes he would screw his mouth up, as if he was whistling a tune that we couldn’t hear.’ Stavro’s eyes sparkled, and there was a moment of silence before he said with all sincerity, ‘I wish he’d lived, Mama, he would have made a great brother.’

  ‘We can’t change what’s happened, Stavro, that’s a fact,’ I replied, holding back tears. And you do have Matthia, but you’re right, we should never forget baby Petro.’

  *

  Although our lifestyles improved slightly, Matthia remained sickly. He became covered in spots that developed into open sores. Yiayá Fotiá paid another visit, which terrified Matthia, but I promised him there would be no bloodletting. She said my son had scabies, a highly contagious parasite.

  Joanna, Eva and Stavroula said he would have to move out and stay in one of the other windmills or we would all have the dreaded crabs, and wasn’t it bad enough with fleas running over our skin and feeding on our blood. They wouldn’t have the dirty lice living under our skin, shitting in our flesh.

  I told the schoolchildren not to come back and explained why. The next day, a small bald man wearing spectacles appeared and introduced himself as the local doctor. He examined Matthia and said the rash wasn’t scabies but simple malnutrition. He gave me food vouchers, nearly useless with precious little in the village shop. Still, it meant the children returned for my lessons and we received occasional payments of eggs and potatoes. Stavro played eating games with Matthia and succeeded in getting him to swallow almost everything put in front of him.

  Summer ended suddenly on the last day of October. The air turned cold and, wearing all our clothes, we huddled together under olive sacks. I borrowed a needle, cotton and scissors from one of my pupils’ parents and made long trousers for my boys from green tent canvas that the fleeing Italians had forgotten.

  Gradually, Matthia grew stronger. We heard the Nazis had left the area and we were able to return to Amiras. We planned to go the week before Christmas but a snowfall blocked the mountain pass.

  In mid-January, a break in the weather put carts on the road. We begged a lift from a potato merchant who was setting out to Ierapetra for supplies. He agreed to drop us off at our village. We all climbed into the back of his lorry with our meagre possessions bundled in squares of blanket or sailcloth. Freezing cold, and with our behinds bruised from the long and bumpy ride, we arrived back in Amiras.

  Chapter 32

  Crete, Present Day.

  ‘ANGELIKA!’ MARIA SAID SHARPLY.

  Angie stared at her grandparents’ puzzled faces and realised she had been daydreaming about Nick. She must tell them the wedding was off. The longer she left it, the harder it would become. She reached for her ring finger to turn her engagement ring, a nervous habit. Then, startled for a moment, she realised it wasn’t there. Perhaps Judy wore it? Why was she punishing herself with such stupid thoughts?

  ‘Does your mother know?’ Maria said quietly.

  Angie’s head snapped up, confused, speechless, eyes questioning.

  ‘There’s only one reason why you would look so sad, and wouldn’t be wearing that beautiful ring.’

  ‘It’s only just happened, Yiayá. After years of living with me, he’s fallen in love with somebody else.’ She spoke quietly, holding back the tears. ‘I didn’t tell Mam, because I was afraid she might cancel her flight.’

  Maria patted Angie’s hand. ‘Very considerate of you. Thank you for that. How long have you and Nick been together?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘And you don’t think he’s worth fighting for?’

  ‘Well, yes, but . . .’

  ‘Then do it, child! I nearly lost Vassili once. I gave up on everything. Don’t make that mistake.’

  Angie looked across at her grandfather and found it hard to imagine he would do anything untoward.

  ‘Let me tell you what happened, Angelika,’ Maria said. ‘Then make up your own mind.’

  *

  Amiras, 1943.

  BACK IN AMIRAS, we found our village had not suffered as much destruction as surrounding communities. A wagon, laden with wide planks, dropped its load for the repair of the houses that were burned. Many of the women had moved back home, and some men returned from the war in Albania. No one had news of Vassili and I feared I would never see my husband again. Between us, we managed to put a roof on our house, board up the windows, and make a crude door hinged with strips of goat hide.

  We found our two big old trees laden with fruit, so much that the branches weighed to the ground. We picked the largest olives for preserving in brine in a terracotta urn. The rest, we took to our local olive factory in the lower village, where the village donkey pulled a millstone around, crushing the fruit to extract the oil. We brought the olive leaves home for goat fodder, the pips to dry in the sun and use for smokeless winter fuel, and the olive pulp to make soap and night lights. Nothing was wasted.

  At first, without cooking pots, or a skapáni to dig the earth, everything seemed set against us. We needed wood to burn for heat and cooking and although surrounded by trees
, we were without saw and axe to cut logs. Before the Nazis left, they burned the crops. No wheat harvest meant no flour, and in turn no bread or rusks.

  I remembered Andreas’s lessons on how to make coffee and bread from acorns, to take sugar from the carob beans, and to use pine cones instead of charcoal or wood for cooking. I shared all this information with the other village women.

  In the spring of 1944, the Germans were retreating from mainland Greece. More of our soldiers trickled home, used up and spat out by the armed forces. In a pitiful state, these men were too sick or weak to be of any further use to the army. Their wives nurtured them back to health and they soon set about making tools and shoes for us all.

  In March, six months after the massacre, I was busy at the outside sink carefully removing the eyes from half a dozen potatoes before cooking them. The shoots would provide us with another crop. I concentrated on the job, and didn’t notice the stranger until he was well into our garden.

  A skinny man, with a beard that reached his chest, wandered onto our land. He walked right through the new tomato patch, flattening the seedlings, but I hadn’t the heart to scold him.

  This stranger wore the coat of a soldier and, from the way it hung limply from his shoulders, I guessed it didn’t belong to him. The garment was far too big. The vagrant’s long hair hung in matted tendrils, and his dull dark eyes were sunken deep into his skull. Some mother’s son, God love him, I thought. The tragedy and pain he endured must have been enormous to reduce him to that dishevelled condition.

  Yet in those eyes that witnessed too much death, there was something familiar. He stood there, smiling; his strong teeth appearing huge in the skull-like face, the breeze ruffling his long hair.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, wondering from where he came and what he wanted.

  ‘You’ve forgotten me so soon?’ he asked.

  The voice! My darling husband. ‘Oh, Dear God, Vassili!’ I cried, rushing into his arms.

  His thin, bent body shocked me. And the smell of him. He appeared to be far less than half the man that left only a year ago. The small amount of skin, visible on his hirsute face, stretched tight across his bones and ran with sores. His dull eyes were sunken and his broad muscular body was now nothing but skeleton and skin. I sat by the stone oven, pulled him onto my lap, and rocked him like a baby. My beautiful husband, reduced to a starved shadow of his former self.